It was May 2, 2015. Tim Cannon, ’14, had been 23 for one day. He sat on his bed in his small Chicago apartment, hung up his phone, took a deep breath and stared at his bare apartment wall.
It was the same wall he’d woken up to every day for the last nine months. Its stability reminded him he had a job and friends and a home and a future that many people work toward their whole lives. He thought about the steps he’d taken that brought him to here and how, in a couple weeks, he’d be thousands of miles away with no safety net and no certainty.
And he felt free.
Cannon had just gotten off the phone with his mom. He told her he was quitting his job and moving to California. His best friend from high school, Austin Kevitch, was waiting there with a little bit of money from a family friend and an idea for an app that could change the way people view social media.
The app idea came from a moment of deep sadness. When Cannon and Kevitch were juniors in college, a friend of Kevitch’s died in a rock climbing accident. After his death, Kevitch was struck by how many people were saying nice things about him on Facebook. He wished his friend could have heard those comments when he was alive.
Kevitch conceived of an app that would subvert the expectations of Internet anonymity and the negativity that can accompany Facebook, Snapchat, and dozens of other social media apps that have come and gone. Instead, it would aim to do one thing: to brighten someone’s day. Users add friends and then, simply, compliment them. Compliments are visible to friends, but the identity of the poster is hidden.
“Anonymity removes the friction that is otherwise there when you compliment someone that you aren't that close with,” Kevitch said.
Kevitch had the basic premise, but he knew he needed help to get it off the ground. That’s where Cannon, who has a penchant for community service and was always bothered by how rarely people gave or received positive reinforcement, came in.
“Austin kept bugging me about coming to work with him on the app. Eventually I just couldn’t say no anymore.” Cannon said.
The idea had potential, but the two knew nothing is ever certain in the world of technology and business. Launching Brighten, as they called the app, was like “a freaking roller coaster,” Cannon said. “So many things went wrong.”
To go from sixth in the app store to only having a few hundred users because it was essentially broken was a whirlwind of emotions.
The first hitch was immediate. After the friends moved out to California with a business model and a concrete plan, ready to get started, they had to wait three months for approval from Apple.
When the app was released, it started to take off, but by then the pair was low on money. An investor stepped in just in time and, from there, the app climbed Apple’s popularity charts, peaking at number 6 in December 2015.
That’s when the roller coaster took another drop. The 19-year-old programmer they’d hired got homesick and left the company. When the app began to experience bugs and stopped working, there was nobody to fix the problem and it began hemorrhaging users in a fickle industry. “To go from sixth in the app store to only having a few hundred users because it was essentially broken was a whirlwind of emotions.” Cannon said.
It took the team eight months to find a new engineer and get the app back to working smoothly again. This January, they re-released the app and it’s back to trending upward.
Feedback that Brighten has changed lives keeps Cannon and Kevitch going through all of the ups and downs. “People have written to us [to say] how they stopped self-harming because Brighten helped them realize that people simply notice them,” Cannon says.
Cannon knows to expect the unexpected as they try to regain the momentum they lost. Still, he’s never regretted that May day when he had the confidence to take a leap.
“I get to work with my best friends, make my own hours, create my own value for the company,” he says, “and all so that people can smile a little bit more. It's a dream.”