There was no electricity when an 11-year-old Michael Brizendine first arrived at an orphanage in Haiti.
He had miraculously survived the catastrophic 7.0-magnitude earthquake that decimated Port-au-Prince in 2010. It killed more than 200,000 people, including Brizendine's family and friends.
"I lost literally everyone I had grown up with knowing at that point," he said, noting he was in school the evening the earthquake hit. "I was the only one who made it out of the school that day by asking my supervisor if I could go to the bathroom. I was walking back from the bathroom, which was about 50-feet away from the main school building, when the earthquake happened and I watched the building collapse."
Through the destruction, Brizendine eventually made it to the orphanage where he immediately set to work collecting lights and batteries to illuminate the building. Fiddling with electronics since childhood, he's always had a passion for technology that's only grown after he was adopted and moved to Louisville.
Brizendine told me that love of technology eventually led him to co-found Yornest, a smartphone application that brings together a social media platform with group messaging capabilities. The Vogt Award-winning concept came from his experience using group messaging to communicate with classmates at Bellarmine University.
"We were using GroupMe, which was very engaging at first, but after 22 notifications from group members, everyone just wanted to mute it or tune it out," Brizendine said. "I quickly realized how fast group messaging was growing — we just needed something to better the experience."
Yornest is similar to a Facebook group, but outside of Facebook, he explained. Brizendine's generation — Gen Z — is using Facebook less and less, according to a 2019 study by Edison Research. That study indicated that only 62% of U.S. 12 to 34 year-olds were Facebook users in early 2019, down from 67% in 2018 and 79% in 2017.
The Yornest application (which is free to download for iPhone users now) enables users to create "nests" for specific groups, such as a private group just for friends and family, semi-private groups for school campuses and larger groups that are open to the public.
Brizendine said he and his co-founder are in the process of launching the app for Android users now before seeking to attract and engage new users. Yornest is also in the midst of trying to raise $350,000, which will in part be used to add more software engineers to its team to help maintain the app as its user-base grows.
You can read more from Brizendine in the Q&A below.
Who (or what) is your biggest inspiration? Why? My biggest inspiration is Jesus Christ! After going through everything I’ve been through, it’s only make sense to me that there is a greater and better thing in life than just trials. Far better than anything that could ever happen to us on this earth, and that is Jesus himself.
Where did the name Yornest come from? The name Yornest (soon to be Yournest) came from a discussion with a friend and how everything in the app seems to be nested in a very unique and private way. Through brainstorming and playing with words, I decided that each group chat can be view as a nest, where they are full with nested features and fully private to the group.
After the Android release, how do you plan to bring new users to Yornest’s platform? We plan on doing some paid marketing in the future, but so far it’s been all organic growth, which prove to us that there is a space for the product; so we believe the Android app will only further that growth via word of mouth.
You’ve been into tech since you were a kid — what’s one of your favorite tech devices, apps or other innovations (aside from Yornest)? It’s a product call "GitHub." It makes it 100-times easier for developers to work together!
What’s one of the biggest challenges you’re facing in your effort to grow Yornest? Biggest challenge is trying to do this type of innovation in Louisville. Because it’s not something many people are doing here, and as hard as it is already to grow something here, doing something like Yornest is like double that difficulty.
How do you think the social media landscape will change as younger generations gravitate away from platforms like Facebook? There has been a massive shift in social media over the last three years and it’s only going to continue to shift more and more. Five years ago, people would go to Facebook or other platform not only to consume, but to create, interact and really get plugged in.
But today, it’s the opposite.
People will go to Facebook, Tiktok, Instagram, etc. to consume content that isn't even made by their friends, but rather creators or influencers. Do you wonder where they go to create? Well, they go to messaging apps. There, they will create massive group chats with their social groups because it’s private and intimate, but messaging apps really lacks the capabilities it takes to create a social space for a group. This is where Yornest comes in!
Shout out to Larry Horn, Kela Ivonye and Dave Christopher for their relentless support towards this.
