Doomscrolling to learn languages is genius!
The most underrated startup strategy: find a “bad” habit and make it useful.
Borrow our audience?
What’s new?
Everyone knows doomscrolling is rotting our brains.
A new startup called Doomersion is using doomscrolling to change the future of language learning.
Founded in 2025 by Mostafa Afr, the app works like TikTok… except every video is designed to teach you a language.
The concept is brilliantly simple:
scroll short-form videos
get subtitles + translations
content adapts to your skill level
videos become slightly harder over time
Basically:
doomscrolling, but productive.
How genius!
The idea gained traction quickly.
~15,000 downloads in its first 2 weeks
some users reportedly spending more than 3 hours per day inside the app.
For context, Duolingo's average daily session is 5 minutes, but Doomersion's users are doing 3 hours, voluntarily.
The startup, formerly called “Doomlingo,” joined Y Combinator’s Winter 2026 batch and has become one of the more interesting examples of a broader trend:
→ Startups redesigning education around existing internet behavior instead of trying to fight against it.
Most language-learning apps try to convince users to study.
Doomersion asks a different question: “What if people are already spending 3 hours a day scrolling anyway?”
Instead of competing against dopamine-heavy apps like TikTok, the company tries to piggyback on the habit itself.
That’s a very different startup philosophy.
What’s cool?
If you’re building an app, take out your note because…
Here are 4 strategies Doomersion applied that got them ~15,000 downloads in 2 weeks: