Here are 4 of the most useful, bite-sized learning tools for startup founders

For a startup founder, it is essential to keep continuously reading and learning from books, blog posts, and podcasts. However, in a chaotic startup world, where the primary concern is to move fast and make daily progress in your venture, sacrificing work time in order to do intensive reading can be a big hurdle.

The common mantra that founders must only learn by making mistakes is no longer applicable. It’s true that nothing trumps personal experience, yet learning from people who’ve been there and have spent half your age (probably more) coming up with golden advice would only increase your chances of success.

You need to have the best knowledge and tools, but also the most efficient learning process.

Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, or even Mark Zuckerberg have all changed the world by making mistakes — tons of them. But they also owe much of their success to their voracious reading habits that have gotten them to where they are. Of course, it would be absurd to say that if you want to be like Elon Musk, you should put in hours of reading, but you got my point!

It’s never been easier to start a business, but it has never been more complex to be successful at building one. While selecting and working with non-technical startup founders at a global scale, we gradually realized that the ones who succeed are the ones with the ability to learn faster than anyone else.

You need to have the best knowledge and tools, but also the most efficient learning process.

A bright future for micro-learning

Among all the trends rising in the startup scene, this one is interesting and real. Founders enjoy surrounding themselves with these cool applications and sites that give them small pills of knowledge. The sense of accomplishment is greater when you have to swipe three cards or read a small paragraph in your inbox consistently than reading two pages out of 400 once a day when you’re commuting or waiting for your next appointment.

In other words, you get hooked and that is the foundation of habit-forming products as explained by Nir Eyal in his book, Hooked.

My friend, As much as Evernote and Trello disrupted your old note-taking and project management tools, apps providing bite-sized content are on the way to disrupt your reading habits or lack thereof.

I work for Hidden Founders which is an incubator. Of all the challenges that we want to address to help our founders get started on their ideas and build great products, the importance of learning rapidly and executing accordingly remains the most critical.

One company under us is Startup Patterns which delivers such bite-sized content for busy startups. Here are some other cool apps that we advise new entrepreneurs and early-stage founders to surround themselves with, to keep an edge on their startup knowledge and keep their priorities straight.

Google Primer

Primer is a fast and easy way to learn new digital marketing skills, giving you bite-sized lessons to learn whenever you have five minutes free.

Clearly, Primer’s main goal is to help entrepreneurs and digital marketers. It does this by expanding their repertoire of knowledge and potential skills. It also serves as a fun distraction, helping kill time when waiting.

Startup Lawyer 

Founder Catalog

Blinkist

Highbrow