We’ve written before about Blinkist and how it transformed my consumption of books and ideas. But as I used it more I noticed two important elements preventing me from getting the maximum out of my reading experience:
- Inability to integrate knowledge from the app with my personal knowledge management platform
- Ability to listen to “Blinks” while I drive or workout.
The Blinkist team is obviously very motivated to bring big improvements to their product, which is very inspiring and gives me a lot of confidence in their startup. These two features might not be as obvious to integrate, and voice over is definitively an aspect of the product that you can’t scale, and is very expensive; But it delivers the kind of premium experience that you can only get from having great dedication to delivering amazing value to your customers.
Evernote Integration
My first desire was to incorporate the great lessons from the books in Blinkist into my personal knowledge management platform inside of Evernote. With Blinkist 3, this issue has been resolved. Somehow it felt like their team was reading my mind! It seems like I wasn’t the only one with this particular problem.
Audio Blinks
The second desire was to be able to listen to Blinks in an audio format. This came as a big surprise, as there was no announcement or build-up. I just got an email notification and I was very much surprised. But the bigger part of the surprise was that the Blinkist team seem to have managed to hire professional voice over support; I’d expected this process to be automated and, even if it was, I would have been fine with that. But with the professional voiceover it makes listening to these Blinks an amazing experience.
In the upcoming issue of Alpha Efficiency Magazine (it is very soon!) we will be sharing trials of Blinkist premium, so you will be able to experience the amazing content and user experience that gets delivered.
Three months with Blinkist
Blinkist definitely gave me value for money, as I’ve started using it far more often than I’ve been reading my Instapaper. In fact my Instapaper queue got stuck, as I shift more towards long form content in general. So far I’ve read a total of 20 books. There is immense value in this form of reading, as it gives you more complete information and ideas than blog pos without the time investment needed to read the entire book.
The biggest advantage is definitely the mobile experience and seamless sync. You can start reading on your iPhone and pick up later on your computer or iPad at the exact place where you’ve left off.
The Future Of Blinkist
Considering the traction that this startup team acquired in this specific business model, and a lack of scalability of it, I feel that they’ve run onto something bigger than themselves, and that they are trailblazing on the new path of digital content consumption. There is a tangible value coming out from their product and I know they are on the right track. I am looking forward to sharing our interview with Holger with you in the upcoming issue of the magazine! (Hint: Check the cover)
