There’s a lot more to the Zwift story than “riding a bike in a virtual world”. From the very beginning they’re revolutionized cycling. Think of it, they’re the single biggest entity to why we enjoy the women’s Tour de France Femmes Avec Zwift the week after the traditional Tour.
More to the point, Eric Min co-founded Zwift thanks to a lifelong love affair with cycling. His life story has taken him all over the map from South Korea to New York City to calling various parts of Europe home to setting up Zwift’s HQ in southern California.
Eric and Ted share connections and stories… like when Eric reminds our host that he was Zwift’s first ambassador!
All right, very excited to have Eric Min on the podcast. Thank you very much, Eric. Thanks for having me, Ted. My pleasure. I I think that origin stories are the most interesting when you start from the beginning. So, to our listener, you sound as though you could be from right next door here in New England or anywhere in middle America. You’ve called home a variety of places. Can you tell me a little bit about where you are born and raised? So, I was born in Seoul, South Korea. Um, and u my family and I, we moved over in the back in the 70s. That’s how old I am. Um, and we settled in New Jersey, settled in the Bronx. Um, really a New Yorker. grew up uh went to high school in in Dobs Ferry which is just north of Manhattan. Um and uh yeah and then you know really since then I’ve I’ve kind of moved around quite a bit but uh deep inside I think I’m still very much a New Yorker. Yeah. And that I think is where we meet today. Is that correct? Are you in New York? I am. I’m in New York. I’m floating around between New York, um, UK, Europe, and and LA where I’m official. That’s my official residency, but I I haven’t counted the days. I don’t actually spend that much time in LA. Well, with any luck, you get some flight status along the way. So, cycling, cycling becomes part of your life at a relatively early age. And I’m I’m guessing it’s in these early years that you’re in the city and you overlap with my friend, our friend Korea. Um, it certainly speaks to New York City’s melting pot nature because here he is as a a Portuguese immigrant family. You’re you’re from South Korea and and I’m guessing you meet on the bike. Is that correct? Like talk about the the influence of cycling early on in your life. Um, I joined a a local club uh called the Sleepy Hollow Bicycle Club in North Terry Town. Yeah. Um, and that’s the same club that Jah started. Um, so when I first met Jer, he was like 10 years old, maybe nine. Yeah. Um, and his father, who was just, you know, a real passionate uh uh cycling fan, um, just encouraged him to to ride. And so he was part of the club. And, um, it wasn’t until I went to college that, uh, um, uh, we pulled together money to buy him his first racing bike. So, I can take a little bit of credit. Yeah. for buying him his first racing bike. But yeah, Joah and I go back uh quite a way since the since the 80s. Yeah. And I mean, yeah, talk about the how is it you stumbled on cycling? Were you doing other sports? Did you have family into cycling? How how was that initial bug? Yeah, when I was a little kid, I I tried baseball, but my, you know, terrible hand eye coordination, so I didn’t get very far. I remember when I was a kid, my coach telling me to lean into the ball so I can get hit so I can get a walk. That’s how bad I was. Your on base percentage goes up. Yeah. Uh and then I tried tennis, which I was actually okay at. Um but it wasn’t until my friend um his name is Travis Mullman from Dos Ferry. He was like he was part of uh AY which is like a American youth hostel. Back then it was all about promoting touring. So um he got into touring and I you know I didn’t have a car. It was just you know as a kid as a 12 13 year old. This is how you have freedom right to to travel. Uh so I got really into uh into it. And um the funny stories he’s a bit taller than me, but I insisted that I get the same size bike. I think it was like a 56 cm bike. I ride a 49 right now. Oh wow. How big it was. But um I got stuck in touring. I’ve been reading go very far, but this is how we, you know, I kind of discover the bike. And at some point I bumped into the uh Subia Hollow Bicycle Club. Uh there is a uh triplet here in New York uh the Whale Brothers, so three identical triplets and they ran the club. Um and they taught me uh all about training and and took me to some races and um I had some early success and that got me hooked. Uh the training on Tuesday nights, these were incredible. uh you know every week I was looking forward to these training uh rides on Tuesdays and then on the weekends you know we had the famous gimbals ride which still go on. I think I’m still the youngest person in that group. That’s how old this uh this group has become. Um but yeah it’s I fell in love with the sport pretty early. Um and uh it kind of overtook my life like it does for for many people. Um and uh you know I was pretty um you know immersed as a junior cyclist. Um and uh you know I think travel the the country and did the whole junior circuit and back then it was actually pretty lively uh uh circuit for juniors. I mean you show up in a junior race it’ be 100 juniors right back then. This is during the Greg Lemon era, right? When you know the the sport was at a height at at back then. So, yeah, it was just this cycling was a big part of my life and it still continues to be uh that. Well, yeah, especially in the Northeast. I mean, I’m thinking in New Jersey, you had a whole race week. You had, you know, tour of Somerville has has tremendous heritage and history. Um, I mean, on a given weekend, you could uh being in New York, you could go to three or four different race on the same day. Yeah. Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut. It was just a great great um, you know, environment for for juniors and Jah was all caught up in in that whole movement. And and I’ve heard you mention that, you know, you were invited to an Olympic development camp um to JWo’s testament. He says he says, “Wow, Eric was very fast. What are your goals? Is it every junior’s aspiration to become pro or or are you just sort of racing race to race or do you know that that this will only take you so far? What are what are you aspiring to at this point? Well, I remember um I was riding um uh as a junior just had, you know, had dreams of becoming a pro or going to the Olympics. Uh, and uh, all of that was smashed when I went to the Olympic training center to get tested. You know, back then we didn’t know how to really train. I I think I had like one of the first heart rate monitors. Yeah. We barely knew how to operate those things, right? They were like, you know, yay big. And it was, you know, on your wrist or on the bike, the polar the first polar ones, right? Um, so really knew nothing about training. But it wasn’t until I went to the Olympic training center and they tested me and I just didn’t have the the the you know the natural talent that allowed me to recover day after day. I’d be good for one day but then the second third day my my performance would decline. Whereas like my peers they could just carry on. You know race the guys like Mike McCarthy and um uh and and a number of other people back then the Moni team was pretty pretty strong right. um those guys were the real talent. So that’s was a wakeup call for me and I said, “Holy I think I need to figure out what else I’m going to do with my life.” And I’m glad I found out early on, Ted, because uh you know, I think I could have uh you know, um just lied to myself about what I could be and just uh kind of carried on for for longer. and um and and so I’m I’m glad it was a a wakeup call for me uh because I just wasn’t as talented as as the kids around me. Yeah. A good realization at some point in life. So in hearing your story, the next step in in a very truncated chronology is making your way to to JP Morgan where you work your way up to a a VP status. Now there’s obviously a lot to that to go from, okay, Olympic Training Center to to JP Morgan. How is it you end up in finance? Is it something that you you’ve studied? Is it interesting to you? Is it sort of just sort of like chase this? Well, that seems like a successful job. How do you end up there? Well, I was fortunate enough to have met my my uh girlfriend back then, wife now, um who kind of, you know, got me on track, you know, she uh uh she was a intern at JP Morgan and she just told me to apply. Yeah. and I and I did and um I didn’t have the grades or even the credential but someone at JP Morgan liked me and oftentimes that that uh you know helps you um you know get across the line. So I got into JP Morgan really on the technology side um and then work my way into like really building a career developing trading systems at JP Morgan commodities trading system. Um, but it was if it wasn’t for my wife who kind of u was wondering like why am I riding my bike? You know, you I’m not a I’m not a pro. Uh, so uh it was you know I’m not I was never very good at doing many things at the same time. I have to say focus on one thing and just give everything to that one thing. So I quit cycling and I said okay I’m going to devote everything to this. Um I quit cycling twice. One was to jumpst start my career. The second time is when we had our first child. Those are the only two times I I just stopped because I needed to focus, right? Yeah. Uh but uh yeah, it it was uh it wasn’t about fin it was probably more about technology, but back then there was a lot of technology need around in in in the finance industry. Yeah. Um so that’s how it all got started. I actually went to college thinking I was going to be a doctor. went into a premed program. I had it just like, you know, the Olympic Trainers Center. It was a rude awakening like I I cannot compete with my peers. Oh man. I pivoted very quickly, you know. Thank god I didn’t drag that one out either. Yeah. Oh, that Yeah, that can suck suck the life out of you. So, you you you migrate from JP Morgan to begin a company called Sakconit. Is that correct? Am I pron I don’t know if it never I always would bumble that sakconet or sak probably sakinet you know as an yeah my my partner who’s from uh Rhode Island um he grew up on on sakinet it’s a you know it’s a it’s part of Rhode Island but we’ve kind of uh uh westernized it and gave it a anglicized it and said sakan sounded more elegant but it’s probably sakinet so however we’re going to pronounce it I I spent Some time online. Sakconet Sakunet is dedicated to excellence in trading solutions for wholesale energy markets. The company believes creative use of technology and superlative services together transform the user experience for trading floor productivity. Now that sounds like a wonderful value proposition, superlative services. But to someone like myself who doesn’t understand the energy market space, what is what does that mean to have started this company in a handful of sentences? What does that what are you doing at Sakana? This was back in 1998 when many uh you know technology solutions were um all in-house. They were built inhouse or even if you bought a vendor system, it was installed in house. This is way before cloud-based services that are, you know, um, uh, dominate the the the technology space today. Um, so what we decided to do was kind of compete with in-house solutions and the big clunky uh, um, you know, uh, in-house installation and try to build something that was cloud cloud-based. Back then it wasn’t called cloud. It was called um, application hosting services. Okay. Um, so we decided that it might have been a better mousetrap because we had been building these systems in house for JP Morgan and we started to see these vendors pop up uh offering these services and we thought we had a this would be the perfect time to build something that was all internet based. Um, this was like we started the business right before the whole internet bubble. So we went through like you know as a professional we went through a whole recession you know the whole the whole market collapsed um uh but uh what we did was basically build a trading solution for um oil and gas traders which was a market you just like you trade currency you can trade um equity and bonds you can trade um commodities like oil and gas um and what really um grew the business for us was um the deregul population of electricity and gas in Europe. So that was a big uh uh open market for us and that’s what prompted me to relocate to to London. I see. Um because that was really where the business was. Um and uh yeah, we we built a a solution and um we were actually relatively small company with a very very big client, a German client called Eon. Um and uh yeah, we kind of ate off that one client for a for over 10 years. It’s the scariest thing like that if you lose that one client, the business is just dead, right? The whole cost structure depended on that one client. Yeah. And we were fortunate to have that one client for a very very long time. Whatever be get success. Um, so Sakcon as a cycling team was just coming on the scene as I was making my way to the European Pelaton and and they were a force. It was a northeastbased development team. So I’m guessing the support of that team was was your idea. Is that is that accurate? I mean, you still have a passion for cycling even if you’re not riding day in and day out at this point. Yeah, I mean I wanted to uh always find a way to to stay uh involved with cycling, give back wherever uh and whenever we we could. And yeah, we used some of the company resources to do that. It wasn’t a big sponsorship, but uh we did sponsor the U23 then U25 um Sakana team for for a number of years. Matt Kosera ran was a DS for for a couple years. Um, and I think we turned out like three or four uh professional writers. Mhm. Um, some I one one person went on to uh join the Garmin team. Uhhuh. Um, and uh Phil um Yeah, Phil is is is a he he he’s an alum of of of sorry, Phil’s last name is Yeah, Phil G. He’s G. He’s got to be the most noteworthy of the bunch. Um, yeah, I think Caleb Fairley might have been part of the team. Yes, Caleb was the one who ended up at Garmin, I think. Oh, an impressive impressive list of riders for how long the team was around quite frankly. Um, it’s a small budget team, but uh we are so passionate about about that team. That’s awesome. So, yeah, at some point you you sell the company and you find yourself at a point looking for a job. How well and how long did you operate in the we’ll call it funemployed space? Well, I mean I think the business sana business for us we we exited that business March of uh 2014 and I started uh with my partner Zift January of 2014. So I never actually took a break. It over overlapped for like three months. Yeah, that’s wild. I mean, it was because uh admittedly, you know, we were just sitting on um paychecks for the last, you know, two or three years. So, I had some time to think about like what what I was going to do next, right? And you know, not working was not an option, you know. So, yeah. Um and the idea of like working for someone after having worked for myself for so many years was also not an option. So the only option was to start another company. Yeah. A great approach. Yeah. But but we uh we really I going back to the concern I had about this one client. Uh-huh. I wanted to do a a consumer business because I wanted to know if we lost 5 10% of our customers, we weren’t going to go bankrupt. So, it had to be a consumer business, you know, internet enabled, etc. So, good foresight and and so yeah, here we are 15 20 minutes into the conversation and I’m excited because we’re not for the last sentence, we wouldn’t have even mentioned Swift yet. And that’s sort of the crux of the the rest of the conversation. you you eventually land on cycling as as the target of your next venture and it reminds me of the expression how do you make a small fortune in cycling which is start with a larger one. Can can you talk about the brainstorming period like you know you want to get into cycling but for this next project is are you looking at all cycling outlets or is it sort of the virtual world exclusively that really is peing your interest? Ironically, the last space that I wanted to look at was cycling. Oh. So, I for the same reason you’re like, uh, I said, you know, I I probably should not invest in my passion, you know, because you could easily justify. Yeah. You know, I know a lot of people who, you know, do vents or, you know, or or own bike shops and it’s a passion play and actually it’s very bad business. So, I didn’t want to fall into that trap. So, I looked at education, I looked at healthcare, I looked at you know, other space uh that I had absolutely no expertise in. I remember my brother telling me like what what are you doing? Like you don’t know anything about that space. So I’m like, what what do I know? I’m like okay, we know finance and I know cycling. So I thought all right, you know, maybe I should take another hard look at at cycling. Yeah. Um and uh and so we one of the ideas actually we looked at was um because I love traveling and cycling and I still do. How do you make that experience much easier so that you can go and rent bikes in lots of different locations and how do you do it at scale? Um so that one we looked into a bit and and you do the math it just doesn’t work. So, uh, and then, uh, I stumbled across this idea because, you know, when I was living in London, um, um, I just can’t be bothered to go outside if there’s too much, uh, uh, too many too much traffic or it takes me 30 minutes or or longer to get out of town to do the proper riding. I mean, I only have an hour, hour and a half to ride. Yeah. So, I was doing a lot of indoor riding and just to, you know, just to keep myself entertained. I bought everything. I every product out there, every video you can think of, I was consuming and not because that that was the business I was pursuing because I I just needed something to keep me entertained. Yeah. And what I realized was um couple of things. One was like they all sucked. Okay. And then but I came across this one product and I have to give them a lot of credit because it’s called Tortourro. Okay. Um, it was a really clunky kind of crappy product is a it was a project by two IBM engineers out of Toronto or Canada and they had built something I don’t even know if they were charging but I used it and I was there with a number like five or 10 other people and while the graphics suck the experience was you know the the experience wasn’t great what what I walked away feeling was like I was there with other people. Yeah. And and that was the magic, you know. Now, if you can make the whole experience better, right? You can make the graphics better, you can, you know, everything that goes with it, training better. Um, I thought there was something there. And I looked at other products that were available. Um, and they were all kind of there were better versions like tax had a multi-user player, but it was, you know, the feedback I’ve heard was that it was just not reliable. This is way way back. And there were a couple of other products that none of them were at scale. So, the idea was like I I thought there was an opportunity to do this. And it was hard for me to say how big this opportunity would be, but I figured there were enough people like me who would want to be engaged, you know, to ride with other people to race and train and socialize. This is what I got out of Central Park. Like when I live right next to Central Park and while I was working at JP Morgan, I would go into Central Park like five days a week. I would race their train there and hang out there. And I simply just wanted to recreate that sort of experience in a virtual setting. Uhhuh. Um, and so yeah, I I just uh I remember writing the the like the the the deck for it, the business plan for it, and it was just, you know, I thought that we could have millions of people doing this, right? Um, so yeah, it just it it started out as kind of a a dream, a a a solution for me and sort of the gut instinct that others would would find this interesting as well. And then you just go from that. I It reminds me of I have a friend who had a program and we’ve probably heard stories like this dozens of times. He was technologically savvy. He created a program called I think roller cam and cam short for camera. And it’s you ride your bike, you set up your laptop with the camera on you. And so it’s it’s like being in a chat room except it’s the you it’s this conversation. It’s as though you and I are on our bikes right now. And exactly to your point, riding a bike will suck less as long as we are talking to each other to to break up the time. And so I’m going to reference this a little bit later in meeting you for the first time and you posed the idea. My mind immediately went to to that. It’s like people do want that experience. They want community. So backtrack one second. In in many ways, Zift feels like this wonderful confluence of events. It’s uh here you are with an interest in getting into a business of cycling. You’re you’re looking specifically about riding indoors and and finding that entertaining. I’ve heard the a very entertaining story about you Google searching and finding John Mayfield. Yeah. Um you have a couple co-founders and all from Sak and and Scott Barger becomes a co-founder. Yeah. The question being, how do you, as you look back at this period, how does this coming together period, how is it characterized in your memory? Is it organized? Is it chaotic? Is it targeted? Is it a bit all over the place? Um, it was so I I knew what we had to do. Um, but I need the team that can actually execute this. So, Allaric, um, he’s, you know, he’s been a longtime partner of mine. He he’s also very technical. He can write code, right? You need you need a partner who can write code. Uh but neither of us know knew anything about video games. We knew that the right medium was was video games like 3D worlds. That is where you create this experience. It’s not going to be through real videos. It’s got to be through 3D graphics. Um and neither of us had that exper experience. So we knew like we had to find someone maybe not even a co-founder but the f who’s the first engineer. So I came across John Mayfield. He had this interesting project. It was a single user experience but it’s beautiful graphics more beautiful than others that I’ve seen. Um and it came very obvious became very obvious to us that he was not going to be just a developer. he would need to be a co-founder because he would be bringing into the group um IP that he had already developed and we would be able to leverage that um and we were lucky enough to acquire through him the the the proprietary game engine that Zift runs on. So there are other like third party engines out there. We have our own like many other you know uh big games they have their own engines. Mhm. Um, so that was an an important missing piece that we secured which is John Mayfield. And then the fourth person was was uh Scott Barger who I met through a mutual friend um uh Kevin Mallaloy. Uh he happened to be out in London. We went riding. We were spitballing ideas before Zift was even born. Um and so I I don’t even think he thought it was a good idea in the beginning, but somehow I I just kept selling it to him. Uh, and Scott bought into it as well. And Scott was important because he he brought a lot of energy to the project, right? He’s so passionate. Um, and whatever he gets involved with, Scott continues to be very very passionate about. Um, and I also needed a partner who could go to California to help set up the shop. I wasn’t going to do that. I have family, young family in in London still. Um, so he and John together would set up the shop. Allaric never moved. he was just remained in New York and then I traveled back and forth. Um, but it was the four of us and we all had our roles. Um, and it was, you know, chaotic, but I knew it, you know, what we had to do was raise capital. Like my my partner Alec and I, we had some we made some money from from uh us able to seed the business. Um but it was a rapid race of you know six months to get to a a prototype that we can demonstrate to prospective uh um you know investors and you know we started with just friends and family but I pitched to 200 people and a hundred of them invested. Yeah. And so it was uh yeah I I knew from my last business like what I needed to do to get this thing off the ground and funding and that that’s probably my big after like you know kind of selling the dream my biggest responsibility was like making sure that we had the the capital to run this business. Yeah. So uh that’s what I did for the first few years just making sure that we had sufficient capital to see this through. Um but it’s been it’s been a ride. I I believe it. Yeah. It’s it’s probably on this whirlwind tour that that is when we meet for the first time. I think I’m guessing the year was 2014. I think I want to say we were in California. I remember Dave Zabriskkey being at the table as the other rider. And in this conversation, something you just referenced, you you suggested that you’re looking for this cross-section of indoor riding and the gaming world. And I was skeptical and leaving the conversation, but in in that conversation, you said something to the effect of, “Look at the video gaming market. It has billions and billions of dollars and hundreds of millions of users. So, we’re just looking for a small section of that.” And that really it it stuck with me. Um, as a founder, you need to have a passionate belief in the success of your company that it will succeed. How how how was that initial period? You talk about seating 200 investors and having a 50% success rate. How how well was the idea received? Uh it was wellreceived. We put together a really great video sort of uh you know showcasing the the endto-end experience that was that was all homegrown and we did it you know we did it ourselves and it was it it really I think people just got it right at least my friends and some of them didn’t get it but they you know uh they they knew that I had been reasonably successful in my previous venture and so many investors base your you know the confidence level based on your previous success. That’s how it works, right? So, I had many investors from my last business roll their you know, money into this new business. Um, but you know, I was in, you know, full sales mode, right? Yeah. Yeah. And I was probably I’m sure people were getting tired of of the pitch, but uh I was s um you know, motivated and and you know, just excited about what this this could be. Mhm. Um but and Ted, like you were our first ambassador. True. And you remember uh you were a pretty big personality uh on Straa and we knew that Strava would just be a great channel for us. Mhm. So, let’s work with Ted, you know, Ted because through Jo um and see let’s have Ted start posting and and that piqued a lot of people’s interest and like what is Ted doing in uh you know in the South Pacific. Sure. Oh, exactly. Well, exact. I mean, yeah, it takes something like the partnership with with Straa so that the the ride can even upload in the first place. And it’s almost as though like that’s a barrier to disbelief. So if someone is zooming in and out of the map and they say, “What are you riding in the South Pacific?” Which in a in a way reminds me of one of the barriers to viability that was difficult for me to accept was indoor riding is not outdoor riding. Like you’re never going to have the perfect feel of a draft in a computer algorithm. And and maybe it’s because I’m not enough of a gamer that there are suspensions of disbelief that I was unwilling to accept at the time. But now we live in an age of hyper reality and VR headsets and feedback in our hardware and so forth so that everything is getting more real. So I guess sort of two-part question. Is the goal to eventually make Zift supremely real? And then overall how do you look at that difference indoor versus outdoor riding? Well, I I think the making, you know, indoor riding real is always going to be challenging. You don’t have you don’t have um sense of movement, right? You don’t have the geforce. Yeah. Right. And as much as we can model uh the drafting in the game, you’ll never feel the draft, right? Never feel like you do when you’re outdoors where you know you’re being pulled along, right? So, that will never happen. Now I think depending on the devices that evolve over time with with you know headsets I think um it will be you know I think more immersive but I think you’ll it will be very difficult I mean we’ve had Oculus Rift support from from the very beginning and the problem with it with with head you know heavy headgears that you don’t want to exercise with something like that on your head right I’m I’m I don’t even want to wear glasses I wear contacts to ride indoors Right. So, that is a real barrier. Um, but I think it you you you know, you don’t it doesn’t have to be 100% immersive. It just has to be good enough. Um, and I’m not a proponent of like, hey, you should ride for hours and hours indoors. I think, you know, 60 to 90 minutes, perfect. You don’t need to do any more than that. Sure. Right. Yeah. Um and so where we win customers over is enough immersion, enough uh gamification and the efficiency of it all is what people like because the reality is like you know I can go outside maybe twice a week right I cannot go out you know most people cannot go out multiple days a week so you start factor in how efficient it is and how convenient it is and how you know you just get the work done and that’s what brings people back for for more just trying to I I we spent 12 10 11 years trying to make the whole experience easier and easier and that’s why we got into hardware just breaking down the the friction points whether it’s the cost of the hardware whether it’s the whole onboarding like knowing what to do when you first arrive on Zift you know make it easier to find your friends or the events um and uh because uh you know what what I found over the years is that consumers are extremely lazy And and uh you just you can profit off that. They are so lazy. Like of course you can read the manual, but no one wants to read the manual. Right. Right. Right. Right. I’m here to pedal. Exactly. Yeah. So, um Yeah. Well, yeah. And I’ve heard you in another interview you say admittedly Zift is not a skill sport and it’s a bit of a a time trial. It’s a watts per kilo competition. Um, so yeah, it’s almost as though it it is not meant to fill the void of of outdoor riding. You’re not trying to change that there. So, okay, even with watts per kilogram, there is craft involved. Absolutely. All right. I mean, why why does Freddy Ovette beat Matthew Vanderpole on Zift every single time? Because Freddy Oette has mastered like he just knows how to time. He understands like you know the timing of when to sprint, how to sprint and if you’re not familiar with that, you don’t have enough practice, uh you’re not going to, you know, get the most out of out of your performance. And so and that is all about watts per kilogram, right? So uh there is some craft. Now where we can add more craft is through further gamification. So steering, you know, um, uh, giving you choices of like the different, for example, different, um, power-ups you can use. Mhm. We have a mode that we haven’t I want to bring back, which is, uh, it’s like an E mode. So you, everyone has a battery. You can pick between two or three different size batteries, right? And you have to charge up the battery yourself. So like you have to pedal to charge up the batteries, right? depending on the battery size you have, you suffer the consequence of a larger battery, right? It’s gonna it’s going to be heavy going uphill with that. Yeah. So, like then you have to start deciding when to use it, when to charge it. Um and that is for the gamification and that’s craft as well. And so, not always, you know, the the strongest rider will win if you deploy these things. Yeah. Oh, that’s very cool. Yeah. Yeah. the the Freddy Ovette Vanderpool example is a great one that everyone will know. In the fall, I drop in on a Zift League. Yeah. And we have uh Kevin Bousard Hall is a name that some folks will recognize and he’s our he’s our team captain and and he’s on occasion will literally not even ride, but because we’re doing everything on uh is it Twitch? What’s the Discord? Discord. We have the whole team and we’re communicating with each other and it’s though I mean it’s like he’s the DS in your ear in the back and he he knows all the nuances of when to attack and he’ll tell you hit it right here and so certainly having strong watts per kilo is your to your benefit but to know the game to your point is it makes it so much more fun. No different than having this community makes it so much more fun too. It’s it’s really neat. So, I mean, we are we are deploying more hardware so that we can do more gamification. It’s got to be super convenient. So, we have controllers um and more and more customers are showing up with controllers. Yeah. Oh, I bet it’s neat. How about backtrack a little bit? You mentioned I was the first ambassador. Uh I didn’t know I had that superlative, but once upon a time I also had the most followers on on Strong. So I like these superlatives and and you outfitted me really well. So there I am living in Jerona and one day I forget the exact process. I think one day in the mail a large screen TV showed up and I never I’ve been living in Spain for a half dozen years and I never had a TV and a big stand and a nice trainer. That was amazing. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Eric, what was the the question is what what were the other elements of seeding the product in marketing early stages of marketing did did you employ to get awareness? Yeah. Well, I mean, you know, working with the likes of yourself, Yenzi was the other person that we work with, right? Both connected to Joel, of course. And uh so personalities and and social uh um reach was important for us. I mean we we also did a lot of uh collaboration with biggest brands out there when we launched we launched at Rafa in in London, New York and San Francisco exactly at the same time. Mh. Um we had the biggest brands in cycling in the game already. Pinella was in the game. We had Team Sky Rider show up in all three locations. So we uh and hired a a a PR company. So we try to maximize the launch to give us a big boost. Um and you know seating our ambassadors and making sure they had the best you know experience and setup was super important for us. Um and we continue to do that as we you know you know that back then we had just the two of you. Now we have an army of people who I don’t know they all have shown up. If you go to Instagram these days or Tik Tok I mean you see so many people promoting all sorts of cycling experiences and brands which is really fascinating right um but uh yeah we continue to do collaborations that’s still important for us. Um uh we we have over the years you know invested in traditional advertising. It just doesn’t work. It’s not authentic and it’s very expensive to be honest. Uh you know working with the likes of Meta and and YouTube is very very expensive. So we just have to be more nimble and work all the channels that we own, our own channels on social media, our own channels on YouTube and then tap into whole network of of influencers and content creators and and VIP um and that you know and also you know you know hopefully we’ll talk about this but um you know our association with the tour to France is just giving us more visibility that’s outside the traditional marketing channels. Mhm. Well, yeah, that was going to be the next topic. So, very timely. I was going to say fast forwarding quite a bit. But then speaking of indoor and outdoor riding and speaking of marketing, here we are in the recent aftermath of a very successful tour to France fem Ac Swift. You have supported uh the woman’s Perry rub in years past. Um you’ve supported the tour the women’s tour many for many years now. Can you talk about that initial decision of getting into explicit real world riding and and how that’s worked out both anecdotally but then also sort of on uh has an effect on the business? Well, I I built a relationship with Yan Leo who is basically the CEO of ASO. This is many many years ago. Uh because he was a customer okay of ours. Yeah. Uh very very well-connected person. He’s probably the probably the most important most influential person that people don’t know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So does Large. Yeah. And uh and so COVID hit and I told Yan I said your tour is not going to happen this year. I already I already told my team this was like February. I said or January, February, I told my team March Madness is not going to happen. They didn’t believe me. It didn’t happen. And then I told Yan like the tour is not going to happen. And he didn’t believe me. It did not happen. And so it was on the back of that I said to him like why don’t we like the team they’re not racing. Why don’t we get the teams to do something on on Zift? Um we’ll do a pilot which was um uh we did a charity event with all the teams and it was televised because the broadcasters needed something to televise during co they were able to do this and we raised money the proof of concept worked and then it quickly followed on to well let’s do the virtual tour to France but I said to young like well we we said to young that um we need to have women’s tour to France virtually as well knowing that it would, you know, if it’s successful, it would be very difficult for them to not to commit to doing a woman’s tour to France going forward. Mhm. So, here we are. We go through three weekends of of virtual tour to France with all the teams. It was televised in over 100 different countries, men and women, equal distance, equal prize money. The viewership, I mean, it was the only thing. Look, was it the most entertaining thing? I’m not sure, but it was the only thing that you could watch. The only show in town. Yeah. Um and it was really on the back of that that uh we started to talk to ASO about what what what if we were to bring help bring back the women’s tour of to France you know we think that’s a huge opportunity for just you know the markets um women cycling um and on the back of that we created this promotion watch the fems and that is a bigger that’s bigger than cycling it’s like watch the fems whether it’s WNBA It’s uh you know it’s it’s women’s um uh uh football. It’s it’s women’s sports in general. Um so here we are four years done with the women’s tour of to France and I was there this year every single stage and the crowds were insane. It it was literally the men’s to France. Yeah. Yeah. It was insane. Of course, it helped that they had a French woman in the lead. Sure. Then she wins, right? So I I knew that that all of us were saying like that could be the best outcome if a French woman wins the woman this year’s woman’s sort of France. And it was massive massive. In speaking with Kate Verinu as a as a guest on this podcast a few I don’t know a handful of weeks ago. She mentioned something to this exact same effect. What is a sign of success is in the days and weeks afterwards, you’re still chattering about it, you know, and we’re still talking about, okay, it’s gossipy and this and that and riderweight and so on and so forth, but like it shows tremendous interest as cycling fans to the sport. And I think we’ve sort of almost given up hope on the men’s tour for the time being because TAD is so flipping strong. Yeah. Whereas Yeah. There was drama and action and and I love the conversation of okay it’s it’s not three weeks long the tour friend France fem axswift but does it need to be like you’ve you have concentrated action for the the period of time and there are nine stages it’s fantastic it’s phenomenal it’s a lot of racing no you know no break and I mean it’s a combination of uh you know the fact that there are fewer stages so people are going all every single day. Um, and also the there I mean there were probably you know four or five uh you know contenders for the overall which made it super exciting. Um and um if you look at women’s racing it’s it’s come such a long way in a very short period of time. They they are using tactics like the men’s pelaton. I mean many of the DS’s are from the men’s pelaton, right? So you’re starting to Sure. Um, but it’s it’s super exciting and and they are so talented. They are so fast. Well, yeah. It speaks to you. You said you go to the OTC, the Olympic training center, and you figured out that you have the ability to race for a day or a couple days, but it’s not until you’re multiple days in that you you start to feel the drag. Yeah. Chronic cumulative fatigue is a thing. And so for these women to be racing nine days in a row is a chore. That is massive. That’s so hard. And they’re not asking. I’ve I’ve because I’ve asked a number of them. They’re not asking for three weeks. They don’t want three weeks. I don’t know who’s who’s proponent of three weeks of women’s race, but I think it’s too much. And in fact, I think three three weeks for the men’s race is too much these days. It um it’s highly entertaining because I know what I’m going to do for those three weeks every morning is flip on the TV. But sorry, four weeks. It’s for the men’s I’m watching three weeks for the women’s the following. Yeah. six weeks of that might get a little bit tiring. So, well, next year there um there’s a five-day break between the men’s race and the women’s race. So, we’ll find out if that’s going to help us in terms of viewership or actually it’s going to hurt. But the it’s an experiment by by ASO. It’s incredible that they can even pull on two races at the same time. They overlap, you know, for three days. It’s incredible they can do that. But you know ASO is a massive logistics machine you know I believe it. Yeah. So the the element of community has always struck me with Zift and I remember that from the very early stages where I would finish a ride and on whatever forum I was on everybody was so positive and they’re psyched that I’m riding and just a in an age of negative online musings. It was great and continues to be great. How positive it is and it it it sort of promotes a a natural gravitation because people want to go to this thing that is going to be inherently positive. Zift has redefined indoor cycling for all intents and purposes. And now it seems like with this community, you’re also redefining women cycling with Twitter France Favic Swift. Is that is that the intention? I mean, I realize initially you’re saying, “Okay, yeah, let’s get some bike racing going and and there’s a pandemic, so there’s nothing happening in the first place, but it still is an inherent chasm between real world cycling and riding indoors.” So, I mean, just talk about the Yeah, I So, um, we’re on this journey of hopefully redefining what cycling is. And we’d like to think, of course, this is our position that cycling is is is you do you do it indoors and outdoors that that defines cycling. It’s not just one or the other, right? And this is like the battle that we, you know, we fought with the purists for a long time, but I think even they have kind of come over. Um, so we’re on that journey of like, you know, cycling is something you do uh indoors and outdoors. Um, and you know, for for women in particular, like the roads are not safe, right, generally speaking. Yeah. And so if you’re going to bring more people into this world, whether they’re children, young children or or or women, or even like there are plenty of um men who are just intimidated by by traffic and big SUVs. So I think um you know riding less outdoors is probably one way to reduce the risk of getting hurt. That is for sure. Um so I think also like if if you you want to be uh fit when you do go outdoors because if you’re not fit, you feel fatigue, you make mistakes. Y um so we’re on that journey of trying to promote uh cycling fitness, getting more people into the sport. There are many people who are starting out indoors and then and then buying their first bike. So this is one of the reasons why we got into, you know, building indoor bikes, very affordable indoor bikes, many, you know, not all of them, but we’re starting to see people show up on Swift without owning an outdoor bike because we sell the whole solution. and then finding that this is what they want and then they buy a bike and then venture outdoors. Yeah. And I think that’s just a fine way of just bringing more people into the sport. Uh during on the back of the women’s tour of France, we’re seeing a massive increase in women’s participation on our platform, right? We know that’s it’s working and it is about, you know, uh the women community. You know, Kate’s doing such a wonderful job of of promoting, you know, women cycling. Um and yeah, you know, safety is an important part of of of of cycling as well. So, anything we can do to help facilitate that, get them started, teach them everything that we can teach them indoors or the community can before they venture outdoors, right? Uh so yeah this this is yeah we’re it might it will take long uh period of time but I do believe in the future when people talk about cycling it will naturally be is something you do indoors and outdoors. Yeah, brilliant, beautiful answer. And I recognize and I’ve heard you mention that you you also rely on the community of Zift users to to help steer adaptations to the game um in hearing what people want. To that end, you also don’t want to go down sort of dead-end rabbit holes. And so, how how do you steer the company call it correctly? you know, is it through democratization with a great team? Is it I think uh you know the the risk is always listening to the loudest Yeah. group. Yeah. And they they may you know point you in the wrong direction. So uh most of the happy customers don’t say anything. So you have to rely on the data about what people are actually doing and not doing and then you take into account the the loud you know voices. But we have uh uh we have a team of 300 people. Wow. And with you know serious cyclists all the way to hey I don’t own a bike but you know I Zift. So we can collect a lot of data just internally about like what what’s working what’s not working. Um but yeah we have to balance um the the crowd that is most vocal because they’re just passionate right. But what you don’t want, as you said, like take you down this wrong path that the other 98% don’t want, right? It’s a, you know, it’s a balancing act. I believe it. Yeah. Well, in an effort to provide you with the rest of your day, we’re going to we’re going to wrap up with three traditional questions. Okay. The first is, what is your favorite place to ride a bike? You’ve ridden your bike all over the world. We’ll we’ll certainly open up a virtual answer as well. Number two, what is the number one place that you would like to ride your bike that you have never ridden anywhere in the world or virtually? And number three, with whom would you like to share a bike ride, a conversation, be across the screen, tap out a little conversation through Zift. With whom would you like to go for a bike ride? So, favorite place to ride a bike. You know, I’ve ridden in lots of different places all over the world, but where I keep coming back to are the roads where I, you know, rode as a kid. So, you know, my backyard here in New York. Sure. Um, and now I just just venture further further north and east. Beautiful roads in Connecticut. Um, so yeah, enjoy the roads here, you know, most. Perfect. It’s kind of interesting. Yeah. Um, where have I where would I like to ride that I haven’t ridden yet? Um, I have not ridden in Slovenia. I heard the roads in Slovenia are amazing. Um, so I don’t know when I’ll be able to get out there, but I’ve ridden in a lot of different countries. I’ve not ridden in Slovenia. Yeah. Or the roads are good, which is which is important. So I’ll have to figure out how to how to get myself out there. Yeah. Well, they’re turnurning out talent over there in Slovenia. So, yeah, good choice. Yeah. And then in terms of who I would like to ride with, um, you know, uh, I often think about, you know, what I’d like to do for my birthday. You know, D had this his 50th, is it 50th? I think it was 50th birthday. Sounds right. Uh, he took everyone to Italy. Uh, I think that’s that’s my idea of like having fun just bringing some some old friends together from the junior years and beyond and having a little bike excursion together for a week. That that I think that would be exactly what I would want. That’s beautiful. That reminds me I I was the recipient of a surprise birthday party once and I just felt so special that so many people showed up, right? and they’re like, they’re there exclusively for you. So, it’s almost the reverse engineering of that. You’re like, well, I’m gonna invite everybody and then do the number one thing that I want to do in a really cool place. So, no one ever invites me to parties, so I’m like, all right, I’ll just I’ll just have my own. Yeah, exactly. It’s true. Uh, all right. Well, Eric, I am very grateful to you for your insight, for your time, for reaching out to me once upon a time and and for creating this terrific platform. So, thank you very much, Eric Mitten. Yeah, thank you. And it’s great to see that you’re healthy and look great. Appreciate it. Thank you very much.
1 Comment
Ah man haven’t listened yet but excited too