With These Tools, Blinkist Makes Its Million App Users Happy

1. Scaling and Understanding
2. Managing subscriptions - and informing about them
3. Good cooperation is the deciding factor
4. These are the tools that Blinkist uses

For nearly ten years, Blinkist has been providing its users with the key points of non-fiction books in an app. The basis of the business model: functioning technology - especially for managing subscriptions. Sebastian Schleicher, Co-CTO of Blinkist, shows us behind the scenes which tools the successful German startup relies on.

If you want to learn something in short time windows, you should definitely take a look at Blinkist. The company founded in 2012 summarizes non-fiction books in its app in so-called Blinks - key statements that can be read in about 15 minutes. In so-called Shortcasts, there are the also in 15-minute listening versions. The concept is catching on. According to its own statements, Blinkist has over 19 million users from all around the world. The company generates revenue through a subscription model. Unlimited access to over 4,500 Blinks costs €12.99 per month. If you take out an annual subscription straight away, you pay €79.99 - €6.67 per month. But which tools does Blinkist use to manage all the content and users?

In our series „Tech Stack“ companies from the digital sector reveal which tools they use and why they have chosen precisely these software solutions. Do you want more information about suitable tools? Then check out our software rating platform OMR Reviews.

Scaling and Understanding

Sebastian Schleicher, Co-CTO at Blinkist

Even though Blinkist was early in the app business, one marketing channel was huge for success. „Without Facebook Ads we wouldn’t have been able to scale so successfully“, says Blinkist Co-CTO Sebastian Schleicher to OMR. „We have maxed out Lookalike Audiences from Facebook and internally constantly optimized and automated, which audiences we should upload.“

Decisive for the scaling of an app model in a second step is to understand from which channel, which campaign new users really come from. For this, Blinkist uses the tool Adjust in operation, which recently celebrated one of the biggest exits in the adtech business. Blinkist is also based in Berlin - they know each other. „We have used Adjust for Mobile Ad Conversion Tracking from the beginning. The huge advantage: Campaigns can be measured across the media break. Normally, the information about new users is lost from the App Store“, explains Schleicher. Even after Apple's privacy initiative, the tool provides reliable attribution - preventing the marketing team from flying blind.

Managing subscriptions - and informing about them

At least as important as understanding the behavior of users is for Blinkist the working management of subscriptions – which are central to the business model. „We use Recurly for our subscription management. With this, you are buying something that otherwise you would have to build yourself“, says Sebastian Schleicher. The tool offers the complete technical infrastructure, which is needed for a subscription model: management of payments, invoicing, handling of free trial periods. Using such a tool allows Blinkist to scale the subscription business worldwide – without having to make a big effort with its own developers. „My technology approach: Focus on your company's core asset and build only that yourself. Buy everything else, otherwise it will always be more expensive in the end“, says Schleicher. „We would never outsource our content management system.“

This is how Blinkist informs its customers about the subscription model. The technology behind it is provided by the tool Recurly

Directly related to the subscription management is the customer relationship management (CRM). Customers who have cancelled need to be reactivated and those who cancelled during the free trial period need to be addressed. And because there is also a free version with one Blink per day included, Blinkist also knows many potential customers for the paid version. „Our B2C CRM mainly runs on Braze. With this, we realize for example email campaigns or send users the suitable offer directly to the apps after registration“, explains the Co-CTO of Blinkist. In combination with another tool, Braze also helps to send individual mail offers: „We use Amplitude, to analyze the behavior of users in the app and build dashboards for this. By now, data from here can also be exported directly to Braze and we can thus address new user segments without any additional technical effort.“

Good cooperation is the deciding factor

Perhaps the most important tools for the company but have less to do with technological processes, as rather with a human level. „Mail, Calendar, Docs, Drive. Google Workspace is the all-in-one solution for the largest parts of our business. From business reports, over meeting alignment, mails, central login. Our entire company is built on Google. It's simply, uncomplicated, extremely reliable, and super integrated“, says Sebastian Schleicher. „We wanted a solution that worked completely in the browser and was in use worldwide at the same time. When we founded Blinkist, Google was a pioneer in this area, and we still love the toolsuite today.“

For internal communication, another software is also used: „Like probably many, we also rely on Slack for our internal communication. We have been Slack customers for years and are delighted with the steady growth of the platform“, says Schleicher. „We come from a chat generation and knew from the start that emails were not the appropriate medium. Therefore, we decided very early on for the newcomer in the business chat environment at the time.“ To keep an eye on internal projects, Blinkist relies on Asana – and thus completes the internal communication triad, which OMR also uses,. „Project management mainly runs on Asana. Only our product development uses Jira. Asana also serves us for meeting control with agendas, notes, etc.“, says Sebastian Schleicher and thus comes to the big problem child in Blinkist's tech stack.

„The entire product development depends on Jira, although the tool is rather bad and outdated. The software has been milked by Atlassian for years and only recently started to be developed slowly and badly. I'm surprised that nobody has been able to compete with Jira“, he explains. Sebastian Schleicher should definitely keep an eye on the category „Project Management Software & Tools“ on OMR Reviews. Perhaps with the help of your ratings he will soon find a better alternative.

These are the tools that Blinkist uses

Here's a list of all the tools that are used at Blinkist:

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