ZWIFT
Zwift remains the world leader in virtual cycling, but the post-Covid tail-off has hit the company hard. James Shrubsall traces the giant’s rise and its quest to retain market dominance
TECH GIANTS
The loneliness of the indoor trainer. All great business ideas begin with a problem that needs solving. In this case, Eric Min – a tech entrepreneur in his early-40s who had just left behind a tightknit NYC cycling community to live in London – had both the problem and the solution. “I wanted to get rid of the sense of loneliness that I felt when I rode indoors,” says Min, now 56, the originator of what has long been a global supersuccess, Zwift.
It may come as a surprise to many that Zwift was conceived not in the airy offices of a California tech start-up, or even in New York City, but in London, England. That said, New York certainly inspired what was invented in part to solve a London problem. The original seed was planted for Zwift when Min was living in New York City, training in Central Park with the close-k nit cycling community he relied on for regular rides and meet-ups. But then he moved across the pond.
“When I moved to London, for my business, I no longer had that community,” says Min. “I didn’t have a Central Park, and the [London] weather is awful – worse than New York at times. And the roads were just unfriendly. So in order for me to continue training, I had to ride indoors.”
At the time, the only good thing about riding indoors was the potential training gains it could offer. Beyond that, turbo training was synonymous with torturous boredom. As the nights drew in and Min contemplated a dull winter indoors, he would hark back wistfully to the time spent riding with his buddies in Central Park. “I just thought, could we recreate some of this digitally?” Inspired by online gaming, Min decided that the key was community. “We thought, it’s got to be anchored around an experience where you’re around other people.”
Beta to world-beater
The aim, he says, was to recreate in virtual form 80% of what he had experienced in New York – “the community, the competition, the convenience”. Min had, as he puts it, already “sold the vision” by the time he released the initial beta version of Zwift in September 2014, touring the industry with business partner and co-founder of the company Scott Barger.
“The idea was, let ’s have a beta, let ’s get our early customers to help us come up with a real core product that we can start charging for,” Min explains, adding that take-up was huge: “I think we had 20,000 people interested in joining the beta right there.” He launched the company with Barger, designer Jon May field, whom they ’d found on Google, and Min’s old business partner Alarik Myrin, with whom up to that point he��
