Oleksandr Matsiuk on Building RiseGuide and Why Human Expertise Still Wins in the Age of AI
Oleksandr Matsiuk is the founder and CEO of RiseGuide, a microlearning app that has been downloaded more than a million times and offers expert-led, human-written lessons built on the experiences of role models. Before RiseGuide, he led growth at the venture builder SKELAR and built and sold Trible, which taught him that a product can’t be built for everyone and that you have to commit to a specific audience. Having seen startups as an investor, growth operator, and founder, he looks beyond the idea itself to how well the founder, the team, and the environment fit together. He also believes that as AI fills the internet with content, accountable human expertise will only become more valuable. In this interview, Oleksandr shares what he has learned about product-market fit, competing for attention without addictive tricks, keeping a lean builder culture, and turning potential into action.
Oleksandr Matsiuk, Founder and CEO of RiseGuide
What did you see in the way people approach self-improvement that convinced you RiseGuide needed to exist?
There are two approaches to self-improvement I’ve always believed in, and they were never combined in one product. The first is learning through people. We trust people more than brands or institutions, so when a trusted expert shares their insights, or the content is based on the insights of our role models, we want to engage with it. The second is microlearning, which fits 2026 well, because attention spans are short and people want knowledge that is quick and interactive. No product brought these two together. That struck me as a very big gap, both as a business opportunity and because people were missing out on something that genuinely helps them. That was the thinking behind RiseGuide, and these two approaches are the ones that help over a million people who downloaded our app.
How has seeing startups as an investor, growth operator, and founder changed the way you judge whether an idea is worth pursuing?
I no longer judge an idea on its own. What matters more is the match between the founder and the idea, and between the idea and the environment it is built in, because execution counts for more than the idea itself. And execution depends on the founder, the team, and where they are based. Location is a real constraint. Capital-intensive businesses are harder to build from Eastern Europe, where capital is scarcer, than from the United States. B2B SaaS is easier from English-speaking markets, where there are more companies and more connections to draw on. So the question I ask now is not just how strong the business model, product, and market are, and how much the team and its location help them actually execute.
What did building and selling Trible teach you about product-market fit that you now treat as non-negotiable?
The lesson I treat as non-negotiable is that you cannot build a product for everyone. One-size-fits-all does not reach product-market fit. You have to choose a specific audience and build for them as well as you can. With Trible, we tried to serve too many groups at once, and we only found product-market fit once we committed to a specific audience. We carry the same discipline into RiseGuide when we choose course topics. However promising a new trend looks, we only pursue it if it genuinely fits the audience we already serve and our human-first, expert-led approach.
As AI makes information almost unlimited, why do you believe curated expert knowledge becomes more valuable?
Experts stake their reputation on what they say, so they are accountable for being right. A language model is not. It feels nothing when it is wrong, and no one is responsible for the answer it gives. That accountability is what makes expert knowledge more trustworthy. It also makes it more valuable over time, because the internet is filling up with AI-generated content, increasingly produced by AI trained on other AI. There is a well-known idea called the dead internet theory, which argues that most online activity is bots talking to bots. It comes with some conspiracy, but it does have real grounding. And the more content is generated by AI, the more valuable real human knowledge becomes. Large platforms see this too. Meta, for example, has said it will prioritize human-made content because it is more valuable to users. That is why our lessons are written by humans and are based on role models' experience and real expert insights.
Can self-improvement products compete with social platforms for attention without copying the same addictive mechanics?
This is very hard, and to be honest, I don't have a final answer yet. In some ways it is an unfair fight. But something similar happened when newspapers arrived. People traded books for faster, more up-to-date information, and critics called it low quality, but over time even literature adopted those faster formats to stay relevant. So I would reframe the question. The mechanics that make social platforms engaging are not bad in themselves. What matters is the content you put behind them. Used to deliver something valuable, those same mechanics are perfectly fine. We are still working out how to do it well, but the mechanics are not the problem.
What have you learned about turning passive scrolling into learning that people actually practice and apply?
Our answer is variety. We ensure that back-to-back lessons always use different formats. One centers on reading, the next on short videos, and another on practice, with tools, simulators, or a small-talk game. Mixing the formats keeps the experience fresh, and that novelty is part of what keeps people going. We also make the material interactive rather than passive. Instead of a long page you simply scroll through, there are flip cards, spoilers, and questions built into the content, and even a video, which runs four minutes at most, can pause partway to ask you something. That mix of variety and interactivity is how we turn passive scrolling into active learning.
How do you protect a builder culture as a company grows without creating unnecessary bureaucracy?
We keep teams small. The company grows by creating more teams, rather than by increasing the size of each individual team. We follow Amazon's two-pizza rule: a team is the right size when two pizzas can feed it. Small teams are autonomous and get most of their work done internally, so they need very little bureaucracy and rarely depend on other teams to move forward. A side effect I like is that each team develops its own methods and approaches to work. Even teams within the same department, e.g., different marketing teams, work in noticeably distinct ways, with their own rhythms and checkpoint agendas.
You often learn through biographies and other people's experiences. What makes a lesson from someone else's life worth applying to your own?
You can learn from almost anyone, as long as you weigh it against your own situation. What matters is not whether you share someone's values but whether their experience is relevant to you at this specific point in time. If someone is driven by money and that is not your goal, their lessons may simply not apply, though that does not make them any less valuable in themselves. The right starting point is to understand your own goal, then see whether it lines up with theirs. It also helps to learn from people unlike you, so you are not only hearing from those you already agree with. I experienced this with a colleague whose background was the opposite of mine. He was a natural salesperson and relationship-builder where I was more of an analytic who relied on data and pure logic rather than charm, and I disagreed with his methods at first. But his approach worked; we came to respect each other, and I became far more of a people person because of him.
What is one principle you believe people should follow if they want to turn more of their potential into action?
You need to act more. As Wayne Gretzky said, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Most people are held back by the fear of failing, often because they feel unready, and that feeling is worth accepting rather than fighting. Here comes the Peter principle: people tend to rise to their level of incompetence. Each time you are promoted, you start out unready, because you earned the role through the previous one, not the new one. Becoming a manager for the
first time is the classic case: you are promoted for being a strong individual contributor, not for the skills you have yet to build. That does not mean you should avoid it. Being unready is normal, and the only way through it is to try.
