The quick summary:
- Endurance events are up an average of 8% from 2023 (which was essentially flat compared with 2019). So all boats are floating right now!
- Transaction volume is up 17% vs. our plan of about 11-12%, always a nice thing to be ahead of plan (mostly due to the surprising 8% growth in participation rates). This allows us to keep our prices low and to compensate our employee-owners well.
- Our RunSignup endurance events business is continuing to enjoy market share growth and we expect to approach 50% market share in the next year in the US.
- Our GiveSignup P2P Event business is seeing considerable growth this year with significant new customers onboarding like Pedal the Cause, Ben the Shore, and Els for Autism. Most of these were not fully open in Q1, but even without them we are seeing growing donation volume in Q1 of 15%.
- Our TicketSignup event business grew considerably in Q1 (90%) and is beginning to achieve critical mass.
- Our technology platform continues advancing with over 500 releases in Q1 and significant advances like the new Membership Product, the early release of our patent pending MTE (MultiDay Timed Entry) Ticketing capability, and Image Gallery for Websites in addition to Email.
Our employee owned company shares our high level numbers and thoughts on the market and technology advances on a quarterly and yearly basis – 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, and 2023.
RunSignup Quarterly Numbers
It was another solid quarter for our company, with all three of our businesses performing well. RunSignup registrations grew 13%, Donations great 15% and tickets grew 90%.
As reported earlier, we are seeing real growth for the first time in years for participation in races. Our data for races held in the first three months of 2024 see an average of 8% growth, so the entire endurance community is growing.
We continue to pick up market share with an increase in number of races using our platform. These again are from races that happened in the first 3 months of 2024 (and 2023 for that column):
For Q1, here are the number of registrations from each size band. The size bands are for the number of registrations that happened in Q1, so for example, there were 228 races that had between 1001 – 5,000 registrations just in Q1. There are a couple of interesting things about this chart. First, the bulk of the endurance market is actually in smaller races. Second, it shows the diversity of our business across so many races, giving us a very solid and durable foundation. Finally, it demonstrates the power of the highly automated system we have built for processing payments, onboarding new races and enabling any size event to have the full power of our platform in their hands.
We continue to see about 5-6% of races not returning in 2024 that happened in 2023 – mostly the smaller races, although a few large ones who had permitting issues with cities restricting the number of races closing down streets. Our competitor churn remained very low, with only 5 races lost to competitors, and those 5 races each went to a different competitor so it is difficult to pick up any momentum pattern as we noted in our March 2024 Registration Market Analysis.
RunSignup Endurance Business
As seen from the data above, we are benefitting from the growth in endurance and continued growth in our customer base as we approach 50% market share. We see a steady growth in this business as we continue to build more features into our single platform and products and hold our prices well below all major competitors. We continue to couple this with great customer support and an ever expanding set of content and education material for our customers. We also share our data and information to help grow and benefit the overall endurance community with our annual Race Trends Report.
Our key feature improvements in Q1 for RunSignup include:
- New Membership Product which can be used by clubs as foster a connection between races and clubs with Membership Discounts.
- Full Transition to Email V2, and Continuing improvements like Font Size Options and Newsletter Archive
- Image Gallery for Email and Websites V2
- Reserved Entry Update
- Donation E-Cards
- Next generation of Account Claiming and Merging.
- Successful implementation of new USATriathlon API and Pricing changes.
- New Strava Routes Integration
- Continued Improvements with Race Result 12 Scoring Software for timers
- MyLaps Cloud Timing integration with RaceDay Scoring for timers
Our big release for Q2 will be Websites V2. We are refining a number of final items to make sure we have the infrastructure right to support the tens of thousands of websites that we will be supporting as races gradually move over the next couple of years. The final item we are working on is a consolidation of the various places where we have added logo support over time to the original content management system we built for race websites. Hopefully done by mid April and then we will release the Beta, along with the recently released Image Gallery, which provides customers a way to manage and share images between their website and email.
GiveSignup P2P Business
We are seeing nice steady adoption of our P2P Fundraising capabilities. We measure this with donations, which we expect to grow about 20% this year. We have a number of new customers beginning to use the platform who have decided to use a specialized system like GiveSignup to optimize their fundraising revenue for their P2P events and also integrate that with their CRM/DMS system. This is proving to provide the best of both worlds for many non profits. Some of the recent examples are Pedal the Cause, Ben the Shore, and Els for Autism.
We continue to bring out innovative solutions for nonprofits. In Q1, we released a number of features specifically for this market, and nonprofits also benefit from all of the features talked about above in the RunSignup section since it is a common software platform.
- Umbrella Fundraising Teams
- Donation E-Cards
- Mail a Card for Donations
- Custom Question Milestone and Badges
- Fast Team Fundraiser Search
- Charity Partner Fundraiser Report Updates
- Customize Fundraiser Instructions
TicketSignup Business
Our newest business is still relatively small in a very crowded and fragmented market, but we are growing quickly. There are three main drivers of this growth:
- RunSignup customers who are connected with other types of events are finding TicketSignup technology to be better and less expensive than alternatives they currently use.
- Eventbrite, the market leader who is 10X our size, continues to make strategic mistakes, and we are seeing a number of our new customers (and ones from RunSignup customer referrals) being from Eventbrite.
- MultiDay Timed Entry Events. These might be halloween events during October, or Holiday Light events, or summer farm events. Our software is particularly good for these customers and we are finding agritourism in general to be a good market for us.
We released the beta version of our Patent Pending Multi-Day Timed Entry Ticketing (MTE) capability in Q1. MTE is truly a next generation capability for events that have recurring timeslots and/or days. We have early customers in production now, and will be making progress on this as we approach the busy fall season when a large portion of our ticket business happens each year. This same technology, coupled with our membership product will be ideal long term for gardens, museums and zoos.
We see TicketSignup growing over the next 5-7 years to be the size of our RunSignup business, and provide years of additional growth for our company.
Technology Recap
We continue to release more software faster as we continue to improve our development process and our team becomes more and more experienced. We set a record this quarter of over 650 releases. This is a graph of our platform releases (does not include the RaceDay apps side):
We also continue to be focused on quality. We still have only 4 minutes of downtime since 2015. Over the past several years we have built up a suite of Unit and Integration Tests that have made us more productive and catch errors before they get released. We have almost 1,700 tests with nearly 60,000 assertions:
Summary
Our employee owned company is running ahead of our plan this year. We are pleasantly surprised by the growth of endurance event participation, which is a primary reason we are running ahead of our estimates for the year. We are also seeing adoption of our technology by new customers to be slightly better than anticipated as we provide more and more product differentiation from competitors as well as have lower prices.
Our scale and efficiency is allowing us to run an increasingly profitable business as we grow, which helps us retain our employees, who have a combined 392 years of longevity at RunSignup. This stability allows us to keep our pricing stable and helps our customers know that we will be here for the long run, and they can be assured the software we provide will continue to get better every day. Thank you to everyone on our team and all of our wonderful customers who support and motivate us!