About

Why a bike company and a tech company at the same time

18 Spokes started as a customer support platform for bike shops. It worked — well enough that the technology grew beyond the bike industry into its own company. But the bike shops stayed on our minds, because their problem was never just support tickets.

The problem is that an independent bike shop in 2026 is expected to be a retailer, a service center, an e-commerce operation, a content studio, a marketing department, and a community hub — usually with a crew of three to five people, sometimes with a crew of one. The National Bicycle Dealers Association's own research shows 81% of US specialty shops run a single location, and staffing shortages sit near the top of the industry's challenge list year after year.

Meanwhile, direct-to-consumer brands ship bikes in boxes with marketing budgets no local shop can match. Two-thirds of shops now call D2C a moderate or significant threat. The shops that thrive against that pressure are the ones that stay visible online, answer fast, and keep their community close — which takes exactly the hours shop owners don't have.

That's the gap 18 Spokes came back to fill. Not another dashboard. Not software you have to learn on top of the POS you already tolerate. A managed layer of AI that does the digital work — support, reviews, marketing, content, web — while the people in the shop do the shop.

Who's behind it

18 Spokes was founded by Wolf Bishop, a technologist and lifelong cyclist from northwest Iowa — RAGBRAI country, where a bike shop isn't a boutique, it's infrastructure. Wolf has spent more than two decades building and running web, hosting, and AI companies, and 18 Spokes practices what it sells: every service we offer a shop is one we run in our own operations every day.

That's also why our pricing works the way it does. AI handles the repetitive work — drafting, monitoring, scheduling, responding — and people set the direction, review the output, and stay accountable for the results. It's how we deliver agency-level output at software prices, and it's proof the model works before we ever ask a shop to trust it.

What we believe

Local shops win on relationships, not reach. AI's job here isn't to replace the person at the counter. It's to make sure the person at the counter isn't buried in email when a customer walks in.

Pricing should be predictable. Per-ticket and per-resolution AI pricing turns your busiest season into your most expensive one. We think that's backwards, so our plans are flat.

The shop stays in control. Everything the AI knows about your shop, you gave it. Everything it publishes, you approved the shape of. When it doesn't know an answer, it hands the conversation to a human instead of improvising.