There and back again in 2020: A year on the trail building Recover Athletics
By: Nick Stewart
Tags: Technology, Startup, Running, Recovery

Nick S, Nick K, and Jaffer with Meb Keflezighi in Tampa

2020 brought a series of unexpected twists in the journey of building Recover Athletics. Back in January I began every weekday morning by waking up at 6:15am, running 5 miles around Fresh Pond Reservoir with Nick Kafker (our “morning 5er”), and then commuting from our Cambridge apartment into GSV Labs in Boston to meet up with the rest of the Recover team.

I look back fondly on the morning 5er’s with Kafker. We were optimistic about the year ahead. We’d recently closed our friends and family round, raising $250,000 to fund our recovery platform, and had released our beta mobile app in Testflight to about 95 runners in the Boston area. As founders we were learning a ton every day, and in lockstep about where the product was headed.

Looking ahead now to 2021, I remain more convinced than ever that Recover will be a successful venture. We began the year with just a handful of beta testers, and we end it with an app in the App Store and 600+ paying members; we’ve now raised $350,000 and are backed by some of the brightest minds in sports and tech; we hired a talented CTO, Jaffer Syed, to join us on this mission. Today our team is aligned and hungry to make a difference in the fitness industry and in the lives of thousands of American runners in 2021.

But it’s a cooler optimism that I feel today than at this same time last year. 2020 was a hard road for Recover. We’ve parted ways with 2 of our original cofounders — our group of 4 has slimmed to a lean team of 3. Rather than collaborate in an urban apartment or coworking space, Jaffer, Kafker and I work from our parents’ houses in the suburbs. Today I commute from my high school bedroom to the basement.

This sounds pretty bleak. Back in December 2019 I would have been shocked if you told me this is what my life would look like in 2021.

But even though COVID closed down offices and running races, today I feel only gratitude for where I’m at in life. Despite the shocks to the industry, the sport of running has flourished. Strava added over 2 million new endurance athletes to its app every month this year, and as running grows so too does the collective need to avoid injury while doing it. The urgency to stay healthy has driven over 9,000 athletes to download our app since May.

And personally I feel exceptionally privileged. I still have savings in my bank account, and I live in a beautiful home without paying rent. An elite education gave me access to a network that I’ve leveraged extensively to help bring Recover to life. I’ve met and learned from dozens of key stakeholders in sports, consumer technology, and venture capital. Most importantly, I wake up every day and know that I’m pursuing my life’s work. There is truly nothing I’d rather do than work as hard as I can to build an innovative health application for athletes.

In 2020 I learned that the journey of entrepreneurship isn’t glamorous. It’s a roller coaster with soul crushing lows and sleepless nights because it looks like we’re running a broke company with a broken product and an insufficient team to realize this opportunity. And often the very next morning I open my laptop to product usage data & messages in my inbox that make me believe we’re building the next tech unicorn in Boston and that nothing stands in our way.

Odds are good that 2021 will hold more paradoxical moments like these for our team. Next year will be a battle. And when I write a similar reflection in December 2021, chances are that even though the numbers will be bigger, I’ll still be saying, “We have so far to go, but we can do this.” In other words, the battle probably won’t be won.

But I wouldn’t have it any other way. This is the journey of a lifetime. There’s no greater gift than the opportunity to build a startup in the industry you’re passionate about, with your best friend, and a small but dynamite team. We earned every inch of progress this year, and we’re ready to bring the heat in 2021.

Thank you to our family and friends, investors, advisors, partners, and 9,000 runners across the USA who gave us a chance and supported us this year. We promise to keep battling, to do great things, and to make you proud in 2021!