The Bikeconomics (Mega)Thread

When you do, please create a version for highly illegal racing of cars on the road. I need some segments on the canyon twisties around me to irresponsibly try and beat please. The top award would be "KOR" "king of the road" - although that sounds a bit Scania truck like. Maybe "douche of the road" could work LOL. You'll probably need to host this one in Moldavia or something. :-) Strava could turn this on so easily, but imagine the lawsuits.

I don't know where paid vs free users normally fall on apps, but if 4 out of 180 is even close to right, that's what 2.2% paid users? CAC has to be fairly high, but I imagine it is a pretty sticky subscriber once they convert.

I wonder if they truly want to go public or are trying to entice offers from the big social media tech companies.  They are an og in that space.  I know plenty of folk who had Strava long before instagram.  As well as folk who use Strava nearly daily while rarely using more common forms of social media.  I’d imagine most people on this forum fit into one of those two categories.

Worst comes to worst they go public.  Ownership lessens its risk of losing what’s been built and management gets to add taking a company public to the resume.  

I assume the only real change is once sold or public there will be more ads in order to create more profitability.  As well as more tiers of membership to access different features or push your profile to be seen by others.

I don’t record rides often and only occasionally get a free trial to get trail usage data.  Really I only use it for keeping an eye on the trails I maintain and seeing where new trails are popping up locally.

Jeff, have you considered loading it up with AI features that don't add anything or alter the core functionality of the app but are present enough that you can pretend that they do for the purposes of raising capital? 

PS - Jeff, as someone who was in the corporate world for a while a couple years ago, whenever you use the word "agile" I physically shudder a little bit in my chair. You've done it twice now in the last few days. 

Agile in the context of software development makes total sense.

Agile in the context of advanced safety critical engineering design less so....

I've seen companies attempt to do the latter purely because the former was/is minting money but that trend (fortunately ) seems to be subsiding.

I have no issue with software teams using "agile" in whatever the original context was. I have issues with what it became in the corporate world. Over my year long in-house counsel contract, I think I attended 4-5 mandatory "agile" training seminars, and it featured heavily at our multi-day retreat. To this day I'm not really sure what it means, except that the "agile coaches" sound like new-age grifters when given a microphone in front of a crowd of people that are mandated to be there. Worse yet was inevitably after one of these seminar things, I'd be on a call with an internal stake holder and be like "we really need to roll out this project because risk X and Y are live and material to Company", and middle manager stakeholder would respond with shit like "ok, but is the rollout agile?".  Please Miranda I am talking about basic regulatory compliance here. I don't know if it's agile. I mean, sure, yes, it's agile. Whatever you want.

What I do know is that when I saw the Company was hiring in-house Agile Coaches for $150k, and what the apparent qualification requirements were, was that I picked the wrong profession - I should have been a professional grifter, which is what I am convinced all dedicated "agile professionals" are.  

And if any "Agile Coaches" or "Agile Consultants" or similar are reading this, some offense intended. 

"The amount of money in the system isn't infinite"

The creature from jekyll island would like to have a word with you

Big changes apparently happening at Trek. 

My friend (- owner of a small chain of bike shops) just told me that, a couple of days ago, Trek informed their dealerships that there's going to be a lot of change in their product line-up in the near future. 

Apparenly they are discontinuing a bunch of models, including the Session, Slash, Remedy and Top Fuel. The way the announcement was worded makes it seem like there's no direct updates or replacement models planned for any of them. For Trek's mtb line-up, this would only leave the Supercaliber and the Fuel (EX, LX, MX).

This (- and Specialized axing the Enduro and condensing the various Stumjumper models into one) could be the first signs of an industry-wide trend. Regular, leg-powered mountainbikes are generally a dying breed - my friend tells me that of all the mountainbikes sold at his chain of bike shops in 2025, over 80% were e-mtbs. A quick google search seems to confirm this trend. 

This leads me to believe that we'll see a lot of manufacturers consolidating their mountain bike line-ups in the near future.

Most brands will probably continue to offer some variation of a 100-120 mm XC bike for racing and one genenral-purpose trail bike in the 140-150mm range - and some gravity-focused brands might still offer some sort of freeride- or dh-bike. But most other models are probably going to get cut in favour of more trendy stuff, like gravel bikes and e-bikes.

What do you guys think? Could this be a sign of financial trouble at Trek? Maybe something to do with the US CBP Withhold Release Order on any goods manufactured by Giant (- which is one of Trek's OEMs). Or is this simply a sign of the times? Could it be that offering regular mountainbikes simply isn't profitable enough anymore for a lack of consumer demand?

We stopped stocking full suspension mountainbikes last year. I'll order them if there is demand for one. Else, it has a motor. We kept low cost hardtails for the youth though. 

All those other models make sense but Trek is seriously going to discontinue the Session? What happens to Trek Factory Racing? Also surprising since the Session is one of the DH bikes I see the most in my neck of the woods. It seems like they sold well...for a DH bike.

I wouldn't be surprised on Trek and Spec to narrow their focus on models that sell. They're both generalist companies: They make a generally good product for the general pop. Sometimes they make something that blows folx away but still the bulk of their sales come from lower cost models. Couple with both of em are still plagued by inventory issues from the C19-postC19 timeline, still trying to sell a number of older model year inventory, a reset would be reasonable. In Trek's case, why keep the Slash when the new modular Fuel platform can be built into a bruiser bike? No doubt 150mm+ ebikes are eating sales from their meat engine powered kin as well. There's a lot of redundancy in their road and MTB lines, and that is a liability.

Some of this Trek news is not surprising. The Remedy has been dead for years. I heard R&D for a new Slash was paused but I did not hear that the existing one was being cut from the lineup. I'll add that the Slash is still a better race bike and one that flat out descends better than the new LX, but I think a lot of consumers still want a bike that is more jack of all trades so maybe it does kill off the Slash. I once heard the Session was going away but that was pending a new super Slash with different travel options, so it's hard to say what will actually happen. Lastly, I've seen interesting photos of a Top Fuel so I don't think that model is going away.

Something weird is definitely happening at Trek. For Canada at least even their latest e-bikes aren't available until September (based on clicking on various models on their website). Happy to be proven wrong but that's what I found.

Trek would be smart to pull an Orbea. Combine your DH/Enduro into one and base it on your long travel e-bike. 3 in 1. 

Ive been pondering the e-bike vs regular bike debate a bit recently, and if that conflict is unique to North America only at this point? From what I gather, Europe has heavily embraced e-biking in all forms, to the point where is it somewhat the default choice for most people. Here in the US, the debate of e-bike vs regular bike is still very much a point on contention, but that seems to be something unique to America biking culture, and not so much the rest of the world. 

Am I wrong on this, or is American protestant work/suffer culture leaking into my mountain bike hobby? 

I think it is because we do not smoke cigarettes on our pedal to the mountaintop cafe while needing enough breath to complain about immigration

Posting this here because it seems more bikeonomics related than tech rumours related, but it's sort of in reply or brought about  to the discussion going on over there. 

I'm curious about eMTBs's impact on the MTB "market cap", whether you want to measure that by industry dollars or total number of riders or some other metric ("rider cap?").  I don't think this can be answered decisively as we haven't had enough years of clean data (setting aside any data-gathering difficulties or whether that's really happening industry wide) in the sense that eMTB has really only taken off recently in North America, and in the same period, there's a number of events that will throw off forecasting efforts, even with smoothing efforts. 

Now that we're solidly post-COVID outdoors boom and anyone who was a fad joiner over COVID has either fallen in love with (e)MTB and stuck around, or left the sport, how much did we grow? On the other hand, what percentage of ebike sales are "cannibalistic"

If the industry "rider cap" is only, say, 1.2 times bigger than it was in 2018, it makes sense that all these major brands are consolidating their (e)MTB lineups. Before they needed a MTB in almost every category, now they need an ebike in all of those same categories as well. We've doubled the number of bikes but only raised the sea by 20% in this example. I hypothesize that a retrospective analysis of the total number of  mountain bikes in a given major brand's lineup ("core" emtbs+ "core" mtbs) will provide some indication of how much the industry did or did not grow since the induction of emtb. Better still if the band doing the analysis can look at the mtb-emtb sales shift in their own territories as well, but this is data they should already have.  Let's say Trek had 5 mountain bike models in 2018 (ignoring the fact they had more and inter-model sales mixes), and now they've added 4 eebs, the total of number of models ought not to be 9 or 10, but is probably closer 6 in the 20% scenario. 

Never thought I'd read gravel bikes described as "trendy" 

The primary purpose of gravel riding is needless suffering

Great question. To your point, I think the cannibalism is worse than that, because instead of wanting multiple pedal bikes for different sorts of pedal days with granular differences between each model, one ebike is pretty much fine for everything.

In the past, as a MTB pedaler, I would have loved to have at least three mountain bikes: a long travel enduro bike, a shorter travel trail bike, and maybe a hardtail or XC bike. Maybe more. If I wanted to give up on pedaling and get an ebike instead, I don't need two ebikes.

For ebikers who want to keep a pedal bike around, that would mean an ebike and a pedal bike. But that still means the market cap has gone from most mountain bikers having 1-4 bikes to now having 1-2.

And @hamncheez2003 don't kid yourself, that gravel bike is trendy AF. You have skinwall tires. Case closed.

At the end of the day that much of a consolidation in treks mtb lineup is likely a two fold problem.  A) lack of sales b) trek seemed to be one of the brands most effected by the post Covid cooldown.

I’d bet trek would happily sell 1000 each of several pedal Mtb’s with very specific purpose.  But if you are only going to sell 2500 then you need to really consolidate around one or two frames.

I find it really hard to believe the session is gone.  Long time industry staple and a popular rental bike.  Have a hard time believing they can’t sell a reasonable number of sessions to keep it going.

To me it is wild to hear Trek pulling back that hard. Their Marlin hardtail is (was?) available in 4 different specifications. Each of those specifications has 3 colour options. There is also 8 sizes available across the line. That's a total of 96 options across that line of bike. They're not historically scared of having a shit load of SKU's to look after. 

Europe is ahead of US ebike adoption, no doubt, but some thought it would reach an 80% market share. That seems to be stalling out now with ebikes as a whole, not specifically eMTB.

This gift link should work: https://www.bike-eu.com/52440/e-bike-market-share-in-europe-stalls-far-…

It's important to note that ebikes are a good option for commuting, for older people and for mountain bikes. Ebikes are decidedly NOT an option (at least a possible wide spread one) for road bikes given the 25 kph cutoff. Besides, an electric road bike, for most people getting into the sport, kinda defeats the purpose, unlike with an MTB.

Also, with sales declining, can it also be attributed (looking across all bikes) to commuters and older people buying new (electric) bikes in the past few years to replace their old regular bikes that would otherwise not be replaced at all? And with them buying an electric bike, they do not need to replace again for the foreseeable future. 

There's a lot of talk about weight, motor power, range and the like in the forums regarding ebike tech and how it drives replacing existing bikes with newer models, just like we had with the geometry progress over 10 years ago with mountain bikes. But I'd bet there's a large group of users who are perfectly fine with their old electric bike that does what they need it to - get out and get around. 

honestly looking at some of the bloated product lines I agree.

as an amateur consumer, I would suggest that what really is needed is 3 mtb frames, and 2 ebike frames max.

1. an XC and downcountry model - like a flex stay 29er, pedalling prioritised
2.  a trail/all mountain model - regular suspension, maybe option of 29 or MX via flip chip.
3. big travel bike - maybe but not necessarly high pivot, MX wheel, descent focussed suspension, could be a DH bike, park bike, enduro bike based on fork and drivetrain spec.

and then 2 ebike front triangles that would work with (2) and (3). maybe keep the trail as a low power motor, and the big bike as a full power

if they wanted to go more granular, offer the options of "lite" and/or "long travel" options via shock stroke, linkages, flip chips etc. (or they could save that as the "updated" 2028 model line).

If some companies want to try to be niche and deviate from this formula, good on them but they should go all in on it. If you think the gap in the market is a high pivot trail bike then dont make a regular trail bike to compete with it.

this is all so stupid. the industry did it with road bikes, gravel bikes, etc. "SALES ARE HUUUUUUGE!" Yeah, because people didn't have them, then bought them, and then they last for many many years and you don't need another one.

Most people who don't have ebikes are going to buy them. Most cyclists have other bikes, and based on my own experience with my Bronson, I used it for 7 years before replacing it, and it was replaced with a lightly used Nomad. Which partners with my Blur I bought used and is 4 years old now, a 3 year old Cervelo Aspero (bought on clearance) and two chromag hardtails that are more that 13 years old each.

My wife would like an ebike, but if we get one it will be her but be semi-shared. Once non-enthusiasts are all kitted up and sales start falling again, what's the next big thing to flog that no one has?

I've been waiting on a warranty replacement Session frame since December 2025... First it was supposed to be delivered in February, then delayed until May, and now delayed until November (!). I'm stuck holding my dick on a cracked frame for bike park season unless I'm willing to give Trek an interested free loan and buy something else in the interim and try to recoup once Trek eventually delivers.

Not super thrilled at this point, but to be fair, Trek warranty has been excellent for me previously... So something weird is definitely going on right now...

Not really bikeconomics, but from a maketing point of view:

I absolutely believe that Specialized's DH program gives them some serious cred and sells bikes (probably Levos) even if they don't sell any DH bikes.

I am very dubious that Trek factory racing hasn't actively hurt Trek in the past few years. Of course we all remember the Gwin glory days, but recently most riders that went over there underperformed and/or overcomplained. If anything their Ticket slope bike, which is virtually impossible to buy, probably gives them more street cred from all the insane Semenuk and other C3 rider edits...

I'd like to think the companies aren't as stupid as we think and know those sales won't last forever, but seeing what happened during covid has me doubting lol. 

To your point about keeping your Bronson for 7 years and replacing it with a used Nomad, I think the industry is screwed for the foreseeable future because the "whales" who get a new bike/frame every 1/2 years have stopped buying. Couple this with the fact there's a ton of previously released bikes that us whales would love to try AND are dirt cheap on the used market. With brands reducing skus and cutting costs doing modular frames (a, la Fuel) we could have a "they don't make em like they used to" thing happen. (I'm only 10 years in on being a bike nerd, has that happened in MTB before?) A previous gen used bike could actually be perceived as better than the current offerings. (previous gen Santa Cruz eebs/Tallboy, prevoius gen Stumpjumper Evo, Norco Range, any bike that the new version has headset routing, and if they discontinue the Slash.)