I can lose 45 minutes to short videos without noticing. Swipe, swipe, swipe. Most nights, I could not tell you one thing I learned.
The frustrating part is that some of the best teachers in the world are giving away free lessons on video sites. Guitar chords, personal budgeting, public speaking, photography basics. It is all there. It is just buried under everything else, with no order to it and no way to pick up where you left off.
The online course sites I tried had the opposite problem. Everything was organized, but every lesson was a 40-minute commitment behind a monthly subscription. I wanted the habit-forming swipe of a short video app, pointed at something useful. So I built MicroLearn.
How the System Works
MicroLearn is a feed of short lessons that learns what you like. Open it, swipe, and pick up a new skill a few minutes at a time.
- A Feed That Gets to Know You: The feed pays attention to which topics you finish and which you skip. Over time it serves more of what you stick with, and it mixes in fresh lessons so it never goes stale.
- Courses Built in Seconds: A teacher types a topic like "photography fundamentals." The system breaks it into an ordered set of bite-sized lessons and finds a strong free video for each step.
- Reminders Right Before You Forget: Lessons you have finished come back around on a schedule, a day later, then a few days, then a week, which is the same method language-learning apps use to make things stick.
- Install It Like an App: It runs in any phone or computer browser, and you can add it to your home screen so it opens like a regular app, without an app store download.
- Teachers and Learners: Only approved teachers can create courses. Everyone else just learns, which keeps the content library clean.
Overcoming the Friction
1. Running Out of Free Searches
The video site lets a free account run only about 100 searches a day. Building a new course uses a batch of them, and so does the feed when it goes hunting for fresh lessons. Early on, those two features did not know about each other. One busy afternoon of course-building could have left the feed empty for the rest of the day.
I gave the whole system one shared counter. Every search goes through the same gate, so course-building and the feed draw from the same daily budget and never overspend it.
2. A Thin Feed for New Interests
If you told MicroLearn you love woodworking and there were only three woodworking lessons in the library, you would see them once and then hit a wall. Now, when your favorite topics run low on lessons you have not seen, the feed quietly goes out and finds more on the spot.
3. Built to Become a Phone App Later
I was not sure yet whether this deserved its own app store listing. Instead of guessing, I made the web version installable and kept everything behind the scenes separate from the screens. If MicroLearn takes off, a phone app can be added on top later without rebuilding anything underneath.
The Business Win
- Five Courses on Day One: It launched with ready-made courses in guitar basics, beginner programming, public speaking, personal finance, and photography.
- No Content Costs: Every lesson is a free video from an existing teacher, so there is no library to film or license.
- Low Running Costs: Careful use of the daily search limit keeps video searches inside the free allowance, so the main cost is the small AI charge each time a new course is built.
The next step is opening MicroLearn to a few schools and small training teams who want to hand their people a short, guided set of lessons instead of a stack of hour-long videos.
Curious what this looks like for something you need built? See more of these side by side on the case studies page.
Top comments (0)