Amazon and RunSignup

If you are not familiar with Amazon’s Annual Letter from Jeff Bezos, it is worth reading (annually of course). I’ve been a big fan for years, and enjoyed reading this year’s annual letter, which also always includes a copy of his first annual letter from 1997 – “But this is day 1 for the Internet and, if we execute well, for Amazon.com”.

The quote that struck me this year applies so well to what we are trying to do at RunSignup:

“We’ll approach the job with our usual tools: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, heartfelt passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and a willingness to think long term.”

We use Amazon AWS as our infrastructure. He spends a lot of time covering AWS in this year’s letter, and calls out in particular the Aurora Database Service. We have been a Beta tester of this, and it holds great promise for increased performance, reliability, and availability for the RunSignup core database. Technically speaking, it is the crown jewels and it is nice to know the future is so bright that it has caught Jeff Bezos attention! We made a great decision back in 2012 to switch to AWS as our core platform and it has continued to be a key to our ability to provide a super fast and very reliable service to our customers.

The other thing Bezos talks about in his letter that applies to us:

A dreamy business has at least four characteristics: Customers love it, it can grow to a very large size, it has strong returns on capital, and it’s durable in time… We are now happily web to three such life partners – Marketplace, Prime and AWS.

Albeit at a much, much smaller scale (our ambitions are much more focused than Amazon’s since we are solely focused on the Endurance market), RunSignup is in a similar position with RunSignup Registration, The Race Director/RD Go, and the RaceJoy Mobile App.

We take inspiration from companies like Amazon who invest over a period of years to reach a critical mass. RunSignup and The Race Director are clearly at critical mass and gaining each month. It is clear that RaceJoy will reach 1 Million+ users within 2 years and that RD Go will continue on The Race Director tradition on a modern technology platform.

It is marvelous what “customer obsession rather than competitor focus, heartfelt passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and a willingness to think long term” will do…