RunSignup Growth Plans

Time flies! We are in the middle of our 10th year. A lot has happened since our inception – growing from 0 races with 0 registrations with $0 of transactions to over 20,000 races with 6 Million registrations and $250 Million expected in our 10th year is amazing.  It is a tribute to our employees and our customers for building and supporting this growth.

We were built on the simple concept (but hard to execute) that we could bring good technology to help the endurance community. Like many startups, it grew out of Bob’s frustration with the tools available to help a race he helped direct, the Scott Coffee Run. The initial focus was simply to help runners and race directors.

As customers continued to adopt RunSignup, we continued to pour our energies into meeting their expanding needs by growing our team. As we grew our team, we wanted to create a better experience and have more customers. We thought about the efficient design and growth of the company from the very start – things like a single code base, any feature would be available to all races, lots of free services with no ads or data ownership, excellent support with lots of online self-help and videos.

All of this led to the virtuous cycle of growth of customers, growth of employees and growth of our technology offering.

The Next 10 Years

As we look towards the next 10 years, we think about what our customers need (especially since we’ve solved so many of Bob’s problems with the Scott Coffee Run!). When we did our yearly planning cycle at the end of last year, one thing jumped out at us:

Nonprofits

We always knew most races were either organized by nonprofits or benefited nonprofits in some way. There are over 8,000 nonprofit entities that have processed their race fees or donations with us. In a recent survey, over 95% of races have some sort of nonprofit connection.

We’ve become a favorite for nonprofits for 5 key reasons:

We are also getting consistent requests from Nonprofits:

• “Can we do registration for our galas and non-endurance fundraising events on RunSignup?”
• “Can we use RunSignup to accept donations year-round?”
• “Can we have our own Dashboard to access, analyze, and promote all of our fundraising?”
• “Can we get a 4% processing fee for all of our donations?”
• “Is there a less expensive and easier to use alternative to Salesforce?”
• “Can we get simple reports in real time to measure our impact?”

After hearing this, we’ve taken a look at solutions currently available in the market and there are significant shortcomings:

• Expensive subscription software
• Closed platforms
• Multiple platforms
• Difficult to use

These were the same issues many races faced when we started out. To address these customer needs, we have been busy doing a bunch of development that will be introduced in an Early Adopter Program shortly after Memorial Day.

Our ambition as an employee owned company is to continue to grow our solutions from our core base of RunSignup race customers to other areas of pain those customers have as they try to raise more money, become more efficient and grow closer to their supporters. This will continue that virtuous cycle of growing customers, growing employees and growing technology solutions.

The next 10 years will be exciting!