It's been a hot minute.

RUNLY NEWSLETTER #143
March 26th 2026

 
It's been a hot minute since my last update. A couple of business trips, a couple of events and a new release have kept me pretty busy.

When I started Runly, I said yep, I'm gonna' send a newsletter every single week. And I did, for 140 weeks in a row.

I even wrote & sent one while standing in our activation at the Sydney Marathon last year, in-between helping customers!

There have been some crazy stories over that period, from stopping someone stealing my van with all of the stock, the chaos of event setups & how we nearly went completely broke.

They are all epic startup stories. 

And I can only hope and wish there are many, many more years of those types of stories to come! They keep it interesting, and keep me on my toes.

But I also want to make sure that when I send this newsletter, I am sending you interesting content.

For those 140 weeks, some weeks were not as crazy as others. I would provide you with updates on stock, what I had been working on that week or perhaps which events we may have coming up in the future.

Now that our email list of runners has grown to tens of thousands, I am far more conscious about making sure I send good content, rather than my own personal ramblings.

So, the newsletter will move from weekly to fortnightly. That way, I'll have banked a few more stories and updates to give you every couple of weeks!

Speaking of updates.

I am happy to confirm that we have been selected again to activate at the Gold Coast Marathon this year!

Yeewww!

Now, you know not everything in this newsletter is sunshine and rainbows. So let me tell you briefly about last year.

It was our first major event activation outside of Melbourne.

I wanted to make a bit of a splash, and make sure we had a nice setup. So I bought a metal frame structure, which basically gave us walls in our booth. They looked really nice, on-brand.

But the problem is, when you're a hustling small business, your resources are limited. 

We don't have the 10-person installation team that some activations do.

This frame was TEDIOUS. Piece by piece, every little hook, bar and connection had to be individually connected and screwed in.

I was the first to get there on bump-in day, and the last to leave.

It was incredibly painful. The frame alone took half a day to put together.

I worked hard, but not smart.

That frame would never get used again.

But aside from the frame, when I was given the opportunity to choose a spot in the expo hall, I really had no idea.

Where do you want to be? What's good? What's not?

The spot I chose was horrific.

I chose it because it was on a corner. But it was one of the last corners of the expo. By the time people had weaved their way through the expo floor to us, I literally heard countless people say 'far out how do you even get out of there'.

Our location was very sub-optimal. I learnt my lesson.

So this year, when the spots opened and we could choose our location, I wasn't leaving it to chance.

The booking system opened at 11am, and from 10.15am I was refreshing the page, trying to get the spot that I wanted!

Boom. I got it.

This year we'll have a better location, people to actually help me, no stupid frames to setup and a better idea of how everything works.

Oh, and you didn't hear it from me, but you might see a special release coming soon 👀

Product Updates

Since my last founder newsletter we've been on a wild journey with stock. We've restocked and sold out of socks twice.

We also launched the brand new R700 in Black White. That has been a huge hit over the last few weeks, and we're almost sold out. With more stock for the Black White R700 not expected for another 4-6 weeks, I would recommend grabbing one in the next couple of days to avoid having to wait.

We've also just completed a big restock of the popular Hybrid Pro in every colourway.

That's all for now.

Run well,
Robbie