Stay motivated, get encouraged, and reach your goals with Leap
Today's featured startup, Leap, lets you create challenges with your friends and compete by snapping photos and earning points.
Leap is an app for group challenges that motivate and encourage people to improve their lives. If you have a goal, you can join a challenge on Leap with other people who want to achieve it. For example, if you wanted to stay motivated to eat a healthy breakfast each day of the week, join a challenge on Leap, snap a picture of your meal and get feedback, help, and support from the community. Read our interview with co-founder, James Dickerson.
What inspired you to start your company?
Our team is incredibly passionate about self-improvement. But two things inspired us to work on Leap, specifically. One, we were working on Wellthy, which was a game for corporate wellness meant to get employees more engaged in a healthy lifestyle. We learned that they wanted to do challenges with friends around their personal goals instead of competing with their coworkers - so this feedback was huge for us. The next thing is that our team was doing a Paleo diet challenge, and we were snapping photos of our meals to prove what we ate to each other. This turned into the basic idea for Leap after we noticed how well this simple action helped us stay motivated to reach our goal.
Tell us something unique about you and your co-founder(s).
I completed the world's toughest outdoor survival program. I lived in the desert for 30 days with a blanket, a knife, and a poncho - needless to say it was incredibly intense. Ryan recently traveled to Kenya to put his dev skills to work on something really meaningful. He helped build databases to optimize and organize their citizen's healthcare data.
What problem does your product or service solve?
With all our advances in tech, self improvement is something that is still incredibly difficult to do. Whether it's eating healthier or being more productive, there's nothing that has turned the motivation to do these things into a repeatable process or tool that works for the masses.
What are your startup's three biggest challenges to growth?
We always want to move faster, so speed is number one for us, at times we haven't had the resources we've needed to push product like we want to. On the flip side, when we have moved faster, sometimes we've rushed things in the past that have hurt us - like having Facebook only login.
How has Startup America helped you overcome these challenges to growth?
Startup America has given us an awesome opportunity the past two years by inviting us as one of a few companies around the country to the Clinton Global Initiative. The connections we've made up there in Chicago have been so beneficial to our team.
Why should startups join Startup America?
Having a good network is so important. Startup America can help you connect to the right resources and people in your area. Also, the staff at Startup America is awesome and have always been very willing to help us.
What is the startup culture like in your City/State?
Cincinnati is definitely up and coming. There are some really big companies in town like Proctor & Gamble, Macy's, and Kroger. Because of that there is great marketing and design talent available for startups to tap into. Organizations like the Brandery, a top accelerator are helping startups tap into the local economy. It was a big help getting us started.
We have about 24,000 registered users and are making some huge updates to our product which will be ready this summer to take Leap to the next level!
Learn more about Leap
Startup America member since January 2012
Region: Ohio
Web: http://leapfor.it/
Twitter: @leap
Facebook: www.facebook.com/leapforit
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