Pride and Motivation

Alan Jones and Roger Bradshaw, the founders of RunScore and The Race Director (the two leading scoring platforms that are used by timers at about 60-80% of races in the US), recently did a survey of their timers. They collected 62 responses from RunScore users and 109 from The Race Director users. Here is a direct link to the results – http://www.runscore.com/Downloads/RegistrationSiteSurveyResults.pdf.

Here is a snapshot of the results:

Pride
When we first saw these results, the immediate reaction on our part was a sense of PRIDE! When you work hard to build something that you think should be useful, you never really know until you get independent feedback like this.

Motivation
The other big feeling we get out of this is an even deeper sense of motivation. While we have come very far in a relatively short period of time (we will be 5 years old in January), we have so many more things that we want to accomplish.

The running industry is so ripe for good, solid technology that is easy to use and leverages the advancements in the Cloud and in Mobile. And we want to continue to build out those solutions for races, timers, running clubs and running stores.

Analysis
While there are plenty of technology providers helping to bring advances to personal workouts and health (think the new Apple and Google health API’s and related gadgets, or mobile apps like RunKeeper and MapMyRun), technology that is used for races and timers is falling behind.

The problem of course is that there is a lot of fragmentation in the running market. This survey demonstrated that with over 37 different registration systems being used today by timers. The problem with many of these solutions is they have not reached critical mass where they have a professional software development organization, talent or infrastructure to advance the state of the art.  Or they become distracted from the running industry and they create solutions that need to work across multiple use cases like soccer camps and collecting parking ticket payments. While most users don’t really care, the fact is that the technology is the key driver that enables really useful solutions. And our industry focused on races has been missing that.

RunSignUp is different.  We are focused right on running/endurance as our only market. We have very deep experience in building fast growing and successful Internet Technology companies. We have deep technical expertise that has created a very fast evolving platform that continues to provide more ease of use and more interesting solutions to problems that races face. And we are runners – we care about doing this. We feel that sense of pride and motivation when we can help our community.

So, thank you for your support to our many customers. And if you aren’t a customer, give us a try – we are here to help with a great team that can get you going quickly and making your race and business better by serving your runners well.