We recently connected with Kaleen Canevari and have shared our conversation below.
Kaleen, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Your ability to build a team is often a key determinant of your success as a business owner and so we’d love to get a conversation going with successful entrepreneurs like yourself around what your recruiting process was like -especially early on. How did you build your team?
I founded Flexia in 2020 and worked alone and unpaid for the entire first year. I convinced some friends to help me along the way by contributing advice and a few consulting hours here and there. Once I was interviewing for the tech accelerator program, I recruited two co-founders to come on if and when we were accepted. This acceptance to the program came with a small investment and provided a much greater chance of our success, so taking the leap into the business at that point made sense for them.
Co-founders are powerful allies in a baby startup, and I can’t recommend them enough. But, it is hard to find the right ones. Neither of my co-founders came from outside my own small network of people I knew (even though I looked!) and I think that’s because I build relationships slowly and am not flashy, so I needed to recruit from a pool of people who knew me already in some capacity. My co-founders took a risk by leaving their old job and working for little or no pay with no guarantee of any longevity or success, so they had to buy into me. They had to believe that together, with me leading, we could do it.
People ask me all the time how to find co-founders. David, our CTO, was a friend of mine from a few years before Flexia who had many conversations with me about my dreams and actually encouraged me to start Flexia in the first place. He thinks about risk and finances differently than I do, which was frustrating at the time because he didn’t just quit his job and jump in at the very beginning when I had nothing done! But it turned out to be a good thing that he waited to quit his job so I didn’t have to pay him with the few dollars I had at the time. He was able to work part-time for equity during the 6 months leading up to joining full-time when we got into the accelerator and that commitment to Flexia helped land our first major funding.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My name is Kaleen Canevari and I am the Founder and CEO of Flexia Pilates. My background is in mechanical engineering, and before founding Flexia, I designed and engineered reformers for another Pilates equipment manufacturer. In order to learn more about what I was designing and building, I started taking Pilates classes. Something interesting happened after a couple of months that I didn’t expect: my chronic knee pain from two ACL injuries went away! I quickly learned that this method of movement was desperately underrated and had some serious benefits that the fitness world wasn’t tapping into.
I became a certified Pilates instructor to help others discover Pilates the way I did. After a couple of years I left that company and split my time between teaching in a local studio and traveling the country as a Pilates equipment technician, going into homes, studios, and gyms doing repairs, installations, and troubleshooting on Pilates machines of all makes and models. I quickly learned that there were some severe downsides to traditional Pilates reformers.
Traditional Pilates reformers were in need of some design upgrades: the carriages were too small to adequately fit most bodies, adjusting aspects of the reformer to fit your body size was cumbersome, moving a reformer around a studio (or in a home) was nearly impossible, and the metal components on the ropes clinked and banged during class.
And the list of problems with Pilates didn’t stop there.
Not only was the physical reformer in need of some tweaking, but Pilates itself was really inaccessible outside of a studio and there was no way to tell if you were progressing in the practice without an instructor telling you “Good job today! I can tell you’re getting stronger.”
This is when I got to work on building Flexia, a studio-grade Pilates reformer designed with your body in mind, equipped with smart technology to give you instant guidance during class and track your progress over time.
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
When I first started Flexia, every investor wanted to know where my traction was: “How do you know this will work?” Of course, my industry experience and 1:1 conversations with clients wasn’t enough.
I faced the same problem that many founders face, you need investment money to gain traction and you need traction to get investment dollars. It’s a vicious cycle.
I ran an incredibly scrappy pre-sale to prove demand and ended up generating $140k in sales in 19 days with just $500 in ad spend. It was hard work and took a ton of planning, but I pulled it off.
Once I proved the demand I took the presale dollars and built the first Flexia Reformer in my dad’s woodshop. At the same time, I went back to investors who acknowledged my ability to sell and there was some demand, but then asked where I was going to manufacture the reformer at scale. Frustrated, I just kept working to execute where I could hoping my ability to deliver results became enough to build conviction I was investable.
I eventually secured a spot with a prominent tech accelerator program which was the springboard that launched us into the venture world and eventually led to our seed round fundraise.
Okay – so how did you figure out the manufacturing part? Did you have prior experience?
I built the first four Flexia Reformers myself, one as the original prototype and three as pre-production tests. I am a mechanical engineer, so I designed everything in CAD and for the first reformer built most of the pieces in my dad’s woodshop. The second, third, and fourth reformers I ordered pieces from potential manufacturers and assembled them in my living room in order to give the okay to move forward. Of course, I knew I couldn’t do that at scale so I searched for a manufacturing partner.
Being a small business, especially a startup with little track record and few resources, made it really difficult to convince a manufacturer to take a risk on us. Setting up production takes time, money, and lots of test runs, and it was hard to find a partner willing to do all that work for a company that is just trying to get off the ground. The manufacturer must also believe in our vision, and in a very male-dominated engineering world it was no small feat to get my female-founded company to be taken seriously while making a stereotypically female-centric product. For example, I had one manufacturing partner tell me my product was overengineered and I should relax my standards. Needless to say, that relationship was not successful.
Our first domestic manufacturing setup actually required us to source every single part and train a company in the midwest to assemble and package them. This was not the most efficient way to do things, both in time and resources, but we learned so much about our product design in the process it made transitioning to our next manufacturing partner much, much smoother and more cost efficient.
Like anything in startups, knowing and leveraging my superpower (designing, building, testing the physical product professionally enough to pass along to a manufacturer) to accelerate the process was key. But that’s not all that it took to make a product come to life at scale. I had to teach myself about finance and cashflow, plus my first outside hire was a full-time supply chain manager to negotiate pricing and manage timing, logistics, and quality. Being self-aware enough to seek out help in the areas I wasn’t an expert in nor had time to do as the CEO was imperative.
Contact Info:
- Website: FlexiaPilates.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/flexiapilates/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/flexiapilates/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kaleencanevari/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@flexiapilates7507
Image Credits
Flexia, Inc.