Over the past year, we have been collecting stats on what happens to races over 500 people that use our platform from year to year. For example, in November, 2018, we looked at the 290 races over 500 that used RunSignup races that occurred in November 2017 to see what happened to them this year.
There are basically three outcomes and stats:
- Renew – 90.2%
- No Race – 6.0%
- Switched to other platform – 3.2%
The meaningful number for the industry is that 6% of races over 500 die. The reality is that the more people, the lower that % is – for example the number of races over 1,000 that do not recur is less than 3%. This is certainly some of the negative pressure that is reported by RunningUSA in the flat to small decrease in total participants in races.
For RunSignup, we want to keep track to see if there are emerging competitors or if we are lacking certain features or not doing a good job of support. 3.2% is actually a pretty low number, as many of the reasons why there is a switch is a change of ownership of the timer (accounts for the top 3 competitors on the list below) or race. As this list shows, the numbers are pretty small:
RunSignup is lucky, as we have a large number (33.8% growth) of new races over 500 participants that continue to hop on our platform. Most of these are moving from competitive platform rather than are newly formed races:
Coupled with the 9% “churn”, this results in the ~20+% growth we are seeing in 2018 overall.
When evaluating our competitive positioning, losing 66 races hurts, but gaining 710 makes us feel like we continue to be on track generally speaking.