If there’s one thing I learned from dealing with investors at my previous company, something (including your sweet race bike that’s totally decked out and definitely worth a lot, right?) is worth exactly what someone will pay for it.
The trick, if you’re planning on selling your bike online or at a swap meet, is knowing what it’s really worth in today’s market. You could set a minimum asking price on auction sites or list a maximum amount in the classifieds knowing people will beat you up on it, but those are guessing games.
Enter Hubinero. It’s a new bicycle-only online auction site developed by Cole Knappen, who happens to have a double major in statistics and astrophysics. He used these smarts to create an algorithm that determines your bike’s worth based on standardized depreciation and bicycle condition. Before unleashing it on the world, he fine tuned the formula by comparing actual eBay sales with “blue book” values. The result is a super quick, ridiculously easy to use calculator that he says comes within +/- 10% of your bicycle’s likely selling price.
Oh, and once you know what it’s worth, you can list your bike for sale directly on Hubinero…wait for it…for FREE. No eBay commissions cut from the top. No listing fees. And no burying your bike among hundreds of thousands of non-bicycle related items on the general use sites like eBay and Craigslist.
Cole also added some nifty extras on his site that make it worth exploring for a few minutes after you’ve listed your sweet race bike. You can also list components or anything else bike-related that you want to sell. Oh, and he donates 5% of his profits (which come solely from the ads on the site, so click around) to 88bikes and Wheels4Life.
