TLDR: We had another record year. Our customers can feel confident that they are working with a long term, durable, employee owned business that will continue providing more and more technology to make their events better and better. Thank you to all of our customers who provide us inspiration as well as help us grow by introducing us to more new customers.
RunSignup helped our customers process $562 Million for their events in 2024 (up 20% from $468 Million in 2023). We have continued our growth in all three of our businesses – the core RunSignup endurance business where we are hitting 50% market share in the US, the GiveSignup Peer to Peer business, and the quickly emerging TicketSignup business.
One of the most noteworthy elements of the growth of $100 Million was the fact that about 12% of the growth came from the growth of participation in races – about 8% growth in participants and a total of 12% including additional price increases and other revenue generators like the insurance offering we expanded over the past two years. The return of true growth to the endurance community is floating all boats, providing events with much needed breathing room as everyone has fully recovered from the pandemic.
We always take this time to share a recap of 2023 and our plans for 2025. Since we document things openly, you can take a look back at previous years in review: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, Q1, Q2 and Q3 2024
You can also review our Company Strategy for context on how we run our business at a higher level, our Infrastructure Report for a technology infrastructure overview, and our Market Analysis for an overview of the Race Registration market. We will also publish our Race Trends report in early January for an in depth look at the endurance market.
The Numbers
Our key metric is how much revenue we help our customers generate from their events and related fundraising. We have helped our customers raise $2.9 Billion since our founding in 2010 (our customers will hit the $3 Billion mark sometime in February!).
We are now breaking out our three businesses. As you can see, the RunSignup business is maturing as we are at 50% market share. We will continue to accumulate market share due to our market leading technology as well as low price. RunSignup is a durable business given our deep ties in the endurance community and our plans to continue to invest in new technology by leveraging our common platform (see more below). Registration related transactions accounted for $456 Million of the total driven by 9,742,508 registrations.
GiveSignup is our brand and product for Peer to Peer nonprofit events. We use Donations as a way to track this, although nonprofits account for 43% of the total transaction volume on our platform including registrations and tickets. Donations to our customers totaled over $64 Million in 2024, up 19% from 2023. This was driven by a growing number of P2P events coming to our platform as nonprofits are looking to optimize revenue from their events.
TicketSignup is the fast growth business. It is still easy to grow quickly because the numbers are small. But we are also leveraging the huge amount of technology reuse we get from a single platform, and are finding many ticket vendors (particularly Eventbrite as this Harpoon Brewery example demonstrates) not paying attention to technology and overcharging their customers. Since Eventbrite alone is 8X the size of our total company, it means there is endless opportunity for growth over the next decade and beyond. Hopefully we gradually catch up and maybe catch them in the next decade.
Our ticket customers had over $41 Million of transaction volume on just short of 1 Million tickets.
Long Term Customer Success
One of the metrics we track allows us to see that customers stick with us and grow over the years. In fact every set of customers that joined us in every single year since 2010 have higher transaction $’s in total now than they did in their first year. In other words, if you take all the customers who were on our platform in 2010, that same set of customers is generating more revenue for themselves in 2024 than they were in 2010 – and that includes “churned” customers who are no longer holding events or might have left for a competitor’s platform.
This is a cohort chart. Each row is the set of customers that joined us in each year. The columns are the number of years since that “cohort” (or row) started using RunSignup. So for the 2010 row, the first column with data is 2010, the second column is 2011 and so forth with the final column being 2024. The last row is 2024, which is the first year for that set of customers, so that shows only in their first year and the first column. So the final cell in each row shows transaction data in 2024.
Several interesting things about this chart:
- If you look at the last cell in each row, they are all above 100%. That means customers from each year are now larger than when they joined us.
- The second column is the number of new customers each year (defined by a new TaxID, not just a new race). There is signifcant churn of smaller events that do not continue. We also lose some big customers sometimes. But even with that churn, we are growing.
- The pandemic was strange. First, you see we had more new customers come in 2020 than any other year. The pandemic was a change force. Most events just keep doing what they did last year unless something happens to make them take the jump to a new platform. The pandemic had huge impacts that you can see affected those new customer numbers the next couple of years.
- The number of new customers has gone down each year since the pandemic (but over 4,000 new customers in 2024 is still pretty good!). This is because RunSignup has reached 50% market share in endurance, and most of those new customers are still endurance customers. TicketSignup is still small, but as it grows, the number of new customers will likely turn around even as there are fewer endurance customers left to make the switch.
We will say this later, but thank you to our customers who stick with us. We do our best to give you the best technology for your events, and to keep improving so you can continue to grow your revenue. Together we seem to be doing a pretty good job!
RunSignup Endurance Business
The big news in the endurance community is that races grew about 8% in 2024 from 2023 (which was about even with 2019). So for the first time in a while, races are growing:
Thanksgiving also showed huge numbers with 1,109,909 people registering for Thanksgiving day races on our platform:
We grew the number of Turkey trots on our platform from 833 to 936, and the average participant count grew 8% on a race-to-race basis from 2023.
2024 also marked the release of our Membership V2 product. Hundreds of running clubs, like the New Orleans Track Club, have already upgraded and we are seeing new customers onboard to this product as well.
So as we look to 2025, we are forecasting 8% total transaction volume growth in our RunSignup business with participation rates being up about 2% from 2024 and decent growth of market share as we hit half of the US market. There is room for upward surprises with potential per race participant growth a strong possibility. As we discuss in our Market Analysis, there is a widening gap in functionality between a number of small niche vendors and RunSignup. At the small size of many of those registration vendors, some may shed customers faster or their parent companies may decide to move in other directions for investment, like when Gannett shut down Enmotive in 2024 (we probably picked up about 2% growth from the Enmotive customers who moved to RunSignup). We find it is always better to run our business conservatively and while we hope for more than 8%, our plan will support the company well and along with our other businesses, we will be a profitable, durable business in 2025.
TicketSignup Business
We had a great year with the emerging TicketSignup business. We had very strong growth of 57% in transaction volume of tickets in 2024 – growing from $26M to $41M. We continue to be amazed at how much opportunity there is in the ticket market as we explore and learn about the many sub-markets and their needs. We are encouraged by the depth of difficulty of some of the needs and how existing vendors are not doing the technical work to meet those needs. We think this bodes well for our Product Led approach.
The good early news is that we come to market with a very complete offering that is a lot different than many vendors, especially Eventbrite. We include a free website, free and unlimited email marketing, better ticket features especially for events with multiple dates, and a far lower price and no subscription fee. Many Eventbrite customers are looking for alternatives where there are not ads for other events on their event pages. We are also benefiting from the large RunSignup base who are using TicketSignup for non endurance events and making recommendations to others.
On the product side, we are excited about our patent pending MTE ticket product for Multi-day Timed Entry events. MTE has been in development for two years and had a very successful Beta program this fall, and is now fully released. We have seen halloween, holiday light show and trolley tours as early adopters of this technology. Existing vendors in these markets like FareHarbor and ShowClix have aging products and early customers are appreciating our innovative calendar driven system that allows them to manage their calendar based events in a more natural, intuitive way.
We are also excited about our partnership with FloSports to help Track and Field meets generate revenue from spectator tickets. We were having success with this market already given our deep ties with the endurance community, but we are already seeing acceleration with indoor meets and some early outdoor meet planning.
We expect to see continued high growth in 2025, although it is more difficult to predict – we have budgeted only 35% growth, but if MTE starts to get some word of mouth the growth could be much higher.
GiveSignup Peer to Peer
In 2024, nonprofit events raised over $200 Million on GiveSignup. We onboarded new events that raised $1 – $5 Million in donations on GiveSignup including Pedal the Cause, Ben to the Shore, El Tour de Tucson, Lobo Cancer Challenge, and Chicago River Swim. Thousands of new peer to peer fundraising events supporting 10,000 nonprofits renewed and/or set up new fundraising events. Our 2024 product releases helped all of these nonprofits: every feature we build is free and available for every event to use.
We had a great year of product advancements for the P2P market including:
- Custom Donation E-Cards and Mail a Card so donors can send appropriate messages to those they want to honor or remember
- Fundraiser Incentives for managing swag rewards for meeting donation levels
- Custom Question Milestones and Badges to honor those who might be cancer survivors or any other customer category
- Donation Transfers so fundraisers can help their friends meet their goals
As we look to the next decade for the GiveSignup business, we see steady growth as we become known as the best way to maximize the revenue for nonprofits from their large events.
Single Platform with Next Gen Module Strategy Reaches Critical Mass
While we have 3 lines of business, we have one single platform with 2,700 database tables and over 2 million lines of code. We also began a long term strategy a few years ago to roll out next gen implementations of many of the features we have had for years like websites, email and store. Those investments are now reaching customers and bringing significant improvements for our customers, and also modernizing our code base while also lowering the cost of sharing code across our three product lines.
A great example of this is when we release a new feature for Email V2 – it is automatically available on RunSignup, TicketSignup, GiveSignup, and the new Membership product. What this means is that we can take the revenue we generate from all of those customers and use them to improve our products for all of our markets. The same is now true with Website V2 and other pieces as well – like the upgraded payment system we are working on. This makes us more and more efficient.
What this means for our endurance community is that there will simply be better software and more features available because we can afford to develop more software because of the larger revenue base. Likewise, nonprofit fundraising events and ticket events get more software. And our company is able to operate efficiently, giving our customers comfort we are in this business for the long run.
Supporting Customers
Our company is divided about 40-60, with 40% of people doing development of our product and 60% helping customers. Our team is made up entirely of US employees who have a total of over 4 Centuries of longevity as Employee-Owners at RunSignup. So we take helping customers seriously. For example, most of our marketing team and dollars we spend are for customer education. While we emphasize that event directors have full control over everything and can do things themselves, we understand how important customer support it. Here are some quick stats of how we helped the 30,000+ events who used our platform in 2024:
- Over 25,000 issues handled via our Online Support Team with an average response time of 34 minutes and 24 seconds from issues customers log online or send via email to info@runsignup.com. It also includes the stats that our RaceDay team handles from Timers.
- Over 50,000 calls and email from our Account Manager Team – this is the team that is assigned to larger customers and handle more complex issues.
- Over 80,000 calls and emails from our Sales Team – this is a combination of conversations and voicemails checking in with customers, as well as working with new prospects on finding solutions to their problems.
- New Daily Video Feed, and Video Library integrated within our website.
- Dozens of Webinars.
- 300+ Updated Support Articles.
Summary – Fully Employee Owned
2024 was a great year for the company. We hit all of our goals and we are now profitable and cash flow positive. In September, we bought out the outside investor we had taken on in 2020. This means we are now fully employee owned. Everyone on the team has shares or options that allow them to participate in the company’s success. We are here for the long run, and there will not be some outside force trying to take cash out of the business or force new pricing or cause us to reduce our level of development or support for our customers.
We want to thank our customers for all the support you showed us in 2024. We are excited for 2025 and the next 15 years and beyond!