2015 ended with a bang for Shorthand. Not a car backfiring or a door-slamming kind of bang, but a nice party cracker sort of bang.
December was the biggest month yet for Shorthand across nearly all the numbers we track. There were more Shorthand stories published in December than any other month—more than ten times as many as January last year, in fact. More than one million different people read stories created in Shorthand (several times that if you consider we don't track stories from some of our biggest customers). More people reached the pre-purchase stage of our sales funnel (more than double the previous month).
That last metric is historically our best predictor of future sales. Couple that with the fact that reader numbers for this month have surged well past the final December numbers mentioned above (already more than two million page views and just shy of two million uniques), and 2016 should be off to a great start.
It was also an honour to be named Startup of the Year at the PPA Digital Awards at the end of November.
Since launching in 2013 from a far-flung corner of the world with a story about a long-standing sporting rivalry, our small but growing team has spread across four—soon to be five—cities and three continents. And we now have customers from, well, everywhere.
It hasn't always been this way, though. Shorthand has had its fair share of humps, bumps, bends, roadblocks and diversions to navigate. It's easy to become disoriented, but it's a problem faced by any young business.
Taking stock of where we were and remembering who we were and where we wanted to go got us moving again. We just needed the courage and patience to focus on what we do best: make a great product for professional storytellers. Our company is dedicated to building a product that helps great storytellers move mountains. That's Shorthand. To paraphrase The Beatles, we learned how to be us in time.
Figuring out who we were was one thing, but to grow as a company we also needed to be right about the increasing importance of multimedia storytelling in the coming years.
Cut to the present, and Shorthand is fast becoming the story editor of choice for some of the world's top storytellers at many of the largest news and media organisations. By "large" I mean the likes of the BBC, The Guardian, Hearst, Dow Jones, The Financial Times, The Telegraph, Fairfax and many others.
But news organisations are not the only ones to reap the benefits of Shorthand; we are proud to count NGOs, travel companies, Silicon Valley tech behemoths, government departments, universities and household-name brands amongst the storytellers using Shorthand.
You can see a selection of the amazing storytelling all of these organisations do by visiting our Pinterest board. It's worth a look.
That bet we made on professional storytelling is paying off if our growing story numbers are any indication. It's a bet that I believe will continue to pay dividends as native ads, branded content and premium stories behind paywalls play a greater role in the revenue mix of many publishers in the coming years. And I have no doubt that the simplicity and elegance Shorthand brings to the newsroom and elsewhere has itself been a significant factor in the growth of rich-media storytelling amongst our customers.
We have already fundamentally changed the time and cost equation for our existing customers. But we are conscious that Shorthand can provide value to others who might have the capacity to create only one or two of these stories each month.
With this in mind, we are introducing transparent tiered pricing plans. Alongside plans that are targeted at organisations similar to most of our current customers, we have crafted plans that will appeal to less frequent publishers. If nothing fits, please get in touch. If you're looking for a personal, consumer product, we still offer Shorthand Social.
I'd like to thank all our customers for giving Shorthand a try in the first instance and then running with it. Seeing the swelling stream of wonderful stories you create every day is what makes working at Shorthand so fulfilling. The team is looking forward to doing great things with you in 2016.
I'm @rickyrobinson on Twitter or you can reach me by email at <my-first-name>@shorthand.com.
