I solved my pain of passively watching Youtube videos & forgetting everything, by making a tool that makes you actually learn from them
I realized this :
People, like me, can spend on numerous hours a week watching YouTube content.
And shockingly, we will remember less than 10% out of it (based on Ebbinghaus forgetting curve report that I read).
This is because people watch videos : passively. Without trying to remember information from it. And it's normal because who has the habit of taking notes when watching youtube videos ? It's not so common (perhaps students or motivated people).
So because I watch a lot of videos about neuro-science & how to learn things (ex https://www.youtube.com/@JustinSung).
I realized that to actually learn from a content like a Youtube video we need 2 things :
-
Structured summary with critical points -> helps the brain digest the information better thanks to structure bringing priority of information and order
-
Doing active learning -> meaning training your brain on it with quizz, flashcards, mindmaps
Based on that, I built a tool that applies this.
Just paste a youtube URL link → get a mini course out of it.
Built the landing page, prompt pipeline, and deployment in a week.
Threw it online. First users started using it immediately.
For now, what I've seen :
- Students use it to review lectures.
- Founders & indie hackers summarize long podcasts.
- Developers skim dev & AI explanations.
The biggest challenge now is :
- Distribution -> I'm learning all about it and it's a tough game! But I started doing youtube videos, posts, X and tiktok. If you have any tips on this, I'd love to hear it.
- Freemium model : I'm wondering how the freemium package should work ideally -> ex number of course generations ? or limitation on some tools ?
The tool I built :
https://holospark.ai/summarize-youtube
I left my job a few months ago and started this indiehacker journey. Would love your thoughts!
