fbFund Finalist RunThere Motivates the Casual Runner

As this year's fbFund REV finalists get ready for demo day, we sat down with Leo and Sirin Hochberg, founders of RunThere.com. RunThere is a Facebook Connect enabled website for casual runners to route their favorite runs and log runs online in a more social context. Users can publish content to Facebook and create group runs for friends to join in on. Below, Leo and Sirin share some background on RunThere, new and upcoming features, and lessons learned from the fbFund experience. Leo and Sirin, when and how did you come up with RunThere? The idea of RunThere has been around for much longer than the company itself. The idea came about because we just wanted to know how far we were running and how we could track that online. This was in 2003 before Google Maps and before Microsoft thought maps were important. People should be able to know how far they’re running without spending money on downloading software or GPS. During graduate school, I learned how to program and started working on RunThere after graduation. Collectively, Sirin and I have worked at Loopt and Zazzle. RunThere began as a side project. Once in a while, we could come back to it, check our users, and add features. Every time when we considered putting the project to rest, someone would send us feedback saying he/she loved the site – and we thought, there’s something here. Who is in your target market, and what trends have you seen in user growth? Our target user is the casual runner who enjoys the social aspect of running. In the U.S., there are roughly 36 million runners, the majority of which run less than 100 times a year. We don’t want people to be intimidated by the idea of a hardcore runner. Right now, our users tend to be on the older side and are not necessarily Facebook users. The majority of our users are in the U.S. and Canada. Twenty five percent of our users are in Canada. In terms of gender, our users are split about half and half. After applying to fbFund, everything accelerated in terms of development. User growth has been faster than before, partly because we’ve been focusing more on the user experience. On average, 20 to 30 people signup per day. On a good day, usually when we get coverage on blogs and people are tweeting about us, around 50 people have signed up. Some of our users have around 300 runs logged. To get in the top 15 leaderboard, you need 700 miles. Six to seven of our users have more than 1,000 miles logged. How is RunThere leveraging Facebook's social graph and APIs? We spent a week implementing Facebook Connect on our site, and we’re still tweaking how we want to use the News Feed. So far, we’ve noticed the content our users are publishing to Facebook is generating a significant amount of comments. Users are sharing their runs on Facebook, and their friends are motivating them via comments. However, one problem with Connect is that sites are generating content for Facebook, but Facebook users don’t necessarily come to your site as a result. About ten percent of our users login with Facebook Connect. What are RunThere's latest features and/or any features you're considering for the future? We recently added a featured called Group Run. This feature allows you to draw a route and invite your friends to join you on your run and is great for people who are looking to run with other people, say if they’re training for a marathon or are a part of a running club. People often ask if we have GPS or mobile integrations, and we don’t have them yet, but they are coming. We want to branch out into the mobile space and develop iPhone, Android, Palm, and Blackberry applications soon. In the future, we’re thinking about adding features that help users track the calories that they’ve burned in the process of running. We also want to add a gaming component: for example, users can send one another virtual trophies, taunt with virtual donuts and couch potatoes, and encourage with virtual water bottles, socks, running shoes, etc. How does RunThere use Google Maps to allow users to route their runs? Our maps are Google Maps that define location by latitude and longitude, so users can interact with a real map as opposed to an image of a map. By far, it’s the most widely used map API and is really friendly to developers. Google Maps keeps improving and ads new features. With the Google Earth plugin, you can preview marathons in a 3D flyover view. It’s fantastic. What kinds of challenges does RunThere face as a location-based product for the running community? You can imagine the privacy issues that come with our site. Coming from Loopt, we’re very sensitive to location privacy issues, so we’re working on letting users customize privacy settings, such as hiding routes. We get fulfillment from knowing that our product encourages people to get healthy. Users go for a run in the real world. Although RunThere is an online site, in order to use the product, users have to get away from their computers. The challenge is that, unlike with games, it doesn’t make sense for users to login to our site ten times a day. We hope to increase engagement. What are you thinking in terms of monetizing your site? One plan that we have to monetize is to build a tool for the personal training marketplace. Personal trainers must effectively keep track of their customers. fbFund really encouraged to think of RunThere as a business. As fbFund wraps up, how has your experience this summer been? The work environment at fbFund was perfect for us because we’ve been able to interact with a lot of teams that are working on different projects. Whenever we have a problem, we collaborate with other teams. We’ve had great networking opportunities, too. Thanks for your time today. What takeaways will you leave with from fbFund? One takeaway from fbFund is the importance of iterating fast. When you have an idea, put out a live version that barely works, knowing that you can improve it later and learn from the usage data you get and improve.

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fbFund Finalist RunThere Motivates the Casual Runner

Jessica Lee

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Jessica Lee