A note from Sam, co-founder & CPO of Pacely.
Last year, I sent a throwaway message to two friends."What if we built something better for runners?"
We laughed about it. The kind of laugh that means yeah, that's a fun idea, but we have jobs. I closed the thread and moved on with my week.
A week later, one of them came back."I can't stop thinking about it. I think we can do it."
Those two friends are now my co-founders. Andy is our CTO. Indy is our CFO. We are all, in varying states of intensity, runners. And what started as a four-line group chat has, somehow, become Pacely.
This is the first time I'm telling the whole story in one place. So here it is.
The thing we kept noticing
Anyone who has tried to register for an NYRR race in the last two years knows running is having a moment. Major marathon lotteries are stacked. Track meets are selling out. Local 5Ks have waitlists. You can't throw a foam roller in this city without hitting a run club meeting up at 6 AM.A lot of that is the running boom — the running of it all is genuinely cool right now — but a huge part of it is run clubs. Clubs are where people find their friends, their training partners, their reasons to actually leave the apartment when it's 28 degrees and dark. Clubs are why running stopped being a solo sport for a generation of new runners.
Run clubs are doing extraordinary work. And the tools they're using to do it are, charitably, not.
What we heard from 15+ run club leaders
Once we started taking the idea seriously, we did the obvious thing: we started talking to run club leaders. As many as would meet us. We've now had real conversations with 15+ leaders across NYC, and three things came up over and over again — almost word-for-word, from clubs as different as you can imagine.1. They have no idea who's actually going to show up.A club gets 80 RSVPs for a Saturday long run. Maybe 30 will pull up. Maybe 50. Sometimes 12. It's a coin flip every weekend, and it makes everything downstream — coffee orders, route planning, group splits, sponsor commitments — a guessing game.
2. They want to court sponsors but don't have the data.Every leader we talked to had at some point thought about partnering with brands. Local coffee shops, gyms, gear companies, recovery brands. The brands want in. But the clubs don't have verified attendance numbers to walk into the meeting with — and "we have a group chat with 400 people in it" doesn't close a sponsor.
3. They want to actually know their members.Most clubs see their members for an hour, twice a week, in the dark, wearing the same hat. Leaders told us, again and again: I want to know who my die-hards are. I want to celebrate the regulars. I want my members to find each other between runs. Today, the only place that happens is in WhatsApp threads that get muted within a week.
The patchwork (and why it persists)
Here's what running a club looks like in 2026.Comms? WhatsApp. Dues? Venmo. RSVPs? Google Forms. Roster? A spreadsheet somebody updates by hand. Attendance? Vibes. Sponsors? More vibes. Member directory? Whoever you happened to chat with at the bagel after.It works. Kind of. But "works" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. Every club leader we've talked to is essentially running a small business out of seven different apps, and most of them are doing it for free, on top of their actual job, because they love their club.This is the pattern we kept seeing: the clubs are thriving and the infrastructure is duct tape.What Pacely is
Pacely is starting as an online clubhouse for run clubs.The idea is simple: build one home where clubs live between runs, and give leaders the tools to actually understand what's happening inside their community.That means:
- Verified check-ins, so leaders know who actually shows up — not just who RSVP'd.
- A real clubhouse, where members can hang out, find each other, celebrate runs, and trade stories without disappearing into a 400-person WhatsApp.
- Member profiles, so leaders can see their die-hards and members can build a real running identity.
- Sponsor-ready data, so when a club is ready to monetize, they walk into the meeting with receipts.
That's the long arc. But we're starting where the pain is loudest.
Where we are right now
The app is live. We're working with a handful of founding club partners in NYC who said yes early — clubs we genuinely love, run by people we genuinely admire. They're using Pacely with real members, in real time, and giving us honest feedback that's making the product better every week.If you run a club in NYC, we'd love to talk to you. We're being deliberate about who we onboard right now because the early partners shape the product, but we're always making room for the right ones.
If you don't run a club but you run with one, tell your leader about us. Or just send them this post.
If you sponsor clubs, or want to, get in touch — we're paying attention to the brand side of the marketplace too, even if it's not the first thing we're shipping.
And if you just like running, building, or watching three runners try to figure out a company in real time: stick around. We're going to be writing here regularly — about what we're learning, what we're shipping, what we're getting wrong, and what the run club leaders we talk to are teaching us every week.
We started this because running has given us so much. Pacely is, in a real way, our way of giving something back to the sport and the community that made us.
See you out there. 🦌— Sam Co-founder & CPO, Pacely