Customer & market
The bike-shop vertical of the Hub targets the owner of a specialty bike shop — typically 2-10 staff, $400K-$5M in annual revenue, $30K-$300K of inventory on hand, and a mix of sales, service, rentals, and (in tourist markets) consignment.
Market sizes below are rough estimates from publicly available counts. Refine with NBDA data once Swicked is live and we have actual conversation rates.
Market sizing
| Geography | Specialty bike shops (est.) |
|---|---|
| United States | ~3,100 |
| Canada | ~1,400 |
| North America total | ~4,500 |
| British Columbia | ~250 |
| Vancouver Island | ~30 |
| Campbell River + Comox Valley | ~6 |
"Specialty" excludes:
- Big-box retailers (Walmart, Canadian Tire, MEC's pivot away from in-store service)
- Online-only sellers (Bike Doctor, Bike Tires Direct)
- Single-brand factory stores (Trek brand stores — they run a Trek-internal POS)
The addressable wedge is independently-owned, multi-brand, in-shop-service-driven retailers.
Customer archetypes
The retiring AIM shop
Operator is 55+, on AIM Tritech since 2006, frustrated by the desktop client and the per-station licensing. Knows AIM has no upgrade path. Doesn't trust cloud, but is hearing "you have to" from their banker, insurance company, and accountants. Adult kids are nudging them to modernize.
Wedge: shadow-mode migration with a 4-round process — the Hub runs alongside AIM until the shop is comfortable, then cuts over.
The Lightspeed-fatigued shop
Operator is 35-50, switched from Quickbooks POS to Lightspeed 4-7 years ago, paying $99-249/month. Annoyed by:
- Generic UI that doesn't know about bikes-on-record, service tickets, or fleet rentals
- Add-on pricing for the features they actually need
- "Premium support" being a phone tree
- Customer data living in a US-multitenant database
Wedge: same price, half the friction, single-tenant per shop, AI-native operator support.
The new bike-shop
Operator opening a new shop or buying a small existing one. No POS legacy to migrate from. Buying decisions: price, hardware compatibility, time-to-first-sale.
Wedge: $199/month, no contracts, hardware the Hub certifies (Stripe Terminal BBPOS WisePOS E, Star TSP143 receipt printer, USB cash drawer).
The BC MTB referral strategy
The first deployment is Swicked Cycles, Campbell River BC. Vancouver Island has a tight, vocal mountain-biking community: Cumberland (Forbidden Plateau, Cumberland trails), Campbell River, Mount Washington, and the cross-island trail networks. Word-of-mouth among shop owners and event organizers is high-trust.
Sequence:
- Year 1: Swicked goes live, shadow then cutover. We document the migration playbook in Migration from AIM.
- Year 1-2: 3-5 other Vancouver Island shops (Cumberland, Courtenay, Nanaimo, Victoria) — referrals from Swicked.
- Year 2-3: Mainland BC (Squamish, Whistler, North Shore — high-density MTB market).
- Year 3+: Alberta (Calgary, Canmore, Banff), Ontario (Hamilton, Collingwood), Quebec (Bromont, MSA), then Pacific Northwest US (Bellingham, Portland, Bend) — same demographic, same trail-network gravity.
US expansion is deliberately later: the US market is larger but Canadian shops are an under-served wedge with predictable bookkeeping (BC GST/PST), and the brand grows credibility before crossing the border.
What does NOT count as the market
- Hybrid hardware stores that sell bikes (Canadian Tire, Walmart) — different POS needs, different staff training, different unit economics
- Online-only sellers — no in-shop floor to operate
- Big-chain operators (Sport Chek, MEC) — they buy enterprise POS
The bike-shop vertical is for independently-owned shops with floor staff who do service work. That's the whole pitch.
Other Hub verticals target their own markets — accountants, motorcycle dealers, individual tradespeople, etc. Each vertical's bible documents its own market analysis.
See also
- What is the Hub? — what we sell them
- Business model — unit economics
- Current state — where Swicked is in the migration today
- Migration from AIM — the 4-round playbook