When Stridekick, a Chicago-based fitness-tracking startup, originally launched in 2014, it was known as MatchUp. At the time, the company made an app that standardized data from a variety of wearable activity trackers, like Fitbits or Apple Watches, so that users could participate in fitness challenges with their friends and family, even if they didn’t own the same devices.
“There needed to be someone to standardize the data between the different devices, which is incredibly difficult,” said the startup’s Co-Founder and COO Anthony Knierim. “It seems very simple, but if you saw the backend of how Garmin reports that distance data and how Fitbit does it, they’re very different."
But when Knierim and his co-founder John Contreras kept receiving feedback from people, saying they thought the company was a dating service, like Tinder or Bumble, they figured it was time for a new name.
“People would be coming onto our Facebook page and posting, ‘Hey, thanks for everything you’ve done. I found a boyfriend or girlfriend,’” Knierim said. “It was pretty funny.”
So in 2016, the startup rebranded to Stridekick, and tweaked its product to provide both a consumer and B2B experience. The company still offers challenges for users across the wearable tech spectrum, but it now also works with corporations to help them track their employees’ fitness activity.
Stridekick released MoveSpring, which helps companies who operate yearly fitness programs better track their staff, especially for companies with more than 500 employees.
“We evolved our business model more into understanding the corporate health space and the health provider space, and that’s mainly where most of our customers and business is today,” Knierim said.
And Stridekick has a different sales approach than other companies. Instead of approaching corporations and asking them to offer their product to their employees, Stridekick looks at its existing users’ workplaces and then approaches companies that happen to have several of their employees already on it.
“We use our consumers as a way to champion the product and win the business at the employer level from the bottom up, instead of me hiring a big sales army to do top-down selling,” Knierim said. “We grow our relationships from there. Employers want to be able to use an administrative platform to manage the backend and incentivize people.”
Knierim says Stridekick has more than 500,000 users on its platform and has about 700 corporate clients.
Before launching Stridekick, Knierim worked at a number of Chicago-area tech companies. He spent three years at Accenture and Aon, and is currently on the boards of other local startups and organizations, including MentorCloud, Packback and Reboot Illinois.
In 2018, Knierim said Stridekick is looking to grow. Right now, they employ 15 people in their River North offices, but are on track to double their staff by the end of the year. And if you’re thinking about joining the team, you’ll have to use Stridekick.
“We’re doing monthly and weekly challenges all the time to incentivize and keep people motivated,” Knierim said. “We’re a pretty fun group.”
