We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Steven VanDyke a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

“August 7th marks the 10 year anniversary for Fight…Win…Survive where they have been touching, impacting and saving lives.”

Steven, appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

On July 8, 2018, my sister at 41 years old had a massive stroke. The stroke happened in front of my mother but every one is not as blessed to be in the presence of another person. My idea for 911 Alert came from my family experience with my sister.

Think about it, you are alone and have an emergency and you grab your cell phone and dial 911. The 911 operator takes the call and sends help to your location. You are transported to a local hospital and admitted. Who knows that you called 911, what’s possibly going on or even where you are? This is an easy answer right? No one!

Here’s where 911 Alert comes in. When you call 911 from your cell phone through our app, a text message is immediately sent to up to ten pre-selected emergency contacts, not only informing them that you called 911, but also provides the address (per GPS) of where you were located when you called. Next, our app has a chat feature that will allow you and your ten emergency contacts to communicate with each other regarding the emergency. You as the caller can provide details while actively on the call with 911 or while waiting for help to arrive, but the key is that everyone is getting the information and are able to communicate with each other in real time. Finally, the app has a live tracking feature that will track your cell phone if emergency services takes you to the hospital. This is valuable information to have if you are unable to speak, unconscious and your phone is still in your possession, your family and friends will know where you are.

In my sister’s case, looking beyond her situation is what made me think how our experience could help others. How could someone be notified if no one else was present? How could communication be streamlined and how could an individual be located when/if they were transported or moved from the initial location of the call?

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

The parent company for 911 Alert is Fight…Win…Survive. We are an encouragement merchandiser/ministry outreach where our mission is to encourage and raise awareness for overcoming obstacles and changing minds through visual, emotional, and spiritual support to individuals going through a life circumstance. We were established on August 7, 2012, when I, the founder woke up in the middle of the night with the three words Fight…Win…Survive attached to my spirit. Exactly how you see the words with the “…” in between is how I typed them in my cell phone before going back to sleep.

The idea was birthed as a security blanket for me while suffering with anxiety at the time in an attempt to encourage myself and to assist others. My anxiety had me paralyzed where I was scared to live and scared to die at the same time. Through those “moments” as I call the times when anyone is actively dealing with their episodes, I learned the value and power of verbal and visual repetition. We immediately started selling t-shirts, moved to wristbands, books and other visual items providing encouragement. Our t-shirts have ranged from saying “Fight…Win…Survive,” to “God’s Got My Back,” to Awareness Ribbons, to “Don’t Stop,” to our newest releases, “Lord I Thank You” and “Accomplish Maintain Grow.”

Our encouragement is for any individual dealing with their own life circumstance or serves as the perfect gift for someone who is going through what I refer to their “it.”

What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?

What helped me build our reputation within our market is going through what it is that we provide the services for. First, having anxiety gives me a platform to better understand the challenges that people face and deal with, not only from a mental health standpoint, but from a life standpoint. Everything that happens to us has an effect on our mind and drawing the connection to encouragement and God helps make our message an authentic one. Also, being a certified life coach helps build the reputation of caring as well.

Second, because my family dealt with a significant emergency, I based the features of the app on that experience. It has helped the individuals who have downloaded the app understand the importance and necessity of it. Our 911 Alert motto ”the insurance you need and the assurance you’ll have because it’s better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it” rings true. Most people do not prepare for an emergency. My family never expected what happened to have happened. Thinking about who your emergency contacts would be in an emergency is the first step and our app helps start that conversation.

Also, there’s no monetary motivation behind the app for the user. Each user can have one FREE emergency contact, so someone will know when or if they have to call 911 from their cell phone. However, users can have up to ten emergency contacts for the convenient price of $4.99 per line per year. At Fight…Win…Survive we are more concerned about people having the app and that is definitely helping build our reputation.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

In my family’s pain of dealing with my my sister’s massive stroke, it was additional pain that I had to go through to build the 911 Alert app. There’s the saying “God works in mysterious ways” and that’s exactly what happened with the development of 911 Alert. My sister had her stroke in July of 2018, but in March 2018, I was in a car accident where someone ran a red light and hit my car. It was around August of 2018, I started thinking about the app and put out a bid for the job to develop it on a site called Guru.com. We received over 100 quotes in less than 24 hours from interested companies in developing the app. I invested the initial money once I selected the company Avion Technology to cover their “discovery” phase regarding the feasibility of the app. My settlement from the car accident gave me enough money to cover building one platform of the app so I went with Android because that’s the platform that my family and I have and it made the most sense to develop first.

As we were getting ready to launch the Android version of the app in June 2019, I was hit in another car accident. By the end of 2019, I was able to settle that case as well and that settlement gave me the money to pay for the development of the Apple version of the app. Although the accidents caused physical damage to my back, I was able to allocate the settlement money and get both platforms built without paying a single dime out of my pocket thanks to my awesome attorney Utrophia Mason with the Trophy Law Firm who represented me well and knew what I needed to build the app, and made sure in both accidents that I was compensated well after the settlement to accomplish that goal.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.FightWinSurvive.com, www.911Alert.app