This will be our last public Registration Market Analysis Report. We started these over 10 years ago to help us understand the market, and we decided our customers deserved to know how we were doing. Here are the old Market Analysis reports:
9/15, 3/16, 9/16, 3/17, 9/17, 3/18, 9/18, 3/19, 9/19, 4/20, 9/20, 9/21, 9/21, 3/22, 9/22, 3/23, 9/23, 3/24, 9/24, 3/25, 9/25.
This is less relevant now for two primary reasons. First, our customers can track how we are doing in our Quarterly and Yearly Updates. Those contain churn numbers and estimates of market share, which are now approaching 60% in the US and continuing to steadily grow. We are simply the stable choice for endurance events.
Second, the lessons that we have learned have reinforced our core value that the best product and a fair price are the keys to success. Along with patience since customers move slowly from one vendor to another. And good technology always takes longer to develop than you expect.
Observations from the past 10 Years
We have seen countless registration vendors go out of business over the past 10 years. Most recently it was Stack / GetMeRegistered / RaceWire and Chronotrack Registration. Customers are always “shocked”, and always scramble and often find us a their safe new home. We have observed the following strategies NOT working because they distract from the focus on building good software and staying efficient with low prices:
- Vertical Integration to increase ARPU – bundling registration with shirts, timing, race management, staffing, equipment, etc.
- Races Owning Registration software.
- Marketplace where all participants will find your event.
- Lots of funding.
- Not enough funding.
- Lack of software development talent.
- Inefficient operations.
- Higher cost of payment processing due to small size.
Predictions for the Next 10 Years
We think the major competitor to RunSignup over the next 10 years is AI DIY. AI is getting better at coding FAST. Claude Opus 4.6 in early February and ChatGPT 5.4 last Wednesday were game changers. And the curve will be exponential. Some customers will choose to build their own. These will be races where someone is capable of using these new tools, and putting in enough time and effort because they WANT to and LOVE building stuff. We think this will become 10-20% of the market in the next 5-10 years.
What we do not think will happen is that a significant competitor will rise from these efforts. It will be very fractured with hundreds or thousands of AI DIY sites. Building a real business is difficult and requires a lot of things coming together – time, money, talent, critical mass, etc.
Our strategy is to run as fast as we can with AI. We feel that our development team will understand how to use AI to both build ourselves and put into the hands of our customers better than our competitors or upstart AI DIY. So we will continue to have significant feature and cost advantages for endurance events.