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 the end of November and early 2025.
We have another exciting year of software development planned in 2025. We return our full team of developers, who have been or will soon be augmented by a couple of 2024 coop/interns who have accepted offers to join our team full time in 2025. Our team continues to get more and more productive and regularly pushes out over 2,000 releases per year. We are also in full production release of a number of the major upgrades we have been working on the past several years including EMail V2, Websites V2, Memberships V2 and RaceDay RealTime. This foundation of a great team, excellent processes for delivering quality code with only 6 minutes of downtime since 2015, and a modern code base will allow us to continue our trend of being the technology leaders for endurance events.
RaceDay RealTime Product Suite
We will start this year with our RaceDay RealTime Product Suite.
There are two keys to this set of products:
- Best Products. We invest more than any other organization into RaceDay Technology and have become the obvious choice for races that want to put on a great event.
- Best Timers. Our over 600 Certified Timer Partners make this technology real for hundreds and hundreds of races each weekend.
This is a unique blend of the best technology and the best people to make the technology work for real world events. We enable capabilities like leaving registration open even after the starting gun goes off, mapping a course so spectators can watch participants in real time, delivering auto-tagged photos integrated with results, checking in over 700,000 people just on Thanksgiving Day (and over 5 Million during 2024) – all with accuracy in any weather and any type of event – running, triathlon, paddling, cycling, skiing, and more. Here is a view of some of what we will be doing in 2025 for our RaceDay Products:
RaceDay Scoring RealTime V5 – We will be rolling out V5 of RaceDay Scoring in Q1. This release will continue the migration of the internal architecture of the product to the super-fast and modern RUST programming language. This means RaceDay Scoring will be lighting fast and able to handle the largest events. RaceDay Scoring will also be focused on a number of other features:
- Advanced algorithms for chip based estimated times.
- RealTime Race and Award Progress Reports easily accessible to the Race Director
- Local RealTIme API Integrations for third party display technology
- Series Scoring V2
- Custom Aggregate Team Scoring
RaceJoy RealTime V5 – We will be rolling out RaceJoy V5 in the first half of 2025. We have already put new RealTime Chip based tracking screens in, but the whole app will get modernized and redesigned to be more direct and simpler for users. We will also be doing updates to the map view to combine GPS and chip based tracking.
Mobile Timing App V5 – The big feature for this next release is fully integrated Photos. So turn the Mobile Timing App into a photo camera that will transparently upload photos to our free Photo platform where they get auto-bib tagged. We will be rolling on the new Mobile Timing App in Q1, and have plans for auto-timed camera shots as well as video streaming and integration with Results.
TXT/SMS Marketing
We have long (V2 released in 2014!) had free TXT/SMS messaging for result notifications and the ability to send emergency txt messages to all participants about situations like a race delay because of weather. In fact we send hundreds of thousands of free txt messages each month.
We will be introducing TXT Marketing for our customers in Q1 for a cost of $0.01 for each message sent. So customers will be able to send 1,000 txt messages for only $10 – lower priced than Mailchimp and Constant Contact messaging services. We are building this in a scalable and secure manner that will comply with the strict regulations in this environment so you can be assured of a quality platform.
TXT messaging will be melded into our Email capability over time so eventually your customers will be able to set preferences, and you will be able to use the Super List capability to generate lists to send to. We will also be providing a number of ways to collect cell phone numbers during registration as well as website pop-ups like we do with email today.
Super Lists
We will be making a major upgrade in our list creation capability beyond the many lists we offer today. Super Lists will have a number of features:
- Create a dynamic Super List based on any set of “filters”. For example, you could create a Super List of your most engaged supporters – those who participated in at least 5 events (race and ticket) and volunteered at least 2 times and is a Member. We will eventually expose over 100 filters from race performance to total donations to distance from a location. And the lists are “Dynamic”, which means they are automatically updated so when an email sends, it will assemble the list of contacts in the Super List – picking up recent registrations or donations automatically.
- Automated Contact Merging. We actually developed this powerful capability a couple of years ago and have yet to expose it. We have built a way to match say Bob Bickel and Bobby Bickel based on other common information like address or email. We use a dozen different matching algorithms, and we do in a very clever anonymous manner across our entire database, but only expose the information for the contact information related to each race. For example Bob might have signed up for a dozen different races on RunSignup and we will use that information to relate all of those instances into a single contact, but share only the contact information that each race organization has on Bob. Matching is a feature of higher end CRM systems like Salesforce have and we will be including it for free.
- Tightly Integrated with Email. This will make it easy to create multiple Super Lists to include in email campaigns. The full power of the email system like Automated emails and Drip Campaigns are available to Super Lists in a very easy to use manner. This also means you can use the “Exclude” feature for a Super List if you do not want to bother your top donors with a mass email.
- Super List Export. The Super Lists can be run at any time and the data can be exported, allowing for open use of your RunSignup database of contacts.
This is a very ambitious and complex project. As usual, this will be rolled out incrementally, first with just a few filters and export options that will grow over time. Our goal is to provide the type of functionality found in expensive and overly complex CRM and Email systems for free in a way that any of our customers can easily take advantage of their data in RunSignup to grow their organization and events. Rich gives a little preview and talks about what we are doing in this video:
Depending on how the year goes, we also want to add more analytics tools to our Email system.
Race Websites V2
While we recently released Race Websites V2 out of Beta and have hundreds of customers in production, we have a lot more planned! On our list for 2025:
- Template Selection. When creating a race there will be multiple templates to give your event website a fast start with a professional look.
- New Wizard and Theme Options. When creating a new event, there will be a new wizard that updates theme options like banner images, colors and logos. (Once this project is complete all new race registration events will use the new Website V2).
- Event Lists. We will be adding a variety of Event List options and updating them with a new look and feel. For example a full page display that shows all upcoming and past events. We will also have a calendar based display (that will work well on mobile!) as well as a rolling tile display.
- Multi-Language. We will begin to provide multi-language support in the Website Builder so customers can have websites that will autodetect the browser’s preferred language. For example, this means races will be able to display both English and Spanish versions depending on the user’s browser settings.
- More Components. We will continue to build the set of data driven as well as content based display components so we give our customers a rich set of features to expose their events.
Custom Display & Print V2
We have a variety of convenient tools for races that allow for custom display and printing. For example bib labels can be customized and printed in a variety of ways. Finisher Certificates is another richer display option with images and custom content for each finisher that can be modified. Membership cards is another example, as are some of the fundraising awards. We want to develop a V2 for all of these display types that relies on a modern, common foundation that will make it easier to have custom options.
Memberships
We released our Membership V2 product in 2024 to great success. We have a number of features we want to continue to develop in that product including Donations in registration path, refund capability, dashboard analytics improvements, updated reporting with ability to save and share reports, and membership card customization. There are a few unique capabilities we also plan on adding:
- Ticket Integration. This will be great for a number of types of customers. For the many running clubs who use our Membership product, you will be able to easily set up MTE Ticket Events (Multiday Timed Entry) for things like Wednesday morning workouts. Club members will be able to scan their Membership card (in their Apple or Google Wallet) in the CheckIn App and you will be able to keep track of how many people came to workouts, and who came.
- Loyalty Tracking. We have a long term project that will enable any type of organization to track engagement – number of events attended across races and tickets, donations and fundraising, and eventually volunteer hours. Again, there are a number of applications of this. For the running club example above, you could give awards based on the number of workouts attended as an example.
Volunteer V2
Just like we upgraded our old Club product to Membership V2, we will begin that task in 2025 for our popular Volunteer feature. This will likely get released in 2026 as a product that will be able to be used with Races, P2P events and ticket events, just like the Membership product does. Our existing Volunteer capability is widely used by thousands of events. We have had a number of great suggestions for features that customers have made that will be driving V2 development. It will take advantage of all of the other features we have created to be used generically across our products like Website V2, Email V2, the newer capabilities in Tickets like Questions, Store, Donations and Reporting. We are looking forward to providing a first class volunteer solution to our event customers.
V2 for Many Race Features
We will also begin implementing some of the other V2 features that we have rolled out first in Tickets like Questions, Store/Add-On with shared warehouse across events, Coupons with pools that allow flexible sharing across multiple events and more. Some of these will begin to appear in 2025 and we will have full implementations of them in 2026. We will take a similar approach as we have with Email V2, Website V2 and Membership V2 with rolling availability and ensuring we match all features in the existing product and then gradually migrating customers to the new version.
Financial
We are in the process of upgrading to Adyen V2, which will enable us to create a couple of new features for customers including ACH payments. We will also be investigating Installment Payments (also sometimes referred to as Buy Now Pay Later – BNPL). For events, this is typically more installment because full payments still get made before the event occurs (and the race as the merchant delivers the service to the purchaser). This will be most useful to our customers who offer travel based packages that might cost $5,000, and we would schedule automated credit card payments or ACH withdrawals on a monthly basis. We would have reports and notifications of delinquent payments. This might also be popular for smaller, but still substantial payments for a triathlon or marathon which might cost $100-250.
Infrastructure
As usual, we will be continually investing in improving and maintaining our infrastructure to ensure we provide the fastest, most scalable, most secure environment to host our customers events and process their payments. We have had only 6 minutes of downtime since 2015. That is over 18,000 releases of our software (that also include monthly upgrades of all our software to install the latest security patches) happening between user clicks with just 6 minutes of downtime.
In December, 2024, we did a major database upgrade to MySQL 8 / AWS Aurora 3. We were very happy with our ability to do this upgrade without impacting our customers.
In 2025 we will continue with a number of upgrades that will improve our development efficiency, security and system performance while keeping us efficient.
Summary
We always get excited at the end of the year to look back at what we have accomplished, and look forward to how we can keep making our event customers successful. As we’ve discussed in the past, we keep developing faster and delivering more and more impactful features for our customers. And we expect 2025 will be even better.
Thank you again to all of our customers. As an employee owned company, we know we can not exist if we do not meet the needs of our customers. We appreciate your support and trust.