I struggled in school. I’m dyslexic, and the way things were taught often didn’t work for me. It was only when I got to university and started learning through projects, teaching myself and finding my own way through the work that I began to understand what I was capable of.
That left me with a fairly strong feeling about education: people think differently, and the system doesn’t always make enough room for that.
The reason behind the purchase
Years later, working in online education, I saw another version of the same problem. People signed up to learn a skill, but the reason behind it was usually bigger. They wanted to start a business, change their career, get promoted or finally do something they had been thinking about for years.
The skill was transactional. The goal carried the meaning.
We spent a lot of time thinking about retention. But I increasingly felt that the question went beyond how to keep someone subscribed to a library. What did they actually need from us to move forward?
Learning had already escaped the course
People were piecing things together from YouTube, podcasts, Google searches and, increasingly, long conversations with AI. I was doing it myself. There was an incredible amount available, but you still had to find the useful part, work out whether it applied to you and decide what to do with it.
You could go through twenty videos to find the one that answered the question you actually had. Then you were back on your own, trying to connect that answer to the bigger thing you wanted to achieve.
What if the product started by understanding what you were trying to do?
That became the starting point for Kairo. Understand the person’s ambition, work out the goal, break it into milestones and bring them what they need as they move through it.
Building around the person
I wanted the experience to feel familiar enough that people could use it naturally. Media discovery, a conversation, short-form video and a visible plan could all belong in the same system, provided they were connected by the person’s goal.
My interest was never just in producing more content. It was in removing some of the work people were being left to do themselves: sorting through the noise, deciding what mattered and holding the whole path together.
That is what I believed needed to exist. It’s what we’re building.
See how the idea became a product