Launch HN: Keet (YC S24) – An app to create video courses on anything

Keet is a mobile app from Zack and Tommy, two founders who met in linear algebra class and kept taking classes together for four years. Their pitch is simple: type in a topic, and the app generates a course with short videos and reinforcement activities that are meant to feel like a real curriculum instead of a loose stack of explanations.

The company’s starting point is familiar to anyone who has tried to teach themselves something outside school. Zack says he ran into this while trying to understand coffee brewing, pulling from YouTube, ChatGPT conversations, and books, only to find that each source assumed a different level of background knowledge. Keet is designed to find a starting point for you, then sequence lessons in what it thinks is the right order.

The app asks how hard the course should be, how deep it should go, and what the user wants to learn. It also classifies the topic using Biglan’s categories — hard-pure, hard-applied, soft-pure, and soft-applied — so it can change the kind of material it pulls in. A hard-pure course might lean on worked problems and proofs. A soft-pure course might lean on primary sources and contrasting views.

Keet’s founders say the product went from website to text-only mobile app to video lessons after they realized plain text was dull and hard to use on the go. They point to Vox and 3B1B as examples of making difficult ideas clearer, and they built explainer videos with Manim and Remotion for different kinds of content. The app is in TestFlight beta now, with three free course generations for each user and the code KEETHN on the waitlist screen.

There’s also plenty they say is still rough. Personalization mostly tracks topic and course goal for now, course generation is slow, and the reinforcement layer is still being improved. Pricing is headed toward a monthly subscription with credits, which is a very startup way to say “we’ll bill you for curiosity.”