 Hello, everybody. It's a pleasure to be here. I hope you enjoy Slush as much as I do. I'm really excited to have this presentation right now. I brought some lessons from the past five years of building Blinkist that I wanted to share today. Before I go into those lessons, let's give me two minutes to explain to you what we're doing at Blinkist. There has been a nice introduction. I wasn't aware of that, so I'll keep it short. We're solving a problem that most of you are probably facing. There's so many books out there, and there's so little time to read all of those books. I'm sure that most of you have a pile of unread books that keeps growing and such a pity that we don't manage to read everything, because we miss out on a lot. Having a habit of constantly reading books can have such a positive impact on your life. And we solved that problem with Blinkist by making it easier to fit more reading into your daily routines. We transformed the key insights from nonfiction books into a format that you can read or listen to in just 15 minutes. We call that format books and blinks, because you can read them in a blink, in the blink of an eye. And I focused my presentation here on lessons on how to build a successful consumer subscription business for two reasons. First of all, we're a consumer subscription business, so we learned something around that. But secondly, if you look at this chart, the subscription economy is booming. There are more and more services out there that monetize through subscription, so it's getting more and more important. And I found that despite its growing importance, there's a lack of great content out there how to build subscription businesses with a focus on consumers. That's why I want to focus on that today. I said the word subscription probably five or 10 times in the past minute. And the first lesson I brought is that you should forget the word subscription again, because you should go for members and not subscribers. Let me explain the difference. A subscription is a financial concept. On the other hand, a membership contains the notion of belonging. It's a relational concept. And making your customers feel they belong to something is very powerful because customers who feel they belong to something, they are more loyal to your brand. They're more engaged when it comes to delivering feedback. They're more supportive when you fuck up every now and then, which will inevitably happen, and they're passionate advocates and ambassadors for your product. And the best thing is that people who feel they belong to something have no trouble of paying a subscription fee. So the big question is, how can you create a sense of belonging? How can you create a community of members instead of subscribers? It's not just about calling a subscription plan a membership. I wish it was that easy, but it's not that hard either. In order to create a sense of belonging, you have to put your purpose front and center. You have to always start with why. Tell people why you're doing what you're doing. Give them something they can relate to, something they can be excited about, something they can talk about. You have to deliver a great brand experience overall. Don't just focus on your product, but focus on every single touch point people have with your brand. And last but certainly not least, make CRM and customer support a priority. Embrace conversations with your users. We at Blinkist put a lot of effort into those things. We introduced a really consistent and personal voice early on. Some of you, I saw some hands going up. Some of you already know Blinkist, so you also may know Emily. Emily is not a bot. Emily is in the lead for all of our customer communications, and she's really great at building relationships with customers and making them feel, making the Blinkist brand feel human and relatable. On top of that, we have a great customer support team that goes a long way to reply fast and really deliver a great customer service experience. Last but not least, we host frequent Facebook live sessions to make it easier for our users to engage with us and look behind the curtains behind the Blinks. It's quite an investment to make, but it pays off because ultimately communication and conversations with your users is the key to turn subscribers into members. The second lesson I brought may sound a little bit contradictory to the first one, but bear with me and I hope it makes sense in a bit. The lesson is that you should listen to your customers but you should not forget the business. The early years of every entrepreneur would probably also, in the late stage, as an entrepreneur, you're always facing a bottleneck when it comes to engineering. So there are a lot of times when you have to prioritize between focusing on the product or focusing more on acquisition and growth. And we entrepreneurs are idealists. We always want to make the product better. We want to work on those features that are requested by heavy users that we want to get that retention curve up. And in the long run, that's definitely a good thing because ultimately you need a sticky product that retains customers to build a sustainable business. But when you're at a good enough level and already retain customers at a good level, it gets really challenging to go on from there and get better because of some reasons. First of all, whenever you work on your product, it takes a long time to build something new. You're facing long development cycles. And even if you shipped something, it takes a long time to test that new feature because you're more in the bottom of the funnel and you have a limited cohort sizes that go through that new feature and you're not sure whether you improved something or not. And last but not least, if you developed it and tested it and saw an uplift in engagement, you sometimes may find that engagement doesn't always correlate with retention. So you may end up focusing a lot on your product and put a lot of time into it just to find out that you didn't drive engagement. And before you realize you're running out of money, you're facing that next funding round and you didn't really improve any of your core metrics. So because of that, it's not always affordable to exclusively focus on the long-term. You always have to find the right balance between long-term thinking and short-term thinking. So when you're prioritizing next time, don't just ask yourself what your customer needs but also ask yourself what your business needs. And sometimes the answer to that question may be to focus on acquisition, to improve the top of your funnel and accept some flaws in the product and even accept that some customers will turn because they don't see improvements going fast enough. It's not an easy decision to make, but it's a necessary one because in order to really improve your product in the long run, you need time and the focus and acquisition can buy you that time. And I believe that if you keep focused on customers in the long run, it's okay to also sometimes take a step back and rather focus on the business because you're not only responsible to deliver a great and valuable product to your customers, but you're also responsible to build a sustainable business for your team. The third lesson I'd like to share is focused exactly on that, on building a sustainable business. It's about that you should continuously test your pricing. The pricing is the most valuable strategic weapon you have as a subscription business. In the past five years, we've run hundreds of experiments and the best experiments that drove the biggest impact have always been related to pricing. I can't highlight enough how important pricing is. The reason why it's so important is that it has a direct and significant impact on three of your most important levers for growth as a subscription business. It impacts your ability to acquire new customers because the higher the price, the lower the conversion rate. So there is an optimal at some point. It impacts your ability to increase the value of existing customers and it has a direct impact on the churn or the renewal rates. And I called this lesson to continuously test your pricing and not find the best pricing strategy because there is no perfect pricing. It's such a complex endeavor and you probably will never get there. You always have to test and improve here and there. The reason why it's so complex is not just about the actual price tag. It's also about the number of plans you're offering, the difference in functionality or duration, whether you offer a free trial model or not, whether you offer discounts, when you offer discounts, and the list goes on. I could share a lot of examples from the test we've run, but that's not the point I want to make. I don't want you to go out there with a specific test you want to test with your business, but just stress the point that you should focus on creating an ability to easily and quickly test different pricing structures because there will be a really strong competitive advantage for your business. Those three lessons I shared will get you to great heights, but in order to stay up on those great heights, there's something more you need to focus on. And we're still climbing the ladder, we're not there, so that last lesson, I can't share it based on our own experience, but I still want to provide some perspective. A lesson I brought is that you should obsess about the problem and not your product. There's two reasons why I find that lesson so important. The first reason is that human needs rarely change, but solutions always change. So the second reason is that it's something that most of us intuitively do wrong. When we started Blinkist in 2012, the app ecosystem was booming back then in Berlin, there were these cool companies like Gitzy, Aimen, Wunderkinder, we were so obsessed about building an app and becoming one of those fancy app companies who were so focused on the product we wanted to build and completely forgot the problem that we were trying to solve. So we didn't really in the beginning ask a lot of customers, we didn't focus that much on the content, on scaling our content library, because all of our attention went into building an app because that was the product to the problem that we had in mind. And that, yeah, cost us a lot of time. As you can see here, we shipped in early 2013, that was the first app we shipped. And in hindsight, what we should have shipped, what would have been the perfect MVP for Blinkist, is the thing you see here, it's an email. The perfect MVP for Blinkist would have been just an email that we send every day or every week to our customers that delivers them one book in Blinkist and then learn from there, learn what kind of format our customers like, who our customers are, how do we reach them, and so on. That's a lesson we learned the hard way, but we won't forget. We've come a long way since then, we still have to remind ourselves to frequently stay focused on the problem and not the solution. So if you want to stay on those great heights and be successful in the long run, you should be ready to constantly reinvent yourself. Because technologies and new ways to solve your problems emerge, there will be new solutions that you have to focus on. So don't be too focused on the current solution. Our mission at Blinkist is to inspire people to keep learning, and I hope I was able to inspire you a little bit today. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me on LinkedIn or via email. And if you wanna join the ride we're on, we're hiring, so also reach out to me if you're interested in joining us in Berlin. Thanks a lot for your attention. Have a great day.