8/22/2014 Preena Patel
Kevin Yun had his first spark of entrepreneurship with his social fitness app Fitsby.
Written by Preena Patel
In his junior year of college studying finance at the University of Illinois, Kevin Yun had his first spark of entrepreneurship with his social fitness app Fitsby. This app was created to help everyone stay motivated to work out. He and his teammates took Fitsby to the Cozad Competition.
Despite the fact they did not win the competition, they decided to accept funding from Tiger Labs in Princeton, NJ, and flew out there for the summer of 2013 to work on improving Fitsby.
Although Fitsby has been discontinued as of March 2014, Kevin has been hard at work on another project, DESIGNATION.
DESIGNATION is a 12 week, in-person, digital design boot camp in Chicago that teaches you UX, UI design, and front-end coding (HTML/CSS/JS). The boot camp is intended for aspiring designers, front-end developers, and UX practitioners.
Kevin also started DESIGNATION when he was in his junior year at Illinois. He met his co-founders Zeke Franco (Senior IxD Designer at GrubHub) and JJ Lee (Senior Designer at SitterCity) by cold emailing them, pitching them his idea, and asking if they would be interested in working on the project with him.
In regards to the future of DESIGNATION, Kevin states, “I was a junior in college when I pushed the DESIGNATION website live. For now, our sights are set on helping every single one of our graduates find a job. We have classes of 20 students every 6 weeks, so it’s a labor-intensive post-grad operation we have going on.”
During his time at Illinois, one of Kevin’s favorite experiences was the ThinkChicago trip because he was able to see companies such as Trunk Club, Nokia Labs, and Orbitz. He was also able to have the opportunity to build his network, which he wouldn’t have had without TEC.
Regarding the help that TEC provided while Kevin was a student, he shares, “In my experiences, I tried to leverage as much of the entrepreneurship that existed on campus as I could. TEC was a venue to meet other like-minded individuals and be inspired by other students making awesome stuff.”