One of our Year End Wrap-up Blogs. Others include 2023 Year in Review, 2023 RunSignup Product Recap, 2023 GiveSignup Product Recap, 2023 TicketSignup Product Recap, 2023 Infrastructure Report, 2024 Company Strategy, 2024 RunSignup Roadmap, 2024 GiveSignup Roadmap, 2024 TicketSignup Roadmap.
TLDR: We had a great year. Our customers can feel confident that they are working with a long term, durable, employee owned business that will continue providing more and more technology to make their events better and better. Thank you to all of our customers who provide us inspiration as well as help us grow by introducing us to more new customers.
RunSignup helped our customers process $468 Million for their events in 2023. We have continued our growth in all three of our businesses – the core RunSignup endurance business, GiveSignup Peer to Peer business, and the quickly emerging TicketSignup business.
We always take this time to share a recap of 2023 and our plans for 2024. Since we document things openly, you can take a look back at previous years in review: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, Q1, Q2, and Q3 of this year.
You can also review our Company Strategy for context on how we run our business at a higher level, our Infrastructure Report for a technology infrastructure overview, and our Market Analysis for an overview of the Race Registration market. We will also publish our Race Trends report in early January for an in depth look at the endurance market.
The Numbers
Our key metric is how much revenue we help our customers generate from their events and related fundraising. We have helped our customers raise $2.3 Billion and hit the $2 Billion Milestone of total transaction volume for our customers on April 2, 2023!
We are now breaking out our three businesses. As you can see, the RunSignup business is maturing as we are at 40-45% market share. We will continue to accumulate market share due to our market leading technology as well as low price. RunSignup is a durable business given our deep ties in the endurance community and our plans to continue to invest in new technology by leveraging our common platform (see more below).
GiveSignup is our brand and product for Peer to Peer nonprofit events. 2023 does not show the reality of the growth of this business. About a half dozen large peer to peer events (> $1 Million in transaction volume) made a decision to move to GiveSignup in 2024, so the growth rate next year will be even higher than this year. Some of the luster is wearing off the CRM and Donor Management systems that customers have adopted because they do not maximize the fundraising of events or the operations of events. So we are seeing more and more nonprofits talk with us about how they can have the best of both worlds – GiveSignup (and TicketSignup) for their events and integrating that information into the CRM/DMS. In any case, you will see that growth ticket back up and make up for this lower growth this year in 2024.
TicketSignup is the fast growth business. It is still easy to grow quickly because the numbers are small. But we are also leveraging the huge amount of technology reuse we get from a single platform, and are finding many ticket vendors (particularly Eventbrite) not paying attention to technology and overcharging their customers. Since Eventbrite alone is 10X the size of our total company, it means there is endless opportunity for growth over the next decade and beyond.
Here are more detailed numbers for the year as compared with both 2019 and 2022.
RunSignup Endurance Business
The big news in the endurance community is that races are returning to 2019 levels. Here is the data for races that were on RunSignup in both 2022 and 2023, showing overall 9% increase:
Thanksgiving also showed huge numbers with 920,000 people registering for Thanksgiving day races on our platform:
We grew the number of Turkey trots on our platform from 730 to 833, so the average size grew 7% from 2022.
Our endurance transaction volume grew 15% with the benefit of the 9% growth on a per race basis and the additional market share we picked up. We are very happy with this given we lost some races in 2022 to Race Roster when they were being super aggressive. They have since backed off that aggressive pricing and actually raised prices to significantly above our price ($1.99 per participant + 6.99% vs. our $1.00 per transaction + 6%). We were also impacted by the final races from Lifetime moving off of our platform back to Chronotrack (owned by Lifetime). We knew those losses of about 3% of our 2022 totals were coming as we entered 2023. The good news this year is that we really do not see much churn in 2024 at all. So the fact we were able to grow market share even with those losses was a nice outcome.
So as we look to 2024, we are forecasting 8% total transaction volume growth in our RunSignup business with participation rates being about even with 2023 and decent growth of market share as we approach half of the US market. There is room for upward surprises with potential per race participant growth a strong possibility. As we discuss in our Market Analysis, there is a widening gap in functionality between a number of small niche vendors and RunSignup. At the small size of many of those registration vendors, some may shed customers faster or their parent companies may decide to move in other directions for investment. We find it is always better to run our business conservatively and while we hope for more than 8%, our plan will support the company well and along with our other businesses, we will be a profitable, durable business in 2024.
We had thought about doing the work to go into Canada in 2024, but there were too many other projects to work on and we can take our time and enter Canada and other countries hopefully in 2025. We do not see International expansion making a huge impact on growth as it will take time to gain market share in new markets, but should add a couple of % points to growth over the next decade as the growth of market share in the US slows.
TicketSignup Business
We had a great year with the emerging TicketSignup business. We had very strong growth, doubling the transaction volume of tickets from 2023 from $13M to $26M. We had major success with fall events, especially Halloween events with over 300 events using us – and a dozen of them over 10,000 tickets. We significantly improved our product, while also doing two major development efforts that have not yet reached customers – a Next Gen Multiday Timed Entry capability and our new Membership offering. Both of those advancements will come to market in 2024 and provide real differentiation in segments of the market like bookings, admissions and seasonal admission events.
Here is a little sneak peek at some of the new technology we are building for multiday timed entry – as you can see it will be super easy to create and manage these with a calendar based interface and mass update capability (eg. set caps or pricing for all Fridays):
The ticket market is huge. There are literally hundreds of vendors and hundreds of market segments like haunts, farm events, track meets, festivals, airshows, zoos, gardens, museums, boat rentals, ferries, etc. We will take our time to learn markets and needs, but can be of most value long term where there are harder problems to solve like where a zoo might sell admissions tickets, special event tickets and memberships. We think that over the next decade we will be able to help customers with ticket events like we have in the endurance space.
The good early news is that we come to market with a very complete offering that is a lot different than many vendors, especially Eventbrite. We include a free website, free and unlimited email marketing, better ticket features especially for events with multiple dates, and a far lower price and no subscription fee. Many Eventbrite customers are looking for alternatives where there are not ads for other events on their event pages.
We are also benefiting from the large RunSignup base who are using TicketSignup for non endurance events and making recommendations to others.
We expect to see continued high growth in 2024, although it is more difficult to predict – we could grow 50% or 200% since it is on a small base.
GiveSignup Peer to Peer
We made a strategy shift of our GiveSignup business coming into 2023 where we began focusing on peer to peer fundraising events. This seems to coincide with general market frustration by nonprofits in their CRM and Donor Management systems not being able to maximize the value of their events. We made significant investments in helping customers integrate their peer to peer event fundraising on GiveSignup with their CRM and Donor Management systems. We also made other nice additions for nonprofit events as outlined in our GiveSignup 2023 Product Recap.
Like many of our investments, it takes time to see the business results. 2024 will be a much stronger year since the strategy has come together and we will be onboarding a half dozen $1M+ peer to peer fundraising events. We are also doing some great product additions in 2024 like e-cards for donors to send, umbrella teams for large events, and fundraiser recognition features.
As we look to the next decade for the GiveSignup business, we see steady growth as we become known as the best way to maximize the revenue for nonprofits from their large events.
Single Platform with Next Gen Module Strategy Reaches Critical Mass
While we have 3 lines of business, we have one single platform with 2,200 database tables and over 2 million lines of code. We also began a long term strategy a few years ago to roll out next gen implementations of many of the features we have had for years like websites, email and store. Those investments are now reaching customers and bringing significant improvements for our customers, and also modernizing our code base a lowering the cost of sharing code.
A great example of this is when we release a new feature for Email V2 – it is automatically available on RunSignup, TicketSignup and GiveSignup (and soon the new Membership system). What this means is that we can take the revenue we generate from all of those customers and use them to improve our products for all of our markets. As we migrate Website V2 and Store V2 into the RunSignup race registration product, it will continue that trend in 2024 to make us more and more efficient.
What this means for our endurance community is that there will simply be better software and more features available because we can afford to develop more software because of the larger revenue base. Likewise, nonprofit fundraising events and ticket events get more software. And our company is able to operate efficiently, giving our customers comfort we are in this business for the long run.
Supporting Customers
Our company is divided about 40-60, with 40% of people doing development of our product and 60% helping customers. And we take helping customers seriously. For example, most of our marketing team and dollars we spend are for customer education. While we emphasize that event directors have full control over everything and can do things themselves, we understand how important customer support it. Here are some quick stats of how we helped the 28,000+ events who used our platform in 2023:
- 23 City Roadshow where we got to interact with customers in person.
- 24,052 issues handled via our Online Support Team with an average response time of 34 minutes and 24 seconds from issues customers log online or send via email to info@runsignup.com. It also includes the stats that our RaceDay team handles from Timers.
- 42,803 calls and email from our Account Manager Team – this is the team that is assigned to larger customers and handle more complex issues.
- 62,295 calls and emails from our Sales Team – this is a combination of conversations and voicemails checking in with customers, as well as working with new prospects on finding solutions to their problems.
- New Daily Video Feed, and Video Library integrated within our website.
- Dozens of Webinars.
- 290 Updated Support Articles.
Summary
2023 was a great year for the company. We have fully made it to the other side of the pandemic storm, our business model of addressing the needs of multiple event markets allows for steady growth for a long, long time, and we have reached a level of efficiency in producing new software and supporting customers. This gives us the balance needed for a durable, employee owned company that Bob talks about in terms of a three legged stool.
We want to thank our customers for all the support you showed us in 2023. It was fun talking with many of you at the Roadshows or in various email chains, phone calls and video calls. We are excited for 2024!