Interview with Sam Cole, CEO and Co-Founder at Virtual Reality Fitness Platform: FitXR

FitXR is a virtual reality fitness platform and the leading developer of virtual reality (VR) fitness. We are passionately dedicated to making fitness more fun and accessible for all types of people – whether you’re a complete fitness-phobe or gym buff.

FitXR creates fitness experiences that are instantly enjoyable, social by design, and effective. FitXR has been a consistent best-seller across the Oculus, Steam and PSVR stores and has won multiple awards.

All you have to do to ensure a successful FitXR session is put your VR headset on, load up FitXR, and box and dance your way through workouts in time to adrenaline-pumping music.
 
 

 

How did you come up with the idea for the company?

 
I was in the weight room of a traditional fitness space in London, and looking around at everyone, wearing their headphones, not interacting with each other.

I believed that the next computing platform after the smartphone would be some kind of lightweight, mixed-reality headset. Instead of carrying around a phone in our pockets, we’d have ‘glasses’ that enable us to interface with a screen that’s in front of our face at all times. Once this technology shift happened, the fitness status quo would be completely reshaped – the screen would be your trainer and tell you what to do next.

For me this sparked the idea to look into augmented / virtual reality. At that time, there was a lot of excitement around when this technology was going to end up in consumers’ hands. We discovered early on in the FitXR journey that VR was much closer to being ready for consumer adoption than we first thought.

When prototyping FitXR we realised that some of the shortcomings we thought would exist like problems around sweat/hygiene, or just the weightiness of the headset could be easily mitigated. That led us on this journey where for the past four years, we’ve been very focused around building the at-home virtual reality studio of the future.
 

What advice would you give to other aspiring entrepreneurs?

 
Make sure you’re monitoring emerging trends and technologies – this way you’ll be ahead of the curve with your business plan and make sure the USP of your product is based on predicting what the future of your industry will be.

Another important piece of advice is once you’ve got your product up and running listen to your consumers. It was the ideas from our early community that we incorporated into what we were building. This early community engagement and loyalty unlocked a lot of future successes for FitXR, like enabling us to raise our first round of venture money.

Now we have teams focusing on community engagement to incorporate their feedback into our product roadmaps. Listening to customers is something every business should do, and we learned the importance of this very early on.
 

What can we hope to see from FitXR in the future?

 
After the success of FitXR we’re building the world’s first virtual fitness all in one studio, that brings the energy and enjoyment of group fitness to the comfort of the home, providing users with total body workouts designed by top fitness experts.

We’re also working on regularly updating the FitXR platform to ensure we’re creating the most immersive and engaging fitness experience possible – this is something we’ll continue to do in the future. For example, we recently launched a new outdoor environment, so users can have the option to choose a brighter space when working out – it features an urban rooftop space with views of the city skyline.

We’re confident that by creating a platform that is constantly evolving we can make each workout a unique experience for players, in the hope that our FitXR mission of making exercising fun, exciting, and effective can be achieved.