How Blinkist (Sebastian Klein) Used Content Marketing to Bring in 500 New Users

If you ask me what I would do in the next time I found a company, I would definitely hire a very, very good HR person as one of the first 10 employees. So someone can really own this process of hiring the right people and finding them and like talking to prospects very early in the process.

Do you want to impact the world and still turn a profit? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to Growth Everywhere. This is the show where you'll find real conversations with real entrepreneurs. They'll share everything from their biggest struggle to the exact strategies they use So if you're ready for a value-packed interview, listen on. Here's your host, Eric Siu.

How many of you have experienced making a bad hire or had bad hires on your team? I personally lost over $840,000 on just one bad hire alone. So that's why I'm doing a free class called the 5 Secrets to Avoiding Bad Hires That Can Cost You $50,000+ Each. All you need to do is to text BADHIRE, spell it out, B-A-D-H-I-R-E, to 33444. That's double 3, triple 4, and you'll be registered. I'll see you there. Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of Growth Everywhere where we interview entrepreneurs and bring you business and personal growth tips. Today we have Sebastian Klein, who's the co-founder of Blinkist, which is pretty much modern Cliff Notes for the latest and greatest business books. Sebastian, how are you doing today?

I'm very fine, thanks.

Cool. Sebastian, so why don't you talk a little bit about your background and how it led up to Blinkist, and then we'll go from there.

Great. Yeah, I'll tell you a bit about it. So I have a background in psychology. I studied at a university, and I was always reading a ton of business books and self-help books and really enjoyed what I could get out of them. And when I and also my co-founders, we have a business background, when we started working, I went into management consulting, worked for Boston Consulting, had these crazy weeks, 70, 80 hours, and then I really didn't manage to read a single book in a month from then, and I really realized that it just doesn't work into my busy lifestyle. So I was always thinking it would be great to have a kind of a personal reading assistant, someone who reads all those great books for me and then just It gives me the key messages, and yeah, that was the basic idea behind Blinkist. And 3 years ago, we quit our jobs and started founding this company here in Berlin.

Awesome. And how are revenues and number of users today?

So we just hit €100,000 or $100,000 a month recently, and at the moment, we're growing quite fast, and we have more than a quarter million users right now.

Wow, that's amazing. So, you know what's interesting to me? I've seen stuff like this in the past and I've downloaded these business summaries. So, you do have competition. So, how do you differ from the competition?

What we started with was to try and find a way of really getting summaries away from this old style where you would write a summary that is basically working for you as the person who has read the book and has written the summary. We tried to get it into a format that really works for the user, like someone who might not have read the book. So what we did is we created this format which is all about key messages, like single pieces of information that you would be able to digest even without having read the whole book or even intending to read the whole book. And we combined this with building a product or apps that is just very pleasant and easy to use and gives you a very nice user experience and makes it rewarding to read those 10, 12-minute summaries.

Awesome. And do you have any case studies or success stories around this?

Regarding our platform?

Yeah, the product.

Yeah, I mean, we have really very enthusiastic readers around the world. We have paying customers in more than 130 countries and get very enthusiastic feedback from people who say, hey guys, I had to do a presentation about Getting to Yes, this book about the Harvard principle of negotiation, and I just used your summary to make my slides because every point Like, every key message is basically the— like, you can use it to make one slide because it's just giving you one key insight from the book or about this principle. And this is just one of the many great case studies we get from our users.

Got it. Okay. And just playing devil's advocate here, you know, when I've used stuff like this in the past, you know, my feeling was I didn't get to get the full kind of benefit of the book itself. So, do you think, you know, tapering it down takes away from it or does it give you just enough?

It depends. I mean, a 10, 15-minute summary never gives you what a whole book with a 10, 15-hour read would give you. That's for sure. And we never claim to really replace the books. But there are tons of users that we have who say, like, I just don't have the time to read all those books, so I need a service that gives me the key insights from all the books, all the best business books, and then I can just decide which of the topics do I really want to dive into, like which of these books do I then buy and read in full. And that's actually a very typical use case. Our users are not people who don't read books anymore, but they want to make very informed decisions about which topics are exactly the right ones for them.

Got it. Okay, cool. I can see how that would help people in many different ways. Okay, so, you know, you have a quarter million users right now. You know, how did you get your first 1,000 users?

To be honest, we didn't have the greatest start. It took us quite a while to get to, like, building a well-functioning product and getting the first 100 summaries out there because we were all very inexperienced. No one of us has really founded like a proper company before, and here in Berlin you don't have as many great mentors and experienced founders as in the US, for example. So it took us quite a while to get to those first 1,000. I would say probably 1.5 years. And it— I mean, it started with having people here in the startup scene and our personal networks. We had Great press coverage from the beginning because there were always people who just liked the idea of— liked our idea in general, even though our product was not that great. They were just writing about it in a very positive way. So yeah, I guess the first 1,000 were really just fans and people who supported our mission even though our product wasn't that great and we didn't have that many summaries.

Okay, and how long did it take you to get the product, you know, the MVP up and running? It sounds like it took you a while, right? I just want to get the timeline.

The MVP, I would say, was— or the MVP was more or less half a year when we started, but it was really very rough, just like 40, 50 summaries in there, a very basic app, and just like iOS only, only in Germany, even only German content. So that was the MVP.

Got it. You know, Jason Lemkin, who talks about software as a service a lot, I mean, you guys have somewhat of a subscription model, right? So he says it typically takes 2 years to really get something like this, you know, get traction going. Do you guys take, you know, is 2 years about right, or was it more, was it less?

2 years is a pretty good estimate. Like really, a year ago we had the first phase where we got like proper traction and proper growth through some— like we had one great article in Forbes mag, like in Forbes Online a year ago, which was the first time when we really got like thousands of visitors every day or like 100,000 visitors in just one week on our website. And yeah, I would say 2 years is a pretty good estimate.

Got it. Okay, when did you know this thing was going to take off? When did you know you were starting to get traction?

I mean, we believed in the idea from the very beginning. We were not super happy with the first versions of the product that we could launch, but we had our international launch a bit more than a year ago, and from then we had the feeling that, okay, we're getting good feedback from all over the world, and it really seems like we can get there. We can get to the point where everybody in our target target group will like what we're doing.

Got it. Okay. And what else are you doing today that's unique when it comes to, you know, user acquisition?

In terms of user acquisition, we had— to be honest, we didn't have marketing, especially like a B2B, B2C customer, B2B marketing expert in our team from the very beginning. So we had to learn all these things. The first— what worked for us first was content marketing, like writing articles for magazines, for online magazines because we have all this content and so we can provide great content for free to publishers. What also works very well for us is email marketing, something that I personally wouldn't have thought a year ago, but it works very well for us. And we're just, we just now the last couple of months we really found a few repeatable marketing channels that seem to work really well for us, like mobile install ads for example. That's at the moment a very strong driver.

Awesome, cool. So, I'm assuming I can just download your mobile app and I could just listen to, you know, summaries in there. Is that how it works?

Exactly, yeah. You download the app and then you get 3 days to try everything for free. You can read all the summaries, you can listen to them, you can create highlights and sync them with your Evernote account. You can even send some summaries to your Kindle. And then after a couple of days, we just ask you to either, like, go for the basic version that is for free where you can just get one Like, written book summary per day, or you have to go for one of our paid services.

Got it. And how much are the paid services?

The Plus version is $50 a year, and the Premium, which includes audio and Evernote integration and the Kindle sync, is $80 a year at the moment.

Wow, that's a good deal for everything, right?

Exactly, yeah. And we had this— on the one hand, like, we really— we wanted to make it available to anyone because we don't want to be a, like, a product for just a small niche of people who can afford such a premium service. But we also had to make it something that people have to pay for because here in Germany it's really very hard to get funded for several years if you don't have like a clear monetization plan and if you don't start generating revenues very early in your life.

Got it. And would you say that's a good thing or a bad thing that Germany kind of approaches it that way where they, maybe they're not quite like the Silicon Valley, the way they approach funding? Do you think they're gonna change soon, and do you think the way it is is good or bad for you guys?

It's really hard to say. I think that we probably won't ever have such a great creative environment where tons of things are tested every year and crazy things are tested and don't happen, and other crazy things just happen because somebody believed in the idea or somebody was just willing to fund something even though there was not a clear monetization strategy. I don't think we're ever going to get there, which means that like the business models you would see from Germany will probably always be a bit different to the ones you will see from the US because like thinking about how you can make money out of it will have to happen much earlier in the lifecycle. And I wouldn't say it's necessarily a good or a bad thing, but I think there's a reason why Facebook, Google, and such companies are from the US and not from Germany right now.

Got it. Okay. Now let's backtrack a little bit. Let's talk about content marketing. So you talked about writing for magazines. What type of content are you putting out there to like Like a Forbes or anything like that? I just want to get an idea of what your approach to content marketing looks like.

What works really well for us and something where we think we can provide a lot of value is because we know all those books and we have read them, it's very easy for us to, for example, say, hey, these are the 7 really most important pieces of advice you will find in the 50 best business books of the past decades, or these are the 7 most common or 7 most powerful leadership principles that you will find in all these great books from the past year. like really put together, which would be something very hard for someone who first has to read all those books. And these are the articles that work very well for us in terms of content marketing because they show what we can do and also they show what value we can provide with Blinkist. And they're also great content for magazines because usually someone else would have to sit down and read all those books to come up with such an article.

Got it. So can you give me like a success story from, let's say you got an article published on a popular magazine, you know, how many visits and users did you get from like one article?

The one I mentioned from Forbes magazine, that was really still the by far best, and I think, I mean, it was read around 100,000 times and it brought us almost the same number of visitors to our website.

Wow, okay, 100,000 visitors and then 100,000 readers, and how many users did it bring you?

We don't know because this was back when we were not very good at tracking yet. If I had to assume, then I would say maybe 500. Wow, that's a home run.

That's, you know, some websites are lucky to even get that in a year.

Yeah, that was really a great success and very, very, very good opportunity for us to publish some of our content.

Got it. Okay, cool.

So the—

let's talk about Holacracy for a minute. And a lot of people probably don't know what Holacracy is, um, so can you explain what Holacracy is and then we'll dive a little deeper?

Sure, yeah. I mean, it's a pretty complex concept, which is why most people And I have a hard time getting behind it. And like, the general idea is to delete management and job titles and all the traditional stuff that you have in command and control hierarchies and what most companies still are using, to remove all of that and just try to create a much more— it's not really democratic because it still has very clear rules and like very clear responsibilities, but it's a much more flexible approach to having smart people who are all willing to take over ownership and want to like— develop their own roles in a company. So it's a very flexible way of bringing smart people together and having them produce results that one individual person wouldn't be able to foresee. Like, there's not necessarily a plan that one person or just some founders prepare, but more like a collective of very smart people working on the right topics and then coming up with great solutions that nobody could foresee. I would say this is like a very, very short Summary. I hope it's clear enough.

Cool. No, it's a good summary. And I think what we'll do also is we'll link to Holacracy in the show notes so everyone can check it out. But Holacracy is something that's really interesting because Zappos adopted it as a whole company. The company I used to work at, Treehouse, I think they have a model that's similar as well. I think Valve kind of does the same thing too. So, I've always been— when you don't have titles, when people don't know who to report, like when outside sales teams, they don't know who to contact, people don't know who to talk to, things like that. get really messy. So how has Holacracy worked for you, and has it been a, you know, a positive or a negative in general?

It's been extremely positive. Like, people now in our company are really saying this was basically like a, like a changing point in our history because we became much more effective and much more efficient since then. And also people became much more motivated because they could take on more responsibilities. And we didn't really adopt the full system because, as I said, it's very complex and it usually involves a lot of coaching and, like, you really have to do— that takes forever, I think, to implement. And so what I did, I was just trying to get behind it and try to understand what the single parts are that it consists of and then just see which of the parts we can use for our company, like which of the parts are helping solve problems that we have as an organization. And, yeah, what you said, that it can become very messy, I think that can happen. But it's not, it's not, as I said, it's not really democratic. You have very clear rules and everything is very transparent. So if someone, for example, doesn't perform or doesn't achieve their goals, that's very transparent to everybody. It's no longer just transparent to like a single manager or someone they have to report to, but it's transparent to everybody. And so you get an organization which is getting very good at like getting rid of people that are not really good enough or not fitting in well enough and just helps everybody make the most out of them. And that's something very rewarding for me as a founder, but also— for everybody who's in the company, I think.

Okay. Now, when you talk about organizing these individual goals for people, where do these goals live? Do they sit in— where do they sit online? What kind of tools are you using and things like that, just so the audience will know?

Yeah, sure. We are big fans of Asana, this productivity system. All our company is basically organized in it. And in a holacracy, you don't have really teams or departments anymore. You would call it a circle, and a circle means It consists of several roles and each role is then filled by one person, but every person can have different roles in different circles depending on how much capacity they have, depending on their skills. And so all of this is documented in our Asana. And yeah, this is basically how we run. Everything is transparent to everybody. I can look up like every other person's goals, every team's goals, every team's milestones, not really milestones, but the, um, Yeah, the accomplishments they want to make in the next months. And yeah, this is basically how we organize ourselves.

Okay. And I'm assuming in Asana it would be like, you know, there would be circle 1, circle 2, people would live in it, and then in that, for that individual, it'll show their goals if you click on them and things like that, right? That's how it would look?

Exactly, yeah.

Okay, cool. And I'm just, you know, I think this would definitely be— it doesn't have to live in Asana, it could be in Trello, it could be in whatever, just whatever tool of choice. It sounds like it can go across the board. Okay. So yeah, Holacracy is super interesting. I've read a lot about it and yeah, it just seems like— I think, you know, if you can work for big companies like Zappos, Treehouse, even startups as well, there has to be a way it can work. And I think it'll just continue to be refined over time and, you know, we'll put the link in the show notes. But I want to switch gears to hiring for one second. What do you think is your number one hiring secret or tactic?

As I said, I'm a psychologist. Studied that for 6, 6 and a half years, and so I have a background in really trying to measure and like really trying to make it as objective as possible to like to see what a person can bring to the company. So on the one hand, you would always have, of course, like skills in terms of what kind of languages someone can code or what kind of tools someone can use. So that's something that is very easy to measure if you have someone who's more senior than the other person. But then we always really try to come up with a list of things. I mean, we have a few standard things, like people don't like this term intelligence, but I'm basically trying to figure out the general intelligence of people before I hire them, and I also try to find out other easy-to-measure components that describe someone's working capacity. But maybe if you ask me about a real secret, maybe that's not a secret because other companies are doing it well, But we would never hire anyone without having worked with them before. So usually we'd always try to, in every case, try to have someone first as a freelancer or just work with them on a project and never really hire someone just on the assumption that they would fit in and that they would do a good job.

And what if you desperately need to hire someone? What if someone left and you need to fill the position?

We have learned as a company that we, it's, for us it was really very harmful to hire someone and then have someone who was not a great fit, so we would rather leave a role open and just try to fill it ourselves with just one founder or some other person just jumping in for a while and take the time to properly find someone who's a good fit. And if you ask me what I would do the next time I found a company, I would definitely hire a very, very good HR person as one of the first 10 employees so someone can really own this process of hiring the right people and finding them and talking to prospects very early in the process. Okay, perfect.

And what would you say is your— the biggest hiring disaster you've ever had and what did you learn from it?

Just in general, we had our biggest disasters when we tried to hire someone to do something that we didn't really understand ourselves. Like for instance, when we— all of us founders had no clue about online marketing, we just tried to find people to do that and it was almost impossible for us to say what does this person have to bring. So there we had like the biggest disaster there was that we just hired like 3, 4 people and all of them didn't really fit in and none of them did really work. And then we said, okay, we just have to learn this in the company first. Like the people who are a good fit in the company and are great contributors have to basically learn those skills to a certain level before we can find someone to, yeah, to come to the company as a new employee. Got it.

Okay, that makes sense. Now What would you say is the biggest struggle you faced while growing the business?

The biggest struggle. Here in Berlin, I would say something very specific for this ecosystem is that, like, you get seed funding very easily, like your first couple of hundred thousand dollars, and then growth money as well if you have, like, a proven product and your repeatable marketing channels, and someone then gives you, like, a couple millions to scale. But in between, like, as you said, it takes 2 years to get there, to show that there's a market fit and the product works. So it can happen very easily that you're just running out of money and that nobody is just there who will do that kind of investment. So this was basically the only point where we were like almost going out of business because we just thought that, hey, there's no one here who seems to believe in this business anymore. And we didn't know back then that this is more like a fundamental problem Berlin startup ecosystem. And yeah, now we made it past this point, so now we can laugh about it, but back then it was not a very nice 2 months.

How dire was that situation? Were you almost out of cash, literally like weeks away from being out of cash?

Yes, we even had to stop paying salaries, and everybody, like, that was also a great, it was great to see that all the employees said that they were willing to just wait for the salaries until the new funding is there. That told us that everybody had trust in the product and the company, and so we were, quite frankly, we were very close to that.

Wow, that's amazing. Okay, I guess what is going through your mind during that time when you're almost out of cash? I mean, I just wanna get an idea into what Sebastian's thinking in general.

I usually have the tendency of trying to forget these things later. We all still thought that, hey, this is a great product idea and we're just not there yet where we can show like everybody in the world can use it and we didn't have the skills to market it. So we were in this situation thinking like, well, it would be such a shame to go out of business now because we think it would just be like, there's still so much potential and we could do it, which is why we kept going and then eventually we also— You were able to raise money? Yeah, managed to close a deal. Nice.

Yeah, I would imagine, you know, your product can probably, uh, go to the enterprise as well, you know, sell a bunch of seats at once, right?

Sorry, I didn't get that.

Yeah, so I'm guessing that you can probably do it. I don't know if you guys have done this yet, but I mean, there's— tell us about, you know, the B2B play here. Are you guys doing any type of B2B play?

Um, we never really focused on that because especially here in Germany, we saw that It's really, it takes forever to sell something to a company. Now we got the first companies who approached us and said, hey, this is really great, we want this for our education department or our learning department.

Yeah.

We closed the first big Silicon Valley company just last month. I'm not sure if we can talk about it, so I'm not mentioning the name, but it's starting, but we haven't focused on it. We said, let's first make it a B2C product, and then if this is where Well-known and people know the brand, then we can start selling to companies.

Got it. Okay, awesome. Now, what's one piece of advice you'd give to your 21-year-old self?

My 21-year-old self. I guess I would say be more confident and believe in your own ideas because I think when I was younger, I was very— I took criticism very seriously and always thought that there must be something to it. And like these days, whenever I have like a new idea or something creative, I think that, okay, most people don't like it, but just because most people don't like new ideas or ideas that they are unfamiliar with. So, I guess, yeah, I would probably say be more confident about your own ideas.

Okay, got it. And who would you say is your idol and why?

I wouldn't say I have an idol, but I'm always very, very impressed by Jeff Bezos because I think it's just like incredible to have someone who's so visionary and just like someone who had this idea of the everything store just before people here in Europe even accepted that the internet was something that would not go away anymore. And yeah, I'm always very much impressed by how great his long-term thinking is, and that's something I seriously admire.

Cool, love it. Yeah, and what's one productivity hack you can share?

I'm using many of them, but I think most of them are pretty common. Maybe one thing I really personally like, I'm always doing this in every meeting I do, also in organizing my circles and organizing myself. And whenever I start a new task, I always force myself or the group I'm working with to first agree on, like, why are we doing this? What is the goal? Like, to just have an understanding of what is really the reason why we're doing this and where do we want to go with this.

Yeah.

Which makes it much easier to focus properly and not, like, drift away or have 5 people in the room who all have a different understanding of why we're doing this and what's the intended outcome.

Okay, makes sense. Do you have, like, a framework around this people can find online, anything like that?

I mean, it's basically— I mean, probably what I'm saying is based on the idea of outcome thinking in Getting Things Done, where you would always say— Yeah.

Okay, Getting Things Done, that says it all. Okay, perfect. And what's one must-read book you'd recommend to everyone since you have so many books in your product?

One that I'm just reading now, so I can't tell you about the second half, but the first half I can say about is really— I have the impression that everybody should read it. It's called Conscious Business by Fred Kofman, and it's pretty complementary to this whole idea of Holacracy, of building this new or the newest kind of organization, and Conscious Business is talking more about the right people, like how the right person should be to work in such an environment. And I really like that book, and I think it's great to think about this human side of companies more.

Got it. Okay, and you said it was Conscious Business, right?

Conscious Business, exactly. Perfect.

We'll drop that in the show notes as well. So Sebastian, what is the best way for people to find you online?

Just go to our website blinkist.com and get your free trial or just download us in the App Store or in the Play Store. Yeah, I guess that's the easiest way to find us.

You know, there's one thing I noticed before we hop off. I noticed that, you know, your Twitter was a little difficult to find and then you— so where is your— you know, is there any— I think you wrote something about Facebook being a killer as well. So, you know, talk about social media and how your life relates to that.

Yeah, my Twitter account is very small.

I'm—

I don't know, this is also something with Blinkist, we're not really putting ourselves as people so much in the front. We're just more about the product, and that's also something I really admire about, for example, Jeff Bezos, that he's not— he's not him as a person. You hardly see him because for him it's more about building this company. I do like social media, but I just use them for my private, private users. So you will find me, you will find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there.

Okay, that makes sense. Okay, great. Well, Sebastian, you know, thanks first of all for doing this. I think there's a lot of insight, especially in the holacracy part, and I think you opened the eyes for people in the crowd. So everyone, this is Sebastian Klein of Blinkist, and make sure you check out his website. I think there's a lot everyone can gain from it. It's only $50 a year or even $80. So Sebastian, thanks again.

Thank you very much.

How many of you have experienced making a bad hire or had bad hires on your team? I personally lost over $840,000 on just one bad hire alone. So that's why I'm doing a free class called the 5 Secrets to Avoiding Bad Hires That Can Cost You $50,000+ Each. All you need to do is to text BADHIRE, spell it out, B-A-D-H-I-R-E, That's double 3, triple 4, and you'll be registered. I'll see you there.

Thanks for listening to this episode of Growth Everywhere. If you loved what you heard, be sure to head back to growtheverywhere.com for today's show notes and a ton of additional resources. But before you go, hit the subscribe button to avoid missing out on next week's value-packed interview. Enjoy the rest of your week, and remember to take action and continue growing. Thank you.