The Quick Summary:
- Customers hit $3 Billion of total transactions processed on the RunSignup platform.
- Endurance continues last year’s upward trajectory with event participation up 3% year over year – so all boats are floating for the endurance community.
- Transaction volume is up 13% vs. our plan of about 9%, always a nice thing to be ahead of plan (mostly due to the 3% growth in participation rates). This allows us to keep our prices low and to compensate our employee-owners well.
- Our RunSignup endurance events business is continuing to enjoy market share growth that was accelerated by a couple of % points with Enmotive closing down. Registrations were up 12% from Q1 last year and the number of races that processed transactions is now over 15,000, up 13%. We have reached 50%+ market share in the US based on our Market Analysis.
- Our GiveSignup P2P Event business is seeing consistent growth this year with Q1 donations up 14%.
- Our TicketSignup event business grew considerably in Q3 (>50%) and is beginning to achieve critical mass. We expect TicketSignup to make up 9% of our total transaction volume in 2024 overall, with the fall being a big season for our customers.
- Our technology platform continues advancing with over 500 releases in Q3.
Our employee owned company shares our high level numbers and thoughts on the market and technology advances on a quarterly and yearly basis – 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024.
RunSignup Q1 Numbers
It was another solid quarter for our company, with all three of our businesses performing well. RunSignup registrations grew 12%, Donations grew 14%, and Tickets grew 56%. Overall transaction volume was up 13% for our customers.
Last year the endurance community saw race participation increase by 8% as compared with both 2023 and 2019 – a record year. The early signs of 2025 are also encouraging with 3% participation growth from our sample of over 1,000 races that were held in Q1 of both 2024 and 2025 on our platform that were over 500 participants.
While we continue to grow market share in endurance, we are also seeing a gradual diversification in our transaction volume from customers, which acts as a way to fund additional development. In 2025 we expect:
Registrations – 79%
Donations – 12%
Tickets – 9%
Our endurance business continues to pick up market share. We outlined a number of reasons why in our Market Analysis. So we are getting a double benefit of the races that were on our platform growing by 3%, plus continued market share growth. Q1 saw the beginning of pickup from Enmotive races that have transitioned to RunSignup after they closed down.
We are also benefiting from races that are migrating from Race Roster because of their high prices and continued lagging technology. We estimate that customers representing over 150,000 registrations in 2025 have decided to transition from Race Roster since November as they lay off employees. (And they are giving us rave reviews – “Why didn’t we do this sooner?”)
We also are seeing a large number of first year events come to RunSignup as we have become the obvious choice for the endurance community due to our technology lead, our high level of customer service and our low price.
These are the totals for Q1 of the number of races that happened in Q1 of 2024 and 2025 and the growth rate:
The endurance community has returned to a normal amount of churn (which is included in the above numbers). We track races over 500 participants that did not happen the previous year. These are mostly in the 500-1,000 range and are only 3.8% in the past 12 months (less than the 5% of pre-pandemic). Our churn to competitors is minimal at 1.2%.
To conclude the numbers analysis section, we are doing very well. For Q1 we are 4% ahead of our company plan for growth, which allows us to continue to invest in our team and products that keep our customers happy.
We usually talk about some of the major technology advances after the numbers. This quarter we will dedicate most of the time to talking about AI.
AI
We have declared this the Year of AI at RunSignup. Of course we’ve been using AI tools for a couple of years. ChatGPT to help write content, Midjourney to help come up with clever banner images for some customers like the one Jordan did below. We’ve been using CoPilot, a development tool that has helped developer productivity some, but probably less than a few %.
The rapid pace of improvement of AI based Large Language Models has reached a critical mass in the past 4-6 months, and we are adopting AI on a systematic basis now. Let’s review a few of the key initiatives. We also have a central webpage about everything AI at RunSignup.
Support AI Chatbot
We have added an AI driven Chatbot to our support page (Ron Synup in the lower right corner). We have had great early success with this. The exciting part is that as time goes on, the chatbot is getting better and better as we train it and the underlying models get better and faster. We are also seeing certain customers being more comfortable with this type of support interaction viewing it as a bit of a personal tutor. When we had tested this a year ago, it simply was not ready for customer use – it would have been embarrassing. Now it is actually very good. Give it a try.
General Questions Chatbot
We’ve added a couple of chatbots to our AI page. Right now Agent Echo is probably the best one. It is trained on over 4,700 RunSignup content sources – all of our blogs, website pages, support help documentation, and even our 1,600 YouTube videos. Customers can ask questions from explaining pricing to asking for the best options for setting up the checkin app. It also includes links to the original source. Here is a quick example:
We feel that RunSignup has a strategic advantage with all of the detailed product based and “how to” content we have produced. It is simply too large for any customer to keep up with. But AI loves the massive amount of content and can digest it (even the videos) and help customers answer specific questions and give guidance on all types of common issues events have.
Note we will be experimenting with multiple models and products – let us know how you like them. For example, we also have Agent Beacon as well, but it does not provide direct links to source information like the little help pop up does for Agent Echo shown above.
AI Chatbots Used by Customers for Participant Self Serve
We had a couple of customers be early adopters of chatbots to automate support of participants. This blog explains how a couple of them are using the Queu.ai product. We also have some customers experimenting with some of the same tools – in particular CustomGPT.ai. One of the secrets to success is to leverage our content – so add videos and help articles on topics that relate to your event in your model implementation.
Internal Development AI Tools
One of the domains that is getting better fastest is doing software development with AI. This is due to AI doing best in fields where there is a good verification feedback loop to train the AI models. Software is a bit of an art, so it is not as precise as math, but it is more verifiable than politics – and AI is getting very good at coding.
Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce recently announced that Salesforce will not hire any new developers this year because they are getting a 30% productivity improvement from AI tools with their existing team. This is a good article on how the code tools inside Salesforce are being used.
We are a bit more conservative, but are still estimating an amazing 20% productivity boost.
The new model is to have the AI write the first version of the code by giving it “prompts”. The AI writes the code, then additional prompts are used to get the AI to make corrections or improvements or add features. The developer has to know the system and be good enough to check the AI.
We are using a tool that we have trained with our code, our documentation and coding standards, as well as things like our Design System.
As an example our design system is something we have built up over the years and refined. It allows all the developers to use common UX components like a list, button, etc. This has helped improve consistency, and has saved a lot of time when developing new features and pages. Here is a screenshot of some of the components. Each one has code and a number of options behind it:
The new AI tools we are using have been trained on our design system. So one of our UX developers, Jeff Kiesel, working on a new dashboard page can take a screenshot from their graphical design system, Figma, and just load it into our AI tool. The AI tool then generates all the code using the existing design system components. It does not get it all correct, so there is still need for human knowledge and fine tuning. But it reduced a full day project to a half day project.
Another nice example was a new feature in our Membership system that Matt Brady estimated would take a week. Using our AI tool, he was able to put the feature into pull request for code review in a single day. Here is an example of his prompt to start this project off – obviously the developer has to be both smart and understand the system they are working with. The various gray boxes are specific files that Matt gave the AI tool to use to model the new feature after.
Of course, there are many examples where the AI tool does not write good code at all. But even in those situations, the AI tool winds up being an idea instigator and AI based pair programmer.
We are super excited to see more and better software emerging for our customers from these improvements AI is brining to us.
AI Tools for Customers to Extend RunSignup
RunSignup has always had an open API, allowing customers to use data in custom ways through Zapier or custom integrations. AI introduces a new set of tools that can generate code through a conversation with a model, some of them with a deployment environment. The options for this are endless, allowing customers to build applications, reports, dashboards, and integrations without detailed coding knowledge. A few examples, all built in short timelines with the v0.dev tool can be seen below.
Application Library Plans
We have plans to make a number of applications public for use. Even more exciting is the tool we are using, v0.dev, allows others to “fork” those projects and create their own custom designs. We have the Results Kiosk app available now for forking. We think timers will love this one in particular.
We are making a number of improvements to our API that will allow for simpler consumption by the AI tools like v0.dev. Once that is complete later this spring, we will publish new versions of the applications above as well as others.
Long Term Product Investments
We wanted to highlight a couple of the long term development investments we have been making over a period of YEARS that have really come to maturation in Q1. Our ability to make these long term investments is due to the support our customers give us, and our patient, employee owned culture. Hard things take time, and we like to do hard things to make our customer’s lives easy.
RaceDay Scoring V5 RealTime
We have spent the past 7 years continually improving RaceDay Scoring. With the latest release, it is ready not only for the largest races, but also ready to provide realtime features like live app tracking and notifications to every timer and every race. RaceDay Scoring is the clear leader for timers who want flexibility in their timing hardware and want to provide their customers with the widest choice of advanced options. Matt and James did a review for the company last week and we posted their session on YouTube:
Calendar Based Ticketing
Our patent pending MTE technology is bringing a totally new way of managing multi-day and multi-time slot ticket events like holiday light shows, zoos, haunts, corn mazes and more. Allison did a demo of how everything just hangs together so well to the company last week and we posted it to YouTube:
Summary
Our employee owned company continues to perform well for our customers. We have become the trusted source for event technology where customers know the product will keep getting better, we will support them well and our prices are reasonable.
We thank all of our customers for your support! (And keep those referrals coming so we can keep growing for you!)