We have humble beginnings as a mobile app to track your runs, walks, and bike rides.  As one of the first 200 apps in the iPhone App Store, we got in early and have been constantly improving the app experience ever since.  We’ve added new functionality, expanded to other smartphone platforms, and more recently, launched an API so other apps/devices could integrate with RunKeeper as well.

We’re very proud of the large, passionate user community that has rallied around RunKeeper as we’ve grown.  We recently crossed the 10m user mark, have assembled an incredible team of 23 employees strong (and growing), and recently raised $10M from a terrific group of investors so we can grow even faster.  Thanks to our user community, because without you, there is no way we could have made it this far.

With all of this good stuff happening, we wanted to write this post because we feel like we owe you an apology.  You see, we have always prided ourselves on being a user-driven company.  A company that cares about your feedback.  A company that makes decisions with you, our users, in mind. We feel like recently we started to stray from those values.  We spread ourselves too thin.  We had too many initiatives going on at once.  And most importantly, we stopped listening to our users as much as we should be.  As a result, improvement to our core product (i.e. the reason you are all here), began to suffer.  Scaling a company is hard, and we made some missteps along the way.  We are not here to make excuses.  Rather, we are here to tell you that we are sorry that we took our eye off the ball and that we are committed to making things right.

Since we came to this realization, we’ve started doing a bunch of things differently around RunKeeper HQ. We went back to the drawing board to better define our company’s mission, vision, and core values.  We completely overhauled our development process so that we can react faster to your feedback.  We hired a full-time community manager (welcome Chas!), and we implemented ‘Support Sundays’ where a bunch of the RK squad handle customer support for the day to interact with the user community directly.  Most importantly we took a long hard look at our product roadmap and trimmed or got rid of anything we believed was only serving our interests, and not yours.

So what does this mean for you?  It means that, hopefully, the RunKeeper that you came to love will be back again.  It means we will run the company in a transparent and accessible way.  It means that, while we can’t always incorporate your feedback, we will do a much better job of listening and keeping a pulse on your needs.  And most importantly, it means we will be building the kind of product over time that you can love and that we can be proud of!

It may take us a little while to regain our footing, but we are feeling great about our progress and momentum, and we can’t wait to show you everything that we’ve got in store.  It’s going to be an exciting 2012!  In the meantime, if you need us for anything, just ask :)

The RunKeeper Team