In two years,

Some of the smartest people in the world have worked hard developing digital engagement loops that tackle the brain’s evolutionary built-in reward system. Essentially, when you see an interesting short video, when your streak goes up, or when someone likes your comment, your brain releases dopamine. It feels good, and you’re hardwired to seek more of the “feel good stuff”, so you do it again. Likewise, when your friends share content that you have to log in to view or a pushy notification tells you what’s trending, it elicits a FOMO – your brain’s primal response to the fear of social exclusion.

These features have been designed to get us hooked with very little conscious effort. Today, the average person uses their phone for

It’s something I’ve personally struggled with, so I don’t believe smartphone and social media addiction is something that people can overcome with willpower alone. For the first decade after the iPhone launched, I resisted getting a smartphone, having seen just how much time those close to me were wasting. However, in 2017, when I moved abroad to study, I gave in – and was immediately drawn in by the social media algorithms. In the space of a year, I went from reading 50 books to fewer than 10.

Social media’s addictive formula

I tried every ‘solution’ – digital detoxes, screen-time limits, deleting apps – but they all essentially boiled down to ‘just do it less’… which ignores both how these platforms manipulate the unconscious parts of our minds, and just how much added value we perceive from spending time on them, which makes it “worthy” of sticking with despite of the obvious drawbacks.

Coined by Nir Eyal, social media companies rely on the ‘Hook Model’, a four-step loop to build habits and maximize engagement:

Trigger → A cue that encourages use. Constant external triggers, such as notifications and paid ads, cause us to form associations with internal triggers like boredom and FOMO. Eventually, when we experience these feelings, we’re unconsciously drawn to social media.

Action → The intended user behavior, such as logging in, watching a video, or leaving a comment. Great thought goes into usability to ensure that completing actions doesn’t require a great deal of motivation and effort.

Variable reward → A reward for completing the action, such as an achievement badge or a new perk unlocked. Making the reward unpredictable triggers the parts of our brain associated with desire and novelty, which compels users to keep scrolling.

Investment → Payment, typically in the form of time, data, or effort, such as watching an ad, creating a profile, or inviting a friend. Companies can use data generated to fine-tune the loop, while invested users are far more likely to return.

Repurposing social media engagement

In my own case, what eventually worked was not prohibition but substitution: pouring my time into creating a platform that could draw people’s attention away from social media and towards building skills that would propel them to get ahead in life.

Just from observing the growth of social media usage, digital trends, and user behaviour, I realised people were never going to abandon the habit entirely. So we would have to find a way to redirect it without taking them off their phones, and here social media offered a highly successful blueprint. Figuring the same loop that encourages doomscrolling could get people to stick to something that provides real benefits, we developed our own “hook” inside RiseGuide:

Trigger → Lessons that start with a hook, e.g. by recognizing a struggle users have faced in the past. Drawing on relatable lived experiences motivates them to recognise the need for a change, and find motivation to get started. Moreover, some of our interactive tools create external retention triggers. For example, users preparing for a networking event often return to RiseGuide’s “Intro Builder” to generate a tailored self-introduction for the occasion.

Action → Mobile-first, interactive, and chunked short-form content, which users are familiar with from social media. Lessons are modeled around practical application rather than passive scrolling. Likewise, theory and application are combined, with users completing lessons to improve practice scores, or completing practice to apply learned concepts.

Invariable rewards → Animations, micro-interactions, and interactive video elements within lessons provide people with consistent dopamine. Different user choices unlock different learning pathways. Similarly, showing progress, through updated user score following practice, keeps users motivated to keep improving, much like a follower count – but in a more meaningful way.

Investment →  Interactive practice tools that allow users to continue progressing, but require time and effort to complete. That investment, coupled with the reward of an improved score, a high streak, and certificates for journeys completed, encourages users to return to the app.

The social aspect is also highly important. Many of the basic features that keep us hooked, such as comments, shares, and tags, are designed to play on our primal desire for community and belonging. RiseGuide leans into that by complementing every lesson with a discussion thread, where learners can discuss and compare their results, get advice, or simply share their story. It’s the same instinct as finishing an interesting video and opening the comments section to see what everyone else thinks of it.

Delivering value over engagement

While RiseGuide has borrowed elements from social media, its hook introduces a fifth step:

Value → Every user should finish a session having gained real, useful knowledge that they can immediately go out and put into practice.

I don’t view social media as inherently bad. There’s value in platforms that connect us with the vast world around us and provide opportunities to socialize, but the way we use them these days almost disconnects us from the initial purpose they served. In fact, much of tech is suffering from the same problem: metrics such as app open rates, use time, and session length are treated as the ultimate measure of success, because greater engagement means users see more ads. In reality, what we should also be tracking is value delivered – and not simply within the app.

Initially, RiseGuide used ratings to judge the quality of a lesson, until it occurred to me that those who skim through lessons without learning anything valuable would blindly click five stars and move on. That information wasn’t very useful. Instead, we implemented a formula that blends ratings, completion time, and completion rates for both lessons and practice sessions. That formula shows not only that users are completing the lesson, but that they're taking the time they need to really process information, and that they're enjoying the experience. Essentially, that they're getting something for the time they're investing.

However, the true value often isn’t realized until long after the user logs out. One of the insights we’ve gained from customer interviews is that the ‘aha moment’ doesn’t follow a lesson or practice. Users complete a lesson, try out a tool, and go about their day. But in their next work meeting, when they put what they learned into practice, and everyone stops and listens, it hits them. The value isn’t in how many days they’ve maintained their streak or how quickly they complete a journey, but how it improves their life.

In the end, our goal is not to substitute six hours of doomscrolling with six hours of growthscrolling. It’s for people to spend 30 minutes a day building confidence and making tangible progress in their communication skills, which they can put into practice in the real world and start enjoying their offline life more.

Social media's addictive formula

The Hook Model, coined by Nir Eyal, describes this loop in four steps: a trigger that prompts you to act, an action made as effortless as possible, a variable reward that keeps the outcome unpredictable and therefore compelling, and an investment of time, data, or effort that makes you more likely to return. It is an accurate and, frankly, elegant description of how habits get built.

But it is worth pausing on what the model does not contain. Nowhere in those four steps is there a requirement that your life actually improved. The loop is optimised for the return visit, not for the value you took away from it — which is exactly why the same four steps describe a slot machine as neatly as they describe a language app. That gap, engagement without value, is the line between a habit that serves you and one that quietly exploits you. It is also the gap we set out to close.

Repurposing engagement for good

We didn't reverse-engineer addiction. We asked a different question: what makes someone come back to a thing not because they were nudged, but because it is genuinely making their life better? For us the answer is self-development. That is the engine underneath everything – you learn something, you apply it in your life, and you return a slightly better version of yourself. The loop we built inside RiseGuide borrows the shape of Nir Eyal's model, but changes what powers each step.

Trigger → real life, not a manufactured need. The trigger is the most manipulative part of any engagement loop, and it is the part we deliberately left alone. Social media manufactures its triggers – the notification, the badge, the "your friends are talking about this" – precisely to create a need that wasn't there a moment ago. We don't. Our trigger already exists in your life: the desire to get better at it. It's the moment you didn't have the confidence to ask for the raise, couldn't find the words with a close friend or a family member, froze halfway through a presentation that mattered, or felt some part of your life slipping out of your control. That friction is the real trigger – the one that sends you back to the app to learn how to handle it. Nobody has to invent it for you.

Action → learning from people who have actually mastered it. You come back to learn from people who are genuinely better at this than you are – and, crucially, people who didn't simply get lucky, but who put in the years to become who they are. Content like that doesn't need to be sold; the credibility is built in. It's why our users so often ask us for things we hadn't even built yet: one of the most common requests is a speaking lesson built around Barack Obama, whose standing as an orator is acknowledged well across the political divide. People don't ask to learn public speaking "in general." They ask to learn it from the person they already admire for it.

Action, part two → ???. This is the one place we borrowed from social media without any hesitation, because what we took was the format, not the manipulation. Theory on its own simply isn't engaging enough to compete for anyone's attention, so we deliver it the way people already like to consume everything else on their phones: short, mobile-first, interactive, and dynamic — video, games, and lessons that branch into different paths depending on the choices you make. It kills two birds with one stone: the same qualities that make a lesson pleasant to sit through are the qualities that make it stick. We took a format people love and poured something worth learning into it.

Reward → the feeling of progress. The best reward we can offer isn't a badge or a buzz; it's the felt sense that you are actually getting better. That's why theory and practice sit side by side in every lesson: you complete a lesson to do better in the practice, and you practise to watch the ideas you just learned actually work. When your speaking score climbs after a round of practice, it means something — not because a number went up, but because the thing the number measures went up with it.

Investment → effort that pays off, because the tool is useful. Every loop asks the user to invest something: time, effort, attention. The real question is whether that investment is repaid. The clearest lesson here comes from two apps that began in the same place. Reface and FaceApp both started as face-swap tools, yet FaceApp went on to earn a place on what feels like every second phone while Reface stayed a novelty. The difference was utility — FaceApp built genuinely useful features, like retouching a photo or clearing up a blemish, while Reface kept turning you into Shrek. Novelty is borrowed for an afternoon; utility is kept. Our own version is the Speech Analyzer: it takes real effort to use, but it solves a problem people obviously have, and that usefulness is exactly what turns effort into a reason to return.

Value over engagement

Social media's loop has four steps. Ours has a fifth, and it is the one that holds up the other four: value. Every session should end with the user having gained something real — a skill, an insight, a bit more confidence — that they can carry straight out into their life. It's tempting to treat value as the last step in the sequence, but that gets it backwards. Value isn't where the loop ends; it's the reason the loop is allowed to exist at all. Strip it out and you're left with exactly the machine we set out not to build.

This is why our goal was never to swap six hours of doomscrolling for six hours of "growthscrolling." Winning a user's entire day was never the point. If someone spends fifteen to thirty focused minutes with us, gets better at something that matters, and then closes the app to go and live their life a little better offline, that is the win. We are not competing for all of your attention — we are trying to hand a small amount of it back to you with interest. Done honestly, we think this can be a way out of the doomscrolling trap rather than another version of it.

That belief has to show up in what we measure, because a company optimises for whatever it counts. Early on, we judged a lesson by its star rating — until it became obvious that someone skimming through without learning a thing could just as easily tap five stars and move on. So we stopped trusting the rating on its own. A lesson's quality is now scored on a formula that blends its rating with completion time, completion rate, and — downstream — how many users go on to complete the practice and how well they score. Together, those signals tell us something a rating never could: not just that people finished, but that they gave the material the time it takes to sink in, stayed engaged enough to enjoy it, and actually put it to use. In other words, that they got real value for the time they invested — which is the only number we think is worth building a company around.

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