How popular esk8 really is in your area?

Sacramento weekly group rides are growing…

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Exactly the same thing for me when I see a cop lol

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Hi Deckoz- new here but looking for people in Raleigh to ride with. Would love more info about the group rides if you have room for one more.

I’ve been busy lately, but look up “Electric Skateboarders Raleigh” on Facebook, that’s where the rides get posted. :wink: @OssifiedMoth

It includes all the sister groups like boosted riders, one wheel, uniscoot etc Raleigh groups(they’re all linked groups)

Well, Santa Clara’s pretty good I guess, home of the elite upper class…and google too I guess :joy: Most kids at Santa Clara University own boosted minis, yeah pretty lit here :wink:

My area not that many i only one of one other guy and ive seen a onewherel once. In minneapolis the boosted scene is pretty big.

Been seeing more and more people on esk8 or one wheel around Chicago.

meesk8 Me

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I thought I was the only one but last weekend, I found out there are at least 2 other guys with evolve boards living withing a 5km radius to me.

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In my country, i’ve found out that we have about a hundred peeps with esk8s, some have more than one board… like me :joy:

We have two groups on Whatsapp. The main group has a hundred members, which consists of riders with prebuilt boards and some DIY. Then there’s a DIY group, consisting of about 30 DIY guys.

Our country is the smallest in the world, Singapore, with a tiny land of 719.9 km², i wish we had more places to skate haha

In Helsinki, Finland, I’ve only seen one single person on an electric skateboard. I’ve also tried looking for group rides but can’t seem to find any. Friends of mine who live 500km away from me are building electric skateboards and hopefully we can go for buddy rides from time to time. Feels a bit lonely In Helsinki and seeing someone zoom by on a motorized murder machine is quite an exotic sight.

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Denver ftw!

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On my campus I see at least 3 electric skate boards per day, I even know friends who had them before I built mine. This is in AZ. Its interesting that it is less common other places, but probably because college campuses are hot spots for that sort of thing, and here in S. AZ we have perfect weather for riding 8 months out of the year, and the other four are still ride able, just hot. This being, I have yet to see a diy board. Literally ever, not sure how this is possible, but maybe someday I will see one on campus…That’s pretty cool some of you guys have groups and do group rides. I have been wanting to organize a race, open class, any board goes, in the streets between two different points, but haven’t really figured out how to get the people and organize it. I think something like an alleycat race, but for esk8 would be pretty cool. Imagine eskate riders everywhere, hitching rides off cars, swerving through every road possible, fighting to make it there fastest. It would be quite a site, but it would probably get esk8 banned in a few months, once someone inevitably got really hurt, so scratch that, lol.

Berkeley/SF. On campus theres a lot of us, mostly boosted but some evolve/china/DIY boards around. SF just has a pretty active community in general, our weekly group rides have 30 or more people.

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So jelly. All I’ve got here are sorority girls on blink boards. Bros on onewheels (with matching gear, they seriously look like they’re about to go cave diving for a week) And I’ve seen one dude on a boosted board ( and he crashed hard wearing sandals holding a six pack) It’s definitely a college town but for whatever reason most the kids here hardly venture outside of Campus

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I’ve seen only 1 esk8 in my life

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we battle for outlets in Palo Alto, California :slight_smile:

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This is a very interesting question for manufacturers, especially in the esk8 space. I’m in the process of bringing a product to market for the DIY esk8 community, and this is a problem that I’m struggling with quite a bit… how many people out there are actually building their own board, and is it really worth it to make a significant investment when you are just serving the DIY community?

I know that there are quite a few pre-built manufacturers out there, from the established brands like Boosted and Enertion, to the Chinese value brands, and finally being rounded out with the smaller ‘startups’ that you see on Kickstarter, IGG, etc. In my opinion this market is reasonably large, but it is quite competitive at the moment and isn’t worth entering into as a prebuilt startup (cheer to Lacroix for pulling it off!) But the unknown gap to me is: sure, there might be a lot of people out there that would happily spend 1000 bucks to hop on a prebuilt board and zip around, but how many people have the technical confidence, or at least gusto, to build their own?

How large do you guys think the actual DIY esk8 market is? As in, to date, how many actual boards do you think have been built? I think the easiest way to estimate this would be to guesstimate how many VESCs or motor mounts have been sold so far (but then single and dual setups will blur this already poor guesstimation even more.)

For some extra reference, it looks like, in total, there are only ~11k people registered on this forum, with very poor active user ship with only ~450 of these users being active on the forum in the last 30 days (stats from https://www.electric-skateboard.builders/about , someone tell me if I’m reading this wrong please.)

Anyway, just a question I thought I would throw out there…interested to get yalls thoughts.

As a quick addendum, I do think that the industry is obviously in its infancy… these boards really only started coming online with Boosted’s kickstarter 6 years ago, and I would say it wasn’t until this forum got on its feet in 2015 that there was enough of a community to make the DIY approach possible for the average person. BV’s VESC contribution also was a huge factory for DIY.

A great sign of future acceptability and popularity of eskating in general is that it is already accepted on the coasts (NYC, LA, SF.) As these things catch on in popularity there, they will eventually be more accepted globally and hopefully will become more popular. As the prebuilt market grows, so will DIY builds at some fractionally proportional rate. Celebrities like Casey Niestat are obviously helping as well, his videos receive millions of views globally and a good number of them feature eboards as a form of transportation for him, which I think is very helpful.

I disagree. They are not nearly as practical as e bikes or even the push electric scooters. I could cover more ground with an e bike, and arrive with out being jarred to death by rough roads. Also, if you truly want to use it to commute, like 8 miles or something, you are going to want to go at least 28 or 30 mph, which can be uncomfortable for people who didn’t grow up with board sports, like snowboarding ect. It often takes people who are not kids quite a bit of time to feel comfortable turning at 30 mph, and to learn how to slide on a normal board, because it would be kinda unsafe to trust the e board brakes only to slow down. Even having experience snowboarding, dirt bikes, and a pretty good amount of skiing and being young and agile, it took me like 10 or 12 combine hours to learn how to slide, and a set of wheel which I basically flat spotted, chunked, and just ruined. Now, I am by no means much more athletic than the average person, so i’m sure some could do it faster, but I am fit and young too which makes it easier. Also, a normal board or really even a hoverboard are suitable for last mile commutes, so there goes that segment too. Really, if you do not love riding it, it will not be your first choice. I ride 8.2 miles of commute because it is a blast, and turns what would suck in to sometimes the most fun part of my day, but if it wasn’t that I liked it so much, and had good roads, with turns, variable surfaces, like slippery surface gravel, big hills ect. to make it fun and different. And im sure everyone here feels like I do, so it may be hard to imagine, but yes, its true, many people cannot or do not enjoy riding for 25 min each was, at 30 mph, on a long board, typing it out I cant understand why someone wouldn’t, lol, but some don’t. So, I don’t think the demand will grow enough to make as big as many people think it will be. I think the real market is in dirt cheap boards people buy to just try and ride around their yard on. Anyway, thats my opinion, but it very well may be way off, I would be curious to hear from more people.

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