Ricky Robinson
- CEO at Shorthand
GetLatka interview
How Shorthand Reached Nearly 250 Customers Paying an Average $6,000 a Year With Zero Marketing Spend (Interview with CEO Ricky Robinson)
Ricky Robinson (CEO of Shorthand) spoke to Nathan Latka on August 21, 2018.
Shorthand figures from the interview
- Customers (2018)
- Just shy of 250
- Avg Contract Value (2018)
- $6,000 per year
- CAC (2018)
- $3,000
- Team Size (2018)
- 10 FTE
- Cash Flow (2018)
- Positive
“So these days, we do annual subscriptions. It's just annual subscriptions. We don't do monthlies.”
“So we've spent nothing on marketing, literally nothing. We've grown to where we are today just based on publishers coming in, creating great looking stories, putting them on their website, people reading those stories going, holy cow, how did they make this? Most of the stories have a shorthand logo at the bottom, and people click that and come through to our website. So I'd say 30, 40% of people reach us that way, and the rest is pretty much all just search.”
“We have 10 FTE. We're based all over the world. So we have a office here in New York, London. So London, The UK, Europe is kind of our main market. That's where we got started. That's where we got traction with a lot of the big publishers.”
Bio
Ricky is CEO of Shorthand, makers of a most excellent storytelling editor used by the likes of the BBC, the Telegraph, Refinery29, FT, Dow Jones, LinkedIn, Médecins Sans Frontières, Save the Children, WWF, Red Cross, a few major investment banks and many others. His roles as a parent of young children and an author of scientific publications means he is in the habit of speaking about himself in the third person. Sometimes Ricky sports a scruffy beard, sometimes he doesn’t. Now that he’s living in New York, he will probably find occasion to wear his rex walking hat more often. When he visits the dentist, he enters a zen-like state approaching total relaxation, which is the only reason he bothers going for a regular check-up.