Bob Bickel 0:00 And what it's one of the business strategies that I saw as an opportunity for us to differentiate right up front is that these other people in the registration ticketing space, were making a bulk of their money off of transaction processing. I saw other people trying to pollute that pure business model with either an advertising type of thing or that listeners, Kamal Datta 0:26 Welcome to Tech in turn the 612 podcast where I'm chatting with leaders in endurance tech industry, to learn about how those different tax support the athletes, the event organizers, and the community in general, on this very first episode of this podcast, I'm happy to bring you Bob bagel, the founder of runsignup. And all in platform for event management. It is one of the biggest platforms for Event Registration TODAY. In fact, 40% of all US races uses runsignup platform. On this podcast, I go deep into learn about brand sign as founding journey, how Bob scale run, sign up to what it is today, the different trends that he has seen over the years, and also where the industry is heading. We also talk about some of the leadership principles that Bob uses at runsignup. I'm sure you'll enjoy the conversation, and the story as well. I am Kamal Datta, founder of Traxamo and host of this podcast. And if you liked this podcast, don't forget to subscribe, leave a comment, or share. Enjoy this episode. Welcome, Bob to this podcast. I'm really excited to have you here and learn about runsignup. Thanks. So let's start with what is Ron said and Bob Bob Bickel 2:02 runsignup is a technology company that provides basically software services to events. And we kind of started in the insurance space. And we've grown over the past few years to expand that into peer to peer fundraising events as well as into ticket events. Especially in the in the category where it's more complex events. And they have needs for like multiday timed entry and things like that. So think of us, as I heard, as described early on as a bunch of old high school, cross country nerds that grew up happened. And it started a company, which I think is still kind of appropriate for us. Oh, that's Kamal Datta 2:47 great. And you want to talk a little bit more on that as you were a an athlete, and cross country. And then you start up. I'm curious to see deep dive into your founding story, like how you are passionate about running and how did you end up founding from stand up? What is the founding story, what drove you to start this amazing company. Bob Bickel 3:09 It can be really long, but But I started running in high school and and I was pretty good. And then I went to Bucknell University, and the coach there trained with the Lydiard method. And he had this philosophy of the strength of the team is the wolf and the strength of the wolf is the pack. And so like it was it was really an interesting type of combination, where I got to be a fairly decent runner at Bucknell. And I and I got there because we ran five miles every morning, 10 miles every afternoon. And, and not a lot of people do that. So we got pretty good, you got better than average. And then we ran together as a team. So we when we when we went out, we would run as a pack. And when you're running as a pack, you want to support the other people that are in the pack. And so one of your motivations for not falling off pace is to help the others keep pace, right? So if you and I are running, I want to encourage you to stick with me. And that's that's kind of like the foundation of like so many philosophies that have taken me through my life and everything that that experience at Bucknell. And then you know, runsignup started 2009 2010 And, and running was a big passion at that point in my life. I was doing a number of running oriented things. And I had I was electrical engineer undergrad and you know, did computers and and went into the business side and product management side of things and was part of a bunch of startup companies since around nine In 92, and was on the first wave of the internet and Java and application servers and deep infrastructure type of stuff. And I, and I, kind of, I was lucky and got involved in contributed on several fairly successful startup companies. Right. So runsignup really was meant to be like a side passion project that combined my, my kind of, you know, I just love starting up technology companies, and my love for running. And it was just supposed to be a side passion project, I met this wonderful young man who was in college at the time. Steven Sigurd, and he's, he's our CTO, he's really the real reason why run scientists successful. I've probably worked with about 1500 software developers, at least moderately closely over the years. And, and he's, he's simply the best. He just, yeah, he's, he's just absolutely wonderful. So we just started building technology in 2010. And people found it and they liked it. And, and then it got out of hand. It's probably more than just a passion project. Now. It is, I mean, just looking at the numbers. And I know you've been very humbled, humbled to, you know, set the numbers by the Fed, looking at the numbers that are publicly available in runsignup, has, you know, has registrations that are 9 million plus runners registered through runsignup platform every year, you are organizing our 28,000. Running organizers use runsignup platform, plus another 131,000 Running clubs that are using non Sena platform. And overall in us we have 40% market share in the registration and an overall event organization in endurance sports, which is pretty amazing set in a year. I'm about to say the number, but I'm trying to see the numbers available publicly. It's an amazing numbers, for sure. Well, you know, this kind of goes back to the Bucknell story, right? Basically, the way I feel, what we've done is we've run five and 10 every day, for the past 14 years. And not many people do that not many people keep their head down, keep it keep focused on like, what do customers need? And how do we build the best software that we possibly can. And, and, and what happens is, you see these other people coming into the market or competitors that used to be big and around. They don't have that focus, they don't have that sense of purpose that we seem to have. And I think that's really our differentiation is just like, we care about our people. We care about our customers, we care about the technology that we put out, and we try to make it really good. And we just tried to improve a little bit every day. And after 14 years, that compound interest of trying to make yourself a little bit better actually pays off. Absolutely. Kamal Datta 8:11 And numbers that are speaking, that you know, continuous improvement cycle that you are on what we're Bob Bickel 8:18 14 year overnight success. Yeah. Kamal Datta 8:24 What did to what are you that? I'm always curious, I know you started to run Santa Fe in 2008 2009. You mentioned like, especially in from the founders, I love to hear the story on getting your first paying customer when someone actually take their card or cash out that okay, I'm going to pay for this technology or problem that you're trying to solve. What is the story of your first paying customer? Bob Bickel 8:49 So So Stephen actually started working with B, in the summer of 2009. He was going to college at the time. And so that summer, he mostly did it. I did like about that much of it. And and we just put it out there at the end of the summer. And I actually had a friend and I live in Morristown, New Jersey, and the friend was having his 10th anniversary alumni anniversary for his high school graduating class. And I asked him if he would kind of be a tester for us and and use it. And so it was like they had a little 5k they had 31 people sign up, and they used our software and it didn't break. Okay. And so, Stephen went back to school at the end of August. And that race was at the end of August, and we just left it up, and neither of us did anything to it. And between then and Thanksgiving, about 20 races had somehow found it had gone Then through the wizard to set up their race and had actually started having people sign up. And so it was Thanksgiving time. And I went to Steven, because he was graduating this semester early, because he's exceptionally bright. And he was graduating at the end of December. And I said, Hey, do you want to join the mega company, you know, run sign up. He said, he said, Sure. And so in January of 2010, is when I call the official start of, of run, sign up. So he would start coming over to my house on Mondays, and we'd work together, and then he'd go home and work the rest of the week. And then we'd get together again, the next Monday. And, and basically, I was kind of the person that would put stuff on the website, and, you know, talk to customers, if we needed to talk to customers. And then I would be seeing what the customers were doing. And then we get together on Monday. And I'm kind of like, an idea type of person. And so we talk about all the ideas of how we can improve the product. And then he would go and make a little bit of improvement and, and just, it just kept iterating like that. Unknown Speaker 11:13 Oh, wow. That's amazing. Bob Bickel 11:16 And, and so today, every week, at 930, on Monday, we have the Monday meeting. And we go through all of the input from all of the customers. So everybody in the company has access to something called GitHub, where they put different ideas and thoughts into an every Monday, it's more than just Steven and me now there's, there's five of us. But we get together and review every idea that comes in. And we put it into buckets, and we decide what we can work on now. And, and those buckets over time kind of build up. And then we'll assign a developer to work on those, you know, like, maybe two years after. And so our customers, and some of them are called Monday tasks. And so we'll turn around those like very quickly, because they only take an hour or two to do or something. And so customers wind up seeing, you know, like real improvements and, and, and real features like very quickly off of off of their off of their suggestions. So that's, that's how that's how it started. That's the first customer, but we just kept doing kind of the same thing kept keeping the kind of the same pace and approach and, and it works. It's the five and 10. Kamal Datta 12:30 That's amazing. There's so 14 plus years, you're continuing the Monday morning. Absolutely. Bob Bickel 12:37 Which is awesome. Yeah, yeah. And we and we call them Monday tasks. So one of the buckets we put things into is Monday tasks, and then all the developers can go in Monday tasks and take a Monday task and it should take, you know, between an hour and a day to do. And, you know, newer developers, they'll actually start off by doing those. And you know, kind of learning and adapting their kind of easier tasks and, and then they kind of, you know, mature and grow and learn more. Kamal Datta 13:06 That's great. I have gone to a couple of your writings that you started, which is an amazing way to connect with your team as well as your customer just called the founders corners that you started and you share your inputs, your thoughts in a very transparent way. Like how you're thinking about the company. One of the key areas that actually struck out was the you're you're leading the you know, the company in a product lead way so the product lead based companies now is a trendy word, but if you've been doing it for a long, long time, and that led you to to stand up to other brands that give sign up and ticket sign up and be curious to hear about their story and how did you continue focusing on the product? And that led to those two other products that either you're not in the market today as well? Bob Bickel 13:59 Yeah. Well as background I, I kind of have an unnatural advantage in that I've been a part of a number of semi successful startups. And so I've bought and I've always had an appreciation for the product side of things I like I was always very much centered on on that even move for product lead was a was a term all the companies I've done a part of the reason that I became a part of them or created them was because of the product on it had superiority over other things that were that were in the market. And so um, so that's, that's kind of, that's where product lead comes from. So you don't spend a lot of money on sales and marketing. You actually spend a lot of money on your software, and then your sales and marketing is really all aimed at trying to get referrals from your customer base. And the way you do that is you spend your marketing dollars our marketing team is really an education team. And so anyway, that's product lead, how we got into give sign up and tickets sign up. So it was 2019 was pre pandemic. And we were probably around 25% market share in the insurance space at that point in time in the US. And I saw this point in time where our, like, our growth would kind of cap and, and so one of the options was just to stick with that. The problem with that is, is in an organization, if you're not growing, then you're not providing the employees an opportunity to grow. And, and what it turns out is that there's a very adjacent kind of potential markets for us to go into. And about half of our customers are actually nonprofit entities themselves. And somewhere around 90% of all of the our endurance customers are affiliated in some sort of way with a nonprofit. It might be commercial company that owns a 5k, or half marathon or something. But they're partnered with make a donation to American Cancer Society or something like that. And so what we did is we initially thought, well, let's go after that nonprofit market, and go after other types of events that they have golf outings, galas, things like that. So we started that, the pandemic kind of sidetracked us, and we got into virtual, which kind of saved the company during the pandemic. But during that process, we started onboarding, a lot of nonprofits who had their galas were cancelled, because they couldn't do in person events. And they heard that we had a virtual 5k platform that they could raise money on and stuff like that. What gives sign up has wound up becoming is focused on peer to peer events. So a year or two ago, a large as an example, a large customer totemo, the towers organization started using us. And they have this big event that runs through the tunnel and commemorates the 911 You know, first responders and things like that they have like 20,000 people, but they're there's like fundraisers fundraising team. So some of the people are able to put up their own page on on give sign up to say, Please donate to, you know, the tunnel to towers Foundation, they actually have multiple events, they have a stair stair climb, they've actually, you know, distributed out this year, we seem to have won a number of life cycling events. So locally here, there's something called Ben the short goes from Ben Franklin Bridge down to down to the shore. Ernie ELLs, Autism Foundation has decided to use us for all their golf tournaments and things like that. So that's give sign up, ticket sign up kind of originated with this idea of creating a lighter weight ticket platform for galas and golf outings is it's, it's the ticket marketplace is very, very large. You know, Eventbrite is kind of like the one that lots of people know. But what we found in the ticket market is that people aren't really paying enough attention to the technology and the nuances. And there's events that need good technology. And so we're finding, we're finding that to be a big potential market over time. So if you look at our business, today, we've got the insurance market, which is growing slowly, because the overall insurance space isn't growing that much. And we have so much of it captured already. So it'll continue to grow, you know, five to 10% a year. The the give sign up peer to peer space, nonprofits make decisions slowly, they move over slowly. So that's probably like a 15 to 20% growth per year. And then the ticket space is just so big, and we're so small, still, we'll have 50 to 100 plus percent growth in that for for probably the next five years to come. So what will happen is that, you know, five years from now, we'll actually have a more balanced portfolio between those three different those three different businesses. What's great from our business perspective, and our technology perspective is that all shares is one single platform. So all the payments go through the same thing. And we've developed this next generation set of technology. So like we have a V two of our email system of V two of our website system, that's exact same thing that is shared across all of these different verticals. So what's happening is we have revenue coming in from each of the verticals. That gives us the money to have crackerjack development team develops great technology that gets reused by everybody. Kamal Datta 19:53 Oh, that's great. So try hearing is that you're continuously listening to your customers that led you to Why didn't you fly some days, especially in the nonprofit segment, which is a lot of your customers and also in the ticket Santa space come from nonprofit but eventually is becoming as big because as you say, it's it's a big market share the target market Bob Bickel 20:14 kind of surprising to us. How many runsignup customers are starting to use ticket signup? Oh, wow. It's just it's amazing. That's most of our ticket signup customers are actually coming from run sign up directly users or referrals from run sign up people. Kamal Datta 20:31 Oh, wow. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, in listening to your customers in focusing on the product in led you to stand up to other business critical be eventually in a two digit growth rate per year to year, which is pretty amazing, Bob, another video, because I think as I read the founders corners more, and I get to know that you run sign up as employ your own company. And one of the concepts that you shared, which caught my attention is you consider employers like an API and then tech world. And it's a pretty unique concept. And I know it's easier said than done. But I'm curious how you actually execute on that vision? Bob Bickel 21:18 Well, we have this, this set of guiding principles, and there's three different wheels to it. But you're focused on this center wheel, which is a virtuous cycle. And the wheel is trust, responsibility, efficiency. And so basically, the concept is that people say you want to, you know, communicate, well, actually, you want to optimize your communication in an organization. If everybody's in meetings all the time, there's no work that gets done, right. And so what you want is for people to do work all the time and have zero meetings. And we're not, we're not quite that efficient. The idea is that, you know, a person has a responsibility, and you trust them to do that. And so you can basically, they've got an area of responsibility, and they're, they're doing that, in that area of responsibility. They're relying upon other parts of the company to do their responsibility. But they don't need to overshare and over talk about that, right. All right, so So if if if, if you're a salesperson has a territory, you've got a very clear kind of thing to do, which is to, you know, talk with your customers and ask for referrals, and then help onboard new customers. When you need help in onboarding new customers, we have an account management and support teams that they can introduce to. And so the sales rep can continue to look for new customers, or ask for referrals or keep existing customers happy. But there's these team members that they can rely on. And they don't need to overshare information on that, right. And then the salesperson when they're talking to customers. They're, you know, one of the magic things about runsignup is a customer buy something today, but they get 2000 new features each year. And so the salespeople know that, and they trust the developers to do that. The development team is probably the best example of this where what we try to do is we try to break projects into individual smaller units, that can be chunked off a little piece at a time by a single individual. So so a person might have the responsibility for a component on the website builder or a component that's in the email system, or to create a new report that shows how many people signed up per day or something like that. Those get chunked out as individual projects to individual developers, the individual developer has a responsibility to figure out how to do it, and what to do. If they don't know exactly what to do, they can talk to product managers like myself for my daughter, Allison, or they can talk to account managers, or salespeople, or the salesperson can actually hook them up with the customer that came up with the idea to do is in the first place, but it's their, it's their responsibility to really figure out what they're going to implement and how they're going to implement it. And so they're working as a single entity. So instead of me kind of trying to articulate what some individual does on a daily basis, that that would be totally inefficient. But if I trust that they're going to take responsibility and do it well, then that becomes enormously efficient. And what's really interesting about this is that individuals when they feel that sense of responsibility, they actually work harder. They take their job more seriously. They feel more passionate about it. They feel happier about their job. because they did that feature, the customer sends a nice thank you letter. They're like, hey, look, you know, you know, we have some young developers here and they, they're, they, they they release something, they go home and they show their mom or something, you know, it's great. Kamal Datta 25:15 This is amazing. I mean, you're pretty much reducing the communication channel because they know what input, they're expected. And you're not overloading them with 10 million other communication channels they don't care about. And the CTO, Bob Bickel 25:30 the CTO, I used to work with Mark DiGRA, blue stone. Yeah, he's a guy that crystallized that for me. And he says, Really, everybody should just be like an API API, you basically it's just a function call, right? So you pass some parameters to the API. And then the API returns what you expect. So you pass some parameters, which is a couple of paragraphs about what the feature is that you want. Right? Then what comes back is the new feature, it's there in the product. Kamal Datta 26:00 And they can see themselves that had been used by customers, and you're having the feedback coming back to them. Hey, look, so and so use my feature that I released because he or she himself or herself, build that end to end that complete ownership. That's pretty amazing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, thanks for sharing. Anything really is curious because runsignup kind of the pricing model is kind of the not a norm in the tech industry, like every SAS or tech companies going after recurring revenue subscription model, you know, making sure that we have the error locked in. But you have chosen to be a little different, which is kind of a transaction based model. I'm just curious, like, what was the story behind it, and how you made work? For sure. Bob Bickel 26:49 So, so I'm old. So when I was when I was young, software company sold licenses and support. And they always struggled with, you know, how do we get value out of out of our pricing model and stuff like that. And then, you know, it was around 2000 2002, kind of Salesforce was the first big one that started kind of coming onto the market as a SaaS platform with a subscription pricing. And, you know, they were competing with Siebel, and PeopleSoft and Oracle, and they basically came in, and they invented a whole new pricing mechanism. And I became part of a company J boss that used that same pricing model to great success and, and, and a great, a great growth growth trajectory. When I started, run, sign up, what I saw was that there was also this kind of new pricing model that others had invented before, but had not been quite as pure as what we have implemented. And what it's one of the business strategies that I saw as an opportunity for us to differentiate right up front is that these other people in the registration ticketing space, were making a bulk of their money off of transaction processing. So you know, charge 6%, but the underlying credit card cost is less than 3%. So take the difference to pay for your software development and other overhead to chap and accompany. And, and what I loved about that basic model is that it was value based, right. So if you have a big race, we actually make a little bit more money off of you than a small race. And that makes sense, because you're getting greater value. So you're sending more emails off of our platform, you know, the website that we host for you is getting more hits, you know, you're timing more people with our software, you're getting free text messages and free photos for your your runners more easily. So. So I love that business model. I saw other people trying to pollute that pure business model with either an advertising type of thing or like five, owning the emails, and you know, and basically, so if, if you have a race, I take your emails, and I sell them to some other race so that they have emails to go to. I saw companies do subscriptions and things like that. And so we basically founded our company with this principle of, you know, like, we don't own your data at all. I just have a right to process. And, and so you don't have to worry about us doing ads to your customers to promote other events, or stealing your customer list or anything like that. You don't have to worry about us starting to add subscription pricing or anything. And by having that pure model and an efficient business process and being focused on, you know, product lead. So our sales and marketing costs are a lot lower than say that brights. And our the amount that we spend on technology is a lot higher than they do torsionally. And we just wind up being a more efficient organization. So like, Eventbrite just reported a disastrous quarter q4. But they are not profitable. And we're profitable, they're there, they're 10 times our size, they should be, you know, a lot more profitable, because they should be at scale. But our company is profitable, because we focused on the right things. And they're charging subscriptions, they're selling ads, they're stealing emails, in my mind, they're stealing emails, and, you know, and reselling them. And it just like, it just does not make sense to me, are the clarity of our business model. And this idea of this value based pricing where, you know, we're just taking a little bit, you know, like the, the amount of kind of net that we take from a customer is very, very small. But we do that over 9 million, you know, participants that are registering for races, and it adds up enough for us to have a decent business.