The quick summary:
- Endurance events are up an average of 7% from 2023. Good news for everyone in the endurance community.
- Transaction volume is up 22% vs. our plan of about 13%, always a nice thing to be ahead of plan (mostly due to the surprising 7% 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 Travis Manion Foundation, El Tour de Tuscon, Pedal the Cause, Ben the Shore, and Els for Autism.
- Our TicketSignup event business grew considerably in Q2 (77%) and is beginning to achieve critical mass. We expect TicketSignup to make up 8% of our total transaction volume in 2024 overall, with the fall being a big season for our customers.
- Our technology platform continues advancing with over 570 releases in Q2.
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, 2023 and Q1 2024.
RunSignup Quarterly Numbers
It was another solid quarter for our company, with all three of our businesses performing well. RunSignup registrations grew 16%, Donations grew 14% and Tickets grew 77%.
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 six months of 2024 see an average of 7% growth of participants and 12% in growth of registration transaction revenue. This means the entire endurance community is growing in real terms of participation. Looking at the Transactions columns, we are also seeing average race prices up about 4-5%.
We continue to pick up market share with an increase in the number of races using our platform. These again are from races that happened in Q2 of 2024 (and 2023 for that column):
The churn is also quite low – both races that do not happen again as well as races that move to another platform.
For Q2, here are the number of registrations within the quarter from each size band. The size bands are for the number of registrations that happened in Q2, so for example, there were 203 races that had between 1001 – 5,000 registrations just in Q2. There are a couple of interesting things about this chart. First, the bulk of the endurance market is actually in smaller races (note we have the most Top 100 races at 19). 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.
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 (for example see this great interview with Allison Carrigan) 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:
- Release of Website V2 for Races
- Fee Transparency for NY, CA and MD, and will add more states as their bills are enacted.
- Real Time Capabilities for Race Results
It is important to understand what we are trying to do with our Real Time capabilities – allow timers to offer a set of race day features to mirror the largest races. This means real time course map displays with our RaceJoy app, instant results provided via App, TXT, EMail and Web Results, data feeds for course displays, and a mix of Chip based split results and GPS results intermixed. This means a 500 person 10K could have the same features the the NYC Marathon has by engaging with a RunSignup Certified Timer.
Here is a deep dive we did internally during Q2 sharing new features:
GiveSignup P2P Business
We continue to make great progress in our software for nonprofits, particularly focused on P2P events. A number of major customers went live in Q2 for the first time on our platform like Travis Manion Foundation, Pedal the Cause, Ben the Shore, and Els for Autism. You can see more examples in our May P2P Roundup and June P2P Roundup. Our product continues to improve with many new features. Here are some highlights:
TicketSignup Business
Our TicketSignup business continues to expand rapidly, as seen above in the stats. We are making rapid progress on establishing ourselves as the technology leader in the market. Eventbrite’s moves to increase pricing and offshore much of their development and support is encouraging customers to look for alternatives like TicketSignup.
We are seeing continued growth based on RunSignup customers either using TicketSignup for other events, or from recommendations to other event directors. The intersection of a RunSignup recommendation and events using Eventbrite is leading to most of our growing TicketSignup business. Long term, we think our product led approach with producing the best product and providing ti at a low cost will continue to enable to company to grow for many years to come given the size of the ticket market.
Long term, we are also excited by the progress we are making on our MTE capability (MultiDay Timed Entry). This will have a number of general uses that will enable us to have significant feature advantages for events in multiple markets like multi-day events in agritourism and seasonal attractions like light shows, admissions to museums, zoos and gardens, as well as bookings types of applications like ferry rides, boat rental, etc. The new capability will bring a new era of complete calendar based management for multiday events, coupled with an excellent user experience for signing up, as well as transferring days and times.
Here is an example Day View for MTE Events:
Here is an example of the new calendar oriented reporting:
Single Platform
The big strategic advantage our company has is our single platform for all of our products. This allows us to have faster and faster development that has a larger and larger customer base across endurance, P2P and tickets to support continued progress – a bit of a perpetual machine. When we make an improvement to any of the infrastructure or core services, all products benefit. And some of the market specific products like Memberships will help endurance, nonprofits and tickets over time.
Our development team continues to get better and faster as well. As this chart shows, we put out more releases each year:
RunSignup University
We hosted 115 customers at the first RunSignup University in Philadelphia in June. It was great to be with our customers and learn from each other. We are shifting to a more and more education based focus, and will likely expand the Roadshows to become more hands on training in the next year. We are producing so much useful and powerful technology at such a rapid pace, our customers appreciate having the opportunity to invest in their events via education of the tools available to them.
Summary
Our company continues to hit on all cylinders. Each of our core businesses are all ahead of plan for the year. We continue to produce better and better software for events. Our customers continue to support us directly and by recommending us to their colleagues. We can not thank you all enough. And you can be sure we continue to work every day to earn your trust.