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We do a US Registration Market Analysis every 6 months: September 2015 March, 2016 September, 2016 March, 2017 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 it since […]
We are happy to welcome Darren Wamboldt to the RunSignUp Team! Darren joins Jeff Kiesel and Meredith Klein as part of our User Experience Manifesto. Darren has led the RaceIT User Experience effort for the past 5 years. Coupling his deep passion for UI design, his coding abilities and his industry knowledge will help make our offerings even better for […]
We are happy to welcome Meredith Klein to the RunSignUp Team! Meredith joins Jeff Kiesel as part of our User Experience Manifesto. Meredith has been working as a consultant for the past month and a half with us – designing the individual results page we recently released. Right now she is working on a new […]
This blog is the other half of the blog on When Software Dies. There are obviously many, many reasons why software dies. This blog hopefully helps a few creators avoid mistakes and a few users from making a poor choice that puts them in a costly position to migrate earlier than they planned. 1. No […]
This past week RaceIT told customers that they would be closing down their servers later this year. I’ve (Bob) had a personal experience with this in the past, and thought I would write this blog to give the creator and user perspective. I also will write a blog on Why Software Dies. As the picture […]
We would like to welcome Jeff Kohart (about a month late) to RunSignUp. He was an intern with us last summer and has since graduated with a Computer Science degree from Gettysburg. He is happy to be returning to work in Moorestown, NJ (the central office for RunSignUp) where he grew up. While at Gettysburg […]
We’ve started to provide an update on how things are going with RunSignUp (Q1 and 2016). The good news is that more races, timing companies, running stores and runners continue to recommend us. One of our key stats we follow is the number of races that process more than 3 transactions with us. Our numbers […]
One of the first decisions we made at RunSignUp was to have a non-exclusive contract. This meant we were not locking customers into using just RunSignUp, and gave them the right to use any platform(s) they wanted to help their race. We did this for two reasons: We do not want the burden of an […]
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 is to create easy to use technology […]
Racepass recently launched. They received some initial press (although Competitor.com took down their article) and that has elicited some concerns from some of the race directors who use RunSignUp. This blog will hopefully clear up any confusion and let you know your options. UPDATE (5/13/2017): We have requested Racepass to take off any races that they have […]
We always look forward to Jeff Bezos annual letter for Amazon. 2016 Letter to Shareholders. As usual, he always attaches this first year letter where he talks about this being Day 1. This year he makes the point that it is still Day 1: “obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of Day […]
Jeff Kiesel started a couple of weeks ago to lead efforts improving the User Interface and User Experience for both participants and race directors. Jeff worked with us part time a few years ago, and we are lucky he responded to our call for a new UI/UX Developer. Bob has worked with Jeff at two […]
We did the first Market Analysis last September, and a second one in March and the third one ins September, 2016. We will continue to do this every 6 months and 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 […]
We wanted to provide an update on how things are going with RunSignUp prior to our biannual Endurance Registration Report in early April. The good news is that more races, timing companies, running stores and runners continue to recommend us. One of our key stats we follow is the number of races that process more […]
Along with the recently released BikeSignUp, TriSignUp and SkiSignUp, we now offer PaddleSignUp.com and AdventureSignUp.com branding for paddle sport and adventure customers who want their signup to be specific to their type of event. Like with BikeSignUp, all races are listed on each iteration of the site (BikeSignUp, RunSignUp, TriSignUp, AdventureSignUp, PaddleSignUp and SkiSignUp), and race […]
Update – This position has been filled. We are looking for a full time UI developer in the Philadelphia area to join our team and help create our next generation platform for the endurance industry. The ideal candidate will be someone who loves UI Design AND loves to Code and produce software that is used by […]
Instead of losing 10 pounds and gaining it back by April, how about making a New Year’s Resolution to improve your race using some ideas you may not have tried before in RunSignUp: More Participants Referral Rewards. Give your participants a reason to get their friends to come to your race – CA$H! On average, […]
Another great year! Lots of happy customers. Lots of great technology released. Lots more registrations. Zero Downtime. As we complete our 7th trip around the sun, here are the yearly totals for paid registrations: The basics of our business are to collect registration fees from participants and pass that along to races. For the first […]
I attended a talk by Thomas Friedman last night. He showed a slide that relates very much to what we do here at RunSignUp: His point was more global – that technology is changing faster than human’s ability to keep up with the change. For example at one point in the US, 98% of the population […]
We are very thankful for all the people who made use of RunSignUp yesterday. We were also thankful our self-serve technology worked so well (and we didn’t have too many support calls!). Here are the numbers for 2016 Thanksgiving Day (find the 2015 results here): SignUp 249 Races used us for Registration 103 Races took […]
At our core, we are a technology company. Yes, we are completely focused on endurance, but so are many races. Yes, we care about our customers, but so does every race. But races simply do not have the focus or expertise to be technology experts – and that is where we come in. RunSignUp makes […]
We had a DDOS attack on RunSignUp today. It lasted from about 4:00PM until 4:45PM when we were successful in cutting it off. It averaged over 1,000 requests per second. The attack was looking for vulnerabilities like SQL injection. This slowed down the average response time on our website about a half second from about 2.7 […]
We did the first Market Analysis last September, and a second one in March. We will continue to do this every 6 months and 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, […]
We have done a number of blogs about our culture, such as Built for the Long Run and Technology Really Does Matter and the Three Leg Stool of Customers-Employees and Owners being equal partners in RunSignUp. In this blog, I (Bob) wanted to review the actual legal structure of the company. Back in 2002 I created […]
We held our annual Race Director and Timer Symposium last week. As usual, we shared an overview of RunSignUp and talked about our roadmap ahead. The core message is that RunSignUp is providing an open platform that provides technology to help races thruout the yearly cycle of Promotion -> Registration & Management -> Race Day. We […]
We “Live Streamed” our Symposium last week. It was our first attempt at this, so we had some technical glitches and some content that could be better and some content that is not there. On the other hand, we captured a lot of great stuff: Bob Bickel: RunSignUp Overview and Roadmap https://youtu.be/9TF9L0Rq0jw?t=4m24s Barbara Herzog: Cultivating […]
This year, the RunSignUp Community is introducing an annual program to give back to charities who promote running or utilize running as a way to improve their communities. We collected nearly 100 nominations and ended up with eleven finalists. The RunSignUp Customer Advisory Board voted yesterday on five unique charities to distribute the pool of $10,000. The results […]
We are very happy to announce that Matt Morrisson will be joining our development team. He comes to us from Amazon where he spent the last 5 years working on various projects including the console that anyone who uses AWS logs into to get around to the various services. Before that he was part of startup […]
I (Bob) was on vacation last week. I got time to read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. While it focused on people, I kept thinking of it in terms of the attributes of success as they related to RunSignUp. A key quote I liked was: “My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how […]
Our summer Development Intern, Jeff Kohart, has been with us for the past 2 and a half weeks. Jeff is a rising Computer Science Senior at Gettysburg College.He also ran for the Moorestown High School Cross Country team when Bob coached the team. He has ramped up very quickly to be able to contribute to […]
The more we develop, the more interesting projects we find! We are looking for another 10X developer to join our team and help create our next generation platform for the endurance industry. The ideal candidate will be someone who loves to code and produce software that is used by millions of people who are running […]
The current ratio is a liquidity ratio that measures a company’s ability to pay off its short-term liabilities with its current assets. In simple terms how much money the registration company has in the bank vs. what they owe races. It is calculated by dividing current assets (cash and accounts or race payments receivable) on […]
I always love when Amazon’s Jeff Bezos puts out his annual shareholder letter. 2015 Letter to Amazon Shareholders Amazon has been an incredible growth story, and while their treatment of employees has come under fire, they have some very interesting things to learn from. In this year’s letter, Bezos writes about the core similarity between […]
We did the first Market Analysis last September, and hope to continue to do this every 6 months and continue to make it better (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 it since there does not […]
Interesting blog suggesting that the TV show Friends was the downfall of Western Civilization. His point is that Ross was the smart guy on the show and always got made fun of for being smart – much like the kids he coached in his high school chess club. The “dumbing down” of America… This rung […]
We are looking for another person for our team who is fast-learning and self-motivated with experience in customer service and credit review to join RunSignUp’s finance team. This position will be located in our Moorestown NJ office. In addition to some customer service responsibilities this individual will have the primary responsibility to review and evaluate […]
We are looking to hire a summer intern software developer to help RunSignUp continue to provide great web services and mobile apps and cutting edge technology to the running community. This is a great opportunity to understand what a real development environment is like, do some good development, work with some very bright people, as well […]
Yes, we are growing again! The ideal candidate is a timer who wants to come in from the cold to help customers use our The Race Director, RaceJoy and RunSignUp offerings – working on weekends and have a couple of days off during the week. We are looking for another person on our team who is a […]
Most people do not understand technology, which is fine. The problem is that many people translate that into not valuing technology or the complexity behind the many simple uses of the web and mobile apps they see every day. This winds up being a risk for race directors when it comes to evaluating registration systems. […]
It upsets me when I see companies in our industry making stupid moves. We should be collaborating to work together with open platforms and solving customer needs – not doing stupid, unproductive stuff… I was reading an article on the Dow-duPont merger this past weekend in the Philadelphia Inquirer and came across this quote that […]
I (Bob) have taken a bunch of vacation time and had minor surgery that required time off, so I’ve had time to do a lot of reading (Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton (great play!) and Ben Bernanke’s Courage to Act and a bunch of web stuff). I tend toward tech, business and economics reading and the collection of […]
RunSignUp is a company that provides a set of web services for the endurance market. We have two differentiators – the fact that we know how to build really a good and open technology platform that makes our customer’s lives better, and the foundations our company is built on. This blog usually talks about the first, […]
As a RunSignUp customer, you are investing in innovation. If you have followed this blog for any amount of time, you will see how we keep creating stuff at a rapid pace. This is one of the key ways (along with customer service) we use the processing fees that are paid when people register for […]
With the rapid growth of RunSignUp and by adding the talents of The Race Director and RaceJoy to our offering, many people want to understand our strategy. We covered this in our presentation at RunningUSA (and our video of that presentation here). It is worth expanding on now that RaceJoy is formally a part of […]
We will be giving a short presentation at the RunningUSA conference on Feb. 8, 2015. It is a company overview of our strategy, how customers have adopted RunSignUp and then a quick review of our 2014 accomplishments and what we have planned for the future. As an open company, we wanted to share that with […]
We would like to welcome Natalie Young as our newest member of the RunSignUp Team! Natalie will be a Technical Customer Advocate – helping our customers set up their races and getting input for future improvements to the RunSignUp system. We are excited Natalie will be joining us for three reasons: First, Natalie will be […]
Earlier this week we had the whole team together to review our strategy and work on where we are headed. We are growing very fast (about 4-5 bigger this year than last), and it is important to make sure we all stay on a cohesive path. We thought we would share the overview slides with […]
