I Heard it Through (the) Racevine
June 22, 2009 | in Fitness | 0 Comments Share
Thinking of running a race and want to get the skinny on the course, the goody bag, or the port-o-potty situation? Racevine.com has that information and more. Co-founder Gregory Lou tells us all about it.
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Interview
Hella Sound: What inspired you to create Racevine?
Gregory Lou: The idea was really to help answer a simple question we've had for years: "Where do you find everything about a race?"
If you want to find a movie, there's Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes. If you want to find a place to travel, there's Kayak, Expedia, Travelocity, etc. If you want to find a restaurant, Yelp or Zagat has you covered. But if someone wants to find a race and everything about it, the answer is not that obvious.
At Racevine, we wanted to make it dead simple to search and find a race, but also really easy to write about and share all the great (and even the not-so-great) race experiences we've had. Our goal is to support the endurance race community and help raise awareness for these crazy races we all love to do.
Hella Sound: What kind of information can we find in Racevine?
Gregory Lou: Aside from helping you find a race, we think you’ll really enjoy reading our user reviews! Hopefully these will give you some good nuggets of information that can really enhance a race experience. Stuff like, “watch out for the big hill at mile 20!” or “the swim start is chaos, so stay to the outside” or “the mile 12 aid station has beer!”. Our reviews are unique in that they're specifically catered to races.
Similar to other review sites, we have standard star ratings and comments, but we also have two extra sections that we think anyone who's ever done a race can appreciate. The first is our "nitty gritty" section where users can vote on all the little details that can make or break a race experience. Stuff like "were there enough porta-potties?" or "is this good for first timers?" or "does the race give out cool schwag?". The second unique part is our logistics section where users can write about the logistics of their race. This includes important info like "the best way to get to the start line" or "which hotel to stay at" or “favorite places for a pre/post race meal”.
Here’s an interesting example of the kind of information you might find on Racevine: recently at the Rock and Roll San Diego Marathon, our users have reported in the “nitty gritty” section that they have beer as a post race perk. Where do we sign up for that!
Or did you know that the NYC Triathlon had jellyfish last year! (those racers sure were brave 'cause who knows what kind of mutant jellyfish are living in the Hudson River!)
Since there are always so many questions when choosing to do a race, we really want Racevine to become a place for people to find everything about a race and then share those experiences with everyone once they’re done. After all, we put so much time into training for these things, why wouldn’t we want to tell everyone about them?
Hella Sound: Who do you think will most benefit from Racevine?
Gregory Lou: Hopefully everyone! We think our site has something to offer for the first timer all the way to the seasoned veteran and everyone in between. We even think that people who aren’t doing the race can find some great info such as good places to cheer from, or which races might be good to volunteer at.
For example, a recent participant at the New York Road Runners Half Marathon Grand Prix suggested the boardwalk as a great place to cheer the runners through the home stretch.
Hella Sound: You're focusing on longer races—half marathons, full marathons and triathlons; do you anticipate covering shorter races like 5ks and 10ks?
Gregory Lou: We cover half marathons, marathons, and triathlons in the US, and have started adding shorter running races; we plan to add other types of races in the near future. One of the biggest problems we've always had with other race sites is lack of confidence in their listings. In other words: it's very hard to trust that you're searching a complete corpus, and in some cases, their search is just plain frustrating to use. For example if you search for "Los Angeles Marathon" on one of the leading sites out there, you get results for pretty much everything BUT the Los Angeles Marathon.
At Racevine, we put a ton of effort into making our race listings as comprehensive as possible, and search options that are easy to use. Initially, we chose to focus those specific types of races to make sure we got them right before moving onto other types and distances. That said, we'd LOVE for Racevine to one day be the place to find any kind of race.
Hella Sound: Racevine just launched recently; can you give us a teaser on the kinds of features you guys have in mind for the future?
Gregory Lou: I can't talk about too many of them right now, but one thing we want to do with Racevine is make it as easy as possible to share race experiences. We are very passionate about user experience so we've recently made it possible to share your reviews with a single click on Facebook and, more recently, Twitter.
Contact Information
Connect with Racevine in lots of places:
- URL: Racevine.com
- Twitter: @racevine
- Facebook: Racevine on Facebook
- Founder Greg's Racevine Profile: Gregory Lou
- Founder David's Racevine Profile: David Nguyen
- Email: .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
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