SkillTrip

SkillTrip turns self-learning into a guided journey with curated paths, AI mentorship, and smart reviews, making any skill easier to learn, structured, and accessible to everyone.

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Inspiration

Growing up in an East African country, Ethiopia, I often felt stuck in my learning journey. as the education system was flawed to say the least, and online resources for self-learners like myself were scattered and unstructured. I spent countless hours on online courses and YouTube tutorials, yet I rarely felt guided or supported. Music and programming highlighted the same problem: content was everywhere, but structured guidance was absent. SkillTrip was born from that frustration, most apps just try to give you more learning content, but we already have an unimaginable amount of learning material on the internet, the hardest part is actually knowing where to start, and after starting, what the next step should be and how to proceed, and not just for the most common skills, but for whatever skill you wanted to learn.

What it does

SkillTrip is an app that turns self-learning into a guided, structured journey, thus why I named it "Skill Trip". It offers curated learning paths, AI-powered custom learning path creation based on your learning goals and needs, an AI mentor which can give you advice, quiz you, give you motivation, answer your questions, and more based where you are in your learning journey. The app also has progress tracking, streaks, Smart Reviews with spaced repetition, quizzes, and frequent reflections to make learning mindful. All these features are designed to make learning as straightforward and mindful as possible, while avoiding all the guesswork and confusion.

Whenever you want to practice/learn something, it immediately tells you what to do. And what makes it special is it works for literally any skill you want to learn.

How I built it

SkillTrip was built using the Flutter framework for the UI, the Revenuecat SDK to handle subscriptions, and Supabase for Auth and back-end services.

Challenges I ran into

The Biggest challenge I encountered was because of where I lived, as an Ethiopian developer, I couldn’t create a Play Store merchant account, as my country wasn't supported, which in turn meant I couldn’t publish apps with in-app purchases. This was discouraging and further solidified the mindset most of my peers have, that building digital products is a privilege enjoyed mostly by westerners.

But I still didn't give up, and reached out to RevenueCat for advice, I learned from Guilherme that collaborating with someone in a supported country or trying to publish on the AppStore could be a solution. So, I collaborated with my aunt in the US, and got a short term solution for my problem.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

For learners that are from Ethiopia, SkillTrip is completely free, ensuring that skill-building is accessible regardless of geographic or financial barriers. I’m proud of building an app that can benefit people globally and is also locally available as access to digital goods is next to impossible where I live.

I'm also satisfied that I got to make a short film on my story as the submission demo, making short films is something I have been putting off for a very long time, I even wrote the guitar part myself, which made me truly happy, I would have never expected this to be my first film making experience.

I'm extremely happy that I got to solve (at least in a way) the frustration I was having while learning skills, and I'm sure that others could also relate, I’m also very proud of all of the custom animations and interactions that I put into the app, it gave me an unimaginable amount of experience regarding UX. Finally, navigating systemic barriers and successfully submitting my entry is a major accomplishment for me that I'll remember for years to come.

What I learned

I learned that persistence and asking for help when you need it is extremely important, no matter how independently we might want to do things.

What's next for SkillTrip

My vision is for SkillTrip to become the go-to platform for someone who's tired of the gimmicky gamified apps that give you the illusion of learning and waste your valuable time.

The next steps are to grow SkillTrip to become as big as it can, that way, I can provide free access to people that could genuinely benefit from the app but can't subscribe due to different restrictions. I'm just very excited to make things easier for people with the same challenges that I have faced. I'll be the happiest person alive if my app helps even a single person with the same struggles, as I don't want others to go through what I did.

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