App caters to professionals who want to increase their reading comprehension in no time

The pandemic continues to disrupt everything, including the habits and routines that many of us use to stay productive and sharp. Hybrid work and increased work-life balance brings more scheduling flexibility along with a demand for new formats of beloved activities.

Because the lack of commuting may add hours to the day, many of us are using this found time for core projects like cooking, spending time with family and home improvements. Consider increasing your cognitive performance on the fly with portable and durable book knowledge that only requires a few minutes of your day and can be used while you are active.

As a subscription-based app that provides key insights from bestselling books in audio and written formats, Instaread is poised to fill the void by helping smart people stay informed and competitive in their fields.

Based in the Bay Area, Instaread was founded by Rahul Chitrapu and Vishnu Chapalamadugu on the insight that successful people tend to be “super readers.” A growing body of research shows a strong correlation between reading, success, and leadership.

Successful people also tend to read widely, dabbling in genres and subject matters that are far outside their areas of interest and expertise.

Learning about new subject matters has been shown to promote creative thinking and innovation. It also provides an excellent return on investment; in addition to being rewarding in itself, reading is correlated with higher incomes, according to the Pew Research Center.

But time and attention are valuable, finite resources. The Instaread library, which features thousands of titles across genres, is a low-stakes (and low-cost) way for learners to engage deeply with a wide selection of classics and recent bestsellers. Reading is an inherently efficient way to process information, beating out audio and video by significant margins.

But the demands and breakthroughs of modern life do not support deep reading habits. Though worldwide literacy is at an all-time high according to Our World in Data, today’s readers are thought to be shallow consumers of information, a phenomenon that researchers call the "shallowing hypothesis."

In our downtime, some of us like to escape or disassociate aka unwind by binging on the day’s news and wasting time on social media. Some may also have ever-shrinking attention spans, especially given the cognitive costs of living through a pandemic.

To counter these trends, Instaread developed a proprietary format designed to be absorbed quickly and easily without sacrificing depth of information synthesis. In 2018, the company added an audio format option for every title in the library, freeing users to listen to insights from books as they drive, commute, exercise, or do chores around the house. In late 2021 Instaread launched a “Cards” feature that features insights in a swipeable card format. Chitrapu describes it as “Instagram stories meets Tinder meets TikTok, for books.”

This approach has been wildly successful. The Instaread app has attracted more than 3 million users on its web, iOS, and Android platforms. It has also racked up more than 250,000 followers across social media channels. The app shares insights from new summaries from the fields of business and economics, self-help, political science, psychology, and health and fitness. New titles are added to the app every day.

While there are other use cases for the service – including researchers, people who don’t enjoy reading, or people who want to screen summaries for books they might read or hear in full – Instaread’s core users are people who wish to maintain their competitive edge and are life-long learners. They are reading their way through one of the world’s most efficient libraries, 15 minutes at a time.

Sign up for Instaread today and be the smartest person in the room after 15 minutes of condensed reading. Use PROMO code: USAINNO on instaread.co. 20% off for American City Business Journal Inno readers.