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Comment by gamblor956 | Hacker News Reader

Radical idea: Peloton's target market is the kind of person who is willing to spend $2000 on an indoor spin bike either as their primary mode of exercise or as one of many bikes they own. Especially people who want to spin during times of inclement or excessive warm weather.

The Peloton may not make much sense to people living in pleasant cycling meccas on the West Coast, but east of the Rockies the weather is a lot worse and being able to spin indoors is huge.

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In particular, Peloton's target market is overwhelmingly female. You won't find it in this S1, but this alone is why you can straight up disregard everything you will read on HN today about their business model.

No, it turns out women don't buy carbon bikes, a standalone trainer, wrench a cassette on it, put the bike on, hook up a tablet somewhere, install a power meter, ... it's the ole "rsync is superior to Dropbox".

I think your rsync-dropbox analogy is a good one, but I also found your statement about how it's a gender thing to be somewhat sexist, (it almost sounds as if you're implying that rsync is for men and dropbox is for women because in general men are more inclined to do difficult things than women).

I think he's harkening more to the standard try-hard neckbeard analogy than just genders. Usually women aren't lumped into that category. I think it's nuanced, but I don't think he meant any harm when writing.

It's not prescriptive, just descriptive. Obviously women are capable of doing all of that, and many do. But 25+ years of road bike (and other weekend warrior pursuits, MTB etc.) vendors trying to target specifically women have not seen remotely the success that Peloton had in reaching them, and there a lot of non-technical reasons in there, too.

very few men would do this either

> Especially people who want to spin during times of inclement or excessive warm weather

New Yorker here. If I had the space I’d totally get one of these.

You might appreciate this twitter thread: https://mobile.twitter.com/clueheywood/status/10896997623312...

On the other hand, if you already have a decent bike a trainer or a set of rollers is a lot less than $2k...

Kinda? Maybe?

I think its a mistake to think of a spin bike as a bike. There is peddling, and you can get most of the same experience out of a turbo, HR, PowerMeter, but then you are also putting the frame and peddles through really weird force profiles as you spend time bouncing between the front and back of the bike.

I mostly ride PowerZone, for which a turbo, hr and power meter would be perfect, but if you like the ‘dance’ classes you might want to look for a more ridged machine, you really have to be able to trust that its not going to break on you.

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