Cix Liv talks about YUR and the competition with Facebook
Some weeks ago Facebook has released Air Link, a feature that the community was requesting for a lot of time. This has been a very bad piece of news for Virtual Desktop that now should compete for its most requested feature with a software that is integrated into the runtime of the Quest 2 and is also completely free. Guy Godin has complained a lot about Facebook itself competing with his application, and it came to my mind that he was not the first to complain about Facebook’s competition practices. Before him, there was Darshan Shankar, the CEO of Bigscreen VR, because his company must compete with Facebook’s own movie rental service and Cix Liv, the previous CEO of YUR, a software that Facebook has copied in its new Oculus Move service.
I so asked Cix for an interview, to ask him about his personal experience with YUR and his relationship with Facebook. Here you are the short answers that he has provided me.
Hey Cix, it’s nice to speak with you! Can you introduce yourself to my readers?
Hey I am Cix, Co-Founder of YUR and LIV. The largest utility and communities in VR fitness and VR content creation.
You’re the CEO of a startup called YUR. What is it about?
Was, left last October. Basically the Fitbit of VR.
What is the main feature of YUR you are the proudest about?
It works across any game, without any hardware, across most headsets.
How have you come up with the idea?
We estimated that we could (accurately) predict calories and heart rate using machine learning and heart rate data. We turned out to be right and it is a very valuable way to quantify your fitness.
Are Fitness and VR a match made in heaven as some people say? And why?
I believe VR will eventually become as ubiquitous with fitness, as headphones are today. It’s because it basically hijacks your visual cortex and forces you to move to survive. Right now VR is great for cardio, and getting sedentary people to move. It’s limited on muscle gaining and various more “serious” exercises. Which will be solved over time.
Is there really the need for a calorie counter in VR? What is its purpose?
Quantifying your exercise helps you track relative success criteria and gamify it to increase the need to do it.
How many users had you?
150,000
During the last Facebook Connect, Facebook has announced Oculus Move, which is basically a clone of YUR with better integration with the Oculus runtime. I was quite shocked when I saw it… what has been your reaction when you discovered it?
Absolutely floored. I was so traumatized I closed my laptop (like in those gifs that they close it slowly while traumatized). Then I played Ghosts of Tsushima for a week (great game btw).
I’ve seen you being openly critical towards Facebook on social media. You told your story about Facebook trying to lure you and then sabotage your application. Can you explain it to my readers? And do you think that Facebook is following unfair competition practices?
Basically, they pretend they want to work with you, while stealing all your methods, even researching your team which they will try to subsequently poach from you. The copying isn’t even the biggest deal, it’s the fact that they will actively assault you and block you, while also running a 3rd party app store.
Have you heard similar stories from fellow startuppers?
Yes, several. The amount of DMs and stories I have heard are much higher than what I publically mention due to the respect of confidentiality. Let it be known that any utility or social app is likely greatly inspired by a 3rd party app that is getting unfair treatment.
What’s your takeaway from this sad story? What would you suggest to other VR startuppers that rely a lot on being published on the Oculus Store or that want to partner with Facebook?
Facebook doesn’t care about 3rd party at all. In fact, name a single Unicorn that has come out of a Facebook ecosystem (compared to even Apple)? They are highly competitive to anything that may be even remotely competitive.
What would you suggest Facebook to do instead?
Mark Zuckerberg having majority ownership of the voting stock is the issue. He runs the company with too much control and has had the same job since he was basically a child. He lacks the emotional maturity and real-world experiences to manage a corporation of that size and scale.
How do you think to survive this situation? I’m glad to see that you are not surrendering, and YUR has just been published on SideQuest…
I left YUR last year, I would ask the current CEO that question.
I’ve seen that you have also experimented with AR fitness. Can you detail the project? And will you transition to AR in the future, then?
I am working on it in a new company I started (not YUR). We tried a mobile app with AR features but frankly, mobile AR is quite limiting to VR to “hack” exercise.
You have worked on successful VR products like LIV and YUR. If you had to teach three lessons to people wanting to do your job what would you suggest to them?
- Trust is cheap. Just create incentives.
- Hire people for how much they care about what you are doing, even if on paper they are slightly less talented.
- Focus on getting scalable revenue as soon as possible. I have made this mistake twice now, and it’s a big one.
Is it true that you think that HitMotion: Reloaded is the best fitness experience ever?
Absolutely, I cannot confirm or deny I was told to say this under duress.
What are your plans for the future?
Working on a new company that I will post about soon. It has AR as well… stay tuned to discover more!
Anything else to add to this interview?
VR is a hard space that takes talent and dedication, if you want fast money get into crypto.
I think that it was interesting to talk with Cix about his experience, and if you want to know more about his complaints and also the ones of other developers, you can read some online articles like this one.
The Oculus Quest 2 is making strides in VR and it is helping the whole virtual reality ecosystem to grow a lot. We VR people should all thank Facebook for that. The Oculus Quest is a healthy ecosystem, and is making some developers earn good money: according to Facebook, dozens of studios have earned more than $1M on the store, and are so now able to live only thanks to VR. These are amazing stories, but I think that we have to look constantly also to the other less happy stories, like the ones of indies that do their best to survive on App Lab (who I have talked about in my post about Lab Surprise, for instance), or others that have been crushed on the Oculus Store (like Cix’s YUR startup). I sincerely hope that from a healthy debate in the communities about all the bright and dark sides of the Oculus Store we can arrive at a better situation for all VR developers and users. Let’s all hope for this brighter future: if someone from Facebook is reading this post, let’s speak and work together for it.
(Header image by YUR)
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