Schematic: How Things Work

Schematic explains how the things around you work — breakers, boilers, plumbing, engines — in 90-second narrated lessons with a quick check at the end. Become the adult who can fix things.

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💡 Inspiration

My friend is a marketing manager who watches what the biggest Facebook and Instagram advertisers run. In late June she spotted a large learning company running hundreds of ads for "learn how electricity works" and "obsessive electricity games", with new ones every week. There was no product behind them: every click landed on a quiz for an unrelated app.

Nobody pays for hundreds of ads for months unless people click. There was a gap in the market, so it was time to find out whether there was a market in the gap.

I picked a name on August 15, and Schematic: How Things Work went live on the App Store on September 15.

📱 What it does

  • Short animated lessons you tap through, with narration and synced captions. Each one starts from a real moment ("It's 7pm. You plug in the kettle…"), explains one idea with one analogy, and ends with three quick questions.
  • Topics: Electricity, Home Appliances, Plumbing and Engineering, with titles like Why Pipes Bang and Why Triangles Hold.
  • Games that teach the same ideas: Close the Loop, Wire It, Bridge It and Which Draws More?. Every level points to the lesson behind it.
  • A start that fits you: onboarding finds your gaps, and the app opens on the lesson that closes the biggest one.

🎨 Design

One idea, one analogy, one screen. Every illustration comes from a single riso-style sprite library, and each topic keeps its own colour across its tile, its lessons and its games. The games show the physics: current flows along the wires in Close the Loop, and in Bridge It members glow blue when they're pulled and clay-red when they're squeezed.

💰 How it makes money: "Design Your Trial"

One $69.99/year plan, and the paywall asks how you want your trial to start: 7 days free or $2.99 for 30 days. The free week suits cautious buyers. The paid month gives committed learners time to build the habit and screens out trial-hunters. Lapsed subscribers can still browse the library and get a $39 win-back offer; everyone else sees one hard paywall at the end of onboarding.

The biggest lesson came after launch. RevenueCat showed trials cancelled within hours: people paid, landed on a pannable skill-tree map, and didn't know where to start. I replaced it with a simple grid and a first-run tour through one full lesson. 95% of new subscribers now play a lesson.

🔨 How I built it

Swift and SwiftUI on iOS 26, starting from the player and subscription stack of my previous audio-learning app. Narration is ElevenLabs v3, lesson animation is made in Claude Design, and Claude Code was my pair programmer throughout, from porting Simon Tatham's Net puzzle generator to the bridge physics and the CI checks. Firebase, RevenueCat and Amplitude run the backend.

🥵 Challenges

  • Rejected on the first try. App Review made me remove a "Rate the app" screen from onboarding and fix an audio bug.
  • An empty library on launch day. The first two trials were cancelled, so I tested the live build and found the catalog had never been seeded. I fixed it server-side the same day.
  • Games took the longest. They finally released only 5 days before the Shipaton deadline

🚀 What's next

New lessons every week, a RevenueCat Experiments on a new paywall to improve trial->paid rate, Apple's Retention Messaging API, and web checkout.

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