Celebrating One Year of Umer & Rohit at Black Cherie Media

Some people complete a year.
Some build one.

Umer Shaikh and Rohit Chaware joined the tech team at Black Cherie Media a week apart. One year later, they’re not just developers. They’re momentum machines — shipping fast, building sharp, and proving that titles mean nothing if you don’t put in the work.

The Engine Room

No spotlight. No shortcuts.
Just clean commits, late-night sprints, and a constant hunger to figure things out.

These two have been behind almost every tech build that’s moved from Figma to live in the last 12 months. From real estate engines to internal systems, if it works — odds are they touched it.

They’ve:

• Owned full-stack dev on multiple flagship products
  
  
  

• Fixed what wasn’t even broken yet
  
  
  

• Asked the tough questions no one else did
  
  
  

Umer earned Employee of the Year 2024–25, not because he was the loudest — but because he quietly made sure everything shipped.
Rohit earned Fastest Growth Achiever, because the kid didn’t wait to be told what to learn. He just went and learned it.

What They’ve Learned

We asked them (kinda):
"What changed for you in one year?"

Umer:

“I stopped thinking like a dev. I started thinking like a builder. Now every screen I code, I ask: does this get us to launch faster?”

Rohit:

“I came in writing lines of code. Now I’m thinking in systems, scale, and speed. One year at a startup like this teaches you more than three years anywhere else.”

What Keeps Them Going

• Speed.
  
  
  

• Autonomy.
  
  
  

• Zero mediocrity.
  
  
  

They both said it differently, but the message was the same:

“This place doesn’t let you get comfortable. And that’s a good thing.”

Best Memory?

• Umer’s was the first time a client signed off on a build without edits.
  
  
  

• Rohit’s was staying up till 2 a.m. fixing a bug before anyone else even noticed it existed. (His words: “That rush? Unreal.”)
  
  
  

Advice to New Joiners?

“Join a startup. But don’t join just any startup.
Find one that respects real work, not just resumes.
For us, that was Black Cherie.”

The Takeaway

We don’t celebrate time spent. We celebrate what that time created.

Umer and Rohit didn’t just stick around — they built around. They’re why our timelines stay sharp, why our clients trust the backend, and why the tech team’s bar doesn’t drop.

Here’s to the first year — and the velocity that comes next.

No fluff. Just launch.