Think about how many group chats you’re in. Between GroupMe, Facebook and Asbury emails, it can be difficult to keep up with all the notifications you receive during the school year. Often times, we end up muting chats or letting those red bubbles accumulate on our apps.
“Well, what if there was a global group chat that you could just press a button and have it filtered to where you only see and share with things you actually need and care about?” wondered senior Roshane O’Brien.
O’Brien is the founder of TheFortro.com, the official college group chat. He created a solution for college campuses that want to have clear communication and stay connected with the student body.
Q: What is Fortro?
A: It’s an online platform for communication among students, administration and faculty.
So, for example, you could filter it to your major, year, school or even just the friends you care about.
Q: How is it different from other social media platforms?
A: Most social platforms have something that they do. So, Facebook wants to connect the world, Instagram wants to share pictures. Fortro wants to help the world to learn. We wanted to create a platform that helps people on college campuses to learn and bring learning beyond the classroom.
Q: What do you want people to know about Fortro?
A: It’s not just your average social network. When you join Fortro, it’s not just an entertainment platform. It is something that is supposed to help better your life and create deeper connections.
A big factor of it is that we don’t want to take away face-to-face interactions. We want it to be a space where when you interact with people on Fortro, it’s people on your college campus. So, when you leave the conversation on the platform, you can continue it in person. It’s a place to start conversations; it’s not a place to live.
It’s the best way to interact with people on your campus. There’s a lot of things out there that do what Fortro does, but nothing is more centralized than it. Personally, even if you don’t sign up, I just want people to have conversations. …
Another reason why I created Fortro was to give people the ability to be heroes to the people around them. We call ourselves Christians, and Jesus inspired the entire world, but he started out with twelve disciples.
So if you can inspire just two people around you the way that professors and students here have inspired me by how hard they go after their passions. … You don’t have to be the biggest hero or a superstar. Not all heroes wear capes.
Q: What steps are involved in signing up?
A:
- You need a “.edu” email, just because we want to keep it close to the college space.
- Tell us your major, school and year you are in.
- You need to tell us a bit about yourself. We found that people interact better when they have some similarities. When you put your bio up there and somebody sees it, they are more likely to interact with you because they see they have things in common.
Q: Why is it called Fortro?
A: It means friend in Danish. We now focus on four things: questions, answers, experiences and creativity. Four things, Fortro.
Q: Why did you create this platform?
A: To bridge the communication gap between professors and the student body, and also to bring learning beyond the classroom and to make college fun again.
Q: What is your major and why?
A: I’m a business major. I’ve just always been fascinated with the world of business and how it works … and how you can build a product to help people and earn revenue and put that into the rest of the world.
Q: Who do you look up to?
A: Steve Jobs, just his mind set. He is so creative and innovative, and he just challenges the status quo. I just look up to anybody who does that, and I also look up to regular people who chase their dreams or do something they weren’t supposed to do.
Q: What does Fortro mean to you?
A: For me personally, this venture is about inspiring people who are like me … people who have been raised in circumstances like myself, who look like me and who have been traditionally disenfranchised. I’m from a third-world country and was counted out a lot growing up.
I came to Asbury and played basketball and I realized, there are enough black basketball players in the world. The entire NBA is black, but I don’t see anybody like me in the business field trying to show people that this is also attainable. I wanted to be a model of that … even if I fail, I just want to show people that I tried… You only fail if you don’t try.
Q: How has Asbury impacted your journey to creating Fortro?
A: Just how close-knit the community here is. I think we are definitely an example of what Fortro is supposed to be. A close-knit community where people are always talking and there’s always good discussion going on. Everytime you walk around, you meet somebody knew. It’s basically a physical version of Fortro.
Q: How long have you been working on Fortro?
A: The idea came to me my sophomore year, but I never pursued it. I didn’t know anything about computer programming and I didn’t know how to make websites. I was like yeah, I can’t make a business. I took a small business management class and one of the professors, Prof. Ross, encouraged me to go after it because it was my goal and dream. … I spend almost every waking hour working on Fortro in some essence.
Q: What advice do you have for people who want to start an ambitious business venture like Fortro?
A: Just take the leap. If you are passionate about it and you have a foundation, just dive into it and try your hardest. If you fail, you fail. But, if you don’t try, you will always regret it.
Q: What do you want Fortro to look like in the future?
A: In the future, I want Fortro to be the place for people to go when they want to find solutions for things, and when they want to have thought out conversations, share content and build deeper relationships.