Bottom line. I love Zwift and want it to grow and grow.
With that in mind, I wanted to see if you all can comment on the strategy for getting new riders. We in the early phases of Zwift’s “High Season” with winter closing in and folks beginning to move from a full end-of-season rest to the holiday slow ramp up to the new season.
I have loved seeing all of the new riders on course as well as participating in the races. I do have a couple of concerns that I wanted to voice to just get some feedback on.
I am surprised that there are not more events coming on line. With so many riders, I was thinking that we would begin to see almost hourly rides planned. Some days there are a few rides but there definitely could be more.
Maybe these are happening more informally. However, the only packs of over 5 riders I see are in more formal(i.e., posted) events. I thought that I might begin to see team group rides getting started on the weekends. These would not necessarily be posted on FB but would clearly be happening on course. However, I am not seeing anything like this in any critical mass.
Also, the folks participating in the races are generally the same folks week in and week out. There is some change but not as much variation as I thought I would see by now. What gives with that?
This got me thinking about what the strategy for attracting new riders is. I think this should grow organically but I am wondering if there is a plan in place to reach out to amateur team/club presidents to invite them onto Zwift…suggest ways that they can work Zwift into their planning and coaching in order to get their team ready for the seasons.
Maybe the company is waiting for some more courses to come online before doing that so that it does not get too crowded.
My suggestion would be to focus efforts on colder climates where folks can really appreciate Zwift due to temperatures and less daylight.
I think that if Zwift would give the community the tools to make rides happen on the fly, rides will happen on the fly.
There should simply be a lobby room prior to entering the game world. A lobby which people can join to start a group ride at a designated time, and designated estimated speed. And once the timer hits, all those in the lobby room should simply be set in the world at the same spot to get things going.
Furthermore, I think it’d be a nice future addition to have Zwift and community organized races. However, for this to work out well I do believe smart and non-smart trainers should be split for such events.
Ultimately though, just as like with any other online game really, for Zwift to grow the community plays an important role as well. Get your own cycling friends involved. Word of mouth plays a big part in making things like this grow. And I do believe Zwift is already seeing a nice increase in numbers already as is, with 400 and sometimes even 500+ others on the course.
Hopefully, greater bandwidth/server size is in the works if you are counting on 400 to 500 riders at a time. With the size of at least the Island, you would literally be riding on top of other riders the entire ride.
We had over 600 riders on this weekend when MTN-Qhubeka was leading rides for 5 hours early on Saturday morning. The Zwift servers have more than enough capacity to handle the load and the Zwift Riders Facebook group has over 7,000 members.
The community is huge and growing, that has never been a problem.
Monetizing Zwift through external community sites and blogs that track rides, races and other events. We have Twitch channels, live YouTube streams, race placement sites and dozens of other resources at our disposal.
I think with thousands or tens of thousands of riders on the course, it will get very unwieldy very quickly as you’re stuck in the middle of a “parade” of hundreds of riders up the KOM or fighting for jerseys and placements (see attached photo for one example from this weekend).
The solution isn’t to add more riders, that would just clutter things and create the opposite set of complaints.
The answer here is to either increase the size of the existing courses to spread things out (20+ miles per-lap) or add more courses to choose from as you log in, vs. enforcing a single course each time.
It’s progressing well, and organically. If it felt “forced”, we might lose membership who relies on the social aspect of the game to help power their rides.