They’ve built the top Muslim app with zero marketing budget. It now has 62m downloads.

Ten years ago, the digital floodgates burst open when Apple officially launched its App Store in 2008. This gave software developers a new way to monetize and bring their projects to a global audience.

Among the first few hundred programmers who joined the digital fray was a bright-eyed iOS developer named Erwan Macé and his small team of three.

Two years after the App Store launch, Macé’s company Bitsmedia made a breakthrough. It released what would eventually become the most popular and downloaded app for the Muslim community – Muslim Pro.

The start of something career-defining

Years before Muslim Pro blossomed, Macé held his own in the world of app development, spending over 20 years in senior positions for companies like Alcatel, Akamai, and Google.

Muslim Pro wasn’t the focal point of Bitsmedia at the beginning. Instead, Macé and his team built applications for top-level clients like Universal Music, Singapore Telecom, and Vivendi.

Though business was good, Macé knew that in order to prevent his and his team’s skills from going stagnant, they could not rest on their laurels.

“In between clients and enterprise projects, we were always trying our own little ideas as well, building our own apps on the side. While client projects were paying the bills, these smaller, pet projects were keeping our excitement high.”

It wasn’t until August 2010, roughly a year after Bitsmedia was established, that they found a hit.

The company had been looking into Indonesia as Macé believed that the country would become the next goldmine for the mobile internet.

He realized that Indonesia was the largest Muslim country in the world, home to 12.7 percent of the world’s Muslim population – about 225 million people.

He wondered whether there were any unmet needs in this group. At that same time, the month of Ramadan was underway, and Macé’s curiosity helped him notice a few things.

He saw that during this period, his Muslim friends were always asking about when they had to break or start their fast. That’s because fasting times depend on the position of the sun, so most Muslims find out through the local mosque, the radio, or newspaper.

This observation led Macé to think, could there be an easier way to track this fluctuating schedule – all in a single app?

Trial and error – from Indonesia to the West

Spending zero dollars on marketing

Searching for partners to scale

Beyond religion

Developers need to pick a horse