You hit the nail on the head. Zwift fell into the same trap as Peloton - prioritizing subscriber growth at the cost of meaningful improvements that create significant depth to the experience. At some point your new users become experienced, and they need somewhere to “go” - whether that is racing and complex game mechanics, deeper analytics, more worlds and equipment to explore, etc.
The fact that they just added their first bike to the Drop Shop in two years, in a sport where everyone geeks out about equipment, is just mind boggling. Or just 19km of new roads in what, over a year?
I checked out after they shelved any improvements to pack dynamics and drafting after the 4.1 debacle, when their reasoning was essentially, “Well, some of our largest group rides slowed down, and that’s a huge issue.”
For real! Great graphics? im sorry sorry but that is far from the truth. And it isnt top notch when some of us have had the same errors/issues for years and they still havent been fixed.
Quite telling, its hit 500 posts in 3 days & not a single post from Zwift HQ.
The price rise is here to stay, they could at least give it the “we hear you, we are doing x/y/z to address concerns and ensure we strive to or keep giving value for money” blah blah.
Honestly, it would make more sense to sack the Marketing, Comms & PR team and keep the Devs. Id even hazard a guess, there’s a few looks at Min and thoughts of, is he the right man for the job?
I think in fairness it is best they sit it out for a while, how would they know what to reply to and what not to.
Let the dust settle for a bit then respond.
This. There has been an astounding lack of vision by the CEO. Zwift has the user base that could have been leveraged into a “full” solution of cycling, and they had the funding to do it. The CEO should have aimed to have Zwift become a combination of virtual training, metrics tracking, training programs, and maybe connection to coaches. Basically a combination of Zwift, Strava, intervals.io, Trainer Road, and Training Peaks. Instead users are left with a ride stats web page that looks like it was thrown together by a sub-par college student who needed to check off an assignment requirement like “include a web page that shows user stats,” and it has not improved in a decade.
I guess what really shows the lack of care are the typos and grammar mistakes in the training plans. It is clear that Zwift management has never given a damn about the quality of the product. They cannot even task an employee with spending a day to fix those. It seems they got rid of the wrong co-CEO because the one they kept hasn’t been able to cut it.
Yep I’m pretty much the same, in fact this last season I probably spent more on a new trainer tyre, and inner tubes for said trainer tyre, than I did on tyres and sealant for outdoors
You probably know they don’t publish their subscriber numbers, so the only thing I know for a fact is that none of us know the answer to that. We can speculate however. And this report shows that the impact the women’s tour had on other areas, and it was overwhelmingly positive… so people do care about women’s racing. One stat that sticks out, 51% of women’s cycling fans are more likely to choose a product from the sponsor rather than a rival brand.
It took them like 7 years to realize that requiring to completely exit the game was a bad idea if you wanted to start another ride after completing one.
What surprises me, is the disjoint between what users requests and what we get. It seems like they take the attitude “we know best”, and creates what they think people wants. That can hardly be a good strategy IMO. More effective usage of resources would satisfy more users.
Poor old David, he did a brilliant job with PD4.1 and made racing much more dynamic than Z2 with a sprint finish. Then the robopacer crowd called fowl and zwift bottled it and brought out PD4.11.
I guess that showed who much they cared about racing and improving the product.
But hey, Big spin was loved as is the coffee stop for any sort of uphill in a robopacer ride
ZwiftHQ have effectively got at least three choices following this rapidly growing negative feedback thread…
Do nothing and hope enough riders stay around to at least not reduce turnover.
Reduce the increase this time around.
Introduce some features between now and northen hemisphere autumn, that make people think the price hike is more palatable.
