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We have been doing a number of infrastructure updates over the past few weeks to improve availability, increase performance and assure security. For example, there was a major Amazon AWS outage on September 5 that took out the SQS queuing service for 1 hour and 40 minutes. Most other registration companies were offline, but our […]
EventBrite had a sparkling (pun intended!) IPO debut this week. They sold over $230M of stock and their fully diluted valuation now hovers around $3.4 Billion. Their S1 filing with the SEC provides a treasure trove of information that is very interesting to registration companies like RunSignUp. This will have implications that will impact the […]
We do a US Registration Market Analysis every 6 months: September 2015 March, 2016 September, 2016 March, 2017 September, 2017 March, 2018 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 internal market evaluation processes […]
We did two pretty major releases yesterday – CRM for Donations and Fundraising, and improved performance by about 10%. We also released a bunch of other things as well: Timer 24hr CSV option. USAT waiver on participant management page. Fix question default responses. Bib range search. Add DNQ option. Minor ROAD iD fixes. Store items […]
We have released a number of performance improvements that make the RunSignUp site faster, especially for mobile users. The overall average page has dropped from about 2.5 seconds to 2.2 seconds, with sub-second response on modern computers and mobile phones with fast internet access. Every 6 months we take a look at how we can […]
There was a recent article in the New York Times by Louis Hyman of the Cornell ILR School talking about how much of the economy has shifted to outsourcing and temp work. “The rise of the gig economy represents liberation from the stifled world of corporate America. But for the vast majority of workers, the […]
We do a quarterly update on how things are going with RunSignUp (2016, Q1/17, Q2/17, Q3/17, 2017, and Q1/18). The good news is that more races, timing companies, running stores and runners continue to recommend us. And we keep putting out great technology our customers seem to like! Looks like we are going to sell out the RunSignUp Symposium – July […]
Yesterday the US Supreme Court struck down a 1992 landmark decision (Quill Corporation vs. North Dakota) that had previously barred states from seeking sales tax from businesses unless they have a physical presence in the state. The 1992 decision had allowed online ecommerce businesses to thrive by not having to comply with the myriad and […]
Warren Buffet and Jamie Dimon wrote an Op-Ed this week about too much focus on “Short Termism”, and how it harms businesses and the economy. They argue for doing away with public quarterly reports and emphasize “Clear communication of a company’s strategic goals—along with metrics that can be evaluated over time—will always be critical to […]
Some of our team was out presenting to a prospective customer yesterday. During the demo, the customer requested a feature – forcing participants to scroll thru the entire waiver form before allowing them to confirm. One of our team members sent a message to Bob to see if we could impress them. In 35 minutes, […]
Bob was inspired to start RunSignUp based on being one of the race directors at the Scott Coffee Run. Eight years later, it is useful to see how the race makes use of RunSignUp technology today (this will be a long blog post). Promotion Race Website – We used to have a website managed by […]
We have two development interns who joined us this summer, Heena Surve and Ben Faria. We have had great success with our intern program in the past, with over a half dozen people learning and growing their technical skills at RunSignUp in our advanced development environment. Three of those interns actually wound up working full […]
As part of our coming support for easier and more powerful Multi-Race bundles, we are in the process of refactoring (re-writing) a lot of our core registration code. We will begin releasing some of that this coming week, and June should see full support for Multi-Race bundles. But the purpose of this blog is not […]
One year ago, we made this pledge: Our Commitment: RunSignUp will not only have the most feature rich race management platform, we will also have the leading user experience for participants, race directors, race management companies and timers by the end of 2017, and will continually improve the user experience into the future. Our goal […]
Here is a quick 11 slide summary of why so many races are moving to RunSignUp.
We are always pushing out new software (over 1,500 times last year!). It may seem like we write a lot of blog posts, but we could do a whole bunch more. We wrote earlier about how we do lots of little things, and we just went thru another batch this week. In addition to the […]
We just did a quick calculation, and we have 35 person years of software development put into RunSignUp so far. We have 12 people in development now, so we should add about another 30% to our existing functionality over the next year (although things slow down as you get bigger). The good news is there […]
As part of our ongoing efforts to improve our financial and security processes, we are instituting additional controls on new payment accounts. This involves collecting additional information on owners and requiring information be entered by individuals with significant control over the entity. As we have discussed, we are part of the banking network, and require […]
Jeff Bezos Annual Amazon_Letter is out. We have written about it in 2015, 2016 and 2017 since Amazon is a major role model for RunSignUp, as well as the infrastructure that runs our business. As usual, he covers a bunch of amazing statistics. Like AWS Cloud Computing is now a $20 Billion (with a “B”) […]
One of the very first concepts of RunSignUp was that we were NOT in the advertising business. This led to the corollary decision that we did not own or co-own customer data. We made this decision for several reasons. First, we felt it set up natural conflicts of interest. Why would one race want an […]
We do a quarterly update on how things are going with RunSignUp (2016, Q1/17, Q2/17, Q3/17 and 2017). The good news is that more races, timing companies, running stores and runners continue to recommend us. And we keep putting out great technology our customers seem to like! Remember to sign up for our annual RunSignUp Symposium – […]
As we wrote about last month we have seen more races cancelled in the past year by operators who have had financial difficulties or just decided it was easier to walk away from the responsibility of the race. We also continue to guard against fraudsters who want to use our site illegally. Without proper safeguards […]
We do a US Registration Market Analysis every 6 months: September 2015 March, 2016 September, 2016 March, 2017 September, 2018 We try to make it better 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 internal market evaluation processes, but share […]
As we discussed a couple of weeks ago, more races are being cancelled. This is a major problem for our industry as it gives a negative image and may over time create more questions on the part of participants when they sign up for races. This also may have severe impacts on registration companies as […]
We did a couple of pretty significant releases yesterday – EMail Templates and CRM View. Perhaps more important for our customers is to know just how many changes we have made in the past two days (38 total changes in 24 releases of our software). Here is a list: Donation Fundraiser Template Fix Fix DatabaseException […]
RunSignUp has become the largest endurance registration company in the US with over 15,000 races using us to register over 4.2 Million participants. Our growth continues to build as more races use us, and our technology platform grows to help races across their race lifecycle from Promotion to Registration to Fundraising to Race Day, all […]
This is Bob. I am at the Running USA conference (which has been awesome!). However, I am feeling like some people may view me as being a little obnoxious. The reason is I have been very vocal about the potential problems our industry is facing relative to races failing and the safety and longevity of […]
Yes, we are hiring again! We are looking for a Part Time Customer Support Representative to help us expand our hours of service in the evening. The ideal candidate is a current user of RunSignUp who understands our system, wants to learn more and wants to help customers and participants use RunSignUp. This position can […]
As we grow, we look for ways to serve our customers better and become more efficient. One of the best ways to do this is be proactive – spotting potential problems before they happen. We implemented a new race review process over the past several months based on taking our best practices and implementing them […]
With the decline of registrations in our sport, the overabundance of small registration providers, the closing of RaceIt, and most customers abandoning another vendor because of a scenario we predicted in “The Big Short and Registration Payments“, races should make sure they have a viable registration company. Races have the right and responsibility to vet […]
Building great software is a complex art. It takes a blend of understanding the problem, creating an innovative solution, leveraging advanced technology, and being able to build a complex system based on code. It does not just happen. You can’t just outsource it to some consulting company. It takes the right blend of people to […]
We are hiring two interns for our software development team for the summer of 2018 – one in our Moorestown, NJ office (Philadelphia suburb) and one in Orlando, FL. We have had great success with this program, with over a half dozen interns over the years. Three of those interns actually work at RunSignUp full […]
The closing of RaceIt in November may prove to be the canary in the mine for registration companies in the declining race registration business. There are now rumors of another failing registration company, and there could be more coming. The real harm comes to the races, with a number of fairly large races being owed […]
As a Payment Facilitator, we have a responsibility to the banking industry and the credit card networks to do background checks on any race who is processing money thru our site. This is to try to prevent things like money laundering, or bad businesses who will not fulfill the obligations of what they are selling […]
Moorestown, NJ – RunSignUp has converted our entity type from a Limited Liability Company to an S Corporation effective January 1, 2018. This conversion is due to the continued success of the company, as outlined in our 2017 Year in Review. This change does not have any impact on our operations or contracts with suppliers and customers, although we will update our contracts to […]
When researching the blog on the RunSignUp History, we came across these blogs where we rambled about the meaning of our company, why we work, how we treat customers, and who we learn from, etc. Here are a bunch of them, with links and highlighted content (from old to new – and you will see […]
Sometimes people think we achieved our success easily or quickly. Actually, we are an 8 year overnight success… As we close out our 8th year, we figured it would be interesting to take a look back. Bob co-owned the Moorestown Running Company in the Spring of 2009, and put up a blog looking for a […]
We’re just finishing our 8th year, and we are more excited than ever about bringing technology to the endurance market. (Take a look back at 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, Q1, Q2, and Q3). First and foremost, our customers count on us to deliver a fast, reliable service that pays them on time. We had our second […]
Knock on wood, but it has been another great year for RunSignUp availability, hitting a perfect 100% for the second year in a row! As we covered in February when a major outage for many sites on the Internet like Slack, Trello and Venmo, RunSignUp’s advanced infrastructure was able to weather the storm. And having […]
As we approach the year end and our 8th Birthday, it is useful to take a look at our original Guiding Principles and make sure we are still aligned. There are actually 3 sets of Guiding Principles that are each self reinforcing – hopefully a kind of perpetual motion machine! The first set is basically […]
Yes, we are growing and hiring again! We are looking for a Sales Representative to join our fast growing company. The ideal candidate has experience working in inside sales in a high volume, fast paced environment. We are looking for a person to join our sales team who is fast-learning and self-motivated. This is a […]
We are very thankful for all of the race directors, timers, partners, and runners who used RunSignUp yesterday. We are also thankful that our self-serve technology worked so well (and that we didn’t have too many support calls!). At RunSignUp, we always want to share our data on the trends and drivers of registrations to […]
We discovered a small bug in our software that has affected races using Braintree Marketplace for payment, who also have Charities setup to get paid directly, where the Charity is paying the processing fee. This affected: 19 races out of the 29,000 races held since this bug was introduced 460 Transactions out of the 5,376,000 […]
In a recent New York Times article “The Running Boom Has Popped”, Jen Miller says “Road races have hit the wall. The number of finishers in events in the United States has fallen from a peak of about 19 million in 2013 to just over 17 million in 2016.” In the RunSignUp Trends Report analyzing […]
The 100th Anniversary edition of Forbes contained a section with short quotes or essays from 100 of the best business minds. There are a number of quotes that are thought provoking for races and for RunSignUp. Here are the highlights we took from the list. For Races & RunSignUp “Over the next few years, as […]
We’ve started to provide a a quarterly update this year on how things are going with RunSignUp (Q1, Q2 and 2016). The good news is that more races, timing companies, running stores and runners continue to recommend us. For us, the highlight of Q3 was our annual RunSignUp Symposium where more than 200 race directors and […]
With such great, well established email vendors like Mailchimp and Constant Contact available, why are more and more races turning to the RunSignUp Email system? Free Our email system is free. Constant Contact costs $500 per year for up to 2,500 contacts and MailChimp costs $300+ per year for up to 2,500 contacts. They include some […]
We have expanded our RunSignUp Analytics Platform to show registrations tied to each email. This will show you in detail how each email you send, and each automated email that is sent (price increases and incomplete registrations for example) performs. This type of analysis will be extended over the coming months to also include transaction […]
There was a recent article on Bloomberg News suggesting that the next financial crisis could start in Silicon Valley and “Fintech”. Fintech is a broad term, but touches all races who use online registration with the movement of over $1 Billion per year thru the 100 or so race registration systems. Here are some of […]
We wanted to share an inside view of what really happens at our company. Last night Bob sent an email to everyone: I know a number of you work in Moorestown, and a lot of others will be coming in another week and a half. PLEASE be careful with your shoes. There is a shoe […]
