Paul Vitelli is the COO of Swish House and the GM who brought the concept to New York.

He was a standout stretch forward at Yale, played professionally in Italy, and then spent six years in private wealth and management consulting before walking away from all of it for the thing he loved most - basketball.

Swish House calls itself the world's first basketball fitness class, and Paul is big driver of the businesses growth so far.

And we spoke with him about his life and career. All of it.

Here's the guy behind your favorite basketball workout class. 👇

I'm Paul Vitelli. I'm the COO of Swish House Corporate and the GM of our New York City locations. Swish House is the world's first basketball fitness class.

Toward the end of my senior year I started getting recruited by agents overseas. A lot of them were from Italy because they saw my last name. At the time each team could only carry a certain number of Americans, so agents reached out thinking that with my last name I might be able to get Italian citizenship. That way I'd have American skills but wouldn't count as an American on the roster.

I went with an agent I trusted, and I spent an entire summer at City Hall gathering the birth, death, and marriage certificates of my family who immigrated from Italy to New York, making them official so we could trace my lineage back to Italy. I ultimately got my citizenship, and that's how I ended up choosing Italy.

The New York basketball scene is funny. The more people you know, the smaller it gets. I played a ton of men's league when I came back from Italy, and one of the guys I played with, Craig Moore, played at Northwestern and knew a lot of people in Chicago. (We had one of the best men's league teams ever, for the record.)

When COVID hit, Swish House was still running classes in a beta phase in Chicago, and people were showing up in masks to take them. They realized they might have something and wanted to raise money. Craig told me to check them out. My previous startup had just fallen apart, and I fell in love with the concept immediately. I invested in the round, helped them close it, and told them that if they needed help, I was around. They took me up on it.

I consulted for them from November 2021 to April 2022. Eventually they said everything I was advising on was hard to act on, because I was in New York and they were in Chicago and I couldn't really see what was going on. Fair. So I said, why don't you let me open in New York? I opened our first New York location at The Post BK in April 2022.

Friday morning is Breakfast Club, and it's a different animal. It's 7am at The Post BK when nobody else is in there, so we rent the whole gym, every hoop. You partner up and go four minutes at a hoop, one person shooting while the other rebounds, then you switch. Every court has its own shooting pattern, and you rotate courts until you've done all of them. You add up your scores and we crown a winner. Warm up, stretch, shooting competition, some abs, and that's the first hour. The second hour we play five on five. So it runs 7 to 9.

A regular class, like a Tuesday night, follows a similar structure. We warm up, activate, and do a dynamic 3D stretch to get every muscle engaged and the heart rate up. Then we move into shooting and conditioning drills, and coaches usually turn it into some kind of competition to make it more fun. By the time class is over you've spent 30 or 40 minutes running and shooting and you don't even realize you got a workout, because you're just shooting hoops. We mix in strength and mobility stations, some abs, and things we call vipers. Then a closing game to wind down.

They are all amazing people with unique personalities and coaching styles and nearly all of them played college, several played pro, and some have coached at the college or high school level. They all have deep basketball pedigrees, and that's part of our moat as a business.. What we do is easy to replicate, but two things protect it: we were the first company to do this, and our bar for coaches is really high. If you're trying to compete with us in another city, that's hard to match.

When we started in April 2022 we did some basic advertising on Meta, just simple still imagery and a good intro deal. That got people in the gym, and once they were in, we could show them the product and it sold itself. We ran a couple of referral programs too. But we haven't done any paid advertising since February 2023. For three and a half years it's been almost entirely word of mouth and organic posts.

We just turned ads back on about two weeks ago, because word of mouth had probably reached about as far as it could, and the new interest the ads have garnered has already been noticeable. We also partner with influencers who come to class and post about it, and some of them let us white label their content.

Chicago's been active for about seven years, New York for four and a half. We're opening in Atlanta and Columbus in a few weeks, and Boston and Milwaukee are on the map for 2027. Long term, we want to be in every NBA city.

On membership, it depends how you count. With active packages, we're probably close to 450 or 500. The recurring monthly members are closer to 120, and the rest are on class packs and punch passes.

Pricing, especially early on. When we launched in April 2022 we did a $9.99 first class. It got people in the door, but it got the wrong people in the door. Compared to the $30 or $40 drop-ins at other boutique classes, ten dollars attracted people who just wanted a cheap workout, not the ones who'd come back. Our referral program had the same problem. People did it for the free class, and whoever they brought didn't really care about being there.

The bigger issue was that the people who did want to come back were anchored to that low rate, so when we moved to real pricing it felt expensive to them. What I tell Atlanta and Columbus now is: definitely discount to get people in, but don't discount so much that you attract the wrong crowd or signal that the class isn't worth much.

In New York the real constraint is real estate. There aren't many gyms available, and the ones that are have to be affordable and open at the right times. As a result our growth is plateuing a little, so the plan is to expand into New Jersey and Connecticut, staying within 20 to 50 miles of Manhattan where the brand name still carries. At the HQ level we're adding cities. And in the meantime we're building community with things like our members-only three on three tournaments, happy hours, and community events while we hunt for new locations.

Basketball has given me so much, but the thing that pulls me to it the most is that it's fun. In college and playing pro, winning started to outweigh the fun, and it became more of a stressful thing than something I enjoyed. Even though this is a business and there's stress, what I want to do is keep the fun and find the love of the game in every part of it.

The best part is the members and the community. People come in nervous, saying they haven't played in ten years, and I just want them to get shots up, run around, dance to the music, and meet new people. Some of our members didn't know each other before and now they go to each other's birthday parties. It's a game. It's supposed to be fun, with no toxicity. That's what attracted me to basketball, it's what kept me in it all this time, and it's what I want to keep bringing to our members.

Favorite book? Gates of Fire by Steven Pressfield

Favorite business podcast? Pod Save America

Entrepreneur, dead or alive, you'd trade lives with? Neil deGrasse Tyson. He may not count as a "capital E" entrepreneur, but I'd love to be able to channel and communicate passion for a subject the way he does, and I have so many questions about astrophysics

Current hype song? We Gonna Make It" by Jadakiss

Favorite basketball team? The Knicks. Both sides of my family immigrated and settled in Canarsie, Brooklyn, and multiple generations lived there until I was born. Knicks fandom is bloodline

Favorite all-time player? Allen Iverson.

Favorite games you've witnessed or played in?

📈 Today's issue was sponsored by Sam's List, a marketplace helping founders find vetted, industry-specific accountants, bookkeepers, fractional CFOs, and financial advisors. It's run by Kimi, one of the founders here at Founders Basketball, so if you need help finding the right fit, reach out to her directly ([email protected]) or at samslist.com.

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