We have been doing the US race registration market analysis every 6 months for many years. We include a ton of analytical data, and also include our analysis of happenings and directions in the market (of course that analysis is done from our perspective and is sometimes biting to competitors, but tries to be honest). This began because we as a business need to take a hard look at how we are doing against a competitive landscape and figured as long as we were doing the analysis, we would share it.
Here are the old Market Analysis reports:
9/15, 3/16, 9/16, 3/17, 9/17, 3/18, 9/18, 3/19, 9/19, 4/20, 9/20, 9/21, 9/21, 3/22, 9/22, 3/23, 9/23, 3/24.
Races Return to Growth
It is safe to say that there have never been so many participants coming to races as 2024. The average race is up 8% over 2023 (revenue is up 12%), and that was only down 1% from 2019, which was the previous record. Coupled with very low churn numbers and a growing number of new races, things are good for the entire community!
Vendor Market Share – RunSignup to hit 50% US Marketshare in 2025
RunSignup will see growth of about 14% in the number of registrations this year, growing from about 8.5 Million in 2023 to about 9.6-9.7 Million in 2024. Of the 14%, about 8% is due to growth in per race registrations the endurance community is enjoying, which leaves about 6% growth in market share (mathematically about 3% since we have about half of the market). We see continued general rates of new race creation on our platform to be consistent with past years, and are likely to see an additional few points of market share growth in 2025.
This is further backed by seeing the growth in the number of races on our platform each month:
The implosion of Enmotive, covered below, will bring an additional 2-3% growth to our registration base in 2025. Along with other growth factors noted below, we believe our 2025 market share to be at 50%.
This corresponds well with the RunningintheUSA calendar, also shown below.
Churn remains very low overall in the endurance community, and for RunSignup. As these numbers below show – based on the number of races over 500 participants that happen within each month:
Finally, we have been tracking estimated website activity for many years. Unfortunately, the service we used to use went out of business and we switched to SimilarWeb. This can be inaccurate and some vendors use different website domains for some of their traffic. It does seem approximately correct for most vendors (our number looks about right compared with our Google Analytics 4 data. And we have looked at several vendors data in terms of potential acquisitions and those spot checks are about right in terms of traffic as a % of RunSignup.
Of the key competitors, this says we are about 5X Race Roster, about 10X larger than BikeReg and Haku. Closer to 15-20X Race Entry and Let’s Do This. Also about 50X Chronotrack, RaceWire, GetMeRegistered, and Marathon Guide. Those numbers seem about right to us, although Haku seems a little low and are likely more along the lines of 5X. Let’s Do This is also a bit larger because they had Peachtree in July, and they spend heavily on marketing and on having a large list of races that they do not host registration for.
Enmotive Joins Registration Vendor Graveyard
Not surprisingly, Enmotive (owned by Gannett newspapers) joined the large graveyard of failed registration vendors (Appendix at the bottom of this blog). We had reviewed in the March Analysis how they had lost key people and seemed to be dis-investing even more. They looked for potential acquirers and it looks like Haku won that bidding.
Enmotive has several businesses, and each is heading in a different direction:
- Ventures Endurance remains a part of Gannett as the newspaper business seeks businesses to generate revenue. They will focus only on Events, particularly on the Hot Chocolate Series.
- Enmotive Registration will cease processing transactions on December 31, 2024. They have internal customers like Hot Chocolate, who will move to Haku as part of the acquisition. They also serve about the same number of registrations outside of Gannett and the majority of those customers are moving to RunSignup.
- Enmotive / RAM Racing Timing is ending the Gannett owned timing business. They had the capability to time about 20 races per day and was what remained of about a dozen timing business acquisitions during Enmotive’s hay day (history in the Appendix). Most of these timers will continue to operate, some independent and some will join other timing businesses. The big winner in this is Big River Race Management, where Enmotive’s previous Adam Swanson had departed to a year ago.
From a registration market perspective, Haku and RunSignup both picked up market share. The good news for RunSignup is that we did not need to pay Gannett anything for what looks like it could be 150-250,000 registrations per year (growing our market share by 2-3% and likely putting us at the 50% market share level in the US in 2025).
Haku Acquires Gannett Event Registration Business, Rumored to Win New York Road Runners
In our last report, the Atlanta Track Club had left Haku suddenly and moved to Let’s Do This. Much better news for Haku in this report as they bought/won the Gannett Enmotive business, which is considerable given the popularity of the Hot Chocolate Series. Although Gannett has bulled back on other events like shutting down the once popular Rugged Maniac series (which at one time did over 100,000 registrations per year). It will be interesting to see how the Gannett event business does in the future and whether Haku will wind up making money on the deal.
We are also hearing rumors from a couple of sources that New York Road Runners will be migrating from their own proprietary system to Haku. Haku is well known for developing custom features for large customers and this might be a good fit.
From our RunSignup strategy and evaluation of the market perspective (which is the purpose of this analysis that we share publicly), this approach has potential troubles over time as specific customer features make new development more difficult. It also has the traditional software challenge of trying to be part consulting company and part software company, which can lead to lack of investment in infrastructure with technical debt piling up. We have an approach where every feature we develop (many at customer request) is done in a standard way in the platform so every customer has access to that feature. This allows us to have a single codebase and allows all of our customers to benefit from the 2,000+ releases we roll out each year. It also allows us to invest in a single infrastructure with only 6 minutes of downtime since 2015. While we would welcome a customer like NYRR, we are OK playing the long game.
Active Loses Ironman, Maybe Motive?
We had reported a year ago that rumors were that Active was losing Ironman to TicketSocket. We got a call from Active in April (yes, 7 months after we published) asking us to take that out of that post, which we did. Unfortunately for Active, the rumors and our reporting were true.
This is a BIG loss for Active. Given their loss of business to us and others in the US over the past 10 years, Ironman was likely a large % of their overall business. They still have a decent International presence and continue operations as a small part of WorldPay.
Let’sDoThis is also reporting that Motive Sports is using them exclusively, although we see most Motive Races still on Active, and this may be yet another exaggeration from Let’s Do This.
Let’sDoThis
Let’sDoThis is the company with $100 Million invested in them over the past 6 years (a bit different set of motivations than our employee owned company).
They report in this video that they will have 2 Million registrations in the UK and 1 Million in the US. They report in that same video that they are the exclusive registration platform for Atlanta Track Club (as we reported in the spring, ATC moved suddenly from Haku) as well as Ragnar and Motive.
We do not see them much in the market and have a number of reports that their technology is still immature (reporting, data validation, etc.)
They have also had a number of executive departures recently. Constantine Louloudis (CRO) then Jessie Scelzi (CRO), Charlie Grimshaw (Head of technical), and Garath Bartman (CFO). Also, their US sales rep, John Kent, has departed. Never a good sign when you have turnover in sales and finance – especially from a couple of long timers.
On the other hand, they were able to attract Mary Wittenberg, former NYRR Exec Director, who has been on their board for 2 years and has assumed the Acting USA General Manager position in May, 2024.
Again, from a RunSignup perspective, we are happy to play the long game and see how investors will get their $100 Million back. Those financial pressures will come at some point, and there may be changes much like Eventbrite is attempting and failing.
Race Roster – Njuko – Asics
No big news out of Race Roster – Njuko – Asics recently. We have noticed it is a bit quieter, at least in the US. Race Roster customers seem to be noticing the price increase they did last year, and we seem to winning a few more Race Roster customers than previous years and certainly reversing the tide from a couple of years ago when they used pricing and financial leverage to win a number of large race clients from us including the Philadelphia Marathon.
Race Roster US traffic stayed about even from the last measure, however the % of total traffic dropped from 55% to 48%, which indicates their non-US business is becoming more of a focus. Combined with Asics’ other registration vendor, Njuko, International seems to increasingly be the focus for Asics. The Njuko pricing remains much lower than Race Roster pricing.
The Asics focus on International and Njuko might be a reason why we have seen a decreased level of activity by Race Roster from previous years. It may also be why Asics raised prices on Race Roster and not on Njuko, seeing Race Roster as more of a “cash cow” that can fund other investments. We are not saying that Race Roster is anywhere near joining the list below, and Asics is used to having multiple brands (Nimbus and Kayano), so they might have the same strategy with multiple registration products.
Again, from our market analysis perspective, this splits investment between two platforms much like our analysis of Haku splitting resources between consulting and software.
Registration Company Graveyard
Enmotive is not the first registration company to close their doors suddenly, forcing customers into a mad scramble to pick a new vendor and then try to transfer data and keep their operations and marketing running smoothly. There is a long list of companies who were once well known in the endurance registration market that are now out of business and closed. Sometimes quick demises, and sometimes a long decline. There are several patterns that emerge that have led to the decline and shutting down (and sometimes with customer money!):
- Outside Investors – either venture capital, private equity or a corporate buyer who do not really understand the business and upset the delicate balance of customers – employees – owners. Most have good intentions, and quite often begin with a spurt of investment to “buy” races, or attempt a “roll-up” of many firms. But they have all ended with less software development and/or higher prices. They also tend to be naive about how much software needs to be developed and continue to evolve for this market. Especially with an aggressive development pace coming out of RunSignup.
- Thinking the Endurance Registration Market is Larger than it is – Obviously, market size attracts the investors mentioned above. The reality is the total amount of Registration dollars in the US is less than $1 Billion (outside the US is about the same). Of that, registration companies might get 3% of Net Revenue – or $30 Million after credit card fees if they are lucky and capture 100% of the market. And they have to develop software, support customers, make sure the systems are up to date and secure, and process payments. The profit after this is really quite small, especially when you stack that up against a company like Lets Do This that has taken $100 Million of capital. As another example, Eventbrite is a public company and processes about $3.5 Billion per year – they still lose money even at that scale and they are currently valued at less than $300 Million.
- Trying to Do Too Much – Developing good software is hard and it takes the focus of a software company. This has been proven over and over in other software arenas beyond registration. GE and Exxon (even had a word processor) each spent $Billions back in the 1980’s to try to get into technology and software. There are several patterns that companies try and fail at:
- Registration and Timing. The concept attempted (in part) by Enmotive as well as originally Get Me Registered (GMR), Stack Sports who acquired GMR and RaceWire to try to increase the APRU (Average Revenue per User). The problem always runs into the fact that building software and operating a timing business are radically different things. And building a timing business that operates on a broad enough scale is very difficult. And if you do that, also building a real software platform is very, very difficult.
- Registration and Operating Events. Similar problem to timing. Very different businesses. This was the downfall of Enmotive and Competitor Group/RaceIT.
- Not Realizing the Size of Development and Cost to be Competitive. RunSignup will have over 9.5 Million Registrations this year (in addition to over 1 Million Tickets which share the same infrastructure and much of the same code). Enmotive at their peak said they had 1 Million registrations. They simply do not have the volume of business to continue to invest in the software. And software is increasingly important to customers. This was a downfall of all of these graveyard vendors.
- Too Much Custom Code. Many new companies (and some of the current vendors) take a custom approach for certain customers. This causes a lot of overhead over time as there are multiple branches of their software that need to be maintained. This creates a huge amount of technical debt and slows down new development more and more as time goes on. This was one of the downfalls of RaceIT, Enmotive, Race Partner and others.
- Too Small. RunSignup will spend $5.9 Million on software development this year and about $600K on infrastructure in addition to all of our customer service, marketing and sales and operating costs. We are able to spread that across 30,000 events this year, but it enables us to build a LOT of software. That has gradually accumulated over nearly 15 years and is quite a high bar for small vendors to find ways to differentiate or create a better product.
Zombie Companies
We won’t speculate publicly on a list here, but there is certainly a lack of product functionality, infrastructure scalability and stability, and financial viability among the vendors on the web traffic list above. There are certainly some small companies in that list where the founder is still in control and their passion will lead to a continuing business.
Summary
As we analyze the market (which is what we are doing publicly in this blog), we believe there will be more companies joining the graveyard, and we expect that we will offer a safe haven for those customers. Our company has the advantage of being Employee Owned and of reaching a critical mass in Endurance with a full platform offering. This gives us the luxury to make long term investments. In addition, we have a single platform strategy that is allowing us to expand into P2P and Ticket businesses at a very low cost and where we can build common functionality across all of our markets. This will allow us to bring superior functionality to the endurance market like Websites V2, Email V2, Memberships V2 and much more. Our size also allows us to invest in our RaceDay Real-Time capabilities for Timers that brings the next generation of technology to events with our Timing Partners.
This all results in having a very full featured set of products that are priced below our competitors.
In other words, as we analyze the market, we feel good about our position and long term prospects for continued market share gain and happy customers!