When Oleksandr Matsiuk launched RiseGuide, the expert-powered self-improvement app, he aimed to claw back the time he, like many, wasted on social media. Today, 33% of people spend over six hours each day on their phones, while 39% scroll for over an hour without taking a break.
Yet, he made a conscious choice to ignore the common advice given to those struggling with digital addiction: put down your phone, set a screen time limit, charge it in another room. Many proposed restrictions as the best way to break the mindless habit – a belief that dominates headlines and shapes policies such as the ban on smartphones in schools.
Yet, it rarely works. In a recent Georgetown University study, only 25% of participants tasked with restricting their smartphone use to calls and texts completed the full two weeks.
The reason lies in the brain’s reward loop. You watch an interesting video, and your brain releases dopamine, which feels good. However, it also causes you to want more, so you watch another. The habit forms, the loop becomes subconscious, and it becomes increasingly difficult to break through willpower alone.
It’s an addiction, engineered by the brightest minds at Meta, Google, TikTok, and more, to maximise engagement and keep users online. In an age where smartphones are embedded in every part of life, it’s near impossible to ignore the pushy notifications, reels that autoplay, and shared content that you have to log in to view.
RiseGuide: Swapping Doomscrolling for Smartscrolling
“You can’t restrict your way out of digital addiction,” Matsiuk argues. “The only solution is substitution – taking the same dopamine loop and pointing it somewhere useful.”
That something useful, the founder believes, is RiseGuide: the self-improvement app determined to “steal engagement from doomscrolling apps” by aggregating the knowledge of well-known experts and role models to teach users important cognitive and communication skills through interactive, bite-sized lessons.
Built around the idea that the best way to break the doomscrolling habit is by repurposing it, it scratches the same itch through a stream of learning content – a concept Matsiuk has coined “smartscrolling”. Utilizing interactivity and gamification to hold attention, its lessons borrow directly from the social media experience. Users tap, answer, apply, and discuss in the same way they would scroll, like, and comment on TikTok or Instagram.
Then there’s the human element. Much like social media’s influencer content, lessons are built around specific experts solving specific problems, because people learn best by observing others. If they want to explore an idea further, they can ask SEEK, a personalised AI chatbot that answers follow-up questions based on carefully curated expert input.
Likewise, a daily streak, marking how many consecutive days a user has engaged with the app, maintains the dopamine loop. But instead of putting their phone down, feeling like they’ve wasted their leisure time, users walk away with a sense of pride and achievement.
“After doomscrolling, people feel guilty – like they’ve wasted their time. We’ve taken the same mechanics and best practices social media companies use to make their apps so addictive, and put them to good use. After using RiseGuide, people feel good about the progress they’ve made,” Matsiuk explains.
Turning Personal Struggle Into a Self-Improvement App
The concept stemmed from Matsiuk’s own struggles with social media dependency. Following the launch of the iPhone, Matsiuk stuck to a minimalist device for over a decade to avoid falling into social media’s trap – a practice that protected his time, allowing him to focus on beneficial hobbies. He was reading more than 50 books a year until 2017, when he purchased his first smartphone after moving to Switzerland to study, and that number fell to fewer than 10.
He tried a wealth of screen-time and digital-wellbeing apps, all designed around the idea of using your phone less, but they failed to break the loop.
It wasn’t until his roles as an investment analyst at TA Ventures and later as Head of Growth for venture builder SKELAR gave him a deep understanding of engagement mechanics – how digital products are deliberately designed to capture and hook users – that he realized the solution: repurposing those same mechanics for good.
So, when he sold his first venture – Trible, a monetization platform for creators – he poured his energy into building an app that took a different approach. With over a million downloads, 500,000 monthly users, and an average rating of 4.6/5 across the two leading app stores, RiseGuide is proof that his decision to go against the grain was the right one.
Smartphones Aren’t the Problem – It’s How We Use Them
Over 50% of people spend at least two hours on their phone each day, with four to six hours the norm for 31%. But that in itself isn’t the problem. The ability to find information, purchase goods, seek services, and learn skills through a screen you can carry everywhere is incredibly valuable.
The real tragedy, Matsiuk says, isn’t spending so much time using technology, but that many don’t use it to unlock their full potential. The internet has put an immeasurable wealth of knowledge at our fingertips. It’s, without question, the most powerful learning tool ever built. Yet, it’s predominantly used to scroll aimlessly through content engineered to consume our attention while providing little in return.
“Smartphones aren’t the enemy. We’ve just been trained to use them wrong. Use that screentime to consume the right content, and that same device becomes an incredibly powerful learning tool,” Matsiuk said.
We can’t put such useful technology back in the box. But with the right tools, perhaps we can at least put it to better use.
