A woman ditched her six figure salary in order to create an app which stopped her sport-mad husband moaning about football.
Susannah Schofield, 45, had enough of her husband Paul, 41, dissecting every footie match he watched, so decided to make an app where he could moan away until his heart was content, to like-minded others.
The app, named Pitch Sport, has over 58,000 users, and is valued at over £3 million today.
The concept is sports fans are able to respond to questions from players, managers and pundits, predict game scores, rate choices made during matches and compete with friends who are also on the app.
Susannah first dreamed up the idea back in 2017, and was so determined to make it work that she quit her job at the Royal Mail and sold all of her designer clothes, shoes, and expensive jewellery in a bid to fund the project.
On the moment she had the brainwave, Susannah said: “Every week my husband returned with my daughters from a football game and moaned bitterly about the decisions made during the match, I’d say ‘tell someone who cares’ and he always reply that no one listens to the fans.
“So I thought – if I build him a platform to share his views, and the views of his fellow fans, he would finally have the voice he craved as a fan.
“In fact even better he and his mates would have a collective voice which would ensure the pundits, the commentators and the clubs would now ‘have’ to listen, and I wouldn’t have to anymore.”
Describing her idea for the app as “football manager meets fantasy football” Susannah says that while the idea was invented to shut out her husband’s moaning, it’s actually done quite the reverse.
“What has now happened, is I still hear my husband moan, but in addition I hear tens of thousands of other sports fans moan too across all Premier League and Championship clubs.
“The app has already carried out a Crowdfund back in 2017, and since then received a Private equity investment establishing a current value of over £3 million.
“It is now of track to be worth much more after the next phase of growth, aided by the Football App update in Dec 2020, and the launch of Boxing.”
Susannah who has two young daughters, Willow, 10, and Brooke, 12, says it was daunting to give up her 20 year career to pursue the project.
She added: “I had a great job but I knew I wanted to make a change as otherwise I’d always be wondering ‘what if.’
“I went from allowing my children to buy anything they wanted – within reason – to checking the price of milk to ensure we were not over spending.
“I lived off my savings but I am pleased that Willow and Brooke have watched me take financial precautions as they now know the value of money.”
Now at Pitch Sport the team of 13 work in Football, Motorsports and Boxing – which is launching next month.
Susannah, of Sevenoaks, Kent, added: “I live in a world of fan views. Our app gives the voice of the fans and we believe that the opinions of the lifeblood of the club need to be heard.
“That is what Pitch Sport is delivering: collating the fans collective voice and feed the views back to Boards and Managers so that they really know how that loss or ‘Marque’ signing has gone down.
“My husband, who is a stock broker, wishes he could meet all the amazing sports people I am lucky enough to, which gives him something else to moan about, but I am not going to try to solve that!”
The app is free to download on Google Play and Apple’s iTunes.
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