How Zwift CEO Eric Min grew Zwift to $103M revenue and 300K customers in 2023.

this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per talk 5 and6 million he is held bent on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit soul Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka I just finished traveling southeast Asia for 4 31 days and I usually always get sick when I travel and quite frankly eating is difficult for me it's hard to find a restaurant and I'm spoiled in Austin with my personal chef well I took these little packets with me this time 30 of them in my carry-on suitcase they kept me totally healthy with 11 different secret ingredients you can see them at Nathan la.com juu I'll tell you more later on in the show that's Nathan la.com juice folks many of you reach out to me and you say Nathan so many guests on your show talk about the importance of batching but whenever I try and batch you tell me this you go Nathan they don't book backto back times so you or they don't show up after they book it's frustrating the answer is guys you have to use Smart Tools I use a tool called a cue scheduling at Nathan lat.com schedu I'll tell you specifically how I use it later on in the episode this is episode 659 coming up tomorrow morning I talk to somebody who might be the first trillionaire and the person that's going to decide this are farmers why drones and machine learning are directly connected to value for farmers who can use this data to save money so the question is simple will Farmers decide the first drone company trillionaire tune in tomorrow morning to find out good morning everybody Nathan lka here our guest today is Eric Min he is the CEO and founder of a company called zwift.com we'll talk all about all about it Eric's a tech entrepreneur a lifelong cyclist and is now spreading Fitness through virtualization and game of all right Eric are you ready to take us to the top yes yes very good so tell us kick us off here tell us what zift does and what's your Revenue model how do you generate money uh so zwift is simply uh you know creating a a virtual space where you know cyclists can can interact with each other uh in in real time we're trying to recreate the the social um uh all the social aspects of of cycling that uh that so many of us really enjoyed it's it's a personal problem that I tried to uh to solve um you know coming from New York and living in London all of my network being in in New York City I thought um you know could we could I recreate some of the social network that I had before in a way that just wasn't available and you know could we do that through a gaming platform and and create a social network where you know the interaction is is is real and physical and are you selling so uh guys I encourage you to check out the the website zwift.com but I mean the reason Eric I look at an idea like this and I go this is exciting is because for whatever reason when I work out if there's people watching or I'm competing with someone that I can beat I just work out harder it's something psychologically in my brain I don't know why so I love that I could be by myself here use whift to maybe compete against other people my question to you is though are you actually selling this whole bike as a as a piece of Hardware or is it just an add-on it's we're a pure software company it's a subscription business we charge $10 uh a month in in most uh most countries and um you we're asset light company we uh we work with so many partners who have all the different equipment that's already available in the market so we're really bringing all the different pieces together and create an experience that um you know that I think the industry has been talking about and promising for the last 25 years and the timing of bringing all this together is you know was is perfect for for today so Eric someone's listening right now they want to buy this what do they have to have for for like physically for zift to work right so the the most basic setup would be your iPad and um there's a there's something called a trainer that can attach to your traditional bicycle that turns it essentially into a stationary bike there a couple of sensors Bluetooth sensors and vaa it gets connected to to our game which is running on iOS it also runs on PCM Mac and then we based on your weight how fast you're you're pedaling and and a couple of other factors we Propel you in the game got it so your weight matters the kind of equipment that you have in the game actually matters the terrain that you're riding on in the game matters all of these things factor into you know how and the drafting within the game y these are all things that you you take for granted but it it's all you know happens in the real world and we take a that and model that and and and turn that into an experience in the game so what year did you launch the company in in 2014 January 2014 we put a small team together we seated the business with how much Capital um my Let's see we SE the business for I you know my my my partner and I we had an open checkbook but uh committed a couple million dollars to build this and we uh we were able to bring a product to life we had uh friends and family raised about $7 million um and we launched a beta product that uh go ahead no I didn't mean to cut you off but where are you at to date how much total Capital have you raised we just closed a series a around back in November we've raised $45 million a date so somebody listening Eric right now they're going to go what what the heck I can't learn from Eric he had millions of dollars to to fund his own company from at the beginning like why should I listen to the rest of this interview it sounds like you maybe had a win before zift what' you do before so my partner and I Al Mar he he and I built a trading platform for the financial and energy markets so on the back of um you know a little bit of success there we decided to do something completely different uh from Enterprise to something consumer facing um and you know we thought you know if we could do something completely different out of our comfort zone we could probably call ourselves true entrepreneurs and so um yeah so here we are with our second Venture and did you what how old were you when you launched that Trading Company your first company uh so I was about 30 years old okay and you built that up for how many years so that was over a decade um and so that that went on for some time uh so that was an interesting business Enterprise um and you know it it was tough is we learned a lot of lessons there we were able to monetize the business which is great and allowed us to you do something fun is rift but um you know Enterprise business is is tough Capital intensive and if you're not clever you you you don't walk away with very much at the end how what was the it finished that story for us I mean did you sell it you shut it down what so we were sitting on a what amounted to a100 million contract so we had a you know we had a decision to make do we reinvest the proceeds highly profitable contract do we reinvest it and and try to compete and scale our business or do we call it you know call it a day and say let's just take as much of that off the table uh we took a tough decision and it took us five years to take a lot of that off the table so someone let me just let me see if I can understand this properly a big uh company liked what you were doing and they said we want to buy a plan or a contract for $1 million and then you spent five years kind of executing that contract and in the process just extrap you took as much of that as you could out into your pocket and your Founders pocket right in order to return eight times uh it was a eight investors received eight times their money oh that's great how much Capital do you raise in that business $3 million okay got it you said three or 30 three three that's great and um okay good that makes sense good so now you guys kind of understand more I always I always appreciate when people kind of expl more about how they got that initial bump because Eric a lot of these Entre even Elon Musk he started with an agency and they snowball their winnings into the next winning and the next and the next yeah so that was yeah we were fortunate to be able to to extract um you know cash out of that business because if I look back it was incredible in a market that was shrinking that more competitors were coming into the space we just knew at that point it was time for us to leave and the difference between the the number one uh um you know vendor versus US you ranked in the top five was just insurmountable difference in terms of you know uh the power that the the a leader of a particular vertical had and so one of the things that we were set out to do is become a category leader and you could become a category Leader by creating a brand new category and essentially that's what we've done with Rift y so you're 30 for a decade you're building this trading...