Is VR the Next Great Growth Frontier? FitXR’s Fitness App Makes the Case

Slip on your Oculus headset and FitXR will get your heart rate up. They are combining gaming, fitness, and virtual reality together to create immersive experiences where users can go dancing or jump into a boxing ring. The immersive part seems to really be working! “There have been some mishaps,” laughs Product Lead, Nejc Skoberne. “A few of our community members shared pictures of holes they accidentally punched in their walls.” Nejc is excited, because FitXR is on an accelerating growth trajectory, in a growing marketplace where the rules are yet to be written. Virtual reality is still very much in its infancy. Players like FitXR must deal with the challenges of a relatively small hardware-driven ecosystem, but they also benefit from rapid innovation and new opportunities constantly emerging in this space. While the playbook has yet to be written, Nejc and the team are driving growth by learning from data and tapping into an enthusiastic community of users. In our conversation, Nejc explains that virtual reality today is at a stage very similar to that of the early days of the mobile app industry. A few key hardware players like Oculus, Sony, and Steam are setting the framework. That means FitXR cannot easily offer a subscription model today and has to rely on one-off purchases. That’s a challenge in a world where Peloton and Mirror, and other at-home fitness systems have emerged, but those limitations also drive the team to focus and innovate within those constraints. By the end of the discussion co-hosts Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr both wanted to try out the virtual boxing game, so take a listen and join us as we find out how FitXR is working to drive sustainable growth. We discussed: * What is FitXR? Think of products like Peloton reimagined for the virtual world (7:25)  * Why boxing and VR? How the founders came up with this innovation (9:18)  * Fitness, gaming, or a combination of both? (12:07)  * Challenges and opportunities in the emerging VR-hardware ecosystem (13:59)  * Growth as people were forced to stay home (15:20)  * What VR today has in common with the early days of the App Store (18:51)  * The emergence of communities and how they drive growth (19:40)  * When there is no playbook for growth, focus on end-user value (23:50)  * Putting data to work and using Amplitude to drive learnings (27:40)  * Subscriptions are not yet possible, FitXR’s business model today (33:20)  * Winning with Product/Market Fit (38:20)  And much, much, more . . . Get full access to Sean’s Substack at seanellis.substack.com/subscribe