It's Our Birthday and We Will Run if We Want to!

Its our 3rd Birthday on the 10th of June, it is crazy we know. Since June 2016 MedalMad has grown to being one of the biggest online running and fitness communities. With members from over 20 countries and 25,000 current registered members in total we are so humbled by how quick we have grown.

In 3 years we have had over 40,000 people take on a MedalMad challenges and 2500 a MedalKids challenges. Over 1.2 million KM have been run or walked and 35,000 KM cycled (based on new app feature allowing people to select activity so could have been higher)

We started out in the office of Active Connections, a sport for good social enterprise. Active Connections was set up by Mike in 2011 and has won awards nationally for its work in helping people make positive changes through sport and physical activity. 

We then had a small corner of an office where we packed medals and managed evidence. Our first website Mike built, but In 2017 we invested in a new website that took MedalMad to a new level. Though the website was working well we knew we wanted to make taking part in our virtual races and challenges easier. So we commissioned a new website to be built with an app. This new website went live in Jan 2018 and to say it was a bit bumpy would be an understatement. Whilst the website was 80% complete, the app that we pushed hard to be launched for the first National Running show was full of bugs. We went ahead anyway, which was silly, and pushed it live. 

For months afterwards we worked long hours trying to fix all the issues with the development company we had commissioned. Then in April 2108 they informed us they were going into administration taking £30,000 of our hard earned pounds with them. We were stunned as we still had not finished all the work on the website and the app was barely functional. After regaining our composure we picked ourselves up and went again. Finding new developers for website and app and slowly, as budget allowed, started working through the bugs. We would like to thank all our MM community who went through this with us, allowing us a bit more time and leniency on issues that arose.

Fast forward another 12 months and we have finished all the work we needed on the website, but more cool features are in the pipeline. The app is now fully working but we are constantly working to make improvements. It now tracks as well as Strava and others, as long as you have allowed it to know your location, worth checking before a run. 80% of all challenges are now completed via the app and 30% of those now use the tracker. 

Our community has been a bedrock of support throughout. 

In Feb 2019 we moved into our own MedalMad offices and warehouse. We needed space to store all the medals and working space to manage the hundreds of packages we send out everyday. 

We have always seen ourselves as that extra bit of motivation to help everyone start to be and stay active. But its the MedalMad community that has give us the motivation to reach where we are now. We get such great comments about how MM has helped people changed their lives. But it is you that has done the hard work, it is you that has made the difference to yourself and to us. For that we thank you. We hope to continue to grow and offer as much value and motivation as we can. 

We will of course be having some celebrations next week. So keep your eyes open.