“Books are a uniquely portable magic.” ― Stephen King
I always like to flip through a book at my leisure, but when I cannot find one around, it feels hapless. I always looked forward to internet reading in my gadgets. Blinkist enables people fit more reading and learning into their days, by taking high quality non-fiction books and summarizing their key insights into a byte sized, made-for-mobile format. Each insight is termed as “blink”, and an entire set of “blinks” from a book takes up to 15 minutes to read. Now, there are over books on the platform, with more than 40 new books added each month. The lifelong learners who show keen interest in reading and learning anywhere and everywhere like Entrepreneurs, Small Business Owners and Young Professionals can use Blinkist to the best.
The Team Formation
The co-founders Holger Seim, Niklas Jansen and Sebastian Klein studied together in Marburg and founded a student consultancy . This positive experience lead the three to stay in touch and keep searching for problems that needed to be solved and could be the foundation of our next company. Tobias Balling was introduced when they were starting to think about Blinkist and, with his background ,working in an online learning start-up, he was the perfect choice to join the founding team.
The Idea and its’ Implementation
“We came up with the idea for Blinkist when we joined the workforce and wanted to find a way to continue to read and learn, despite having significantly less leisure time”.
Majority of the people were facing the same dilemma: A lack of time, and an information overload in day-to-day life, making it more strenuous to learn effectively. At the same time, people were using their smart phones ever more as reading platforms. Hence, mobile product tailored with facilities to read specifically, would serve learn more effectively and so it did.
Unstoppable challenges
The biggest challenge was to take the decision of getting started by quitting well-paid jobs, without knowing if we would survive the first 12 months at all. After that everything was convenient . Capital was fairly easy to raise (because there are lots of early stage funds in Berlin) and they managed to ship first product within 4 months without big set-backs along the way.
How is it better ??
It is difficult to find the content, people are interested in and digging deep for searching the information .However, by breaking down the most important insights from books into byte-sized pieces and hosting them on Blinkist and on Page19,it makes convenient, manageable, and efficient. It is beautiful to help people read and learn .
Competitors
There are some established, Web-based services for book summaries out there (e.g. bizsum.com or getabstract.com), but they are focusing on selling corporate licenses to enterprises and implement their content into enterprise learning systems rather than providing an easy-to-use and affordable, mobile-friendly solution for consumers. Hence, there is no big competition as such.
The main competitors are other services that provide ‘learning content’ on mobile devices like Podcasts, Blogs, Magazines (or even ‘reading content’ in general like News apps), because users only have a certain amount of time to read or listen to learning content each day and they either spend this time with Blinkist, or with different services.
Moving Ahead
“We want to establish Blinkist as a global consumer brand for lifelong learning, via content and apps that fit into people’s daily routines”.
There is a huge market for such a service because the ‘learning contents’ is approaching towards mobile devices and there are only few services that really adapt content for such new consumption patterns, unlike a lot of players ,who just take the ‘old’ content and put it on a mobile device. The focus in 2015 is to strengthen the position and make awareness in the market.
Focus on Monetization
Blinkist is a subscription-based model.Customers can read and listen to everything they want during a 3-day trial and have 3 options afterwards:
1) Reading one pre-selected book for free, each day, with Blinkist Basic
2) Reading & highlighting as much as they like with Blinkist Plus.
3) Enjoying all the Plus features + listening to Audio versions, sending books to their Kindle and syncing highlights to every note with Blinkist Premium.
In the long term, there is going to be a huge revenue potential in selling books or other long-form learning content as well as selling data insights or advertising spots to publishers. However, the subscription model will always be the core of our revenue.
Special Offers
Extended trial of 10 days for the members of ‘Startup Dope Readers’.
Now you use it to know it, but for me, this one is surely going to my pocket.
To add Blinkist to your gadgets visit:https://www.blinkist.com/
