Simon sits down with Zwift CEO Eric Min for the now traditional “ask me anything” annual interview, covering a huge range of topics from the health of the company to, yes, the possibility of a velodrome. The conversation provides deep context and background on why some things happen, and why others don’t… plus quite a bit on the pace at which things happen, or don’t, on the platform.
We hope you listen to the whole of the interview, but if there’s one subject in which you are particularly interested, maybe you’d like to skip to that first. So here is a log of where to find the topics covered.
00:00 Hello and a word on transparency
01:45 Zwift’s new London office
02.45 What’s made Eric happy in the last year?
GENERAL ISSUES
04.30 Pace of development for Zwift
05.40 Peak Zwift and growth
07:15 Fun is Fast marketing campaign
09:40 Is eSports a massive, risky bet?
15.20 More on pace of development, specifically Game Development
19:50 Zwift’s new Hardware division
COMMUNITY ISSUES
27:15 Trainer Difficulty confusion
29.30 Juniors’ Racing
32:00 Race Categorisation/Sandbagging
38:30 Is eSport in danger of diminishing general user experience?
43:00 Family Pricing Plan
45:30 Zwifting for people with disabilities or different abilities?
47:20 Is Zwift listening to the community?
FEATURES
51:15 Steering
52:45 FutureWorks
54:00 Ghost Rider/PB Bot
56:25 World Switching Expansion
57:15 Workout Mode
60:15 Allow Saving Without Exiting Game
62:15 Hang out after end of ride
63:35 Velodrome
64:55 Can remote racing ever be credible?
68:15 What’s the next new map?
COMPANY
69.30 When will Zwift be profitable?
70:25 Future of running
73.05 Effects of lack of direct competition for Zwift
75:45 Marks out of ten for Zwift’s potential
77:55 Zwift’s carbon footprint
One thing I am struggling with as a business person myself – who is Zwift made for?
I mean, on one hand you need a smart trainer / treadmill and your own bike to participate. You need to be somewhat interested in cycling beyond just “I had one when I was a kid”. On the other hand, it’s a lot about community, being friendly to newbies, welcoming and encouraging etc.
With Zwift – hey, I am pretty serious about my riding, but the biggest event of the year is made of 20-min long races, all group rides even though the TT functionality has been around for quite a bit of time. There is no proper category enforcement, so I need to sign up for an external website and go there and check my results after every event. This backfires with new participants as well. The question I keep seeing everywhere – hey, I signed up for a D cat race and it was won by someone pushing 5w/kg for 30 minutes. How is this open and welcoming? I get the point about “new participants” and people who don’t know their trainer is miscalibrated, but that’s exactly what has to be figured out.
TrainedRoad is very nicely positioned – it’s all intervals, workouts, improvements, easy, all about adding a few watts to your FTP. If you are a random bike commuter, you don’t need TR. If you are all in about improvement – this is what you need. It’s 100% clear and understandable. I don’t use TR because I am not matching what their client is, as simple as that.
What I hear in this podcast is just “we need to be careful, it’s not so clear, there are many options”… At the end, this is just an OK product which is not growing as fast as it should even without competition. Unfortunately.
You really nailed it. It baffling how disjointed the product is. Zwift is just now trying to build a low friction solution, which is to say they’re just now getting serious about owning the user experience soup to nuts by working on their own hardware. It was apparent to anyone using Zwift in the early days that the level technical expertise needed to even take a ride on Zwift was very high. Let’s add up all the things you needed in the beginning: a bike, a compute device and display, a smart trainer, a cadence sensor, a heart rate monitor. That’s 6 different things you’ve got to cobble together and try to get it to work. That’s not mass marketable. This was obvious to everyone but Zwift. It was certainly obvious to Peloton who knew they needed an extremely low onboarding friction and launched with dedicated hardware and promptly exploded in growth due largely to that and also other factors. The largest inhibitor to growth on Zwift is onboarding friction. Beyond that it’s everything you pointed out. I don’t think Eric’s leadership has been very effective. I think he would be a great CTO but if we’re honest, Zwift needs a better CEO and a better product lead.
Good morning/afternoon all,
So far, 808 people voted for the feature allowing “saving a ride without exiting the game” in the zwift forum.
I don’t think that’s only 2% of the people on Zwift forum.
I don’t care at the moment about velodrome, steering, workout, more worlds, e-sport, personal bot … First things first, we need to be able to save a ride without closing the game.
Thank you ZwiftInsider for everything you do !!
I agree. The way you load the game, choose a route and then end your ride hasn’t really changed since the beta and I think this was fine where there wasn’t much choice and more importantly any monthly fee. It now feels to me like the way you navigate around is poorly designed and quite poorly implemented.
Racers are warming up before a race.
We would like to be able to save this part before entering the race/event pen.
It does it, it saves the moment you clic on “Join event” but it’s not obvious at first. You find it by yourself while experimenting.
And at the end of your race, it’s your warmup workout name which is reused and not the event name to save your activity.
Not a big deal, but a bit annoying.
“I don’t think that’s only 2% of the people on Zwift forum”
That is undoubtedly true, but the user forum for any software product will always be populated by the more serious, more vocal part of the userbase. Zwift is connected to the servers every time you ride, and it should be fairly easy for their system to gather data on what proportion of users end and save a ride and then go back in to do another.
I am in no way defending the way it works at the moment, but it isn’t realistic to use the amount of noise on any forum as reflecting the majority opinion on any issue … it is a self-selected and non-repesentative sample.
On the other hand, if this has been dealt with as part of the major UI overhaul that is coming, it makes sense that they haven’t jumped the gun and updated that by itself.
I love the idea of race categorization similar to IRL racing with upgrade points – not based on FTP.
Absolutely agree. I have trained a lot this Winter at the same time as shedding almost 5 stone in weight. As a result my base FTP as measured in Zwift is hovering right around 3.15 w/kg which is slap bang on the border of the B and C categories … but my utter lack of experience/racecraft means I can do OK but not great (but still have fun) in the C category races.
Being moved up to B before I have learned even basic tactics because of my FTP would probably suck the fun out of it.
I truly don’t understand the lack of category enforcement. Just don’t give people to option to choose categories in races. Zwift can use the organizer’s categorization scheme (Age, FTP, etc) and the FTP (or Age, or both!) of the person registering, and slot them into the correct category that way. This ghosting idea is optimally bad, you’ll piss off users, and they still will have influenced the race. You may need to have a background Zwift calculated FTP that the user can’t edit, but this isn’t rocket science folks.
I’m wary of making a big deal out of the confusion surrounding Trainer Difficulty because there are plenty of Zwifters who understand perfectly well what this does and use it as they need, e.g. perhaps setting it lower (20%) for racing to reduce constant gear changes but then also setting it higher (100%) for ‘real world simulation’ e.g. Alpe de Zwift / Alpe d’Huez. If people keep banging on about how confusing “Trainer Difficulty” is (it really isn’t) then Zwift may be tempted to remove the option and just hard code it as 50%.
Eric Min did say that he thinks the solution is language and I wholeheartedly agree. Just renaming it “Gradient Scaling” or, something similar, ought to help reduce confusion.
Eric Min says that he “gets it” when discussing the problem of riders entering a lower performance category than they should but I’m not sure that he does. He says it’s a minority of vocal people who are complaining. I think if Zwift surveyed Zwifters who race then they’d find that almost everyone who races on Zwift believes it is a problem.
Not least because if you blow-up trying to hang on to another rider in your category and then find out at the end of the race that they clearly should have entered in a higher category then it’s wrecked your race.
I don’t expect to win races but I do expect to be able to at least hang on to other riders racing in the same category but that’s just not possible when, for example, a rider who belongs in Cat A or B is racing in Cat C (as I do).
So, one of the major issues with riders entering in lower categories than is appropriate is that it is affecting the tactics and dynamics of racing.
Well with respect to Eric I think he says that he get it for a lot of issues but when he gives his version it is clear that he does not. Another ‘I get it’ that miss the mark by a mile is the need to save without exiting. He ‘get it’ that racers want to hang around after the race. That is not it at all. Users have give at least 10 valid use cases as to why this function is needed and not of them include hanging around after a race 🙁