The winding path to Unite
Trevor Nichols - Jun 01, 2017 - Biz Profiles

Photo: Contributed

Jesse Brown, the co-founder of a the new Kelowna-based app Unite, always considered himself and adventurous guy.

After moving to and exploring Kelowna for a few years, he’d basically hit all the landmarks you tend to hear about.

Then, one day, he realized there had to be more.

“I sort of just had a realization one day that there’s no way I’ve done everything that I can do here,” he recalled.

With that realization in hand, the UBCO student went to his friend and future (former) business partner Jay Bell, and the two starting chewing over the idea.

Before long, they realized they could create a solution.

“I, like many here, want to find something that I can go out and do with my friends that isn’t that restaurant I’ve been to 100 times, that isn’t Knox mountain, you know. I wanted something different,” Brown said.

Their solution, the Unite app, aims to catalogue all Kelowna has to offer and serve it to hungry activity seekers in a simple, user-friendly way.

The app is loaded with a selection of “cards” for a bunch of different activities in and around the city, complete with a picture and some basic information about the activity, and how to get there.

Users can swipe through the cards and, similar to Tinder, chose what does and doesn’t interest them.

It also allows users to share activities and connect with their friends, or find new people to go on adventures with.

It’s fairly user friendly, and Brown says having easy access to a plethora of information about what to do in the Okanagan is something many have been waiting for.

He’s passionate about his app, primarily because trying to find things to do in the city was one of the primary “pain points” in his own life. But the fact that Brown is all-in on his new startup might surprise some, considering the fact that only a few years ago he lost it all on a different one.

Back in 2013, Brown and Bell ran a company that dealt in the digital currency Bitcoin.

Things were going well: they had moved to Silicon Valley, there company was valued at about half a million dollars and investors were taking interest.

The pair were “living the dream.” Brown says, until their company got hacked—an especially catastrophic event for a Bitcoin company—and they lost everything.

“We lost a considerable amount of both ours and client money, and it was just a total shit show,” he recalled.

After the hack he and Bell decided to shut the whole thing down, and Brown found himself back in Kelowna, going to school.

But he still had ideas, and in particular his concept for Unite was one he felt quite strongly about.

But an idea is only an idea until you can put it into action, and Browns says he and Bell were having a tough time finding developers to build the app, or investors to give them a financial jumpstart.

“We were unfunded, we were basically just grinding students, and everyone we talked to said this is the best idea ever, this is the number one pain point in my life, so that was good for us, but it was really hard to get to that next stage,” he said.

Those challenges forced Unite to the back burner for a while, and Brown found himself taking a job when he got out of school

But then his Grandfather slipped him a little seed money— just enough to get the project off the ground— and Brown quit his job and once again dove head-first into another project.

Photo: Contributed
Jesse Brown shows off the Unite app.

Once he had the cash he rounded out his tam, found a few developers, and got to work.

“We worked out of our hose. On an hourly bases we were probably all making like seven bucks an hour. We had no air conditioning, we lived in a house right on Richter Street with no air conditioning. Right in our living room all five of us were working in our tank tops and gym shorts all day,” he said.

“It was not easy to jump back into the deep end again, but I don’t regret it at all,” he said.

Then, last fall, they attempted to blast Unite onto the market, with less-than-desirable results. The app was buggy, Brown said, it had too many features and just wasn’t properly refined.

“I think we tried to do way too much, way too fast, and we ended up not even solving the problem,” he said.

However, the crummy launch ended up being a “blessing in disguise, because of the assumptions we had ended up being wrong.”

Over the next six months the team went back to the drawing board, and vowed to created something truly worthwhile.

“We said ‘let’s not make a student app, let’s make a full-fledged, awesome, thing. Let’s design it well, let’s get good content, and really do this right.’”

The new Unite app launched a few weeks ago to a small group of friends and family, and Brown says it’s starting to take off, which is exciting for Brown not just because he wants to see his company do well, but also because he feels like he’s offering a really good service.

“This isn’t just we want to get some money, or because we want to be the next Zuckerberg. It’s really not that,” he said. “When we started talking about this it was like ‘this is something we would use every day.’”

Unite is available on both Android and Apple phones, and Brown says thy will continue to add more features and improve on their product as more feedback comes in.


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