Why AWS is RunSignUp’s Business Model too

If you are a frequent reader of the RunSignUp Blog, you know that we run our technology stack on Amazon AWS. Not only are they the largest Cloud service provider, they have the broadest array of services for the lowest price. It has served us well – we do about 2,000 releases a year, we are able to scale to meet any need (like yesterday’s 130 hits per second), and we are just finishing our second complete year with ZERO downtime (knock on wood).

AWS is also a model for how we are running our business. Andy Jassey’s Keynote was a rapid fire tour of their growth ($18B revenue with millions of customers), how the Cloud is changing the world, and a plethora of new and improved Amazon services. He also talked about one of the basic concepts they had from the very start – that even a small startup should have access to the same services as the largest corporation. He said something similar in this 2015 interview with Fortune:

“We knew that the largest consumers of infrastructure would be large enterprises because they spend more absolute dollars. But we also had a mental image of a college kid in his dorm room having the same access, the same scalability and same infrastructure costs as the largest businesses in the world.”

Like Amazon, we are rapidly rolling out new and improved services that make for an increasingly complete race management platform – Promotion, Registration, Fundraising, RaceDay and at the core our CRM database. With most of our services being free (email, race websites, RaceInsights, CRM, etc.) or extremely inexpensive (RaceJoy and fast, reliable TXT messaging). Like Amazon customers, we are hearing our customers ask us how we are doing so much for so little money (we seem to be emerging as the low cost provider in the endurance space).

While Amazon began with startups and smaller companies (of course many of those like Airbnb, Pinterest, Slack, and Stripe have grown up), Amazon is seeing practically every large organization in the world moving to Amazon. Companies that 5 years ago said they needed to build it themselves like GE, Goldman Sachs, Capital One, and Federal Express are now moving to Amazon AWS. Similarly, RunSignUp began with smaller races and now 15,000 races are using RunSignUp. But it is not just the small ones anymore, but huge races like Pittsburgh Marathon, Monument Avenue, and the Silicon Valley Turkey Trot. In fact, 11 of the Running USA Top 100 race list now use RunSignUp:

In Amazon’s space, IBM and HP used to be the dominant vendor for enterprises providing specialized solutions at very high costs. And smaller computing customers could not compete with what the big guys could do because they could not afford it. Now these same large enterprises are realizing they can not afford to try to keep up with the massive investments that Amazon is making.

RunSignUp aspires to do what Amazon has done – become the default platform for any size race with the broadest array of technology solutions at the lowest price. Our recent RaceInsights release is an example of that. Even the largest races with professional outsourced marketing agencies doing their Google Analytics and Facebook ads can not do what RaceInsights does – for any size race.

As Andy says, “we are so excited to bring you this technology, so let’s giddy up!”