Revisiting the Run.fund Crowdfunding Concept

I’ve been trying to keep tabs on what Run.fund is up to and today the developer announced a ton of new features worth revisiting the project. Via Instagram announcement:

We just added everything Linktree has. Plus everything it doesn’t.

All free. Built for athletes.

Linktree charges $5-24/month for these features.

We give them to you free because we make money when you make money (prize pools, community support, sponsors).

Aligned incentives. Better product.

I just took the athlete profile page for a spin, and from a tech point of view it’s massively impressive. This is Patreon for athletes, build from scratch, tailored just for the trail space. My mind is sort of blown.

And yes, I have been very critical of this particular effort when it first launched and I am still not sure about the larger vision of this. But! Maybe that’s the shift we’re seeing here, and I alluded to this on last week’s Singletrack episode with Krissi Polentz about this very topic:

What used to take an entire team of developers to build – and with it came some stupid VC funding from Silicon Valley – is now possible to spin up seemingly overnight. And we’ve seen how fast this can go. The Aravaipa/Steep Life Media machine upon seeing what Run.fund was doing immediately jumped on the bandwagon and copied the entire concept for themselves.

Now Run.fund responded and doubled down creating so many new features that it feels a bit mind boggling and might take Aravaipa a bit to catch up here, and maybe UltraSignup or Freetrail “get inspired” too and builds something similar. This, at the moment feels like a race to see who can come out on top. And in tech that is usually one, maybe two players at most.

Now the question is: Does our sport need this?

Clearly, as seen this past weekend – money was raised, folks watched the livestream of Black Canyon and gave money to the podium. So, in a ‘Twitch stream, pay to watch your creator do that thing and chip in a few bucks’ way, this seems to be working and there seems to be a place for this. Does this scale? Of course not, no one is going to chip in for me, amateur runner to get paid to race some fun race somewhere around the world. But! Is it a tool for elite athletes to put themselves out there and one that can potentially put pressure on the brands holding the cash purses currently? And even more so, is it a tool that is ‘thank god’ not another Silicon Valley startup aimed at maximizing profits for Zuck, Elon, and Jeff?

There are a lot more questions that need answering, but for now, as a tool platform in itself, is impressive and a fascinating addition to our sport and media landscape. It will be interesting to see how and when the first big race adopts it.

• How would we feel if UTMB builds a tool like this?
• What would we say if Western States would become an official partner and gives it legitimacy?
• In order for this to work for the athletes, does it need direct tie-in with a livestream and an only Aravaipa (as the only livestream provider in the US) succeed with it?
• Will race directors and/or brands adopt this and use it to skirt their responsibility to provide podium prize money themselves?

More to come on all this, I am sure. And I might swing back and forth a few more times on my opinion on this concept. But mostly: what an exciting time for a product to drop that isn’t another podcast, a substack, or an announcement by Freetrail, Aravaipa or UTMB. More diversity like this, please!