The Scott Coffee Run was this past weekend. As followers of us know, this was the race that inspired the creation of RunSignup in 2010. Bob is a race director for the race and saw the need for better technology at races. We wanted to share our observations from a “post pandemic” race. Fun It […]
We have been following Eventbrite since they are a similar company serving events and having a similar business model of charging for their services only with processing fees since they went public. We are also beginning to overlap with them more as nonprofits discover the GiveSignup Ticket Platform that is purpose built for nonprofits. We […]
Over the next couple of weeks we will be rolling out new payment processing. We have done a major refresh of the code and moving to new payment processors, Adyen and Payroc. The purpose of this is to prepare properly for our next phase of growth as we try to help our customers raise more […]
SignMeUp is the latest race registration vendor to close down, joining a growing list we have covered before in our Registration Market Analysis. As is typical, these closings happen quickly, without thoughtful migration strategies put in place. For example, their website is still up and telling people to create their race registration with them. This […]
We usually do a Race Registration Market Analysis twice a year – March and September. 2020 was an unusual year, but we did a special one in April, 2020 and September, 2020 to try to capture what was happening in the endurance market. We will share our data and then share observations from the market in general and specific […]
Monday, March 8 is a big day. It is our one year anniversary of understanding the impact COVID would have. And we simultaneously achieved a milestone that says we are coming back. Monday, March 9, 2020 A year ago, we pivoted our business realizing the impact COVID could have. We had started tracking it a […]
We began monthly updates in July after doing weekly updates that ended in Week 18, and are shifting to monthly (August and October, November) and Quarterly (Q3) updates. The monthly update is meant to give stats that are useful to the endurance and nonprofit communities we serve. Quick December Numbers: Transaction volume was down 47% to $9.9MM Overall Registrations down […]
TLDR; January – February – Customers are happy, our business is up 29% and life is good! March – OMG-OMG-OMG! We have paid over $75 Million to races that have not happened! Will we survive? Employees take a 50% cut in pay. Everyone stays and works twice as hard. April – PPP! Virtual Races! Employees […]
We usually do our Year in Review in a single blog post. This year has been much too big to put it all in one place, so we are breaking it up a bit. We already published our 2020 Development Recap. This one will cover our product roadmap for 2021. First, we will continue our investment in […]
We usually do our Year in Review in a single blog post. This year has been much too big to put it all in one place, so we are breaking it up a bit into this one, with a recap of this year, and then a blog about our 2021 roadmap. The development team had […]
In the dark of COVID, Rich Sbarro has snuck onto the RunSignup | GiveSignup development team this year. Bob has worked with Rich for nearly 20 years while Rich has been the CTO at Metaverse (see FramedArt.com for an example of his work). He has built a complete ERP type system at Metaverse, where it […]
This is Bob. We will be releasing several year end blogs over the coming weeks. A couple of them will be an overview of the features we released and another for our 2021 product roadmap. But I thought yesterday was worth mentioning. Each morning, I get an email that sends me to a page to […]
We began monthly updates in July after doing weekly updates that ended in Week 18, and are shifting to monthly (August and October) and Quarterly (Q3) updates. The monthly update is meant to give stats that are useful to the endurance and nonprofit communities we serve. Quick November Numbers: Transaction volume was down 38% to $17.3M Overall Registrations […]
Like much of the web, RunSignup and GiveSignup host our infrastructure on Amazon AWS. Unfortunately, they had a pretty major outage on Wednesday before Thanksgiving in one of their data centers. It took down major websites like 1Password, Acorns, Adobe Spark, Anchor, Autodesk, Capital Gazette, Coinbase, DataCamp, Getaround, Glassdoor, Flickr, iRobot, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Pocket, RadioLab, Roku, RSS Podcasting, Tampa Bay Times, Vonage, The Washington Post, and WNYC. Apparently this was caused by their rush […]
We have been following Eventbrite since they are a similar company serving events and having a similar business model of charging for their services only with processing fees since they went public. We are also likely to begin to compete with them more as nonprofits discover the GiveSignup Ticket Platform that is purpose built for […]
We are looking for a senior leader to help us continue our expansion in the endurance market, and to help us reach more nonprofits with the technology we have to help them grow their fundraising events and programs. We recently took a Series A round of funding. The new VP of Marketing will help us […]
This is our second full quarterly report during COVID-19. As we have discussed over the past several months, this has impacted our entire community, and certainly RunSignup/GiveSignup negatively. The good news is that we are all adapting and learning new ways of doing things. There is some return of in person events, but with new methods […]
We began monthly updates in July after doing weekly updates that ended in Week 18, and are shifting to monthly updates. The monthly update is meant to give stats that are useful to the endurance and nonprofit communities we serve, but also to bridge the gap between our Quarterly Business Updates, and our Monthly Newsletter. We also published […]
We have always eagerly studied Eventbrite since they are a company with a business model very similar to ours – earning money based solely on processing fees for events (and for us nonprofit donations). During their Q1 report, we learned how COVID-19 was impacting their business. And we have been awaiting these numbers as we […]
We had been doing weekly updates on the numbers we are seeing since the pandemic began. We ended that in Week 18, and are shifting to monthly updates. The monthly update is meant to give stats that are useful to the endurance and nonprofit communities we serve, but also to bridge the gap between our […]
Wanda Sports Group announced the sale of Ironman to Advance, a New York based investment company known for owning media and entertainment companies like Condé Nast and Stage Entertainment. One of the interesting things about the sale was occurring during the middle of the pandemic. The original sale price of $730 Million was announced in […]
We kept getting the same question of whether RunSignup and GiveSignup can work together – so we decided to make it very visual with our new combo logo you may have noticed on both websites. Just like those old ven diagrams you learned in school, RunSignup and GiveSignup share the same foundation with a single […]
We got a number of questions about our Q2 report regarding our estimate that 2021 was going to be much like this year. Our expectation is that normal running of races will not happen again until 2022. There will be some real races this year and in 2021. And the number and size will probably […]
This is our first full quarterly report during COVID-19. As we have discussed over the past several months, this has impacted our entire community, and certainly RunSignup/GiveSignup negatively. You can review past results here: 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, Q1-19, Q2-19, Q3-19, 2019, and Q1-20. Summary Numbers As expected, the numbers are all down […]
Wow! Eventbrite said yesterday that transaction volume in March was down 90% and was still down 85% in early May, 2020. Before we get into the analysis, here are the links: Q1 Earnings Press Release Q1 Letter to Shareholders Earnings Call Transcript The news they shared was simply extraordinary, and made us feel good about […]
We usually do a Race Registration Market Analysis twice a year. We usually include a bunch of stats from different sources to compare the various registration platforms and track general industry trends. Usually, we publish the spring one in March. This year is obviously different because the Coronavirus really started impacting normal life in the […]
A bit late for this past quarter, but we have been busy adjusting to the Coronavirus crisis as we have been helping the endurance community find solutions to postponement, cancellation, going virtual, and finding ways to make money and save money. But we want to make sure we continue to record what is happening as […]
We wanted to take time to document what has been happening inside RunSignup since the Coronavirus started. We have seen lots of different speculation from all sides – that we are small and therefore will be crushed by far larger competitors to speculation that we have all this money and are stealing from races by […]
Every event organizer is trying to figure out how to generate revenue right now. Here is an overview of ways to can use RunSignup to potentially make some money. We also have a sister blog for ways to Save Money with RunSignup. Here is a quick list: New Virtual Race Replace/Extend Your Race with Virtual […]
It has been a full month since we shifted into Full Coronavirus Mode on March 9. At our core, we are a technology company. We have been in hyperdrive mode this past month on a bunch of different fronts and wanted to take a moment to give an overview and some depth of insight on […]
As we talked about a couple of months ago, Tough Mudder did go to bankruptcy court and ended up with a settlement deal. Spartan will acquire Tough Mudder for $700,000 plus assume debts of $10 Million including honoring prepaid tickets. According to Obstacle Racing Media, Spartan is brining back a number of Tough Mudder employees, […]
We have attempted to put together the Largest 100 races that were timed from 2019. We have been accumulating this list for a couple of years (here is 2018). While we try, we may have missed some races, or we might not have the numbers exactly right since this is a manual process. So if […]
Enmotive announced today that they have acquired imATHLETE. This follows on the heels of Gatehouse acquiring Enmotive last year. Gatehouse Live also acquired Rugged Maniac in 2018. Gatehouse was a small division of New Media Investment Group, which owned 150+ newspapers nationwide. New Media acquired Gannett in 2019, which also owned over 150 newspapers including […]
We heard a disturbing story about a race who is going to be moving their registration platform, and their former vendor has locked them out of the system. So they are now fighting with that vendor trying to get access to their data. Ouch! While most races want to find a system and then never […]
Bloomberg reported that Tough Mudder creditors are trying to put the company in bankruptcy. “Signs of distress have been hovering, with CEO Kyle McLaughlin departing the company. The company’s website says ticket sales have been suspended. Creditors are attempting to push the organizer into bankruptcy over $855,000 they say the company owes them.” Bloomberg OCR […]
We have been issued a new Attestation of Compliance for PCI. This is our yearly report issued by an independent auditor that does an annual (and quarterly) multi-dimensional audit of our system and processes to ensure we meet the highest levels of compliance with the credit card industry standards. RunSignup spends considerable effort, and we […]
Justus Fee is joining the RunSignup team as a coop student software developer in the Moorestown, NJ office. He’s a senior at Rowan University pursuing a Bachelor’s in Computer Science and is the first of many Rowan students working with RunSignup as part of the Cooperative Education Program. His programming passion is to create tools […]
A recent article in the NYTimes, Short-Term Thinking Is Poisoning American Business, talks about the short term focus: Public Companies: “being evaluated by investors on their ability to produce immediate financial value, almost always in the form of value-extracting activities such as cost-cutting, price increases, share buybacks or other forms of financial engineering.” Private Companies: […]
A Decade. Yep, RunSignup has officially been around for a decade now. In the beginning, we did not really know what to expect. But it is safe to say we greatly exceeded the expectations of customers appreciating what we built. Our very purpose for existing is to provide technology to our endurance and nonprofit customers […]
Tim Berners Lee, the inventor of the Internet, announced the Contract for the Web today. RunSignup has endorsed the contract and pledges to live up to the ideals of a better web. Much of the founding principles of RunSignup came from Open Source principles that are essentially the same as what Tim outlines. We felt […]
Our industry consolidation continues. Asics has acquired Race Roster. This is good news for Race Roster’s investors. As we have been vocal about the limited valuations of race registration providers, they likely were paid a good profit. This is also good news for Race Roster employees as Asics does have a commitment to this market […]
We do a quarterly update on how things are going with RunSignup (2016, Q1/17, Q2/17, Q3/17, 2017, Q1/18, Q2/18, Q3/18, 2018, Q1/19 and Q2/19). The good news is that more races, timing companies, and nonprofits continue to recommend us. And we keep putting out great technology our customers seem to like! Q3 is always busy for us with our annual RunSignup Summer Symposium where 293 people […]
Being the open company we are, we do not express political points of view, and we respect a diverse set of beliefs among our employees, partners and customers. We also say “No” to events and donation websites on RunSignup and GiveSignup that are for the benefit of a political organization. This means that 527 Groups, […]
We do a US Registration Market Analysis every 6 months: September 2015 March, 2016 September, 2016 March, 2017 September, 2017 March, 2018 September, 2018 March, 2019 We try to improve on it with your feedback (so feel free to send suggestions or corrections to bob.bickel at runsignup.com). We do this as part of our own […]
We will try to provide information as directly as possible, but remember that RunSignup does not provide tax, legal or accounting advice. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for, tax, legal or accounting advice. RunSignup makes no representations, warranties, or […]
We held a Sales Tax Webinar on August 21, 2019 to review the status of our Sales Tax implementation work, expected to complete by early October. We had hundreds of people attending and this is a list of the questions asked (trying to remove similar questions). We will try to answer your questions as directly […]
Do you… Have a passion for the race endurance and nonprofit industry? Love working with the latest and greatest technology? Want to bring technology solutions to thousands of races and clients in the endurance and nonprofit market? Want to work with a dynamic and cutting-edge tech company that’s using the art of technology to make […]
Jen Miller’s NYTimes weekly newsletter contained some more “bad news” about the state of races: “Triathlons appear to be facing the same kind of participation slump that hit running in the mid-2010s: U.S.A. Triathlon’s membership dropped about a quarter over a five-year period. And that’s not all — on July 26, Wanda Sports Group, which owns, among […]
This is Bob. I’m getting a bunch of “Congratulations on your 10th Work Anniversary” on LinkedIn today. At our Symposium, Allison and I talked about this being our 10th year in business and what we have planned for the next 10 years (more of the same in Endurance and, of course GiveSignup for nonprofits). But […]
We do a quarterly update on how things are going with RunSignup (2016, Q1/17, Q2/17, Q3/17, 2017, Q1/18, Q2/18, Q3/18, 2018, and Q1/19). The good news is that more races, timing companies, and nonprofits continue to recommend us. And we keep putting out great technology our customers seem to like! Our annual RunSignup Symposium is less than a week away. We are happy […]
