Posted Mar 13, 2019, 5:30 PM
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Join Date: Jul 2014
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Wodify leaving South Jersey for new Center City HQ
https://www.bizjournals.com/philadel...r-city-hq.html
Quote:
After seven years in South Jersey, fast-growing tech company Wodify is making the move.
Wodify, which builds fitness and gym management software and recently hit the $10 million recurring revenue mark, is leaving its former space on Haddonfield Road in Cherry Hill after signing an 11-year lease in Center City’s slowly reviving East Market neighborhood.
The 10,000 square-foot space at 1100 Ludlow St., above Mom's Organic Market, will house about 30 of Wodify’s 75 employees, with the other 45 based in Lisbon, Portugal.
It needed the additional space to grow its staff, said Chief Marketing Officer Brendan Rice, but also to pursue a primary goal behind the move into Philadelphia — becoming a bigger part of its tech community.
“We kind of just stayed scrappy and built ourselves from the ground up in New Jersey,” Rice said. The company’s bootstrapped approach made it more economical to keep their heads down and focus on building the business, not a sharp new city office, he said. It's now reached the point in revenue and staff growth where the move makes sense.
“Over the past year or two, we’ve grown a lot, and as the Philly tech scene continued to grow and expand, we wanted to become a part of that network and put ourselves right in the heart of it,” he said.
Based on his own experience at his local CrossFit gym in South Jersey, CEO Ameet Shah founded Wodify to help gyms like his manage membership and digitize performance tracking, which mostly lived on whiteboards when the fitness trend first took hold.
Wodify launched in 2012, the same year CrossFit franchises began sprouting up at an “unprecedented rate,” according to CrossFit news outlet the Morning Chalk Up. Between 2012 and 2015, about 8,500 net CrossFit gyms opened up.
The startup grew at a similar pace, repeatedly landing on the Inc. 5000 and the Philadelphia Business Journal’s ranking of the region’s fastest-growing companies. It hit growing pains as it did so, Rice said, spurring the company to shut down for an entire week, gather its entire staff together and go through an intensive program to reinvent its culture.
“This is a company that takes its culture super seriously. They’ve invested a lot of time and money and thought into it, ” said Mike Krupit, founder of startup coaching service Trajectify. He was brought on about a month and a half ago to help Shah map out the next few years of operations, and described Shah as having a “Silicon Valley-style intensity,” as well as a Silicon Valley-style laid-backness.
“There’s nothing inauthentic about Ameer. Everyone who meets him knows he calls it as he sees it,” Krupit said. “He thinks quick, he acts quick, he holds himself to high standards, holds people to high standards and like to be surrounded by the best.”
Wodify purposefully sought a larger space than it needed in order to build a large training room and event space when moving to the city as part of its efforts to become part of the tech community, Rice said. Wodify’s move date is set for March 18, and will host its grand opening party four days later. Shah’s friend, San Francisco 49ers President and area native Al Guido, will be interviewed in a fireside chat by 6ABC Action News anchor Rick Williams about the intersection of sports and technology.
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