Startup Story: How Zygo is Making Waves in Swimming and Beyond
Like all kids, we loved swimming when we were little. Jumping into the water gave us a fun, carefree way to cool off on hot summer days in our hometown of LA.
As we got older, swimming disappeared from our lives until we realized, as 30-year olds, that we hadn’t enjoyed swimming for decades. We watched boutique fitness studios turn other sports into engaging, community-driven activities, while swimming appeared solitary, intimidating, and monotonous. Where was the innovation? We loved group fitness classes, and wanted a similar experience in the pool where we could improve our strokes and stamina with real-time instruction, encouragement, and music. It would be low-impact and full-body — the perfect addition to our fitness routines.
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We couldn’t find such a class, so we designed one ourselves. Our first company, SwimTeam, gave participants an entertaining and convenient way to build confidence in the pool by making it social and stress-free in a 45-minute swimming-based group exercise class. But recreating the studio environment in the pool was no easy feat. It’s the high-energy playlist and charismatic instruction of SoulCycle and Barry’s Bootcamp that make those classes so popular. We needed an elegant way to transmit live instruction and music to our swimmers. After months of attempting to hack existing technologies to fit our needs, we realized that the ideal solution did not exist. We never planned on becoming a hardware company, but we quickly realized that everyone else wanted this product too.
So two years ago, we set off to create Zygo — the first wireless headset for underwater streaming audio and live coaching.
We used rough prototypes to run SwimTeam classes in the summer of 2017, which gave us the opportunity to gather valuable feedback from swimmers and coaches alike. We assembled a team of industrial designers, mechanical engineers, and electrical engineers, and spent months overcoming the challenges of fitting the many critical components into a lightweight, non-invasive wearable. It was a constant balance between aesthetics — such as having the bone conduction pads resemble a water droplet — and functional requirements, such as achieving a range of 50 meters at 2 feet below the surface. Bluetooth doesn’t penetrate the water, which is why existing products for underwater audio are MP3s, forcing swimmers to pre-load content every time — a terrible and antiquated user experience! Our patent-pending solution uses radio frequency in a configuration developed by our antenna specialist and manufacturing partner.
Now, we’re on the cusp of bringing Zygo to the world. While our initial focus was swimming, we’re excited about Zygo’s potential to make waves in the wider world of watersports. Zygo can benefit athletes and adventurers across all aquatic activities, including surfing, rowing, sailing, stand up paddle boarding, windsurfing, kite surfing, aquarobics, and water polo. We believe that the ability to receive real time instruction on/in the water and to effortlessly stream audio as we do on land will transform the way people view these sports.
In parallel with the hardware, we developed a companion App of guided workouts. Like Peloton, the Zygo App is an ever-growing library of pre-recorded instruction paired with upbeat music. It’s available in the App Store and free to use all of 2019.
Developing a new product from scratch can feel like swimming upstream. “Hardware is hard,” as they say, and it’s true, which is why we’re grateful to so many members of our community who have believed in us the past 2 years. As we launch our crowdfunding campaign and open up for pre-orders next week, we want to highlight three ways you can help:
- Sign up to be one of the first to hear when our campaign goes live
- Join our communities on Facebook and Instagram
- Share our story with your family and friends on Facebook and Twitter
Thank you for your support!
Charlie and Sheera
