Tim Turner Owner and CEO of Subsplash

Humility and Innovation

Entering Subsplash’s new headquarters, about ten employees are leaving for lunch.

Two characteristics of the group are immediately evident: They carry themselves with the trendily-dressed confidence of the cutting edge computer-tech world, and they are smiling. Walking down the halls of the company’s offices, more workers wave and smile through the glass walls that define their bright work spaces.

These apparently universal characteristics of joyous competence become understandable as we get to know the company’s owner and founder, Tim Turner.

Tim is a member of a C3 Leaders Forum, in the Ballard/Wallingford area.  He had been introduced to the forum by Jon Sharpe, whose son Chris works at Subsplash as Platform Evangelist.  “C3 has been a great opportunity to learn, grow, and be challenged by other business leaders who love, worship and follow Jesus,” Tim says of his group, led by Martin Barrett of Sozo Wines.

Tim’s office does not stand out particularly from the other offices in the building except that he stands most of the day at a desk that faces out the window.  He pulls a couple simple but comfortable chairs to the middle of the room and he relays his story.

His mother had been raised in the solid and faithful home of a pastor and his dad always has a sermon playing on the radio, so Tim and his family enjoyed listening to sermons during the week.  Tim found that much of the new portable technology (phones especially) did not allow for the Flash format of most online video sermons.  Tim had been considering for some time creating an app that could deliver the sermon media and decided to approach the leaders at the church he attended at the time, Mars Hill Church in Seattle, to present the idea.

“My company at that time had enjoyed many contracts with major companies like Microsoft, Samsung, Cisco, and several other companies designing software,” Tim recalls, “The economic downturn in 2008 caused a lot of our projects to be put on hold. Mars Hill said we could build the app but said they had no budget for it. With more time – and less income – my wife and I prayed about it and I woke up feeling like God said “trust and obey.” So we started working to create this app.  Crazy as it seemed at the time, we used much of what savings we had and presented the church with their media-streaming app-the first of it’s kind.  Within the first week 10,000 people had downloaded that app and it even made the nightly news!  Through the media coverage that ensued, Rick Warren from Saddleback Church in California heard of it and told his staff “I want this now.” The ministries we serve have gone onto reach millions of end-users. Our goal with The Church App is to make the Truth of Jesus incredibly accessible around the world and we are excited to see that happening!”

Subsplash has built a robust and intuitive tech platform for delivering audio, video, news, events, and a slew of other features. They now have shipped thousands of customized phone and tablet apps across the iOS, Google Play, and Windows Phone app stores.  And this extraordinary growth is built on a strong foundation.  “Before we ever built anything or even named the company,” Tim explains, “we committed to two key values: Humility [‘sub’] and Innovation [‘splash’].  From those two values we have derived another key emphasis: Drive for Excellence.  God is both the most powerful Creator and greatest Servant.  We hope to reflect Him in both aspects.”

Measuring their rapid growth, broad impact on the global church’s ability to spread the Truth of Jesus and the warm smiles on the faces of their staff, it seems Subsplash is well on it’s way to meeting its value objectives.

Article by Dean Orrico

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