the medellin run club origin story (founder interview)

Lais IG:   / lais.karvelis   Jordan IG:   / jspensir   Our "little" Run Club started with 4 people in April of 2024. 66 weeks later, it's a community with: • 59 runs hosted • 180+ average weekly runners (99.8% YoY growth) • 35% new, 65% returning weekly • 4,200+ email subscribers (42% open, 6.5% CTR) • Monthly sponsors, themed events, and a 10+ person volunteer team This is the origin story interview with Lais Karvelis, my business partner, and founder of The Medellin Run Club, and the lessons we've learned: 1. People aren't meeting at night clubs anymore. They're meeting at run clubs, inside of a sauna saunas, or at a group workout. The cultural shift toward social fitness / wellness is one of the fastest growing macro-trends in the world: → Wellness-focused real estate: $1.1T → Health/fitness event attendance: +146% (Eventbrite) → Wellness tourism at $1.4T → Gen Z & Millennials spend 3x more than Boomers on fitness Follow these accounts for data/trends: The Stanza, Fitt Insider, SweatPals, Active Overwatch While our run club served our own individual priorities, our timing couldn't have been better to capture the growing desire of people to be part of these types of communities. Also, living in Colombia, the demand is much higher than the supply for these types of events. 2. We're a social fitness community, but we're also a content company. The branding and visual aesthetics of the run club is the crux of the growth. People attend because they saw how the club looked online. We have a professional photographer there every Sunday, make reels each week, and tap into social trends. Everything we create is designed to be shareable and create the "viral loop" for exponential growth. 1. The content gets new people there. 2. The experience and connection keeps them coming back. This angle is our biggest monetization lever with sponsors. We're able to package content with the right aesthetic to aligned sponsors, and connect them to influencers in our community, which creates massive value for them. Having a content-first mindset from day one has made all the difference. Plus, we can do this without needing to abandon our mission to provide a free space for people to run together. 3. People overlook the consistency required to deliver an experience. Every week, at 8am, we're there. For close to a year, Lais has only missed one week (I've missed a few more due to travel). The essence of an in-person community, the soul of it, is reflected by the commitment of the founder. Communities can only thrive when the people serving them show up and care deeply about the experience they're providing. We've taken feedback, iterated, changed restaurants, added a volunteer team, adjusted routes, invested our own money, all for our members. Our consistency is our number one hack. What of the three lessons resonates with you most?