Kamal Datta: I'm really excited about today's episode. I'm here with Gerry Perez from LA. Gerry Perez is the founder and CEO of RunGP, the number one CRM platform for events. I'm really excited about chatting with Gerry, especially about how runners, organizers, and communities can use the marketing platform that RunGP offers, how they can benefit from it, and how it has actually become number one. So I'm really excited. Welcome, Gerry, to the podcast. Gerry Perez: Thank you, Kamal. Thanks for having me. Really excited to be with you, and thanks so much for the opportunity. I hope that we can add some value to all of your audience. Kamal Datta: Great. So let's start with a quick background of yours. I know before RunGP, you had a background in marketing. So let's start there and how your background helped you to start RunGP. Gerry Perez: Absolutely. Well, over the last 20 years of experience in marketing, business, and business development and actually sales as well, I've had the privilege of working with some major brands. I started my career in Coca-Cola then moved to Frito-Lay, and then I also served Warner Brothers for 13 years. Throughout my career, I was consistently involved in projects related to sport, which is a passion of mine. Back in 2015, I decided to start my journey as an entrepreneur by founding an agency. Within this agency, we were serving the entertainment and sports industries generically. Initially, we offered a range of marketing services. But in 2018, I decided to narrow our focus and dedicate to the industry that I'm really passionate about, which is running, and that's where RunGP was born. Kamal Datta: What's RunGP? Gerry Perez: RunGP is an all-in-one marketing platform built exclusively for the running industry, and it combines advanced CRM capability with SMS automation marketing tools. The main purpose of this is to help running businesses. When I say running businesses, it's endurance events, management companies, retail stores. We work with running crews. We work with coaches. So anyone within the running industry that needs to engage with the running community, I think RunGP could be a great tool for that. Kamal Datta: That's exciting to know. I'm just curious, when you ran or transitioned from running the agency to founding RunGP, were there some trends that you noticed that kind of triggered that whole pivot to start a dedicated focus in CRM? Gerry Perez: Absolutely. So let me walk you through the timeline on how RunGP became the software company that we are right now. As I said, RunGP started as a full digital marketing agency. We were developing social media marketing. Back then, we started with the Run Specialty Channel. I started small, I wanted to help local businesses, and that's where we started. Basically, we were helping these businesses drive foot traffic to their stores, and we were tapping into social media, specifically Facebook ads and Instagram ads. When we were running these ads, we realized that our best performing ads were those that were targeting custom audiences. I don't know if you're familiar with Facebook, but in Facebook, you get the capability to target different audiences, cold audiences, lookalike audiences, custom audiences. Custom audiences is basically you're feeding the system, the Facebook platform with your own database. So you have a list of your previous customers. You upload that to the system, and then you target those people. And these ads were the ones that were best performing. So I realized really fast that there has to be a better way to engage with databases, with the list of clients without the need of a third-party advertising platform like Facebook. Why? Because if we're working with first-party data customers, there should be a better way. So that's when I introduced SMS marketing. Kamal Datta: Let's dig a little bit into the core offerings of RunGP. You mentioned SMS definitely is one of the core offerings that you have. So my interest is in two fronts. One is what are the core offerings, and also, what are the case studies or the data points we have seen? Like, okay, is Facebook the right one today or was before versus, hey, maybe Instagram? Or is it other channels that are kind of trending what the race organizers should think about? They may not be thinking about today. Gerry Perez: I do believe that all of the channels that I mentioned are valuable. I do think that business owners and companies, when they're planning their marketing strategy and assigning their budgets, I think there has to be a good balance of different channels or where you're putting your money. Different channels bring different value. Email is great for long content, images, videos, and all that. Social media is a fantastic channel to bring new customers to your list. But when it comes to first-party data, I do think that SMS marketing is the king of engaging with this. So our offering relies on two fronts. The first one is the major pain point that I saw in the industry is that most of the people and companies are using multiple software tools in their business, and they lacked a unified system to consolidate all of the data. Arguably the most valuable asset of a company is their database. And if you talk with many of these business owners, all of their information is scattered around their email client, their registration platform, and in many cases, it's going to blow your mind, they have everything on spreadsheets. So the fragmentation of data was not only inefficient, but it also limited the ability to leverage their customer insights. That's the first pain point that we helped solve is to have a central hub within RunGP in which we can upload your existing database, wherever those might be, on spreadsheets and whatever platforms. We bring everything together. So now you have your leads coming in from your registration platform live. You have your history, and now you have a comprehensive CRM that can help you run your own business. The second one is that even though we have email and social media capabilities built in, now we're adding a new layer of communication, which is SMS marketing, in which now they can engage with their communities on a different level. Kamal Datta: Jerry, is there clear data that you have seen which makes you believe SMS is a solid investment for the organizers, compared to other channels? Gerry Perez: Yes, absolutely. And I'm glad you used the word investment. Oftentimes, when I speak to business owners, they see new technology as an expense. When you have the mindset of, hey, I'm going to have an expense, there's a lot of friction. This has been one of my biggest challenges when I talked to business owners, but, as you said, this is an investment. SMS is not new. It's a channel that, yes, it has a hard cost associated with it because you have, in the middle, huge players that are called carriers. AT&T, Verizon, and all of these carriers, they're right in the middle, and there's money to be made for all of these people. So, yes, sending out a text message has a hard cost, and when you compare that to email, obviously, it's more expensive. Not that email is free, but it's more expensive. That being said, our data suggests from the users that we have worked with that SMS has been one of their most cost-effective channels. So I'm just going to give you a round number. I have clients spending between 10, $12,000 per year on our platform. That includes subscription, SMS cost, and all that. And I can tell you that within one campaign that we ran, we generated close to $130,000 in one campaign. So that tells you that the return on investment is really, really high1 . Kamal Datta: That's a very good point. Jerry, since you have a marketing background, you probably love metrics or data. One thing that popped up as a curiosity is that if someone is looking at it from an investment point of view, you just shared an example of your client, which is a 10x kind of return based on what they spend on your platform. What success metrics should they be looking at? So if they're looking at RunGP and want to spend x dollars or invest x dollars, what are the metrics they should be thinking about in terms of what return on investment they can get back? Is it the conversion or how many people signed up for it? Gerry Perez: So we have two answers for this, and this is based on what we discussed on our main offerings, which is the CRM and SMS. The first one on the CRM side, we help clients increase their databases. We have clients with lead generation, meaning that for every single marketing touchpoint that they might have in their ecosystem - their website, their social channels, even their expos, and all of these channels - we make sure that every time a runner goes to these channels, we have lead generation efforts in terms of inviting them to join our list for SMS and email. On the SMS side, absolutely the main purpose that business owners are going to see is, hey, if I want to put $100 on RunGP, what's going to be the output that I'm going to get? Thankfully, most of our clients right now, and I would say to not say all, all of our clients are seeing a return on investments on SMS marketing in the form of registrations. So, the numbers that I shared with you, that they're investing, let's say, $10,000 in RunGP in 12 months, and they get in one campaign over $100,000 in revenue, that's a huge return on investment. Kamal Datta: Now probably the last question for you, what's next for Jerry? But I want to add some context because I think you mentioned that one of the core strengths of RunGP is that you exclusively operate in the running industry. So from that context, what's next for Jerry? Are you thinking outside running or within running, what's next? Gerry Perez: Great question. As you know, at the end of the day, CRM platforms are just tools. They are 100% tools, and I'm telling you this because as a tool, you can customize that tool to whatever niche or industry that you might want. I'm only scratching the surface right now of the running industry. And I do believe that my growth will come from, obviously, getting more customers within the run management vertical or niche. But we have seen that there are hundreds of thousands of running crews. There are a lot of running brands that are doing great e-commerce. You know, product shoes, apparel, nutrition, accessories. All of these, there's a huge opportunity for RunGP also to go into all of these businesses. So when I say running industry right now, yes, most of my use cases and users are with the events. But running in general is very big. So I do believe that the next stage for RunGP is to go into all of these verticals - retail, e-commerce, running crews, clubs, and even further, if we go to collegiate, high school, and all these teams. I'm a coach myself. I think I shared this with you. I'm a cross country head coach for the high school that my kids go to. And on my roster, I have 50 athletes. And I started emailing them about scheduling and all that, and I failed miserably. Why? Because these guys are Gen Z's, they're Gen X's. And they don't read emails. And they told me, "Coach, can we use other things?" So now I'm using RunGP as my coaching platform to communicate with them. So I'm showing you all of these things that RunGP can help with within the running community and not only for businesses, but for clubs, for universities, for brands, for e-commerce, for all of these major things. So that's the mission that I have for the next few years, tapping into other businesses within the running industry. Kamal Datta: Great. Thanks for sharing. And it was great chatting with you, Jerry, and thanks for sharing your journey and educating our audience with what RunGP does and the trends you have seen. So thank you so much. Gerry Perez: Absolutely, Kamal. Glad to talk with you, and thanks for having me.