“It is a superpower for anyone working in growth to know how to get their own data”

CEO Holger Seim and his co-founders developed Blinkist to help users fit learning into their lives by reading or listening to “Blinks” - 15-minute summations of non-fiction books. He explains, “sometimes you need a three-course dinner, sometimes you need a snack, we are the snack.” In this episode of the Breakout Growth Podcast co-hosts, Sean Ellis and Ethan Garr dive in with Holger to learn how the company has built a sustainable growth engine where focused effort on improving engagement spins a flywheel of paid acquisition and word-of-mouth expansion and it helps them avoid a dependency on venture capital.

In the beginning, growth was slow for Blinkist. The team launched their mobile app in 2013 in their native German-language, and Holger calls this their biggest mistake. But we also learn how the company found traction in the US and then came to realize that adding audio content could improve engagement. Success then blossomed as a process of iterative learning through experimentation, and Holger describes how a cross-functional strike team approach that the company calls “missions” has worked to break down silos and motivate teams.

One such mission focused on “cracking” paid acquisition channels proved to be the company’s largest driver of growth, but Holger is quick to point out that it is the product’s value to end-users that makes all growth possible. The Blinkist team always has the customer in focus, working to help them build positive habits around learning. From automatically starting a new recommended title after a user finishes listening, to adding “Shortcasts” (brief summations of podcasts) to its content lineup, Blinkist continuously pushes to improve the user experience.

With that intentionality, it is no surprise to find out that the company has adopted a North Star Metric of “Monthly Engaged Users” to align teams against its broader mission to fit learning into people’s lives. So jump in with Sean and Ethan as they find out from Holger Seim how growth is built at Blinkist.

We discussed: 

* How Holger and his co-founders struggled in their own lives to find time for learning, and why they saw a mobile app as the right solution to this problem (4:42)

* Why launching in German to protect a non-existent brand turned out to be a poor decision in hindsight (8:42)

* The impact of qualitative feedback and how that led to the addition of audio versions of Blinks (10:50)

* How authors and publishers react to finding their content on Blinkist (12:15)

* Why the company is focused on mobile apps as its key platforms (16:53)

* The company’s push for annual subscriptions (21:27)

* Why fast payback windows are profoundly valuable for helping the company optimize for independence (25:50)

* The impact of Covid-19; why less commuting has meant less time for reading and learning but has ultimately helped Holger learn to say “no” and improve efficiencies (32:48)

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