Cameron Flotow and Dominik stand near Davidson Hall on the Coker College campus.
Photo by Melissa Rollins
By Melissa Rollins, Editor, editor@newsandpress.net
Though their stories are very different, Coker College students Cameron Flotow and Dominik Rega have the same desire: to make a difference in the world. Next month, they plan to launch a crowdfunding campaign for their app, Brite, to work toward that goal.
Flotow’s story began in 2011 when he was diagnosed with Leukemia, just days after his 21st birthday.
“My mom dropped me off at the doctor and they checked my blood and then they wanted to do another check because they thought the first sample was contaminated,” Flotow said. “Turns out it wasn’t; I had Leukemia. My entire life changed that day. When you go through things like that you realize what things are important and which things aren’t.”
Flotow said that he had an inkling that something might be wrong but nothing prepared him for the diagnosis.
“I knew that something was wrong because every day I couldn’t walk as far and people kept telling me that I looked pale,” Flotow said. “I remember putting my arm into a blood pressure cuff because I was worried it might be a heart problem but my pulse was fine. A day later, my whole arm was bruised. How in the world could my whole arm get bruised? I didn’t realize it was from the cuff until after the fact.”
He endured round after round of chemotherapy and a bone marrow transplant, spending months in the hospital.
“At the very beginning, I was just dumbfounded,” Flotow said. “Two days after my diagnoses, I was getting ready to begin chemotherapy and I was watching on tv that Steve Jobs passed away. He was someone that I looked up to and I was watching this story and found it really inspiring. Yes, he probably made billions and billions of dollars but that isn’t why he did what he did; he did it to help the world. I was looking death in the face and I made a promise to myself that if I survived this I was going to do something. I didn’t know what that would be but I wanted to make my life meaningful in some way.”
Rega is a freshman foreign exchange student from Czech. While his family has a successful company back home, he said that it was important for him to find his own way, at least for a little while.
“I come from a family of entrepreneurs so I grew up in that setting,” Rega said. “We have our own company back in Czech so I saw my dad and my grandfather, how they were running the company; the company is as old as I am.”
Rega said that watching his dad and grandfather he noticed a similar fire in himself.
“I saw how they were interacting with people and how they were building it; I have a little bit of that mentality of wanting to do something by myself,” Rega said. “Later on I will probably run the company but I just decided not to inherit it without almost any work; they’ve done most of the work. I decided to do something on my own, to start it a little bit from scratch. That’s why I came to America, to be by myself and kind of grind it out from the beginning.”
The young men met in an entrepreneurship class.
“When we met each other in the class, we were pitching our ideas and Cameron pitched his idea for this app and said that he had already been thinking about it for three years,” Rega said. “As he was talking about it I saw that he still had the same passion for it and I realized it was really good to do this instead of me coming up with something else. If I came up with something else, it would probably be because of the money and I’m not sure that that is the best approach. If you are going to create something, it needs to be valuable and you need to be passionate about it because there are going to be a lot of setbacks that you will go through.”
Flotow said that there is a prototype for Brite but that the Indiegogo money will go toward building the actual app.
“What we are trying to do it get the application built,” Flotow said. “We have a prototype but we want to hire some graphic designers and some programmers and that is very expensive. One app company that we talked to, AppOcta, told us that they can do everything for Android and IOS for $20,000.”
Flotow said that he knows that figure is a barebones number so their fundraising goal is quite a bit higher.
We are getting the Indiegogo campaign set up to raise $100,000 because if it costs $20,000 just to do that, there are tons of other things we are going to have to do,” Flotow said. “We have looked at marketing, servers and all that stuff but there are also probably hidden costs that we don’t know about, and we can’t know about, until we come up against them.”
A business model competition for their entrepreneurship class will contribute $1,000 to their efforts if they win.
The app will work as a social network for the community users are in. Users can put in a location and be connected to everyone within a ten-mile radius.
“Brite is going to put everyone within a ten-mile radius of you in one application,” Flotow said. “I feel like this could help out many people, no matter the situation they are in.”
There will be several uses for the app, Flotow said, from work to meeting new people in your local community.
“You can make new friends on this app,” Flotow said. “We generally use social media to talk to friends we already know; what if it we had a social media that allowed us to create new connections? It will also be a way to network yourself out. One of the things you can post on Brite is sound files. If you are a musician you can post your music on there and get feedback from everyone in your community.”
Flotow said that with his app, and his partnership with Rega, he hopes to help others in the way that he was helped.
“A lot of people gave me so much, and did so selflessly,” Flotow said. “I just feel like I am made to return that favor.”
To find out more about Brite and its mission, visit www.thebriteapp.com and signup for their newsletter to be notified when the crowdfunding campaign goes live.
