State of VR - FitXR/Golf+

Today, Boost VC hosted a “State of Virtual Reality” with Sam Cole and Ryan Engle. Sam Cole is the founder of FitXR, one of the top performing fitness applications on the Meta app store. Ryan Engle is the founder of Golf+ VR, which is the #1 performing golf game on the Meta app store.

We do these events every quarter, and invite our 70+ VR startups in our portfolio to listen in to an intimate discussion around what issues and opportunities are emerging in the field of VR.

I wanted to present my personal take aways from the conversation:

The first of which is that Virtual Reality has transformed from something with no clear business model to a platform that enables startups to build businesses.

The number one thing that both Sam and Ryan discussed was centered around optimizing for the Meta Store. The reality is that because they are optimizing, that means that:

1. Enough people want their products to build their business

2. There is enough unfilled demand for their product that they feel they are losing business

In this topic, if anyone from Meta is reading — Meta’s incentives are not aligned with successful games. The reason they aren’t allowing optimization of the app store for the top apps is because Meta wants more content. The irony is that if they allowed for the best apps to fly higher, there would be far more content created for the store, rather than making a market of average competition.

The other core piece of the discussion was complimentary towards an app called Gym Class which has succeeded where no other VR application has succeeded — socially through Tiktok and various other video platforms.

Both Sam and Ryan cited Gym Class as being the gold standard of creating viral content for Virtual Reality. However, they also both explained how Gym Class’ users may be a different user than each of their products

The last thing I want to touch on was from a tweet, tweeted out by Ryan Engle:

I think this tweet summarizes the confusion around Virtual Reality in a very simple way. Everyone wants to understand which app will be the killer app, but how adoption of VR has happened — there is no killer app. There are a bunch of individual applications based on who is playing in the headset. Everyone has their own application that brings them in to the headset, and no specific one is the killer. Eventually there will be enough great applications, that you will consistently be brought into this next generation of computing.

This means that one of the core problems holding back the market is the lack of new and experimental content to target new demographics of users.

This talk made me incredibly optimistic about the future of VR. I’m very excited to continue supporting founders building new experiences.