When you see what IndieVelo is doing, with what I think is one person? It makes it that much more confusing for how zwift can have the number of paying users they do and still be in this situation.
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I think the Peloton PE investors understood exactly what they had invested in, which is why they offloaded it with an IPO (although they left a lot of money on the table vs if they had held on to it to the covid peakā¦but hindsight and all). It is the subsequent public stock buyers, especially the ones who bought in at the covid peak who didnāt understand what they had invested in.
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It would be interesting if itās trek. They were pretty vocal about not āover growingā during Covid, hence why the didnāt have massive sales with specialized did. That said, when your biggest competitor has a massive sale and you donāt, itās kinda the kiss of death. The local trek shop by me is always crickets, so wouldnāt surprise me
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Yeah exactly!
Joe
I also wonder how Zwift is affected by UCIās partnering with Mywoosh for the e-sports world champs - I am a big fan of zwift and donāt like the idea of switching platforms. But if mywoosh has just as many players, races and is cheaper / free ; I would 100% consider the platform
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One might argue it benefited Zwiftā¦
They got out of having to pay for it all, without any real downside. Very few people were watching the UCI Indoor World Championships, as evidenced by the actual view counts. It was a mere 99K views on YouTube for the final event, spread over 3 hours. For context, a similar view-count about Zwift (thus, a similar audience) in the last few months on my channel, earned $788USD.
Sure, the UCI had some other distribution channels for that, but nothing much in the grand scheme of cycling. And while you could argue the marketing value, letās be honest: Every single person watching that, is aware Zwift existed. And probably 98% of them have a Zwift subscription (and those that didnāt, this certainly wasnāt going to sway them). Thereās no real marketing value there in 2024 (in 2020-2021ā¦sure).
Whereas at least with the headliner Zwift womenās TdF sponsorship, thereās a strong chance regular people ask āWhat the heck is Zwiftā?.
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In addition to Rayās excellent analysis above, I believe Zwift had come to realize that their plans for esports akin to video gaming were 100% unrealistic.
esports bike racing is a niche in a niche in a nicheā¦ā¦no one is going to randomly fire up YT to watch a handful of people throttle themselves. It just isnāt interesting.
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I went by my LBS during the pandemic, they had month-long wait times for service and no inventory. I asked them if they were expanding due to demand, the owner literally chuckled at me: āThis is a flash in the pan. Cycling is too hard for all these people to do it forever.ā 
Not everyone was naive enough to believe the pandemic was the ānew normal.ā Zwift, Peloton, Zoom - all have come back down to Earth the last couple of years
Companies that expanded aggressively based on pandemic demand were always going to have big contractions. No surprises there.
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I donāt know much about IndieVelo other than seeing a couple of short vids about itā¦.but even assuming it is a single person (which seems kinda dubious to me), it is a question of scale. Zwift has hundreds of thousands of subscribers while IV hasā¦hundreds? (Ok, probably a few thousand, but you get the point 
)
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Unless of course youāre tuning into vegan cyclist and heās talking about breathing out his bhole /s
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Exception noted.
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How much of these layoffs, if any, are in anticipation of warmer weather? Like, we all know Zwift numbers drop precipitously over the summer. I have maybe one more month on Zwift before Iāll cancel it and ride outside. Could Zwift just be anticipating this and trying to trim some fat before they start seeing a drop in income?
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- None?
Itās not like we have seen this as a trend of hiring & firing in any of the prior years of Zwift on a seasonal basis. There have been layoffs in the past, but none as a result of seasonal changes from what I have seen.
Then keep in mind that your summer is winter for others, so there is likely a trade-off between seasons split by the equator. I doubt itās an equal match, but itās unlikely the falloff is as severe as you might think when considering only one range of users.
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Most reports indicate that these are steep cutsā¦see the example cited above. You donāt slash teams by +60% or lose your co-CEO due to seasonality.
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It would be if they was eliminated by electric shock, just enough to fling them off the bike. I would watch the sprints for that alone 
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Exactly. Modern venture capitalism (at least for anything tech adjacent) is all about spending huge sums to hypergrow, hype the hell out of it, then cash out with an IPO. They donāt care if i the company crashes and burns as long as they got their ROI. They just need the bigger fool to buy into the IPO.
The really shitty thing is any tech adjacent company not following that playbook has to compete with others that are. Itās hard to sustain a business if your competitors are purposely operating at a loss to buy market share and suppress competitors.
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Alsoā¦ Canadaā¦ I use Zwift at least a few times a month, even in āsummerā.
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So zwift hub is being retired in favor of kickr core bundle now, for anyone jumping on that bandwagon I wonder what support will be like for bad units
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