How the humble Bunz Trading Zone came to have a white-brick, open-concept 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 commuBnity, 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 Facebook 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 with them 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 marketing manager David Morton, also 32, his hands motioning the push and pull of a pack. “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 forces for “safe exchange zones” for purchases from Craigslist or similar websites. The zones are an attempt calm fears that arise from meeting with a stranger when buying off, say, Kijiji, 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.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

But sometimes it’s also strangers arguing with strangers, who have recently delved into emotional topics and arguments 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,” he says. “If it had an appraisal system, I feel like that would take away the magic of it.”

Community or commerce?

The following are examples of startups that have weathered and been weathered by decisions that please and displease their community loyalists:.

Flickr

Flickr started out as an image-sharing platform, but its strength lay beneath the surface: in the community that had formed around it. With the ability to comment and tag family members, it became somewhat of a social network, a community — all before Facebook and Instagram. But after Yahoo bought it in 2005, it didn’t adapt quick enough and a series of changes made by the Internet conglomerate, like requiring a Yahoo login and email address, made users flee.

Imgur

Richard Lachman, director of Ryerson’s Transmedia Zone, uses Imgur (pronounced “imager”) as a successful example of a community grown on one platform that becomes its own. The meme-sharing website was started on Reddit, but evolved to become its own platform. It’s a difficult transition to make, Lachman says, and one of the reasons it worked is because most of its ads are native — created by a designated team that works with advertisers to create sponsored content aligned with its brand.

Etsy

Etsy didn’t have to make significant transitions (say, from one platform to another). It’s found ways to maintain and grow the community it’s had since the beginning. And money has been one of the sacrifices to long-term growth: in its IPO last April, it was worth $4 billion (U.S.), but has fallen to $1 billion, according to a recent New York Magazine profile. The company is a certified B Corp, meaning the company’s priority is its community and its values, over its shareholders and even profitability. It’s a philosophy that resembles what Bunz says its relationship with its angel investor is like.

Twitter

After a flutter of reports that Twitter was about to launch 10,000-character tweets in Sept. then again in January, the backlash was swift and Twitter hasn’t flipped the switch yet. “I’m looking forward to not reading your future 3 page tweets,” Twitter user @RampCapitalLLC tweeted in January, referring to the equivalent of 10,000 characters in 12-point font pasted into a Word document.

Digg

Started in 2004, Digg members could up or down vote (“digg”) content, resulting in lists of trending web content. At the same time, its founders hosted a podcast for three years. But the content aggregator struggled to support its growth with some parties finding ways for their content to dominate the platform. New features, like the Digg bar appearing on pages visited through Digg as well as sponsored content, created discontent among users. Digg was sold to Betaworks in 2012 for a reported $500,000.