Bike Dad of 2 in Denton, TX, Started Bunch Bikes in 2017

[cargodad]

Hey guys,

Started bike commuting when I was a school band teacher to save money after reading the Mr. Money Mustache blog (and forum!) back in 2011.

Kept it going with a Thule child seat on my road bike when my daughter was born in 2014.

Took a vacation to Sweden in 2016, saw front load cargo bikes everywhere and wanted to buy one, as child #2 was on the way and the rear seat wasn't going to work anymore.

Couldn't find one to buy, so I started Bunch Bikes in 2017, thinking that there might be other parents out there like me who would be interested in a bike like this.

Pandemic was a wild time to operate a business, but we made it through (getting a couple investors from Shark tank helped a lot).

Now continuing to grow the brand as we work towards making the most reliable car replacement cargo bikes for multi-kid families.


These days, we are riding the cargo bike less , as my 10 and almost-8 year old have transitioned to generally riding their own bikes now, are walking themselves to school, and most of the places we go (grocery, downtown, parks, etc. are ~1 mile from our house). But we had a solid 7 years there where it was a multiple times daily use.

Pic of my crew:





p.s.

Thanks to @Bike Shop Girl for starting this community.

IMO, forums were peak internet for niche communities, and then FB groups and Reddit trashed it.

I miss the days of forums. Maybe we will see a comeback?

 

[Bike Shop Girl]

Aaron! So happy to see you here and hope Bunch will bring their customers on board.

I've been calling it a "community" instead of Forum because when I had this idea in 2023 everyone said NO to forums and recommended a discord or slack .

What could we do to make this useful for Bunch? (I'll send an email but figured building in public is more fun for our consumers!)

 

[cargodad]

What could we do to make this useful for Bunch? (I'll send an email but figured building in public is more fun for our consumers!)

idk. I'm just here for me for now.

As I am riding my own cargo bike less, I've found myself losing some of my grasp on "the pulse".

Really just here to connect with like minded people that are daily users with younger kids and live vicariously through them.


I would just focus on getting people here, getting them to stay here, and then think about how to commercialize it later.

a discord or slack

Even worse than FB groups or Reddit. Who has time to digest real time chat feeds?, plus not enough people use either on a daily basis, so you might as well build your own website and get people coming there. I think threaded topics in sub-forums is the ideal way to pick and choose what conversations I want to engage in, vs. sifting through a lot of noise in a slack channel.


FB Groups were ok, for that brief period in human history when nearly everyone was on facebook, until the algorithm nuked organic reach of groups, and pushed time on app to reels, and more and more people have left the platform entirely. I did like that FB groups was non-anonymous, generally. We do have a FB group for our brand, and it's a good way for some people to connect, but I don't love that I and others have to login to facebook to access it.

Reddit sucked (sucks), because it's hyper-anonymous, so people never know who they are talking to, so the quality of the conversation is throwaway/surface level with fly by comments (Facebook is not much different in this regard), in exchange for the convenience of not having to login to multiple forums, and getting all into one feed. Not to mention half of it being AI bots now.


I've thought for a couple of years that we are nearing a cusp of mass-disillusionment with social media, and that it might be a ripe time for forum ("community") resurgence, in whatever form that takes. I just read The Anxious Generation and that book is making big waves towards reversing the tide. Or maybe I'm wrong and attention spans will continue to devolve until we are living in the movie Idiocracy, and long-form discussion mediums like forums will never work again.