Kenny Morgan has developed a rather breathtaking resume for someone who occasionally gets mistaken for a 16-year-old.
By day, he's the art director at Dalton-based Tandus Flooring, and former art director for Chattanooga-based Area 203.
But after hours, the 25-year-old UTC graduate has created a free mobile application with a group of college classmates, drawing on a passion for design and a budget of zero dollars.
"We've talked to investors but we weren't going to wait for that," Morgan said. "It's more exciting this way."
Like most creations, TruExpo was built to address a problem.
People who attend events want to know what to see and where to go, but it takes too much time and money for each event organizer to create a custom app. Such apps cost up $30,000 for each show.
So attendees more often rely on banners, printed schedules and eye-catching colors to dictate their route.
"When you go to these conventions, you get a little disorganized," he said. "You don't know where to go and afterward you don't know what you accomplished."
If it catches on, TruExpo would replace paper handouts, schedules and flyers to become the standard way for eventgoers to manage visits to the more than 50,000 annual conventions across the country, he said.
TruExpo bundles in maps, feedback, photos, schedules and social media functions for display on cell phones and tablets. Attendees can even download event-specific information weeks before the exhibition starts, something Morgan calls "pre-gaming."
To be sure, TruExpo isn't the first event-planning app ever coded, and it won't be the last.
Though Morgan is part of an emerging trend of independent application development in Chattanooga, most of his west coast competitors have been around longer.
But Morgan isn't worried. With tens of thousands of events happening every year, there's enough room for everyone.
And as a part-time developer, his overhead -- and fees -- are lower than some competitors, he said.
Competitors apps also depends on exhibitor participation. Morgan, on the other hand, can bypass uncooperative exhibitors to ensure that there's at least some information on each booth.
"With some of these other guys, if the exhibitor doesn't log in to add their information, then the app looks broken," he said. "We built ours in such a way so that doesn't happen."
The way it works is simple.
Morgan's company licenses the program to event organizers, who supply basic location and contact info for each attendee to populate the database.
Exhibitors can later log in and add more info to their entries, which are then translated into a slick, easy-to-use map and planning interface for attendees.
In spite of the app's humble origins, the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce has already signed a contract to use it at the upcoming Expo Chattanooga, an annual business showcase with more than 240 exhibitors.
"Really, we liked the customization of it," said Chrissy Jones, event coordinator at the Chattanooga Area Chamber of Commerce. "Exhibitors can put all their own information into the app so it's accessible to the attendees."
It's not bad for a first gig, and Jones describes the group as "wonderful to work with."
"They are really just saying, 'give us the exhibitor names and we're going to run with it from there," she said.
At a cost to organizers of about $15 per booth for smaller events, TruExpo is cheaper than printing out hundreds of new business cards, Morgan said, for an app that could cost from $20,000 or $30,000 to develop independently.
"Some of these other guys have millions of dollars invested and 10 teams working on it," said Morgan, confidently. "But our features and pricing model are better."