The brother and sister team behind the Peetimes

A RunPee fan recently commented that he thought the RunPee app was just another app created by an app farm to make money. He was delighted to discover that it’s a bootstrapped company created and maintained by a small family.

RunPee: A Brief History

You can read the details here, but the idea for the RunPee app came to me (Dan Gardner) after watching Peter Jackson’s 2005 remake of King Kong. This was before smartphones existed. I’m a software developer, so a few years later, in 2008, I created the original web app. Then in the Spring of 2009 the website went viral and we were off and running. Never in my wildest dreams did I think RunPee would be anything more than a niche app with a few hundred users at best. Currently, there are over 250,000 people who use the app at least once a month.

Since 2009 the RunPee app has gone through at least 70 updates, and there are more to come. But it turns out, building the app was the easy part.

Where Peetimes Are Made

The number one question people ask is, “How do you get the Peetimes for movies?” Most assume it’s crowd-sourced; others think there’s a complicated algorithm behind it—which, I guess, technically isn’t far from the truth. We have a sophisticated algorithm that runs on a general-purpose bio-matter-based processing unit. Or our brains. 🙂

We go to the theater and watch every movie we add to the database, sometimes twice. We have the process down pretty well. We use a timer on our phones to know when the Peetimes, and as a plus the Timer app provides enough light to see what we’re writing on our notepad. Because we’re taking notes we always sit in the back corner of the theater so that no one will be bothered.

The hardest part of this process is when we get home and go over our notes to pick out which Peetimes to use and which to discard. Then we add all this data to the database. Another challenging aspect to adding Peetimes is writing a short synopsis. Anyone who has done a lot of writing will understand that writing a short synopsis is more difficult than writing a long one. We try to keep our synopsis to around 100 words.

During the past year we have added 120 movies to the database. Either me (49) or sis (51) has done 101 of them. The going rate for doing this work is $50/movie.

You can read more about the Peetime process here.

Eternal Thanks

I am eternally thankful to my sister for doing the Peetimes for all of the horror movies. That’s a genre that I really don’t enjoy. We have discovered that it’s difficult to do the Peetimes for a genre that we don’t enjoy. I focus on the action and sci-fi genres and sis gets the horror movies. And then we share whatever is left over.

Rob Williams has been an absolute gem. Back in 2019 he retired and contacted me to volunteer to write for RunPee. He’s based in the UK and so he adds the occasional British-only release to the database. Most of all, Rob is a movie-reviewing machine. He recently published his 500th movie review to RunPee. His contribution to the blog has been huge for us because the blog is our primary means of organic growth for the app.

Expansion

I hope to expand RunPee over the next year. Much of that depends on the success of another startup I’m working on. If that startup (Mapt.co) is financially stable, it will allow me to invest more in growing RunPee. My main focus will be to grow RunPee into other languages, so I’ll be looking for RunPee fans in countries outside of the US.

I’m always happy to hear our fans’ suggestions to improve and expand. Please drop me a comment below, and I’ll respond.