Making waves with CITYROW Founder and Author Helaine Knapp
The fitness founder shares hard-won lessons from building a startup through industry booms, busts, and an unexpected exit
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Key takeaways
The fitness founder shares hard-won lessons from building a startup through industry booms, busts, and an unexpected exit
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The narrative around startups is often glamorized, focusing on success stories, but the true journey of entrepreneurship is much more complex. The rise of connected fitness, followed by its decline, brought unexpected challenges for many companies during and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Helaine Knapp, the founder of CITYROW, navigated this tumultuous landscape, ultimately selling her company to WaterRower in early 2024. But what does it really take to build a business from scratch, and what happens when the journey doesn't end with fairy-tale success?
How do entrepreneurs cope with the emotional and practical challenges of winding down a business?
Welcome to Tuesdays with Morrisey. In this episode, host Adam Morrisey sits down with Helaine Knapp, founder of CITYROW and author of Making Waves. They explore the highs and lows of Helaine's entrepreneurial journey, from founding CITYROW to the tough decisions leading to its sale, and the lessons learned along the way.
Key Points:
– The Realities of Entrepreneurship: Helaine shares the often untold, gritty aspects of the startup journey, emphasizing that success isn't always a fairy tale.
– Founding and Growing CITYROW: Helaine discusses how a personal injury led her to create CITYROW, a fitness brand that became an early adopter in the digital at-home fitness space.
– Winding Down and Moving On: The emotional and strategic challenges of navigating the end of CITYROW's journey and why asking for help is crucial for founders.
Helaine Knapp is the founder and former CEO of CITYROW, a nationwide fitness brand that she led for over a decade before its acquisition by WaterRower in 2024. With extensive experience in early-stage SaaS companies and a strong background in business strategy, she now focuses on coaching, advising, and consulting for growth-stage companies and executives. Helaine is also an author, with her first book, Making Waves, detailing her entrepreneurial journey and offering insights to other founders.
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About the author
Strategic thinker, continuous learner, and connector. Experience working with high growth and established businesses in strategic, financial, managerial, and operational capacities. Track record of excelling amidst ambiguity, across differences and in a variety of industries and environments. Adam is currently Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Shipshape, a rapidly growing start-up out of Austin, TX focused on helping homeowners monitor and maintain the critical systems of their homes through the application of AI and IOT technologies, with the ultimate goal of making homes smart enough to take care of themselves. Shipshape empowers homeowners with powerful data to help them make smarter decisions about their home and connect them to other service providers in the home support industry. In Adam’s role, he seeks win-win outcomes with strategic partners in the service contractor, manufacturer, insurance, real estate, energy, and smart home sectors. Prior to Shipshape, Adam was a Director at Trumont Group, a privately held investment firm with offices in Dallas and Phoenix. Adam attended Miami University (Ohio) and started his career at PwC. In the community, Adam works closely with Big Brothers Big Sisters, Beyond the Ball and Social Venture Partners. In his free time, Adam enjoys reading, writing, traveling and hosting the "Tuesdays with Morrisey" podcast which facilitates conversations with authors, entrepreneurs and thought-leaders.
