Saving the soul of Bunz Trading Zone
How to generate money off cashless system perplexes startup primed to go global
How the humble Bunz Trading Zone came to have a white-brick, openconcept office downtown and 11 people working in it is a secret. At the crux of that secret is an unnamed funder.
It’s not unusual for a startup to have an angel investor. But word that Bunz has one caused a stir among its, well, Bunz (as the members call themselves). His arrival meant their beloved community, started on Facebook when founder Emily Bitze needed a can of tomatoes three years ago, had become a business.
“He’s just a Bun,” said marketing director David Morton. “The guy’s worth like — he’s a wealthy guy — he comes in and sits on the dog bed.”
The team is now grappling with how to support the startup’s growth by making money with a community created around the absence of it — how not to trade its soul.
Bunz started off as a Facebook page where members posted objects and services they’d like to trade for anything and everything — except for cash. Since then, offshoot groups in different cities and for different interests (rentals, making friends) have also sprung up.
Bitze says the Bunz app, launched more than two months ago, is a way to keep that community alive as posts get lost on the flooded Face- book page, now 40,000 members deep.
“We don’t know the answer yet,” to making the company sustainable, says Bitze, 32, who still plays in her band and keeps her bartending job while working full-time at the Bunz office on Richmond St. near Spadina Ave. “We basically just don’t want to do anything to compromise the community.”
Bunz regularly invites members to the office to consult about what they do and don’t, would and wouldn’t like, she says. Would they pay a dollar for the app? Would they tolerate ads or Groupon-style marketing?
“We’re like a bunch of border collies, running around, herding,” says Morton, also 32. “We’ll be like, ‘Where do you want to go? . . . OK!’ ”
But Bunz has an idea of where it wants to go with plans to grow the app to a global scale. So far, 26,000 people are on the app and have completed 18,000 trades with 89,000 items posted. In the future, you’ll be able to see what trades are within a certain distance of you, no matter where you are, according to community manager Eli Klein.
At the same time, it’s finding ways to expand in the In Real Life (IRL) place it started, Toronto; with local business partnerships so people can meet in “trading zones” where they can feel safer meeting a stranger.
The zones are mostly near the subway lines, since a lot of people choose to meet at subway stations. Two of the zones are Seventh Sister Bakery on Roncesvalles Ave. and Crosstown Café, near Yonge St. and Eglinton Ave., an area Bunz saw more and more people were trading in through a heat map, using data from its app.
The idea resembles an initiative by police for “safe-exchange zones” for purchases from Craigslist or similar sites. The zones are an attempt to calm fears that arise from meeting with a stranger when buying off Kijiji, for example, which Morton identified as a sort-of competitor, though he says its concept is different.
“Bunz is creating real-life interaction for people outside the internet,” says Bitze.
The zones are an extension of Bunz’s appeal, in a “cold digital era,” as Morton calls it.
On a recent day, the app recorded 500 trades. “That’s 1,000 people meeting in the city,” Morton said.
And it draws a generation “short on cash, long on stuff,” Klein says. “Let’s trade it.”
The charm differs. “Maybe it’s just trading and some people really want a sense of belonging, and really want to meet people with similar interests,” says Bitze.
Either way, monetizing without alienating those people is delicate, says Richard Lachman, director of Ryerson University’s Transmedia Zone.
“It’s a process that has failed so many times,” Lachman said, explaining a company like Bunz’s value lies almost solely in its individuals.
However it monetizes the trades, they have to pay into it, or they may “feel like we were all friends and now suddenly you’re selling me something,” Lachman said.
It could be made easier by the fact Bitze, Morton and Klein are known to users, who call Bitze “Mother Bunz” and “Mom.” (Lachman admits it may sound “cult-y” to someone on the outside.)
Bitze and Morton say the value in their transition from Facebook page to startup is also supported by its people — on a smaller scale: Its three developers, employees and volunteered help. “We’re definitely struggling to keep up with how fast it’s growing,” she says.
Members “get” that a startup needs money to survive, Lachman says. “We’re not dumb about the way that the internet works,” he says. “It doesn’t mean we can’t get offended.”
Though the Facebook group may be difficult to trade on, it remains a lively discussion hub, a kind of glue.
Over the summer, members helped each other find, then retrieve, stolen bikes. “The community cares so much about itself . . . It was such a groundswell of strangers helping strangers,” Klein says.
But sometimes it’s also strangers arguing with strangers, who have recently delved into emotional topics surrounding social justice.
How to keep everyone happy and keep things kosher, while allowing for self-regulation is tough to manage, Lachman says.
“It crosses a lot of boundaries between commerce and . . . society,” which happens because of the lack of money. The value of Bunz is . . . also the story. If it had an appraisal system, I feel like that would take away the magic of it.”