Our Journey with Cheer
and why you should turn you ideas into reality
Cheer is Spectators (remote parents!!) on the Virtual Stands
website: cheerapp.io
Parents cannot attend their kids games in person due to commute/work conflicts, communication is not streamlined at times, and scheduling is disorganized. Megha and I faced these problems when we played on our high school sports team, and we decided to create the solution. The solution is Cheer: the one-stop-shop platform for organized communication and event scheduling within sports teams, with plans for remote presence enabling parents to virtually attend events.
Connect with us on LinkedIn if you would like to use Cheer for your team!!
Here’s how Cheer came to be:
In 2021, as two high school sophomore girls, my friend Megha and I decided to embark on our DECA career by participating in the annual Business Pitch Challenge. We came up with an app to solve the problems we recognized in our sports community. We named it Cheer From Home.
Cheer was initially a platform that brought live streaming to the sports community, giving parents a way to watch their children play from home!
Although we did not place in the top ten at the state level, the experience motivated us to continue building on our idea for the upcoming DECA regionals competition, the Silicon Valley Career Development Conference in Santa Clara. We competed in the Innovation Plan event and placed in the top ten with Cheer From Home.
With this success, we improved our report and presentation immensely for the State competition. We also changed the name of our app to Cheer and expanded the product to also include organized communication and event scheduling to solve the disorganization with these functions in teams.
At the DECA State Conference in Anaheim, we competed in the Startup Business Plan event and placed 8th. After this success, we decided to actually start building Cheer since it was solving a real problem in our community and beyond. We applied to startup accelerators like Y combinator and Sequoia, but were rejected. But this did not stop us, we continued to develop the app, drew out screens, sent out emails to coaches across California, talked to our teachers and high school coaches and conducted surveys for parents and coaches in order to understand the needs of our market and validate Cheer.
In this year’s regional competition, which just took place last weekend, we competed in Business Growth Plan, which required competitors to own an actual business, which Cheer was for us at this point! We had a test build ready to demo during our presentation, and had mockups of screens. We won first place among top qualified competitors! Since then we have applied to the Diamond Challenge, a global entrepreneurship high school competition. We are also starting to build our Cheer team to include marketers, designers, developers, writers, and website builders who are our friends and classmates, to maximize Cheer’s potential.
Preparing to launch soon and share Cheer with our community and the world, Megha and I are excited to see the growth of Cheer and the impact it will have on the world. We plan to keep improving Cheer based on our market needs and keep learning, as we believe there is always room for improvement.
As of March 2022:
Cheer placed 2nd at DECA States Competition and we are so excited to be representing Cheer at Internationals in April!
Now, how do you overcome the bridge from idea to reality?
For us, it took competition success and validation of the problem in our community to ultimately motivate us to create Cheer. But most of the time, all it takes is a leap of faith, confidence in the problem you are solving, and a passion for your idea’s mission.
Anyone can come up with ideas to help their community, but it’s those who execute who ultimately see their dreams come true. If Jobs and Wozniak let the Apple I remain an idea, technology would be nowhere close to where it is today. Everyone has the capability to change the world, but only some actually do, not because they are smarter than others, but because they let go of fears and believed in their ideas to the point of creation.
This is also connected to the art of risk-taking. What stops many from pursuing their startup goals is the financial and time risk. Why put many hours and thousands of dollars into starting your own company when you can work at a profitable one already existing? This is what 90% of working adults stand by. The remaining 10% are entrepreneurs.
Of course, not all ventures end up succeeding, but that is what the entrepreneurial process is all about. Growth. If we don’t act on our ideas and push to positively impact our community, innovation hinders. Innovation is what creates jobs, inspires people, and improves the standard of living.
As Peter Thiel says in Zero to One, “Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
