In the early nineties, Bob Pritchett made the decision to leave his then employer, Microsoft, and enter the risky world of entrepreneurship. More than two decades later, it’s safe to say that this risk has paid off. The company he founded, Faithlife, now employs nearly 500 people and is on the forefront of digital publishing. Headquartered in Bellingham, Washington, Faithlife creates digital tools and resources for Bible study and publishes ebooks. While this company primarily creates content for the digital world, that’s not all they do. The Acton Institute is working with Faithlife’s imprint, Lexham Press, as part of the Kuyper Translation Society project. Lexham will be publishing the forthcoming Abraham Kuyper Collected Works in Public Theology.
Glassdoor, an employment review site, recently featured Pritchett on its “2015 Highest Rated CEO List.” That’s no small feat. “I celebrate the leaders appearing on this list,” said Glassdoor CEO Robert Hohman. “They’ve managed to inspire and engage their employees, as proven by the feedback shared on Glassdoor around the clock and around the world.”
Pritchett is the author of Fire Someone Today: And Other Surprising Tactics for Making Your Business a Success and the soon-to-be released Start Next Now: An Action Plan for Getting Ahead. In the following interview with Religion & Liberty’s associate editor Sarah Stanley, Pritchett discusses Faithlife’s innovative approach to publishing, what it means to be a for-profit company in the Bible market and more.
R&L: What inspired you to leave Microsoft and embark on this uncertain entrepreneurial path? Do you ever regret leaving Microsoft, a company where so many employees became stockholders and fabulously wealthy?
Bob Pritchett: I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, so I had always wanted to have my own business. That’s what my grandfather had done and my dad had done. I grew up seeing that modeled. I don’t regret leaving Microsoft. We have a fantastic business, and we built a product that is really important and really useful. 
We serve people in the church. We serve a lot of pastors and, of course, anyone who wants to study the Bible. It’s a blessing to work with such great people and build a product that helps people and that they really enjoy using.
Faithlife has won wide respect in the Christian and secular publishing industries for its innovative merchandising and pricing models.You constantly tweak and refine these approaches. Is that how you avoid being squashed by the likes of Amazon?
Sure. At one level, being in the Christian space, it’s good and bad, right? It’s a smaller market, but the religious connection keeps some large companies and competitors out of the space. But that’s not to say we don’t compete with them. We think of ourselves as competing with Amazon all the time because they’re just so big and have such an imprint in digital publishing and publishing in general. Even without intending to focus on the Christian market, they sell a huge amount of content in that space, just like they do in all the different categories. So one thing we’re constantly doing is trying to educate people about why a specialized tool is much better for doing Bible study than, let’s say, buying a Bible commentary on your Kindle. You can’t easily navigate a Kindle to John 3:16, but Bible software is designed for the way the Bible is referenced. Amazon is so big in the market that you’re constantly competing with them.
Can you discuss your innovative prepublishing and community pricing models? How do they work, and what is their history?
Prepub basically came out of an internal argument. We wanted to do an $80,000 project to build an electronic edition of a ten-volume book. And we debated whether or not we could afford to do it. So we basically internally agreed that if we could get enough users to commit with a credit card, that they really would buy it to cover the cost, that we would go into production. That model was such a success that we tried it with the next project and the next and eventually started running most of our new projects through it.
Nowadays everybody’s familiar with that as Kickstarter, right? But we basically did Kickstarter for electronic books back in the ‘90s. I wish I’d had the sense to take it to other business models earlier. We should have been doing Kickstarter. But it’s actually an ancient model. In the early days of movable type printing, that’s how books were published. A book would be written longhand on paper, but it was very expensive to typeset it. And, of course, you had to break down the moveable type after you printed each set of pages. You couldn’t go back and make 10 more. So they actually used the same kind of preorder model in the 1700s before putting a book to press so they knew how many copies to print. We just kind of reinvigorated that model for the digital world.
And then community pricing I’m really proud of because we just kind of invented it. Maybe it’s been done elsewhere, but in community pricing, we basically exposed the price demand curve to the customers. We show a chart, and we show how much revenue would be generated at each different price point based on the number of orders we’d have at that price point. We show people what our costs are, and as soon as that price demand curve breaks the cost line, we do it at the lowest price that will cover our costs. So if it costs $10,000 to produce, and if one person paid $10,000, that covers all of our costs. Or if 10 people paid $1,000or if 10,000 people paid $1. We let the users tell us where the sweet spot is.
It’s fun because users get to see that we’re not trying to get the most out of them. We’re trying to put more product into production. It also kind of turns into a game, right? When users really want to see a book get produced, they rally in our forums and say, “Hey, if everybody gets on board, we can drop the price of this by $5 or $10 per person.” And we’ve seen users cut the price in half on something, kind of evangelizing other people to place an order.
Talk to us about Faithlife’s philosophy of selling the network, not the specific book.
Bible study is a multi-book exercise, right? The Bible is always at the core, but people are often consulting. They want to go back to the Greek and Hebrew, so they need a Greek or Hebrew lexicon. They might want a commentary to help them understand the history of its interpretation or to put it into cultural context. You don’t do Bible study by opening one book. I mean, obviously, we start by opening the Bible, but most sermon preparation and paper writing is done with all this content. And that is essentially a big network. All those books … link back and connect to Bible verses.
Scripture itself is interconnected, as verses in the New Testament are quotations of verses in the Old Testament. You buy a book on a Kindle, and it generally stands alone. You buy a novel, you read it front to back, and you’re done. In Bible software, you’re adding continually to a library of materials that gets richer as it grows. And all of those things cross reference inside of one another. Many people have read a book full of footnotes and cross references at the bottom of the page that they never really pursued. In theory, maybe some scholar looks at that book and does that. But in digital, we can make that really easy. We can make it where you just hover the mouse over the reference to the original article, and it pops up on the screen. If somebody in this commentary cites this Greek dictionary, you just click on it, and you’re reading that dictionary article. So the more books you add, the more valuable this platform becomes
What sort of religious texts and books have had the most surprising market response? Faithlife offers the full gamut across Christian traditions, including Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox content.
The core of our market has been the North American Evangelical market. That’s where we sell the most and have the most customers. But we decided a long time ago that we weren’t going to let the company just reflector denominational background or our particular beliefs. We wanted to serve everybody who studies the Bible. The only thing we’re sure about is God’s Word. And everything else we might have wrong. So we serve everybody who wants to study the Bible.
I think some of the surprises are that there are some very narrow interest areas that digital makes easier to support. We have done an Ugaritic library of digital books for studying ancient Ugaritic, which is a language that was in cuneiform. Cuneiform being when you press the little wooden wedge into clay tablets. There’s not a huge audience for that. But we actually made profitable project that delivered Ugaritic text and resources because there’s a few number of people who really value the digital tools to help them work with that. The Internet can help you find those people even though they’re scattered all over the world. That is one of the fun things we do. While the majority of the business is selling to pastors who need tools for sermon preparation, we actually work in some very interesting academic and niche specialty areas that are sometimes amazingly obscure, but they’re important feeders into the scholarship that leads to better Bible study down the road.
Do you consider Faithlife a Christian workplace that is doing real mission and evangelism or simply a workplace where a lot of Christians work?
Well, we’ve certainly won some awards from organizations such as Christian Workplace Institute and things like that, but I don’t think companies have souls. I think people have souls. I’m sometimes uncomfortable with the phrase “Christian company” or “Christian workplace,” because it’s the people who are Christians. We’re a for-profit company. We’re not legally allowed to discriminate. I’d say we’re probably, I’m guessing, 95 percent believers, because there’s strong affinity in knowledge that fits well with the job. So it’s a place that does employ a lot of Christians. Our business is to serve the Christian church. That’s what we do. But within the company, it’s a diverse group of people. If we ran a snowboarding shop that sold snowboarding gear, we’d probably have a lot of snowboarders on staff. They know about it, and they care about it. In the same way, most of our people are very passionate about Bible study and helping people with those tools.
Do you ever hear criticism for turning Christian texts into money-making projects?
All the time. There’s always somebody who thinks everything should be free. And there’s always somebody who thinks everything that’s connected to the church should be free. I try to listen to those people and understand their perspective, but I often point out that they probably paid the carpenter who built their church, right?
They probably paid the publisher who printed their hymn books and their pew Bibles. They probably pay the pastor a salary. Even if that’s done from gifts or donations, that’s the pastor’s income and how they’re supported. If they buy communion wafers and grape juice, they buy them from a store.
And we’re providing a tool that people use in the study. We definitely agree the Bible should be free to everyone. And we’re supportive of free Bible efforts. We give Bibles away digitally. We recommend some really nice open-source and free Bible software on the Internet. No one is unable to get good Bible study tools for free. And we point people to those tools, and we can provide them. But what we do is provide power tools for people who want to go deeper. We have to pay the publishers and the authors and the software developers. Most people understand that and appreciate the value we deliver.
Personally, I like being a for-profit company instead of a nonprofit, because it creates a form of accountability. I have to build a product that people find useful. They have to be willing to open their wallet and buy a copy or we don’t get to stay in business. We have to earn every dollar we make. And we do that by delivering a really useful product. If we go the wrong direction or deliver something people don’t like, they’re quick to tell us. And one of the ways they tell us is by not buying it. The big thing about being for-profit is accountability. And I think accountability is a good thing.
