In just 10 years Zwift has changed cycling in ways that no one could have imagined. Except there’s one man who actually did imagine it – Eric Min, Zwift’s co-founder and CEO. Rouleur sat down with him and asked how it started and, a decade on, how it’s going.
The idea for Zwift came to you while you lived in London. Was riding outdoors in London really that bad?
I’ve learnt that Londoners are pretty hardcore. And maybe living in New York City next to Central Park made me soft. But it was where I could get everything done. The training, the competition, all the social and community all happened around Central Park which is this incredible 10-kilometre loop that’s right in the middle of the city. I couldn’t find anything in London remotely like that. Maybe Richmond Park but it took me 30 minutes to get there from where I lived in Chelsea. Regents Park – it’s just too small and also took 20 minutes to get there. So I resorted to indoor riding.
And don’t forget, back in the days, the air quality was way worse. When I drop into London now, I notice the air quality is not bad! The taxis have largely become these hybrid vehicles and there are many more EVs out there, so it’s definitely improved. But the number of cars in the city has not gone down.
So you’d left Central Park behind and you were missing your community there. That’s how it basically happened?
It took me a while to find out what motivated me and it was because of what I had in NYC. I missed all of that and I wanted to recreate all of that sense of community, a communal experience where I’m there with lots of other people and the products at the time that I tried didn’t have that. In fact, many of them went the other way by offering too many maps. I’d never see anyone, even if it was an MMO.
Which apps were you using?
There were three I can think of. Tacx – I never used it but I heard it sort of worked with about eight people. That’s not really a community. There was another one, I forget the name, that people used for racing. Again it wasn’t a big community – it was smaller groups of people racing – but the one that really inspired me was a product called Tour de Giro. I subscribed to it and I did this one particular race with people I think who were mostly in the US, I think there were 10 of us, but at the end of it, oh boy, I felt like I was there with these competitors. And I thought, this could work. If I can just have a better experience – I hate to say this but it was poorly implemented, the UI was terrible, the graphics were terrible as well – but the concept of doing this kind of exercise or competition together in a 3D world in a videogame of sorts… I felt it could work. So it was that product, which I give a lot of credit to for giving me the inspiration to realise what was possible. I think we just took it to another level in terms of quality, experience… and I think this was really the difference: social density was super important. You got to feel like you were around people all the time. That was the crux of what we built our business around.
How did you get it off the ground?
Fortunately my partner Alarik Myrin and I had made a bit of money from our last venture [Sakonnet Technology, which specialises in trading systems] so we were in a good position to pick and choose what we wanted to do next. So we had the money to really jump start the business ourselves and get it to a state where we could then go out and raise money from effectively friends and family. We were able to assemble a team, there were four of us and I’d managed to find the person – Jon Mayfield – who had actually been working on it for two or three years as a closet project. I contacted Jon because my partner and I were not game developers: we had to go out and find someone who could help build this thing. Jon had built the tool for himself because he was a busy young dad and he couldn’t go out any more. He also didn’t like what he saw with all the other products at the time. He said to me back then he wanted to Kickstart it and I convinced him not to do it, to come and join us, and I think that worked out pretty well. My other partner Scott Barger and I flew to LA to meet Jon at his home. We got a demo, went for a bike ride and within two weeks he quit his job and joined Zwift. We didn’t even have an entity back then. I had to set up the whole legal entity and inject money into it but within I think a couple of months, from January to March of 2014, we had a team of maybe eight people, we had an office in Long Beach and we were already building on top of what Jon had already built, which was a single user experience.
Jon Mayfield's project in spring 2012, with bots to ride against
So fast forward another few months, September or even before, I was on the road trying to raise money from my friends and family. I think I pitched 200 investors, some of them were investors from my previous venture. I pitched to 200 people and 50% of them gave me money.
But you’ve got to have a good product and so you must have been convinced that you did, and your investors must have also been convinced?
I think they all believed that I could pull it off even if they didn’t fully understand it. Our last venture made money for our investors so they were like OK, these guys on their first attempt to build a business, they made money. This one is completely different but they’re passionate about it, Eric’s a cyclist, let’s just roll some money into it. Then once you have some momentum with investors, it’s very easy to convince other investors. So I created this demand, some of it artificial. We had a great demo video. The stars of it were two of my co-founders. It was fantastic and you just got what the business was by looking at this video. So that really helped and we raised $7 million from our friends and family. So that set a pretty high bar already. We were off to the races and went on to build the business that it is today.
There were some dark moments too. It’s not all fun and games. There was a time when we realised that we needed to raise more money. Within 12 months it was, oh shit, we’re going to run out of money, our beta program is going to get delayed because we need more time to make the product, it’s not ready for primetime. So we decided to extend the beta program from six months to 12 months. That immediately meant I had to go out and raise more money. Raising the next $10 million was so hard. I ended up doing it but I said never again do I want to find myself in a position where I don’t have enough capital. Subsequent rounds were much bigger rounds. More money than I ever needed because I didn’t want to find myself in a compromised position.
In terms of getting it how you wanted it to be, you say were more interested in the community side of it, making it multiplayer, whereas Jon Mayfield’s original just had bots that you could pass. How did you settle on something that bought everything all together – the training, racing, workouts and a community?
I think Jon and I are very complementary. He’s a bit of an introvert and I’m more of an extrovert and I think you can see the product resonates with both groups. There’s plenty of workouts that you can do by yourself; there are group workouts that you can do if you’re social. You can collect route badges by yourself or as part of an event. So we try to cater to both types of characters. But the racing came from the community. I knew it would eventually come, but the community drove that. Some people ride on Zwift just to race. They will go and train somewhere else, I don’t know where, maybe on another product. But when they’re ready to race, they know that the competition is on our platform.
Final screenshot of Jon Mayfield's project in January 2014 before he joined Zwift
Some of the comments on the original Slowtwitch forum where Jon Mayfield posted his first pre-Zwift screenshots in 2012 were: “Awesome, when can I buy it?” Another: “Shut up and take my money.” And another: “Now, if we could race each other online, every Wednesday night, that would be really cool.”
What we try to recreate isn’t far from what we actually do in reality. A lot of the things we do in the 3D world are often things that happen in the real world but may not be easy to do. Including shooting people, right? Very hard to do in the real world but you can do that freely in a game! And so racing is an interesting one because from getting your first bicycle to your first competition can take months or years before someone has the courage and feels like they’re ready to engage… whereas on Zwift you can literally do that on your first day. Get on Zwift and then boom, join a race and see what it’s like. You can fast track everything in the cycling experience and hopefully it’ll fast track you into buying your first bike and going and doing a fondo or a gravel race. I like to think that Zwift could be a type of funnel for new cyclists. It’s so easy to experience some of those things that you would do outdoors.
Did everything go the way you thought it would go? Did you visualise the way Zwift might appeal to people, how people would take to it and how quickly it would grow?
So there are always surprises. If an entrepreneur tells you it went exactly to plan they’re always flat-out lying. One of those surprises was just how much the community would form and organise itself and want certain things. We’re always on our back foot because it’s like a market – it’s hard to control the market. And so we were just learning from the experiments that the community was doing off-platform. For example organising events, We didn’t have event organisation tools. The community were using a spreadsheet that they were sharing. I never expected that they would be so engaged and powerful. But it can go both ways. They can be harsh critics, they can also really help you build the business. So that’s been a real surprise for me personally because I’d never worked at a consumer-facing business, I’d always been in a B2B business. The other is, as an entrepreneur you’re always aspiring much bigger than you’re actually capable of doing. Your eyes are much bigger than your stomach, so if I’m looking at where we are today compared to where I thought we would be, I’m probably going twice as slow! I think one of the things I learnt as an entrepreneur, and I should have known this with my first business, is that it takes five years to validate a business. Getting a product to market and turning it into a sustainable business, it takes 10 years. That’s what I say to new entrepreneurs who come to me seeking advice. I’m like, do you have the stomach… for the next five years work your ass off, pivot the business and then maybe it may not work out. Do you have the stomach for that? And then you might have to work for another five years to turn it into a successful business. That is not for everyone. And I think if you know that going in, you may not even start the damn project!
Obviously you were not expecting Covid, but that gave Zwift a huge spike. If there is such a thing as an expected trajectory, you didn’t get it because of Covid. Were you ‘ready’ for Covid?
We were ready for Covid in the sense that we had invested heavily in our infrastructure so that if we doubled our business overnight the infrastructure would hold up. Thank God we had done the work because had we not made that investment I think we would be in a different place today. Covid doubled our business and for sure it pulled forward demand, like for other businesses. And nobody had a clue how long that would last and it took us some time to figure out what the new baseline was like if you take out the Covid effect. It’s a double-edged sword and many companies didn’t make it. They had that huge bump but then they overinvested and they didn’t have the capital and then they’re finding themselves in a compromised position. We’re fortunate that we did go through that growth, but we were able to raise enough capital that we could cover ourselves if that demand disappeared. Many companies had to go through cycles of restructuring to rightsize the business for the demand in the next 12 to 24 months and not build for five years ahead. So that was really painful, it’s not a pleasant experience and I wouldn't wish that on anyone. But that was the whole market to be honest.
You had that massive peak Zwift day in 2021 where you had 47,500 users on the platform at the same time.
I think we peaked at over 50,000 at some point. That was a bit of a vanity metric that we used to use and some of our communities still use it. I don’t any more. I used to obsess over the numbers on a real-time basis, every minute and that’s not healthy. We used to have this app that we shared with our board members. We got rid of it because we realised it wasn’t healthy. So I get the numbers once a month and that’s fine!
Zwift now, 10 years on, did you expect to be getting into hardware?
The hardware was a complete surprise but it makes absolute sense because if you look at traditional hardware companies they were perfectly happy selling less hardware and capturing maximum margin. Which is great for a hardware company. You don’t have to overproduce, you make a lot of money on a single sale, but that’s not very good for our business, which is driven by subscribers who pay $20 a month, so for us that was getting in the way of our growth. So we decided, let’s innovate on price by offering a great product at a reasonable price. If you have $2,000 to spend, go for it, there are products out there for you. But increasingly our new customers are softer cyclists who might spend $1,000 on a bike. They’re not going to spend $700 on a bike to ride indoors. So we realised we had to get into the hardware business to just bring down the price. We went on this journey of building a more affordable smart bike. But even then a smart bike is still expensive. We cancelled it because we realised the market is shifting. That bike needs to be half the price. So we accepted the bike would take a bit longer, let’s introduce a lower-cost trainer at about $500. That’s where the Zwift Hub came in. Long story short, we got into a little lawsuit with one of our partners today, that’s settled and we’re not making trainers any more. In fact, Wahoo is making the trainers for us but we’re also working with many other partners who have slight product differentiation, slightly different price points, but I think the $500 price point for a very good smart trainer is here to stay. If you’re new to indoor cycling you shouldn’t have to spend more than that.
So I think we’ve innovated there and then recently we launched the Zwift Ride, which brings down the cost of a smart bike to maybe less than half what the market is selling today but with a design that lets it work with other manufacturers of trainers. And by doing that we’re hoping that consumers who already have invested in trainers will just buy the frame from us and turn that into a smart bike. I thought that was a clever strategy that we pulled together and that’s gone very well in its first year.
But you must have seen – for example at Rouleur Live – a lot of cyclists love expensive things and almost every cyclist uses Zwift. There was the Pinarello Dogma F with the 'designed in Watopia' Zwift paintjob… do you think you’ll do some exclusive colourways for Zwift Ride or make special versions for those people who want something high-end?
We did a colourway for the Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift. And that paintjob cost more than the entire [Zwift Ride] bike. I think it cost $1,800 for the paintjob! So the answer is probably not… they can buy the bike and take it to a specialist painter themselves.
And bring us up to date?
I think we’ve been through a lot of change and what’s really working for us right now as a business and for the community is being laser focused about how we add value. One thing is making sure that people can afford the equipment. They can buy it and they understand what to buy. For 10 years it was like a DIY experience, you go to about five different places to buy the bits and pieces that you need to get on Zwift. No more! You’ve got a one-stop shop but with choices. If you are ready to get into Zwift, just buy a trainer that’s Zwift Ready. Very simple. We’ll have half a dozen different products that you can choose from, and they’ll all have some product differentiation, different price points, but we’re guaranteeing that they will all work with Zwift and with the Zwift Ride frame. So that’s the first part because that’s very important for onboarding new customers. The second part is once you really get into Zwift – and people show up to Zwift for different reasons – some want to compete, some want to lose weight, some want to just have fun. And we want to make sure we understand what your desires are, and your desires change over time. That we are serving the right kind of content at the right time. All the time. We are doing the heavy lifting so you don’t have to go and search for anything. We’ll tell you, hey, we know a little bit about what you want, we know what kind of fitness you have, we know maybe what time you work out – here are some choices. Really distil it to a handful of choices rather than going through a library of a thousand different things that you can do.
