Meet Gerrit Kamp

We recently connected with Gerrit Kamp and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Gerrit, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?

I found my purpose in life when I discovered that my creator has a purpose for me, that God created me for a purpose. It took me almost 35 years to discover this, and it required some serious detours and mistakes on my part, before I was willing to accept that God, as the creator of life, knows better how to live it than I.

God is love. He created us to love Him, and to love other people like we love ourselves. When we do that, we find that God Himself loves us and that Jesus will dwell in our hearts through the Holy Spirit. He will show us how we should go about life. My journey and purpose started with faith in Jesus and then I grew in my relationship with Him.

This change started some 15 years ago. I was in a desperate and unsuccessful quest for fun, happiness, and success. God changed that into a calm peaceful pursuit of Jesus, and now I’m following Him wherever He leads. I found purpose and happiness as a result. Jesus said: “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full.” John 15:11.

This story is about how Jesus showed me how to live, and how He wants to use my talents and my life for His purposes rather than my own.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

The main change in my life came when I started to read and study God’s Word, the Bible. God created us to have a deep and intimate relationship with Him. We are His children and He is our Father. Once I started spending time with Him every day, by reading His Word (the Bible) and praying to Him, I started to look differently at life. Jesus said that He came to give life, and to give it more abundantly (John 10:10). This abundant life comes when His teaching and His Words take deep roots into our hearts. Jesus also said that “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.” (Matthew 4:4). Just like our bodies need food every day in order to be strong and healthy, our spirits need God’s Word every day, to be strong and healthy.

The anxiety and despair from my earlier days were slowly replaced by joy and hope, as I was starting to understand better how God wanted me to live and use me and my skills. The main way God achieved was through my daily quiet time, my daily time spent together with Him in reading the Bible and prayer. I made it a new habit to start my days with God. I would read a chapter or two, and think about how those words applied to my life, and then I would pray and talk with God in prayer. At first this daily habit took maybe only 15 minutes per day, but over time it has grown and now I frequently spend 45 minutes to an hour with God at the beginning of my day.

I also started adding some other things to my daily time with God. I started to write down some things I learned in a journal. I created a list with people and things to pray for, and I started memorizing some Bible verses as well. Having different tools for each of these things became a bit of a hassle. So one day I decided to build a tool that combined all of these tools into one, and this is how Quiet Time was born. I started building the very first version in 2014 and started using it myself later that year.
I worked on the project in my spare time because during the day I was working as the Director of Engineering at Big Human, a prestigious design and development agency in New York City. In 2015, I was able to work with Spenser Garden, one of the most talented designers at Big Human, and he created a modern yet functional design for Quiet Time. This updated version featured not only a daily Bible Reading section, but also modules for Scripture Memory, Prayer, Journal, and ToDo’s. I went live with the updated website in 2016. In 2018, I started working on a mobile app that went live in 2020.

All of this was done part-time, but in 2023 God made it clear to me that He wanted me to start working on the project full time. He did this in a beautiful way. Back in 2016, at Big Human, I started working on a project called Plentiful. Plentiful was backed by a number of food pantries in New York City that envisioned a better experience for their visitors. Before Plentiful, people would wait a long time in line outside until the pantry would open, so that they could be assured of taking home some food. This was costly both in terms of time and dignity. Plentiful turned the process upside down, and enabled people to make reservations with pantries to come and pick up food at given time slots during pantry opening hours.

Plentiful launched with a handful of pantries and an SMS service to make the reservations, but then grew pretty quickly and in 2019, just before Covid, more than 300 pantries in NYC were using it. During Covid, the usage grew exponentially, both because there was a larger need for food from pantries, but also because Plentiful allowed for social distancing much better than the earlier ‘wait-in-line’ model. By this time, people could make reservations not only through SMS but also through Android and iOS mobile apps, and through a responsive website. Pantries were
managing their services through a custom built backend platform and website.

Other cities got interested in using Plentiful for their pantries, and Plentiful started operating in Denver, and upstate New York, amongst others. By 2023, more than a million people had received food at food pantries through reservations made on Plentiful. Now Plentiful is active in many cities across the nation.

I was the main engineer working on the project and in 2023 someone calculated I had committed 97% of the code for the entire Plentiful ecosystem. At that time, I realized I had been working on the Plentiful project for 7 years, helping people get physical food. It was a good project to work on and I learned so much about how to build websites, apps, and infrastructure, to support a growing project. But now it was time to move on and the Lord was calling me to use what I learned at Plentiful and apply that knowledge at Quiet Time, in order to help people get spiritual food.

The transfer from Plentiful to Quiet Time has a Biblical parallel. In Genesis 41 we read about how God told Pharaoh a dream that Joseph, one of the 12 sons of Jacob, interpreted for him. The message was that there would be seven years of plenty, in which the harvest would be plentiful, and that these years would be followed by seven years of famine. Joseph told Pharaoh to use what God provided during those years of plenty to store up food for the years of famine, and it indeed came to pass.

In the same way, God has richly provided for me and my family, in the seven years that I worked for Plentiful. I learned how to grow a software platform from very small beginnings into something that is used by over a million people. And now God wants me to use those skills to provide people with spiritual food, with words of life.

In 2024, Quiet Time became an official WA non-profit organization and we also received 501(c)(3) non-profit recognition from the IRS. Quiet Time has three board members (myself, Prem Kumar in India and Erica Berdan in WA). We have since launched a fully updated version of the website, which is now also available in Telugu, one of the main languages in India, and we added multiple new features to the website. Later this year we plan to launch an updated iOS app and an Android app. The goal with Quiet Time to have fed a million people with spiritual food by 2030, seven years after leaving the Plentiful project. How beautiful that would be.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

First and foremost, in order to develop a new website and/or mobile app from scratch, you need software development experience and you need to know the business domain in which you want to launch your product. Having worked for over a decade in various NYC startups and agencies, I learned the technical development skills I needed for Quiet Time. These skills include database design, backend and front-end development, and hosting management. And having been diligently working at my spiritual growth, I knew what a product to support this for others should look like.

But it doesn’t stop there. As an independent entrepreneur, you also need some graphical design, user interface design, product management, and growth hacking skills. You may get help in these areas but you will still have to do a substantial amount of the work yourself. In my case, a top-notch designer (Spenser Garden) created the initial design, but then I had to apply his templates to dozens of new and different screens. I learned UI design and growth hacking partly at the various projects I had worked on before, but also through self-study (books and internet).

Finally, you need perseverance. It may take many years before your product gets noticed and people start using it. You may feel many times that the time investment is not worth it, and that you can use your time better somewhere else. In my case, it helps that I’m a daily user of my own product and experience the value of it daily. That strengthens my conviction that it will be useful for others as well.

Is there a particular challenge you are currently facing?

The largest obstacle we are currently facing is to get our users from occasional visitors to active daily users. We get decent numbers of people visiting the Quiet Time website (about 400 visitors per month) but not enough of those are becoming active users. This will be one of the focus areas this year. We are learning various growth hack strategies, for example the EUREKA framework from Product-led Onboarding by Ramli John, and are looking forward to implementing those in the coming year and seeing results.

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Image Credits

Shane Hamstra

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