Posted by hussein-khalil 12/15/2025
Ask HN: Is building a calm, non-gamified learning app a mistake?
I intentionally avoided gamification, streaks, subscriptions, and engagement tricks. The goal was calm learning — fewer distractions, more focus.
I’m starting to wonder if this approach is fundamentally at odds with today’s market.
For those who’ve built or used learning tools: – Does “calm” resonate, or is it too niche? – What trade-offs have you seen when avoiding gamification?
Not here to promote — genuinely looking for perspective.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=st6uE-dlunY
Found this episode fairly interesting (without being particularly interested or personally invested in the space)
He talks about how they wanted to let people know that they would stop sending them notifications after five days of inactivity, but that the "passive-aggressive" nature of that notification actually got people to come back. To me it illustrates that it's such a fine line to walk if you want to respect the user but also maybe push through their own lack of motivation.
(I'm not a user of Duolingo so I can't speak to where they land on that but it's clearly controversial)
The funny passive-aggressive communication style is something I personally consider Duolingo's thing. I kinda like it that they have a persona and stick with it in all of their communication.
If it was cold and to the point "you have missed today's lesson", I wouldn't come back.
Spent 6 months building the product. Now I’m focusing on marketing and branding.
I’ve spent last few weeks studying other successful educational products.
And so far, from my research, pretty much every single one of these apps/sites prioritized making the user “feel good” about learning rather than actually learning.
And unfortunately, this is what the users want. They want to feel good about learning.
All the successful education sites employ these mechanisms that you’re intending to avoid. I wanted to avoid using these as well - but I just don’t see another way. I’ve even had users explicitly ask me to add milestones, streaks, etc to motivate them.
Reality is - most people who really want to study or learn anything, can do so without an app. Even a book from a library will do. But it requires tremendous consistency, effort and time. Apps are way easier and make the user feel good - there’s still learning being done, don’t get me wrong. But user feeling good about it is what keeps them coming back.
Edit: I’ve also studied many of their ads. Often times on places like TikTok, Instagram, etc their ads are what I would call “intelligence porn”. They get you excited about being more intelligent, investing in yourself, intelligence eliticism, etc. These were a common ad strategy that I have discovered so far.
Some apps literally ran ads with text: “become dangerously intelligent” text and had the song from the show Succession play with images of famous researchers and scientists changing quickly. (Newton, Einstein, etc). Stuff like this cracked me up tbh lol. But apparently it works
So if you are building a learning app where learning is forced on the learner by someone else (their boss, employer, parent etc), then gamification won't be of any real use. No one will care if they just unlocked some imaginary points.
On the other hand, my kids love learning in apps like Duolingo where they are proud of the "streak" they have for continuous number of days. But here is the thing. No one asked them to learn this stuff. They got interested (by watching a friend etc) and now they are playing the same game.
I spent 8 years in jr high - college studying German without having any real competency in German, it did however teach me something about learning another language.
Mango isn't gamified. Its basically a curated set of flashcards, and the lessons are essentially flashcards themed together. There are some extra explainers throw in that are helpful. I really enjoyed it.
On top of Mango as the primary lessons, I've been listening to podcasts, watching series in french, reading books, etc.
I didn't pay anything for mango, it was entirely funded by my local library so that was great.
https://www.justinmath.com/why-is-the-edtech-industry-so-dam...
It ended up being easier to Vibe code a bespoke one that took the input in a format that was easier to provide.
Strangely, through iterative prototyping, the app evolved into something that my testers (and teachers) are calling... a game. I see it as a good thing, and I am adapting this language. The free version is about 'play,' and the paid version is about 'study'.
Reach out if you would like to chat!
This is cool, and I've auto-didacted a number of things with resources like this, and I know most here have as well.
But, watching the interview with the Duolingo CEO linked in this thread, he's talking about reaching the far larger set of people that don't have strong intrinsic motivation to learn. Which is arguably a much more difficult and more important mission. The natural learners (and kids of white-collar parents) are already pretty well-equipped by the general state of the internet. This is where I'm finding some appreciation for some of the techniques that might be considered low-brow or deleterious by that cohort.
As far as CEOs go he did seem sincere to me in a half-business half-believer kind of way. The interviewer asks pointedly about his transition from academia to IPO-land.
Some learning products are just content with zero container. Books are the limit example. Karpathy's "Let's build GPT" is another.
Most learning products -- and all apps -- live or die by the container they create. (There is no reason to build a learning app other than to build a container. If you feel you have the best content, ship it on a content platform and save yourself a very painful distribution slog.
Duolingo is in the container game. Their container is made of every cheap trick in the book -- notifications, streaks, etc -- because they work. My startup was Hack Reactor, the coding bootcamp, and we did it with pair programming and fixed classroom hours. (We had great content, but our competitors with good containers and bad content did leagues better than vice versa.)
If you're building an app, you're in the container game. You can build a great container with no cheap tricks. I have done so! But you can't build a great learning app with no container, and you can't build a great container if you if you don't want to change your users' patterns of engagement and attention.
So, what is your container? How will you weave a powerful spell that meaningfully transforms the attention and engagement of the app's user? What will cause them to pull up your app again and again, when they would have churned from a simple anki deck or whatnot? Given that you find it distasteful to use the easy levers you mentioned (notifications, "streak" psychology), what alternatives can shift your users' patterns of attention and engagement towards the learning task?
If you have great answers to those questions, great! If you don't want to build a container, build content on a platform with easy distribution. If you want to build a container but you don't want to shape your users' attention or engagement, you are confused.
I run a productivity desktop app by myself and have been doing it full time since 2017. The app is a one time payment, free support, no gimmicks, no marketing. Support is becoming time consuming, but profit is high enough that I may hire a few people to help soon.
Good luck! High growth rates with investors is one way to do things, but not the only way.
You can start a conversation with someone, and talk to them about say, the Saracens, and then have them start wondering how they came about their (small) understanding of them. When they realise it was AOE cutscenes, and that the whole project was a backdoor to deliver historical knowledge to people.
I feel like if you eschew gamification, your audience is largely only those with a deep interest of learning.
I used an app to do a security cert a while back, and it would bug me 3 times a day, and challenge me to test my knowledge. I think it really helped keep my focus on the challenge. Likewise, when I was doing my CCNA years ago, the In-30-Days gentleman, would subscribe you to 30 days of motivational emails to read his book and practice the skills. Not an app, but the same sort of thing.
Some people sell the motivation as the core product, some sell the game as the core product (to deliver motivation) and some people sell the knowledge as the core product. All are valid approaches just make sure you are happy with the market you are targeting.
One more thing: I have absolutely no idea how to obtain calm in todays environment. I dont see myself engaging with an app that requires me to be calm ahead of time, but if it somehow strengthened or created a sense of calm that might be a sufficient product differentiator.