We do a quarterly update on how things are going with RunSignup (2016, Q1/17, Q2/17, Q3/17 and 2017). The good news is that more races, timing companies, running stores and runners continue to recommend us. And we keep putting out great technology our customers seem to like!
Remember to sign up for our annual RunSignup Symposium – July 16-18 in Philadelphia where you can learn and interact with the whole RunSignup team and a couple hundred other race directors and timers.
Industry Update
There are some pretty big market shifts going on right now given the relative flat race participation numbers. RaceIt and RaceMine have closed their registration sites and there are reports that RacePartner is having trouble paying races. There is also pressure on races with some being cancelled and leaving runners high and dry. We have been writing a number of blogs on these topics:
- What the Running Boom Pop Means for Races
- The Risks of Declining Registrations
- Registration Company Viability
- Is Your Race Registration Company Safe?
- Why Software Dies
- When Software Dies
- Cancelled Races
- Registration Market Analysis
There are two implications for RunSignup as a business. First, we are benefitting from being #1 in the US market as customers increasingly look for technology and financial stability. As registration companies fold (and, yes there will be more), RunSignup will be the safe place to go as well as the one with the best offerings and future prospects.
Second, RunSignup is becoming stricter in our underwriting. This means that we may not accept all races in the future, and may require holdbacks for some races – especially new ones with no or negative track records.
RunSignup Numbers
Our numbers were great for Q1 with 23% growth of races (on a very large number of races!), 19% growth in # of registrations and 23% growth in total transaction dollars. A good deal of this growth is coming from customers forced to move off of platforms that were closing. Here are

Gross Profit is actually the most important since it is how we pay our people and Amazon costs and for the year we are up. Gross profit was up about 25% due to the above increases and economies of scale we are experiencing as we become more efficient with greater market share. For example, we are able to spread our $50K/year PCI Audit costs over a greater number of transactions, and our AWS costs are also about even. We’ve added to headcount in support, but that is keeping a pretty consistent ratio of about 3 support cases per 1,000 registrations.
We also released our annual Race Trends report at the RunningUSA conference. It contains over 40 detailed statistics based on over 10,000 races and 4 Million finishers from 2015-2017 to show trends and areas races should be investing:
- General growth trends and statistics
- Marketing strategies and Promotion impacts
- Registration patterns
- Fundraising and donation campaigns
- RaceDay technology

RunSignup Technology
The best news is that we continue to make great progress in enhancing our product offering for our customers. We have a very broad platform for races, helping them with their entire race lifecycle. Some of the great work we are doing:
Promotion.
We’ve expanded our Email capabilities with improved Email Templates. We also added the option to easily export new participants to MailChimp, as well as upload participant reports. In addition, we have begun an overhaul of the Race Search on RunSignup, as we realize many runners are coming to RunSignup to find their next race. RaceInsights has also improved with drill down capability into Fundraising and Donations.
Registration.
The new Race Websites has been a hit with our customers – making their race look great on the web. And we continue to make it look better and better. Reserved Entries are a great and simple way to manage special pricing for certain people like sponsors or elite athletes. Now editing multi-use reserve entries is simple. The Race Status indicator has also been a hit, quickly letting race directors see their status. We’ve also introduced Conditional Refunds.
Fundraising.
We’ve made it simple for fundraisers to “bring back their team” – sending invites to fundraisers from the previous year once the team fundraising page is complete. We also made a number of other fundraising improvements such as email updates and improved reporting, as well as the new RaceInsights capability to see where your donations are coming from.
Race Day.
The big news is the Beta release of RaceDay Scoring. We held a training session in Chicago and all 25 timers there were able to get the next generation product running on their laptops, and successfully transferred race definitions and data from The Race Director and score a race with the new software. We are on track for releasing a great production product at the end of 2018, and get a ton of customer feedback during the year. We also continue to make nice improvements on RaceJoy with new designs rolling out as well as some big functional improvements around teams and relays.
CRM.
Our CRM View is getting quite powerful. We also added the new extended views to show Fundraising and Donations.

User Experience Manifesto Update. Hopefully you know about our User Experience Manifesto. Jeff, Meredith and Darren joined us in 2017 and have made a ton of progress since joining. Q1 highlights were the new Race Website Template, the CRM work (above), the Race Status indicator and Title Tile, and of course our entire new RunSignup.com front end website, along with countless incremental updates. Also note our new Support website, which was also totally revamped.
Timers now have the option to set incremental per user pricing as part of the processing fee. This allows races to shift some of the cost of timing from the race to the participant, and also allows timers to replace older registration systems that have higher pricing and revenue share with RunSignup.

We also announced a partnership with Strava to bring a National level sponsor with great training technology to races.
As always, thank you to our customers. Your support is really important to continuing the positive cycle we have going.