[Please note: this interview with HearMeCheer founder and CEO Elias Andersen appeared in the Collingwood Connection newspaper in suburban Toronto, Ontario, Canada on Friday, June 4, 2021.]
By John Edwards / Collingwood Connection / Friday, June 4, 2021
In March 2020, Elias Andersen was in Arizona pitching a product to Major League Baseball teams.
He had created ChampTrax, a monitoring system that, when attached to players, can track them on the field or ice and provide a wealth of information.
However, then came COVID-19. The Pretty River Academy graduate had dropped out of the University of Toronto and with youth sports on hiatus, he was unsure about his future.
“What at am I going do for the next 12 months?” he said. Along with his father, Tom, he developed HearMeCheer.
“Dad came up with the idea; fans could actually cheer from all over the world and have their voices heard from inside the stadium,” he said.
Elias was tasked with selling the product to leagues and sports franchises. And within months, HearMeCheer was being used by Top Rank Boxing on a nationally televisedevent on ESPN.
“It just snowballed,” said Elias, who is CEO of the company.
The company has worked with partners in college football, Major League Soccer (MLS) and for political events like the U.S. election, collaborating on more than 125 events with about one million users.
Elias said they are now focusing on the growing industry of social audio and sites that allow fans of music, sports, or politics to enter into a discussion from around the world. He said they are like Zoom meetings, but without the video.“It’s been a wild 15 months, that’s for sure,” he said. Elias has always been interested in sports and using technology to improve it. In high school, he was a science fair winner with robotic umpire technology and participated in the Summer Company program with ChampTrax.
While he was studying to be an engineer at the University of Toronto, Elias wanted to follow his passion and be an entrepreneur.
“That’s one of the best parts of being an entrepreneur … every day I get to make pivots and make adjustments to my product and how it works in order to improve it,” he said. “I’m so competitive, I want to make it better.”
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