As global markets were at their most turbulent, traders in Robinhood accounts were frozen in place earlier this year, leading to a social media eruption and a decline in the trading app's ratings.
Now, in part thanks to a huge fundraising that brought in $280 million at a $8 billion valuation, Robinhood ($PRIVATE:ROBINHOOD) is still looking good.
Robinhood was - and continues to - grow in spite of the historic outage it suffered a few months ago. This year, headcount has risen more than 25%.
When we last checked in on Robinhood, the app was loading up on engineers - perhaps to patch up whatever led to the account freeze-out - and after a slight downtick, the company is still out in the job market looking for two-dozen-plus programming pros at last count. Year-over-year, job postings (not shown) are up 33% overall, putting Robinhood in a minority of apps that can still maintain a fairly aggressive hiring pace at a time when most are seeing a big slowdown.
As we mentioned earlier, in the Apple Store, users began to rate the Robinhood app far more often once the trading snafu unfolded. In the Apple Store, ratings have risen by more than 43% - a massive increase that began just around the same time its users started teeing off on it, on social media. They also began rating it down - but they didn't rate it that far down, and the recent influx in reviews didn't ding Robinhood's overall user satisfaction score in the store.
Today, Robinhood's rating is back on the ups, to an average of 4.8 out of 5 in the Apple Store, an indicator of still-solid user satisfaction.
Hear that? No? Neither does Robinhood, finally. The chart above reflects social media chatter via its Facebook Talking About Count, and Robinhood saw chatter soar as it caught an earful from angry traders who couldn't make investments in March - that's what our camel-hump chart represents. And, those aren't happy users.
But, between its high ratings, continuing hiring and rising headcount, it seems that Robinhood can weather the storm. The next challenge it may face, could come from traditional Wall Street firms that are launching apps and cutting deals to fortify their digital presence.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales, and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue, and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.