December Monthly Update: A Christmas Classic

Gather round the fireside for a familiar tale

Settle in, Fetchies, and pour yourself a glass of eggnog, or a nog of your choice. I've got a few important things to share with you first, then I'll tell you a classic story to warm your hearts on the gloomiest of winter days.

Press your noses against the window of the Fetch Shop

After a few hiccups, I am proud to say that our 20th anniversary kit is now available to buy in the Fetch shop – and it looks awesome. Click the banner to see what's available. There are still a couple of posting days left before Christmas, and an infinite number after that!

Review of the Year

I thought it'd be fun to pull together some stats from the Fetch community as a whole so you can see how your performances stack up. Come and check out our 2024 review of the year to compare your mileage, training pace, WAVA and best benchmarks to whole Fetchiverse!

Your Annual Infographic

Proud of your achievements this year? Generate a colourful infographic like the one below, and annoy your friends on social media by sharing it all over the place. Here's mine. You can see where the wheels fell off in November.

And now, a cosy tale...

Forgive me, but as we celebrate 20 years of Fetcheveryone, I thought it would be nice to recap the Fetch story. Those of you who are new to the site may not know the history behind it. And for the folks that already know it, please feel free to hog the chocolates and enjoy some isotonic mulled wine.

In 2003, after a disappointing end to the cricket season, I vowed to 'get down the gym' to get a bit more strength to help my batting. My induction involved being shown the treadmill, which I was dreading because I'd had a distrust of running ever since placing second last in the class 100m at school with a time of 19.94s.

But I actually enjoyed it, and started increasing my distances. Work colleagues cajoled me into entering the Great South Run; and in mid-2004, I ran for the first time outside the gym, and never went back.

I found some online running forums, and got chatting to a bunch of similarly enthusiastic runners. I am a proper nerd, so I had a spreadsheet for all my runs – but I got fed up of having to email the latest version from home to work, and vice-versa. I was working as a web developer for a small agency at the time, so I decided to build my own website to house my training data. I already had the domain name, but that's ANOTHER story.

After not too long, I shared what I'd created with other runners online. They seemed to like it, although they said things like 'can it do this?', 'it would be great if...', and 'I think I've broken it'. The whole thing was one great big ball of excitement for me, so I made those updates and fixes, and evolved the site on a pretty much realtime basis. There really was nothing like it at the time. There wasn't even Facebook! But the word spread from that small core of supporters, and before too long, there were a couple of thousand people using the site.

In 2006, I got an email from the folks at Hearst Magazines. They own Runner's World, and my site had caught their eye. They came to my town, and took me out for pizza, and generally said very nice things about me and the site. And then the bombshell – they wanted to buy the site, and hire me to run it.

I agonised over it. I was worried about whether they'd just want to shut it down or force me to turn it into something I didn't like. But the idea of working on the site full time; with experts to help me share it with the world; and being paid for it was something I had only dreamed of. Initially I said no, it wasn't worth the risk. Then they came back with a better offer that I couldn't refuse. After six months of soul-searching, I went for it, and in spring 2007, I found myself sitting at my desk at home on a Monday morning, with nothing but my own thoughts and the Fetch community to guide me.

Worries about their influence were mostly unfounded. Over the next nine years, I heard very little from Hearst. I'd maybe go to the London office a couple of times per year. I had a bit of contact with their sales team, who wanted to sell adverts on the site – but it was pretty minimal. On the flip-side, the bit where they helped the site achieve worldwide notoriety didn't really happen. They didn't seem all that enthused. But they left me to it; and paid me a decent salary every month. I still thought I was living that dream.

Around 2009, Strava loomed large on the horizon. They offered a lot of the things that the Fetch training log offered. But they had millions of dollars of venture capital. So it was shiny, and advertised everywhere. They captured a huge audience, and would later go on to charge people to use their 'premium' features. Thanks for that. Inevitably, it was a worry. I didn't know if Fetch could survive it. It was always at the back of my mind that the axe would fall.

On the morning of December 12th 2016, I got an email from my boss, asking me for my phone number, as he didn't know it. Perhaps that gives you an idea of how isolated I was at that point. I was hoping he was getting in touch to authorise a repair to my laptop, which had developed a fault right in the middle of our very busy festive calendar.

The call wasn't about my laptop. The board of directors had decided that they were no longer willing to fund Fetcheveryone, and that as an obvious consequence, I was no longer required as an employee. On the plus side, they had no interest in retaining ownership of the site, and so it was free to be mine again. I paid £1 for it.

I was alone when the call came in. Katie (my wife) was in her treatment room with a physio client. I knew she had one more appointment straight after, and I didn't want to upset her before that, so I hid upstairs and tried not to panic, until she'd gone in with her second client.

When I told her afterwards, she was as shocked and worried as me. We wondered what would happen - whether I'd get another job; whether we'd have to downsize; and most distressingly of all for me, the impact it would have on my time with my boy. As things stood, I would drive north each week to spend time with him, doing my work there whilst he was at school or asleep. What new employer would be flexible enough to allow this, and also give me enough income to keep us going?

All these horrible possibilities crystallised in front of us within the first couple of hours, like a terribly powerful glacier ready to scrape us away. But alongside them in the gloom was a small glowing light. The site was mine again. By lunchtime, I'd tweeted a picture of Han and Chewie, captioned 'Chewie We're Home'.

The weeks over Christmas helped me form a plan. The site would bring in about £1000 per month in revenue from Google ads; and the Amazon affiliate link was good for a few hundred quid more. If the community was willing to support me too, then perhaps we could make it work if I found a bit of freelance work around the edges.

I was dead set against the idea of a paywall. The site had always been free for everyone, and I wanted to keep it that way. I don't want to support an online class system. The site began through collaboration, and it would live or die by it now. It became my golden rule. So instead I asked for voluntary donations. Give what you can each month, to help me keep Fetcheveryone online. I set up a limited company in the first week of January, and held my breath and pushed 'Submit' on a message to Fetchies explaining my plan.

And you came through for me. Fetcheveryone was independent again, and enough donations came in to give us breathing space. If you've ever seen It's A Wonderful Life, it reminds me so much of the scene where the townsfolk help George Bailey save the building and loan company. I cry my eyes out every Christmas watching that. I am now truly living the dream.

Since then, donations have become a solid part of how the site is funded. Despite the cost of living crisis, they've held firm. A few people have had to stop, but they still get the same access to all that I can produce, because that's the golden rule. Others have taken their place. And it doesn't matter whether it's a big or small donation – they all add up to something wonderful.

The money I initially relied upon from ads and affiliate links has shrunk dramatically. If I was starting out today, I don't think it would work. The Google ads bring in less than £100 per month at most, and Amazon have tightened things up so much that they're not worth bothering with. Two more examples of big companies that have cornered the market, and then applied the squeeze for their own profit. But that just makes me all the more determined to make Fetcheveryone a different experience for you.

So every December 12th, we celebrate Fetch Independence Day by recreating a scene from Star Wars. We lost a few well-loved Fetchies this year, so our choice of scene felt like a good one to remind us that the folks we love are always with us. The hardest part was getting Yoda to sit still for long enough.

Check out our 20th anniversary kit!

I'd be very pleased if you'd have a rummage through the Fetcheveryone Shop to see if there's anything there that takes your fancy. All prices include postage within the UK, and your purchases help make sure Fetcheveryone stays strong now and in the future.

Visit the shop

About Fetcheveryone
Fetcheveryone is a small independent company. There's no big corporation behind it, just me, with a dog on my feet in a home office at the bottom of the garden. Despite that, the site generates nearly 25 million page views per year and plays host to over 300,000 visitors every year. We also offer extensive training logging and analysis; and a thriving supportive community of lovely people. Unlike some sites, we have no paywall. As someone who loves running, my goal is to add value, not extract it. Three quarters of our funding comes from voluntary donations from happy users.