Economy & Economic Development  May 27, 2016

Colorado incentives in hand, ZingFit planning August move to Boulder

BOULDER — ZingFit — a software company recently awarded a $2.8 million incentive package by the state of Colorado to relocate its headquarters from New York to Boulder – aims to move in this summer.

Co-founder John Bogosian said in a phone interview Friday that ZingFit is negotiating a lease for office space at 311 Mapleton Ave.

The company, based in East Hampton, N.Y., has six employees at its headquarters now and another eight spread around the country. Twelve of the 14 will make the move to Boulder.

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“It’s a great lifestyle (in The Hamptons) but a terrible place to build a business,” Bogosian said. “We want to expand and get our distributed team all in one place and hire a lot more people.

“We’re excited for it. It’s going to be a really fun place to do it.”

ZingFit, which provides online scheduling and studio management for group fitness studios, doesn’t plan on wasting any time on the “hire a lot more people” objective.

The company aims to ramp up to 156 employees by the end of 2018. The state incentives are tied to growing to that size within three years, and Bogosian said they can be reauthorized for five years after that with continued growth. The company ultimately aims to be at 500 employees within eight years.

Bogosian acknowledges the space constraints in Boulder that accompany trying to grow a company to that size. He said he’s not opposed at some point to moving just outside of Boulder or even to Denver to accommodate growth, saying he views the tech scene along Colorado’s Front Range as one connected community. But such decisions will likely be a ways off. He said the space on Mapleton, if a lease is finalized, should serve the company for 18 months to two years.

“I think (Boulder) is a great environment to grow up in,” Bogosian said.

ZingFit had also considered Austin, Texas and Asheville, N.C., for its new headquarters. Austin, he felt, has a great tech ecosystem but is growing too fast as a city. Asheville, he said, had a great setting but not quite the tech ecosystem of Boulder and Austin.

He said the choice of Boulder was about a mixture of lifestyle and ecosystem. He noted the large fitness community locally as well as the growth of the venture-capital community and Boulder’s overall reputation as a tech hub.  Getting most of his team to move, he said, took a bit of a sales job.

“But Boulder made it easy,” Bogosian said. “It was the one place everyone could agree on.”

Founded in 2012 by Bogosian and Jeremy Firsenbaum, the company’s sweet spot is in strength-training and indoor-cycling studios. But it also has clients in the yoga and Pilates spaces, among others.

Bogosian, who declined to disclose revenue, said the goal is to dethrone Mindbody as the major player in the space. But he said the convergence of the fitness and wellness movements are providing so much growth right now that stealing market share won’t be the only way for ZingFit to succeed. The company has plans to break into the health-club space as well, and Bogosian said there is also more and more opportunity internationally as personal fitness is gaining traction in other parts of the world like Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

“It’s amazing to see British people sweating now,” he said. “That’s really an enormous opportunity.”

Correction: The original version of this story stated that ZingFit is negotiating a lease for 314 Mapleton Ave. The correct address is 311 Mapleton.

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