TLDR: WATCH THE VIDEO (click above)
Blinkist promises to help you ‘Understand powerful ideas’ 💡 Sign me up! 🙂 The book-summarizing platform must feel relieved—they got acquired just before ChatGPT showed up. There are a few ways they could make their learning experience stickier. But with 25M downloads and 1M paying subscribers, they’re doing something right. And it starts with their sign-up flow 📱
3 things you’ll learn from watching this:
The smart thing Blinkist does in the sign-up flow to explain the product benefits
2 viral mechanisms they’re using to grease the wheels of growth
How they could improve on their core value proposition of learning
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👂 Transcript:
Okay, today we do Blinkist. Blinkist is a subscription service for summarizing your favorite nonfiction books. They were recently acquired. They said they had 25M downloads and 1M paid subscribers. They also show up as a top 30 or number 23 education app and listed as a top app in Apple's App Store. So, there's something going on here. They've nailed something.
Now, if I were Blinkist, I would be quite relieved to be acquired right before the onset of AI. Maybe they could have been a platform to get summarized reading, but maybe you would just use ChatGPT to get your summary of your book. So, hopefully it was a good outcome for them, and we'll dive into today the things that they, what I think they did right to increase their growth. Specifically, we'll talk about the sign-up flow. We'll talk about the viral components and mechanisms that they have; they have two really good ones. We'll talk about how they use key behavior to drive a user to action. And of course, we'll talk about some of the things that they could improve.
So, we'll kick it off with their very concrete benefit. “Understand powerful ideas.” This is so FOMO, like there's a powerful idea out there and I don't know it, I need to understand it, right? They're using curiosity as a driver within their value proposition, and then “15 minutes.” And obviously, if you've been following behavioral science, you know that making something easier increases the chances that people do it. If you want someone to read a book, a book is pretty long. You may get to it on the weekend or at night, but you'll fall asleep while you're reading, like, we need something that's easier than, you know, reading these books. So they're offering you the answer, the solution, the miracle pill, a 15 minutes to understand these powerful ideas. So, a very concrete benefit and an important one.
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But the thing that they do really well here is this is creating a mental model. So, at the very beginning of the app they're telling you “Invest in your personal growth while running, while driving, while waiting.” They're telling me exactly how it will fit into my life. Now, of course, we should know that if we're buying a subscription service, we should know how it would fit into our life or we shouldn't buy it. And yet, as I study behavioral science more and more, and human behavior more and more, I've realized that we're just not that creative. Like we're not thinking and visualizing our future selves and how life will be when we're setting up for an app, we're really thinking about today's self. And so, by helping people concretely tell them how their life will be better, you're creating a mental model for how they could use your app. Really what Blinkist has done is give people the perfect key behavior. A user will listen to a new book for 15 minutes a day while driving. So, a key behavior is basically the action that you as the product manager, designer, or researcher want the user to take. And the more specific it is, the better. So why is that? Well, it's very clear that if the key behavior is “15 minutes while driving” that at some level the app has to have audio. These types of behaviors make features much more clear, and make it much more easy for us to actually design the behavior change we want to see. So, the more specific, the better. And Blinkist does it very nicely.
And then what they do in their signup flow to make it really sing, what I love, is they're asking me questions that explain the benefit of the app to me. So, I now know, by the questions that they're asking the type of content that I should expect and what maybe, you know, I would like to see when I'm in the app. So, they're giving me and engaging me in this. So, you know, it's not a carousel, carousels would tell me that they have history, this is asking me, it's engaging me. And so, by doing this, they're getting me to think a little bit more. By the way, this is also what's not on here is nonfiction or fiction. They're not telling me that they do anything with sci-fi or romantic novels. Like, all of the questions are about nonfiction. So, they're signaling the mental model again of how you should expect to behave within the app.
And then, this is my favorite, so they're basically doing a “Hot or Not” thumbs up, thumbs down about “Does this title interest you?” It's a very easy way to engage people. When we think about friction, friction is bad if it's cognitively overwhelming, that there is some level of thought that the user needs to put in.
So, if you're asking me to think about what interests you in general, I'm going to think deeply about this at back, but if you're asking me “Does this title interest you?” Yes or no. It's a much easier question. So, when we try to decrease friction in sign-up flows, we're not thinking about this type of friction. This is actually very easy for people to answer. It's very unlikely that people would drop off if they just, you know, are asked to enter their zip code like we know our zip code. This is not the type of friction that we're trying to avoid. We want easy, easy questions. If you're going to have a question, this qualifies. In general, this type of model of interaction is something Netflix has said works very well. So they went to from a 1 to 5 continuous scale of rating for their movie preferences to a thumbs up, thumbs down. And why? It's because yes, it'd be great, it's more granular data if people answer one through five, but more people answer if you ask them yes or no.
The goal here is to get information about the user that could help predict their future preferences. By the way, Netflix said, “Look, the best thing that predicts people's interest in movies is their prior interest in movies.” And so, you have to get my preferences in order to predict them. That's exactly what these screens are doing. And then, this is just beautiful. Basically, they're helping you understand how the app works. So these are saved to your library.
So now I know when I'm going into the app, which will happen in a few screens, that I should expect to see the things that I just did in my library. Instead of telling me that they have a library, they're showing me that they have a library by getting me to save things and put them in there. Very nice.
And then this is just, you know, an in-between screen, one of those small things that kind of build up to the next step. But by showing the effort that they're putting into personalizing; they're really increasing the perception of value that you'll have of the recommendations. And they're doing this at a critical moment right before they ask you to pay. So Blinkist is a subscription service, I actually tried to “x” out, or I'm not able to understand how the free version actually works because once you sign up for paid, difficult to go back to free.
But the Internet says that there almost is no free version. It's just like you're getting one title a week and you're able to see kind of how the app works, but you get zero of your actual decision. So, it's really that, here you go, here is a paid version. They've done some nice things where they gave a fair amount of sunk cost. You answer a lot of questions and now they're going to ask you to pay. And I would say they're using free in an interesting way. So, they're not, they don't have a free offering, which we know like having a free offering is going to widen your funnel. They're using free within the trial. And this is important because it is likely that somebody has come to the app thinking about a title that they want. So, it's not a general I want to, you know, have 50 titles or I want to read 50 books, it’s I want to read this specific book today. And so, they're letting people do that. They're letting people basically get access to do the thing that they came to do. And then hopefully they will be so interested in all the other titles that they see that they will convert to paid. This probably is a very nice strategy for anything that has, kind of, curiosity behind it where you're letting people do the thing, but then they're, you know, asked to pay at some point. They chose seven days, which is nice. So, the Duolingo folks we talked to said also they've chosen seven days, they tried 14 days, that did work.
They moved to seven with the idea that basically people get one round a week. You know, maybe you do something different on Sunday than Thursday. So, we want to let people kind of experience that full cycle. They're also telling you that they'll tell me that the trial will run out and which is a nice trust-inducing signal and that is kind of where some apps are going to. Now, this gets you over the hump of signing up because you say, of course, we're going to forget, and we'll remind you. And so, I would guess, and feel free if you know the answer to this, that around 10% of people are actually going to cancel when they get that email. So, they're taking a risk here. They're basically saying we're going to try to open up the funnel. But we know that when we remind you, it is likely that you will cancel versus a more subversive thing would just be not reminding you, getting at least, you know, a month in there and moving on.
The thing that they could do better is the price of $99, which is bolded, is a lot. It definitely is something where if you think about one book on the Kindle or one book on Audible and you compare it to this, it's much more. And that's not really how you should be thinking about it. You should be thinking about it, all your books on Audible, all your books on Kindle, and now it's a lot less, you know, they can even compare it. They said $8 a month. They could do, you know, less than a dollar a day sort of thing. My hunch is that when you anchor people so low the first time that they get billed for the $99, they are going to have sticker shock and cancel. So I'm assuming they did some testing here to say that, look, we need to tell people there's a $99 fee that they're going to get on their credit card in seven days so that they don't cancel or get surprised. This is going to shorten their funnel, but likely get more of an engaged set of users who actually continue.
But I do think the big opportunity here is helping people see that $99 is actually cheap if you compare it to all of your spending on your current kind of knowledge or reading. Okay, and then after this, they ask for your email. They haven't yet asked for my email!
They've gone through all of those questions and have not yet collected my email. So there seems to be two strategies in sign-up flows. One is, ask for it right away, don't wait. And the second is, wait. This is what Noom does. If you haven't been through Noom sign-up flow, it's like hours, exaggeration, but it's long. And then they ask for your email. The theory there is basically you've done all this sunk costs; you couldn't abandon at this point because you would lose all the work you've done. It's very interesting and probably context dependent. I don't think there is one right answer. It's definitely a testable hypothesis.
The benefit of putting it upfront is obviously you can remarket to people if they get distracted, like it could be that I'm going through this very easy and appealing sign-up flow, but I just get distracted. Now they can't reach out again to me to remind me to continue.
At this point, this is probably the most clever thing that they do, and probably one of the things that has increased the likelihood of their growth is, they're not begging you to make a referral. So, most apps are like, please, please, please, like, can you refer somebody? Here's a $10 scheme that pays you and the person split in some creative way. They're basically saying, “No, you're paying, and you get one invite included.” So now it's not something that you want to do, it's something that you feel bad not doing because you're going to waste it if you don't. And so, this type of including it in the paid version and giving you one invite is a really clever way to grease the wheels of growth and it's free and included. But really, they're involving more people in Blinkist with the overall likelihood that at some point people are going to add their friends, talk about it, and there's some growth model there.
Okay. And now I'm in. I'm here, the promised land, and we will start exploring. So here is a “Blink.” We'll go deep with Robert Frank and look at his Blink. So first off, I notice that it's 21 minutes. That's great. The full audiobook is 5 hours, so it’d be fun if they basically said “Look, you could do this in 20 minutes or you could do it in 5 hours” and continue to get me to appreciate how valuable the service is.
They also have, you know, “Rate” and “Add to a shared Space.” You know, we hit them, I hit them for not having a key behavior in the right place before. Now they do the key behavior, this “Add to a shared Space.” That is the action that you want somebody to do, and so, pretty clever to pair it with the actual, like, promotion for it.
Okay, so now we're going into the Blink. Now, the thing I was worried about coming in is not actually true. I was worried that they were just kind of telling me the ideas without giving me the stories behind the book. And the reason we want the stories behind the book is to make them a little bit more memorable. So, turns out they do, that they're actually giving you some of the nuance, some of the texture that a book would have. They're not just telling you kind of, like, the business book, here's the thing to believe, and they are highlighting kind of the key messages that are involved.
So, critique-wise, I'm actually not critiquing the type of Blink that they're doing. The big thing that I am worried about is retention. So, the interesting thing about reading a book is that you're engaged in it for a fairly long time. Like this is, again, a five-hour exercise if you're doing the Audible and don't actually know how long it would take you to read a five-hour Audible, but much longer than a 21-minute Blink. And so, your memory is going to be much higher. And so, what they could do, and I'm hoping they will do in some future is add, really, quizzes or some sort of test to recall the things that you just learned. So, in general, learning is sped up and really ingrained with recall. So, testing, while we maybe don't like it in the classroom is really, really helpful to actually remember or ingrain anything into your life. So, if you want to remember something, you should think to yourself about the thing that you just learned and try to quiz yourself. It would be very easy for Blinkist to do this and add these things into their, and they can even have an offering here about increasing, you know, I would pay more if it guaranteed that I would learn and remember these books. Because we all know that you're going to like, digest this, and then two weeks later, are you going to remember exactly what you read and how it applies to you? Most of these nonfiction kind of self-help-y type books are really useless unless you're applying it to your actual life. And so, the opportunity here for Blinkist is to help me apply it to my life, and they are well set up to do that.
Okay. And then the bonus thing here, which I came in, again, a little skeptical. So, you know, if I'm searching for something and I can't find it, then is the app really good? Because I'm here to get the books I want to read, and if it's not there, it's not useful. So, I'm going to search for one that I know is not here. So “Voltage,” I spelled it wrong, “Voltage Effect.” Here we go, the “Voltage Effect.” It’s not here. So now should I just cancel? Like this thing, is it useful? Instead, they say “Look, no, no, you can suggest it.” It's suggested. Now of course, is that going to be kind of a black hole?
It'd be really helpful if they were to give me some indication of the likelihood that it would actually go through. But more so, just, books like it. I've just given them a pretty strong signal of the thing that I'm interested in. They should now basically, instead of this, we have another John List book that you could read, this could scratch your itch, or we have other books about incentives and behavioral science that you would enjoy.
Okay. So, we have now picked apart the sign-up flow, the key behaviors, the two viral mechanisms that they have, and the core value proposition of learning, which they are doing not terrible, but they kind of need some improvement here. I hope you enjoyed it and see you soon.
Questions about your product? Email kristen@irrationallabs.com.
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