The show gets canceled

"Ian, the show is canceled."

It was Monday, March 16th. I felt crushed.

We had just pulled off the first Philly Shamrock Run, and I'd been looking forward to the show. Now, the Iran conflict was ruining it.

The Kanye West show, that is — as controversial as he is, the man has made a lot of great music.

Plus, it wasn’t just Kanye West’s music I was looking forward to — I was also looking forward to celebrating with our Run The Day team that has been hard at work behind the scenes.

You see, Run The Day is more than just the people who show up on race day. A big part of our team works halfway around the world and given our recent progress, we wanted to celebrate together.

Rewinding back to February, when I learned that tickets were on sale, I went online to buy them. As soon as I landed on the site, I immediately needed to buy the tickets. I tried paying 10 different ways. Since it was an international show, the payment processor didn’t like my credit card and it got rejected multiple times (shoutout Stripe for helping us seamlessly process payments in Run The Day’s registration platform).

I was infuriated that I couldn’t buy the tickets.

It wasn't until the next morning that I realized why I’d been so desperate — the site had a countdown timer. The clock was ticking and it rewired my brain to act immediately. I had FOMO.

That same morning, walking to work, I was pondering a different problem — our first Philly Shamrock Run was stuck at 10 registrations a day. With a month to go, we were short of our goal.

Then it hit me: if a countdown made me lose my mind over concert tickets, what could it do on our race page? I added a countdown to the hero section of our website that day.

Our daily registrations tripled.

A month later, we pulled off the first Philly Shamrock Run — with 2,000 runners.

I won’t guarantee that a countdown timer will triple registrations for your race, but with the right design and thoughtful price increases, it’s likely to help you, just like it helped me.

I’m still sad that the concert was canceled, but I’m grateful that the ticket purchasing process brought the power of a countdown to my attention.

Countdowns are now just a single prompt away from your race website with our AI site builder — so your race can create FOMO that drives more registrations.

Because when races grow, we all win.

— Ian

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