VirZOOM

VirZOOM WeFunder: Final Countdown to Closing this Friday!

founder @ VirZOOM

Published on Nov 17, 2020

Meet the Team Video

Hi Everyone,

Only three days left in our WeFunder campaign! This will be our next to last update before the campaign closes this Friday November 20, at 11:59PM ET.

The team is busy on the exciting new version of our VR fitness app for the newly shipping Oculus Quest 2. Being on the Oculus Store, where anyone can try us with just a download and without taking their headset off, will be huge. More on this below.

It helps a startup a lot to be part of a fast-growing ecosystem, what some investors call a rising tide. In our case the current platform we run on, the Oculus Quest, is booming. Quest 2 sales are through the roof. Before it launched, there were 5 times as many pre orders as there were for the original Quest, 18 months ago.

Since it launched, VR game developers are seeing as high as a 10x increase in sales.

You read that right, ten times as many sales.

Another rising tide piece for us is that the first market Facebook/Oculus is focusing on after gaming is fitness. Mark Zuckerberg said it, and Oculus CTO John Carmack said it again in his recent Quest 2 keynote speech.

John Carmack's comments on VRfitness start at 5 minutes and 30 seconds

The people at Oculus like VZfit and consider it a unique product. The only reason we aren’t on the Oculus store now is because of the way the store works today. This may change in the future but today store apps can’t require extra hardware, and we currently require a stationary bike. Earlier this year Oculus invited us to propose a version of VZfit that exercises you in other ways, that works with the Quest headset and hand controllers alone and doesn’t require a bike, that they could put on the store. Our proposal was accepted, we started development, and we expect the finished product to be in the store by mid-2021. In the meantime we continue to sell our current product to Oculus 2 buyers at a nice clip through other channels, as I described in the previous update.

Today VZfit is not listed on the Oculus Quest storefront, requires purchase and set-up of fitness equipment and sensors, and multiple steps just to try it out. This has limited our new monthly recurring revenue to around 0.02% of the Oculus Quest installed base on average. Getting on the Oculus Quest store is going to change our business. Suddenly everyone with a Quest will be able to try us with a quick download. They can add a bike or elliptical later if they want. The number of Quest headsets (versions 1 and 2) sold by the time we ship the new version is forecast by independent market research firm SuperData to be around 3 million. Just a quarter of one percent of those Quest users becoming VZfit subscribers will bring VirZOOM approximately $20,000 in new recurring revenue a month.

We're not sure what percent we can convert, and the remainder of our assumptions are based on what percentage we think we can convert and churn rate. How many subscribers we’ll get and retain depends on a number of things that aren’t firmly predictable, but we have good reason for optimism. VZfit is in a class by itself; it’s the only fitness app that allows you to move freely through 10 million miles of streets mapped by Google Streetview, and if you add a bike you can pedal a tank or a winged horse or other games, in full virtual worlds. With VZfit, every play is a new adventure.

Summing up: VirZOOM was invited by the Oculus Quest Store curation team to build a version they can put on the store for the world’s hottest selling VR headset. Fitness is now a key market for Facebook/Oculus, and so many Quests are getting sold that even a tiny fraction of them becoming VZfit subscribers will create significant revenue for VirZOOM. This WeFunder campaign is funding this exciting new product.

If you’ve been following the campaign and haven’t invested yet, you still have until Friday night, or until the maximum is reached ($535K), whichever comes first.

If you have any final questions, I’ll be glad to get on a call with you. Please email me directly to arrange: ej (at) virzoom.com.

If you’ve already invested, the VirZOOM Team is delighted to have you on the project. It’s particularly validating that so many of you are customers who already know the product well.

If you’d like to get to know us a bit better, please take a few minutes to watch the Meet the Team video at the top of this update.

All good wishes,

Eric Janszen