One of our Year End Wrap-up Blogs. Others include 2024 Year in Review, 2024 RunSignup Product Recap, 2024 GiveSignup Product Recap, 2024 TicketSignup Product Recap, 2024 Infrastructure Report, 2025 Company Strategy, 2025 RunSignup Roadmap, 2025 GiveSignup Roadmap, 2025 TicketSignup Roadmap. These will come out incrementally between end of November and early 2025.
Over the past 4 years since the pandemic, we have gotten back to our long term strategy of making great products to help events. There are a number of pieces to this strategy that have really come together fully in 2024 to set us up for long term success.
The net effect of our efforts has positioned us in an enviable position with the best product at the lowest price because of the investments we have made and the fact we are an efficient Employee Owned company. We have achieved a 50% market share in the endurance market with RunSignup and have large opportunities to continue to grow and help customers in our next 15 years with TicketSignup and GiveSignup.
2025 will be continued execution of these key pieces to our strategy.
Events
We have a focused business to build technology that can help events grow and operate efficiently. We have three primary markets:
- Endurance with RunSignup.
- Peer to Peer Fundraising with GiveSignup
- Events with TicketSignup, with emphasis on markets where our superior technology can help multi-day and multi time slot events or large events with demanding checkin requirements.
We are also focused on the US market, and our entire team is based in the US.
Product Led
We are a Product Led organization. We care about building a great product that helps our customers.
The theory of Product Led is if a company is able to build a better product, then the cost of marketing, selling and supporting it can be lower. The new wave of empowered customers who are evaluating based on features and fit to solve their problems will select the better product and the win rate will be higher. Satisfied customers will be more likely to recommend the product to others.
This has certainly proven to be the case as we have grown over the past 15 years – we like to say we are a 15 year overnight success. That success is built on happy customers recommending us to new customers, and helping those customers grow and improve their events.
The key to being Product led of course is to have the ability to build software better than others. While we certainly spend more of our budget on development than any other company function, the real key is people. Bob talks about the people, processes and infrastructure that allow us to give over 2,000 new releases of our platform to our customers in this blog on Accelerating Product Delivery and this video:
Single Platform, Multiple Event Vertical Markets
Our first 10 years, we focused entirely on the relatively small market of endurance events. It was perfect for a smaller company since there was not a lot of competition and products were fairly narrow especially in the early years. As our platform has grown in scope, capability and vision (to include things like full website and email capability, promotional capabilities like referral rewards, advanced participant management, leadership in race day technology, etc.), it requires a larger development team that costs more than the endurance market can generate.
We gradually grew into the P2P market with GiveSignup about 5-6 years ago as there was cross over with many of our endurance events that were raising money. Over the past 3-4 years we have brought our TicketSignup product to market. Those two new product lines now account for 20% of our transaction volume, and have a much higher growth trajectory over the next 10 years given we are already at 50% market share in endurance with RunSignup.
The magic is that we get to use a common platform across all of these products. Not only the same infrastructure that scales to thousands of registrations per minute and has only been down a total of 6 minutes since 2015, but also the one that allows us to release over 2,000 new features or improvements between clicks by our customers.
It also allows us to use common features we build into our products. Certainly payment processing, but also key capabilities like Website and Email and Membership. When we add a new feature to websites, say a new component, it becomes immediately available to all of the products – RunSignup, GiveSignup and TicketSignup.
The net effect is the broader revenue generation helps all products improve – and very efficient model.
Key Feature Differentiation
We have literally thousands of features – many coming from real world customer requests over the years. When we started the company race registration was simply that – a registration page being able to process money to signup for an event. As we look forward, events need more capabilities that are tuned for the specific requirements of an event business. We recently wrote a detailed blog on Event Powered Email and Websites as being the new requirement for events. Allison does a quick 8 minute demo on integrated email and website capability in this video:
We obviously have a lot more going on than these projects, but the 5 listed below are key to our strategy of having the most functional product in the market for events:
- Free Event Powered Email (and soon TXT!) – Our Email V2 capability will be used by our customers to send about 800 Million emails this year. Email V2 is generating about 17% of all signups, so we know it is important to our customers. We intend to introduce our TXT Marketing capability in Q1 at a cost of only 1 cent per message sent.
- Free Event Powered Websites – Our customer’s websites they host with us will have well over 1 Billion pageviews this year – again showing us how important websites are for events. All of our TicketSignup customers use the new Website V2 capability and an increasing number of endurance customers are moving to V2. Website V2 will become the standard in the coming months for RunSignup.
- RaceDay RealTime – We have been rolling out our next generation RaceDay Real Time platform this year, and we are seeing adoption and excitement in the timing community for the next generation of race day experience our timing partners can deliver to their race customers. One of the keys to our success is our vibrant timer partner community, and we keep pushing the envelope on the modern technology available to them.
- MTE – We released our Multiday Timed Entry product to TicketSignup in October. This patent pending technology brings an entirely next generation of capabilities to recurring events like Holiday Light Shows, Haunts, Gardens, Zoos and more.
- Membership – We released our next generation Membership product earlier in 2024. We have seen rapid adoption by our hundreds of running clubs who used the first generation Clubs product. We have invested in this product because we see such a huge opportunity to combine the power of Memberships with many of our event customers. Certainly in endurance, many running clubs partner with races to offer discounts to members and get new members when people signup for partner races. We think this can be expanded with the use of the Membership product in endurance for event organizations and running stores. We also see this as a powerful capability with many of the TicketSignup customers we are working with. We hear so often it will be nice to offer memberships to ticket buyers at gardens and zoos.
Employee Owned
RunSignup is Employee Owned. That means that we do not have outside investors and all employees own stock as well as participate in a profit sharing program. We were lucky to not need outside investment. Our team wants to continue building software for events and helping make customers happy for the long run.
Efficiency of Operation
Since the beginning of the company, we have thought about how we can be efficient. Efficient in developing software, efficient in processing payments, efficient in helping customers. Those investments are paying off now as we operate a profitable, cash flow company that is owned by employees. It allows us to deliver consistent, high quality products and services to our customers and to ensure we have enough money to compensate our many long term employees well, while also beginning to pay dividends.
We talked in more detail about our efficiency last year in our Strategy for 2024.
Best Product, Lowest Cost
A company has to be better than alternatives in the market to be successful. The bottom line is we need to build a product that is better and offer it as a less expensive price than alternatives customers could choose. The strategy outlined above has put us in the enviable positions – a better product at a lower cost.
Summary
RunSignup is entering 2025 with strong momentum across our product line. We have built an efficient business where our customers get a great product at a fair price, and we are able to fund our growth and make a profit. This creates a flywheel of continuing momentum and success. It means our employees share in the success, which motivates them to work harder and continue their careers at RunSignup. Customers get continued upgrades of the products they use. And everyone is happy since we do not need to serve an outside investor or big company.
We thank the 30,000 + events who used us in 2024 for providing a foundation that we can grow on together. Thank You!