The RaceDay Real-Time product suite has become the most powerful set of tools available for timers. RunSignup has invested a huge amount of development talent and money to build out this technology because of the importance of timers to the endurance market. Timers are also a very important part of the RunSignup business model. Our business strategy for RaceDay Real-Time is simple – if we provide great tools for timers, then they will recommend our RunSignup platform to races they work with because it will make their race customers more successful.
The RunSignup business model is based on generating revenue for our company via taking a small % of each transaction when people signup for events. We will subsidize the development and support of RaceDay Scoring with about $2 Million dollars in 2025, yet we only charge $199 for the product suite to about 500 timers each year (~$100,000 of revenue). The business term for this is “loss leader”. We feel the investment is wise because our timer partners help to generate revenue for us and help support races better.
US Only Business Model
RunSignup has chosen to focus only on the US market. There are a few reasons for this:
- The fact that we are a Tier 1 Payment Facilitator allows us to be very close to the credit card payment rails and enables us to do things more more efficiently as well as have great features like Referral Rewards that our customers rely upon. This capability is only available to us in the US.
- There are many additional development and system management costs associated with going International. For example, some countries require locating the data within their country, which means we would have to duplicate (triplicate, etc.) our infrastructure which is not inexpensive to operate, but also had a lot of costs in terms of being able to update our platform over 2,000 times per year. It also adds overhead to development since each feature we create will need to evaluate the potential international implications.
- The International market for events is approximately equal to the US. If we focus just on endurance, this means that we could potentially double in size over some very long period of time by going International. In addition, when we look at mature companies like Eventbrite who have put in years of effort and investment, only 27% of their net revenue (and less Gross Profit) is from International customers. However, we see an opportunity to grow 10X by moving into ticketing in the US over the next 10-20 years.
RaceDay Suite International Use
Based on the above business model and strategy, RunSignup can not afford to support International use of our RaceDay Suite. The product is available for download and timers can use parts of the suite. We can not stop timers from using it, but we can simply not support training, questions and issues that arise.
For international timers who are currently subscribed to the RaceDay Suite, we will continue on the current level of support until the end of 2025. After that date those timers will need to either move to another product or continue with self support.