The Quick Summary:
- Endurance events are up 8% year over year – so all boats are floating for the endurance community.
- Transaction volume is up 22% vs. our plan of about 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 that was accelerated by a couple of % points with Enmotive closing down. We now expect to hit 50% market share in 2025 in the US.
- Our GiveSignup P2P Event business is seeing considerable growth this year with Q3 donations up 25%. Our customers had over $11 Million in donations in September – a record month.
- Our TicketSignup event business grew considerably in Q3 (50%) 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 600 releases in Q3.
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, Q1 and Q2 2024.
RunSignup Q3 Numbers
It was another solid quarter for our company, with all three of our businesses performing well. RunSignup registrations grew 14%, Donations grew 25% and Tickets grew 50%. Overall transaction volume was up 22% for our customers.
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 nine months of 2024 see an average of 8% 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%.
While we continue to grow market share in endurance, we are also seeing a gradual diversification in our transaction volume from customers, which acts as a way to fund additional development.
Registrations – 73%
Donations – 15%
Tickets – 8%
Other – Membership, Add-ons, Extra Fees, etc. – 4%
Our endurance business continues to pick up market share. We outlined a number of reasons why in our Market Analysis. So we are getting a double benefit of the races that were on our platform growing by 8%, plus continued market growth. Q3 did not include any of the upside we will get from the hundreds of races moving to our platform with likely 150,000-250,000 registrations from Enmotive. We are also starting to see migration from Race Roster because of their high prices and continued lagging technology. We also are seeing a large number of first year events come to RunSignup.
The endurance community has returned to a normal amount of churn (which is included in the above numbers). We track races over 500 from 2023 that did not happen in 2024. These are mostly in the 500-1,000 range and are back to less than 5% the last quarter. Our churn to competitors is minimal at 1.5%.
Technology
Of course the thing that really drives all of those numbers above is our technology. We continue to push hard on releasing new features across our platform and get more productive as seen in this chart of the number of releases we do by month. In Q3 we did 598 releases on the platform and over a dozen on our RaceDay and Ticket apps.
Our automated testing continues to get better as well – approaching 2,000 tests of over 65,000 assertions. Developers can run these on their laptops and our Github integration does automated testing during the code review and release cycle:
Our infrastructure continue to do well. We had a big day on September 30 with over 52,000 registrations, 6,000 donations and about $3 Million of transaction volume, while our servers hummed right along at only 10% utilization.
The bad news in the quarter is that we had our second outage since 2015. This time it was a 2 minute outage that happened during our monthly server upgrades. It was kind of a Catch-22 situation that got us. We had a 4 minute outage in 2020, so at least we were quicker to recover this time. While 6 minutes of downtime in 9 years is pretty impressive, we try to learn from each mistake we make and publicly document the problems and what we learned. We know having your technology vendor be reliable is important and we take it as our top priority along with on time payments (we are still 100% on that for many, many years).
Feature Usage
The most used feature of RunSignup is our Email system. September saw 61 Million emails sent.
Another interesting stat is we sent 440,159 free txt messages for our customers – these are mostly results txt messages, but there were a few emergency txt messages. We are working on TXT Marketing, which will be priced at a penny per txt and hopefully get released in Q1. So that number should explode in future years.
One more stat – participants save over 1.3 Million credit cards on our platform, allowing them to checkout super fast. Combined with our ApplePay and the fact that there are over 50 Million accounts on RunSignup with saved information like address, shirt size and emergency contact, we are simply the easiest platform for people to signup for events. This is one of the network effects we are benefiting from to drive our growth.
Key Advancements
RaceDay Real-Time Went to Beta
We have a number of customers using the beta of RaceDay Real-Time. This is where RaceDay Scoring acts as middleware to distribute real-time updates. For example, if a race timer has multiple mats on a course, people can get real-time alerts via RaceJoy or TXT. This opens up the possibility for any size race to give a similar experience to participants and spectators as the largest races like the NYC Marathon. It puts the most powerful and cost effective set of tools in the hands of our Certified Timing Partners.
Patent Pending MultiDay Timed Entry Beta
Along with RaceDay Scoring, this is probably the most advanced and innovative single project we have ever undertaken. It is so innovative we have applied for our first patent. And the potential impact on future transaction volume is immense for our company since it will appeal to any event or venue that might recur and have timed admission – such as Haunts, Trolley Rides, Gardens, Zoos, Museums, Escape rooms, etc.
We are currently in Beta and will go to open production on October 16. It has an entirely new calendar based approach that solves problems with legacy ticket systems like Eventbrite, Fare Harbor, ShowClix and TicketSpice. Here is just an example (from one of our beta customer’s events) of using calendars for everything from setup to reporting to ticket buyer experience:
Allison reviews the wizard:
And a preview (now available) of one of the several front end calendar views ticket buyer see from one of our developer, Duy Nguyen:
Peer-to-Peer Enhancements
Our customers had a record $11 Million of donations in September. This is due to a number of new peer-to-peer events moving to our GiveSignup fundraising platform and continued growth in events like Tunnel to Towers who had 30,000 participants for their event. The reason we continue to grow in this space is because of our focus on providing improvements, like these recent releases – Display Event on Fundraising Pages, Highlight Team Captains on Fundraising Pages, Fundraising Donation Transfers, Charity Partner Leaderboards and Display Offline Donation Instructions.
Membership Enhancements
We continue to push ahead with our Membership product and hundreds of clubs using the platform released this year (another network effect of cross-sell between races and running clubs). We have released dozens of improvements in Q3 alone with lots more planned like this cool new Member Self Serve Management page.
Website V2
We continue to roll out a TON of new features for Website V2 as we march towards making this the default option for races. For example we have added a number of new components like Event Tiles and Top Teams. More and more races are starting to use the Website V2 Beta like the Scott Coffee Run. We have released a new template for Ticket events and will be bringing that to races soon. This makes the website that gets created look modern and beautiful – a very nice upgrade from our current default website created when creating a new race.
Lots more
With over 600 releases of our software, we could go on and on. You can check out our RunSignup, TicketSignup or GiveSignup Blog or our RunSignup or TicketSignup Newsletter Archives for more information.
Summary
Our company is in a very good position. We have great technology that is only getting better each day. Our customers continue to support us by referring new customers and expanding their events that use our technology.
We are somewhat unique as an Employee Owned company that is here for the long run.
Thank you for your support!