Raise your hand if you love swimming but have always wanted to add some music to your routine. Of course, the underwater factor was a problem—until Zygo.
Today’s guest is Sheera Goren, CEO and founder of Zygo, a company developing the perfect underwater headphones.
A career change
By profession, you could say that Sheera is a lawyer. She went to Law school and worked in the legal department of many companies. However, as she tells us, she never saw herself working for large law firms. That’s why she chose hospitality as her niche. There was something very alluring about the business side of things, so when the time came to make a career change, Sheera knew that she was more than ready to be her own boss.
It all started with a fitness studio
Sheera and Charlie, the other founder of Zygo, had met in high school and reconnected sometime later over a friend’s wedding. They spent hours discussing how it was possible that swimming had been left behind in the fitness industry. If you went and searched for a boutique fitness studio, you could find yoga, and boxing but you won’t find swimming classes. Could it be because swimming had gotten a reputation for being a tad boring? They created Swim Studio to solve the scarcity of swimming classes, but what about the boring part?
Reverse engineering
Music had to be included in a swimming lesson, but when Sheera started researching underwater headphones she couldn’t find any. They were just nonexistent, that’s where she decided to take things a little further and definitely more complicated than just running a fitness studio to find a way to develop a good product. Bone conduction headsets were the first step but they weren’t perfect, so it was necessary to understand how they worked.
3 years of improving
Without planning it, the idea of creating the friendliest underwater headphones became Sheera’s complete focus, but it took 3 years of testing and learning from mistakes to finally come up with a product that could be offered to the public. That was the Z1, it was functional in the sense that it met the main requirement of streaming music when swimming at the pool but what if something better could be designed? That’s how the Z2, Zygo’s latest model came to be.
It's normal to be afraid at the beginning when you when you want to create something new
Z2, is more than a music
Many things have gotten better with the Z2, for once, the case is now the transmitter, you can charge the headset there just like you would do it with a pair of airpods and it has an improved range so quality isn’t affected no matter how far you go. By connecting to the Zygo app, you can keep track of laps and maintain a record of your performance, another bonus it’s that it’s specifically designed for flip turns, so you don’t lose connection.
Happy stories, happy lives
Sheera is honest, at the moment they don’t have the numbers to show it but they are listening to what customers say and the general response is amazingly positive. People are just happier now with their swimming practice, engagement rates at the pool seem to have improved, and maybe swimming wasn’t the problem, the obstacle was the lack of music. And it’s not only the music, Zygo is making the communication between coaches and swimmers straightforward, with the headset and the app a coach now can directly speak to the swimmer if something needs to be changed on the go.
Say no to the status quo
It’s a question we often ask our guests: What advice would you give to the young entrepreneurs out there? For Sheera, it’s all about rejecting the status quo, this might sound difficult, but in reality, it begins by asking a lot of questions, to yourself, discovering what makes you happy, what sort of experiences can keep you up in the face of challenges. Ask others as well, people who are doing similar things, and gather their opinions to see if their path is what you expect. Above all, remember, being afraid at the beginning is normal.
