The History of RunPee

This is RunPee's story in dates, for journalists, editors and anyone else who needs the facts straight. For the story told the long way, read How RunPee Started. For logos, photos and the words we'd like quoted, see the Media Kit.

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At a Glance

The idea: late 2005, after a three-hour King Kong.
The website: 2008.
The iPhone app: July 2009. Android followed by the end of 2009.
Free: since May 2023. No ads, no paywall, no premium tier. Donations keep it running.
Languages: 42 when version 7.0 shipped in March 2026.
Movies with Peetimes: more than 2,300.
Users: about 250,000 a year, about 50,000 in a typical month, and about 20,000 new installs a month (November 2026).

2005: The Idea

Late in 2005, Dan Gardner sat through the opening night of Peter Jackson's King Kong, which runs more than three hours. By the end he wasn't watching the movie. He was waiting for the ape to die so he could get to the men's room. Walking out past the line for the next showing, he thought someone should tell those people to go during the giant-bug scene, which has nothing to do with the rest of the film.

He was working at Microsoft, in the Xbox division, at the time. The idea sat on a shelf.

2008: The Website

2008. Dan leaves Microsoft to work as a freelance developer and builds RunPee.com as a project to sharpen his skills. The first movie in the database is Star Wars, added as a test.
July 4, 2008. The site goes into private testing with family.
August 2008. RunPee.com launches to the public, with a debut on stage at the 360Flex developer conference in San Jose. Then, for about nine months, almost nobody uses it.

2009: The Media Wave and the First App

April 30, 2009. RunPee.com has 9 visitors that day.
May 9, 2009. At his mother's suggestion, Dan calls in to Leo Laporte's radio show The Tech Guy. Leo talks about the site on air, and daily traffic jumps from a few dozen visitors to more than 600.
May 20, 2009. Dan's first interview, on the net@night show with Amber MacArthur and Leo Laporte.
Late May 2009. Humorist Dave Barry writes about RunPee on his blog. A producer at NPR's All Things Considered reads it, and NPR interviews Dan. Lifehacker covers the site on May 21. One day passes 32,000 visitors, the server falls over, and the site moves to a dedicated server.
Through June 2009. Even the slowest days now bring more than 6,000 visitors.
July 2009. The RunPee iPhone app reaches the App Store, built with a partner firm.
Summer 2009. The Cincinnati Bengals are the team on HBO's Hard Knocks. Quarterback Jordan Palmer, an investor in the startup that built the app, mentions RunPee on the show with his brother Carson Palmer, and the server crashes as the episode airs in each time zone.
2009. Ginger Gardner, Dan's mother and now known as RunPee Mom, writes her first Peetimes, for Drag Me to Hell.
September 2009. An update makes the phone vibrate before each Peetime.
December 2009. The website can show Peetimes in Spanish, French and German as well as English. An Android app is out by the end of the year.

Press coverage from these years names the founder as Dan Florio. That is Dan Gardner, then writing as Dan Florio.

Winter 2009–2010: A Letter from Beijing

A moviegoer in Beijing reads about RunPee before going to see Avatar and writes to Dan, offering to help bring it to China. Her name is Vera. She later becomes Dan's wife, co-develops the 2021 rebuild of the app, and today is Vera Tsien-Gardner, CEO of RunPee China.

2010–2016: Dan Builds His Own App

2010. The Chicago Tribune and Entrepreneur magazine cover RunPee.
July 21, 2011. Apple approves a new RunPee app that Dan built himself, replacing the partner firm's version. The same app is out on Android. It is the App Store listing RunPee still uses today.
July 2012. The database holds 467 movies and 1,246 Peetimes, and about 225,000 people have the app on iPhone or Android. The family sees every wide release on opening day.
January 2013. NPR reviews the app.
End of 2013. 677 movies in the database.

2017–2022: Growing Up

September 2018. Alert Peetimes arrive: a warning for scenes of sexual violence, animal cruelty or torture, so viewers who want to can step out.
April 2019. Version 5.0. By May the family has found Peetimes for more than 1,500 movies over ten years.
2019. Rob Williams, a retired teacher in the UK, volunteers to write for RunPee and becomes a Peep.
2020. COVID closes the theaters, and RunPee has almost no income for the next two years. Dan and Vera use the time to rebuild the app from scratch in Google's Flutter.
February 2021. The rebuilt app, RunPee:NX (version 6.0), opens for testing on Android. iPhone follows in March.
May 2021. Dan publishes a short book about building the business, Entrepreneurship: Captain of Your Ideas.

2023–2024: Free for Everyone

May 2023. RunPee becomes free, with no ads, and runs on donations from the people who use it.
July 2023. The busiest month in RunPee's history: 258,069 movie views, driven by Oppenheimer and Barbie.
May 2024. Google invites Dan to its Google I/O developer conference and pays for the trip.
August 2024. RunPee has added about 120 movies in the past year. Dan and his sister Christene Johnson, RunPee Sis, do more than 100 of them between them.
September 2024. RunPee starts using AI to suggest tighter wording for synopses that its writers have already written. People still pick every Peetime.

2025–2026: RunPee Speaks Your Language

October 2025. Version 7.0 is announced: RunPee in the reader's own language, with AI translating the Peetime text.
March 30, 2026. Version 7.0 ships in 42 languages. It adds My Movie Library, cast photos, content tags and tips that go to the Peep who wrote a movie's Peetimes.
August 2026. cn.runpee.com, the Chinese site, goes live in time for the August 14 China opening of Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.
November 2026. jp.runpee.com, the Japanese site, follows.

RunPee Today

RunPee has Peetimes for more than 2,300 movies, and adds about two a week, usually on opening night. About 250,000 people use it each year: about 50,000 in a typical month, with about 20,000 new installs a month.

Most Peetimes still come from the family. Dan Gardner founded RunPee and still runs it. His mother, Ginger Gardner, is RunPee Mom, and his younger sister, Christene Johnson, is RunPee Sis. Vera Tsien-Gardner runs RunPee China. A small group of friends who love movies fills in the rest. You can meet them all on The RunPee Family page.

A person picks every Peetime. No algorithm decides when you go.

Writing About RunPee?

Questions, interviews and fact-checks all go to Dan at [email protected]. He answers them himself.

Media Kit: logos, photos and quick facts
How RunPee Started: the full story
The RunPee Family: who finds the Peetimes
How Peetimes Get Found
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