Dom Maskell was a product manager at McKinsey who wanted to run a marathon. He asked Ben Parker, a friend from university who coached runners for a living, to write him a plan. Ben sent workouts with pace targets and comments, adjusted week by week. Maskell got faster, finished the race, and noticed two things at the same time: no running app came close to what Ben was doing by hand, and he was paying Ben roughly five times what a Runna subscription costs today.

That is the origin Maskell has told over and over. The interesting part is what the two of them shipped first, because it was not an app.

The first version of Runna was a PDF. Maskell is blunt about it in his own post on how the company started: "When you think of the first version of Runna, you might think of a waitlist landing page, or a basic mobile app." It was neither. They built the first version of the plan generating engine, then wrapped it in a plain website. A runner picked a plan, paid, typed in some details about their running history and goals, and sixty seconds later a personalised PDF landed in their inbox. You could not tick off runs. You could not edit the plan. It did not sync to an Apple Watch.

Neither founder could build a mobile app, so they did not try. They paid a former colleague, Walter Holohan, out of their own pockets to get the engine deployed to the cloud. Holohan is now Runna's CTO. The company was called The Run Buddy, and Maskell describes the launch in one line: "We set the website live and waited to see if anyone bought it."

People bought it. The PDF business sold 1,500 plans and made about 60,000 pounds, numbers Maskell posted himself a year later. Plans ran up to 80 pounds for a marathon block, which is roughly a fifth of what Ben charged as a coach.

A word on how the dates here are anchored. In December 2024 Maskell posted a chronological timeline of building Runna, and that post is the spine of this story. It opens with "Jun '21: Ben Parker and I quit our jobs to launch The Run Buddy, a running training plan PDF generator website, with no funding". We treat June 2021 as day zero. The paid PDF site was already taking money by the time the two of them went full time, which is why the first customer sits at day zero rather than somewhere after it. Maskell has separately said the PDF service was something he and Ben "launched in our spare time" before the jobs went.

The rest of that timeline reads like a checklist. September 2021: ultra runner Joshua Patterson became their first investor, which paid for the first two hires. December 2021: a companion app to the PDF appeared on the app stores. That version tried to send people back to the website to pay and was rejected by the App Store immediately, which is how Holohan ended up wiring in-app purchases through RevenueCat instead. March 2022: they relaunched as a subscription app. April 2022: they rebranded from The Run Buddy to Runna, team of five.

The switch from one off PDFs to subscriptions is where the shape of the business changed. On 23 January 2023 Maskell posted that Runna had hit one million dollars of ARR "just 10 months after launching our paid subscription", and broke it into two numbers: eight months to get from zero to half a million, then eight weeks to double it. That post sits 601 days after the June 2021 start, and it is the earliest revenue figure Maskell dated in public, so it is what the milestone in this record is pinned to. Runna crossed 100,000 dollars of ARR well before that date. He never said when, so we do not guess.

The funding was not smooth. In the post announcing the sale, Maskell singles out Eka Ventures because "we received >100 rejections at our Seed round and Eka were the only one to offer us a term sheet". The two million pound seed closed in November 2022, followed by a five million pound round led by JamJar in November 2023. Before any of that they crowdfunded on Crowdcube in early 2022, which turned a few hundred of their own runners into shareholders.

Growth after the subscription launch came mostly from runners telling other runners. Maskell has described the loop plainly: a Runna goes for a run, feels good, especially when they hit a goal, and shares it with friends, which gets the friends signed up too. By April 2023 there were 10,000 Runna Premium subscribers. By December 2024 the team had passed a hundred people and Runna was one of three global finalists for Apple's iPhone app of the year, with a 4.9 star rating across more than 50,000 reviews.

On 17 April 2025, less than four years after quitting their jobs, Maskell announced that Strava was acquiring Runna. The price was never made public. His post is worth reading for the bit most acquisition announcements leave out: he ran the whole process in evenings and weekends without being able to tell his own team, under the cover of "people emergencies". In February 2026 he stepped back from the company to go travelling, handing Runna to Josh Oppenheim.

What makes this story useful is the gap between the first product and the winning one. The engine that personalised the plans was the same asset throughout. What changed was the wrapper: a PDF you paid 80 pounds for once, then an app you paid for every month. The PDF was never the product. It was the cheapest possible way to find out whether everyday runners would pay for coaching at all, and it answered the question 1,500 times before anyone wrote a line of Swift.