Being Underestimated: The Beginner Who Built CheersBuddy
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There is a strange thing that happens when you are a beginner.
People see what you do not know before they see what you might become.
When I started building CheersBuddy, I was not an experienced software developer. I did not have years of technical knowledge behind me or a perfect roadmap showing me exactly what to do.
I had an idea.
I wanted to create a place where people could be recognised for progress that might look small from the outside but feels enormous to the person making it.
Learning something new.
Taking the first step.
Building confidence.
Showing up again.
Doing something today that you could not do yesterday.
I called it CheersBuddy.
The idea came from something I had begun to understand deeply: we live in a world that celebrates visible success very easily, but often overlooks the effort that happens before success becomes visible.
We applaud the finished product.
We notice the expert.
We congratulate the person who made it.
But what about the beginner?
What about the person sitting alone trying to understand something for the tenth time?
What about the person whose progress is invisible to everyone except themselves?
I wanted CheersBuddy to be a place for that person.
What I did not fully realise when I began was that I was also becoming that person.
Building CheersBuddy forced me into territory where I was inexperienced. I had to learn how applications worked, how different technologies connected, how databases behaved, how authentication worked, how deployment worked, and how to solve problems that sometimes seemed completely beyond me.
There were moments when an error on a screen might as well have been written in another language.
Then slowly, it wasn't.
I learned.
I searched.
I asked questions.
I made mistakes.
I fixed things.
And every problem I understood became something I could not have understood a few months earlier.
That changed the way I think about capability.
We often treat capability as something people either possess or do not possess.
“She knows how to do this.”
“He is technical.”
“She isn't experienced enough.”
But those statements capture only one moment in someone's development.
They tell you where a person is standing.
They do not tell you how far that person can travel.
There is something particularly powerful about being underestimated when you are still becoming.
Sometimes other people cannot see what you are building because there is not enough evidence yet.
Sometimes even you cannot see it.
The evidence is being created quietly.
One solved problem.
One new skill.
One uncomfortable step.
One small win at a time.
Eventually, CheersBuddy stopped being only an idea in my head.
It became a real application.
And eventually I saw it somewhere that once would have seemed almost impossible to me:
Google Play.
Seeing it there meant more than publishing an app.
It represented hundreds of moments that nobody else could see.
Confusion.
Learning.
Persistence.
Tiny breakthroughs.
Problems solved quietly at a computer.
And that is perhaps the greatest lesson CheersBuddy has taught me.
Never measure someone's potential only by their current level of experience.
Beginners are easy to underestimate because their evidence hasn't arrived yet.
But becoming is happening underneath the surface.
Today, I am still learning. CheersBuddy is still evolving. And I no longer think I need to wait until everything is perfect before allowing myself to recognise what I have accomplished.
My effort is real.
My progress counts.
And perhaps that is why CheersBuddy means so much to me.
I didn't just build an app about celebrating progress.
Building it taught me how to recognise my own.
1 comment
Fabulous Tunde! You are living proof of trusting an idea, seeing it coming to fruition and pushing through your comfort zone to achieve your dreams and a new self evolving. Onwards and upwards – the sky is no limits!