"Quests" Will Blow Up the $350B E-Learning Market

01 /The Concept

Branching narratives – "choose your own adventure" in the old parlance, quests in the modern one – have found their way into a software platform, and the early traction suggests the format has been waiting for this moment.

The mechanics are straightforward: a quest is a branching story that evolves based on the user's choices. Each step is a card with an image or video, a brief situation description, and buttons to pick the next action. Hit a button and you land on the next card with a new situation. The author designs the story and all its branching paths using a visual graph editor that maps cards and connections. An AI engine then generates images or video for each card based on the situation description and adds voiceover to the text.

Payment works on a credit model. Credits are consumed when generating images, video, or using other AI features. The entry point is $20 worth of credits, though early adopters currently get 50% off.

The platform earned Product Hunt's #1 Product of the Day – which means the broader maker community validated it, not just its creator.

02 /Why It Matters

The founder mentioned using Questas to build stories about his own life, games for his kids, and "what if" scenarios for friends. That detail triggered a useful comparison with several platforms that have recently emerged in this space.

Fifth Door ([related review](/review/kuda-smotrjat-faundery-uzhe-zarabotavshie-milliard-dollarov)) is building a platform where users can create and play games without any coding. The company hasn't launched yet, but it raised $20M in late November – founded by the ex-CEO of Cruise, an autonomous vehicle startup acquired by General Motors for around $3 billion. When someone with that track record bets on a new category, it's worth paying attention.

Y Combinator graduate Sagaland took a similar approach but focused specifically on "playable books" – text-based quests that readers navigate through as a story. The AI handles dialogue and narrative generation from the author's plot structure.

And Then ([covered here](/review/a-vot-jetim-malo-kto-zanimaetsja-nu-i-ochen-zrja)), which graduated from a16z's accelerator in October and raised around $1M, extended the quest format into fully voice-driven mode – players can navigate branching stories entirely through speech.

Wabi ([related review](/review/zabud-pro-app-store)) raised $20M in early November for a broader take: a platform where anyone can build any kind of software using AI, not just games and quests.

What all of these share is a social layer. Participants don't exchange posts or videos – they exchange programs, games, interactive experiences. These social networks became possible only because AI reduced the cost of creation to near zero, making it something people can do purely for fun... or for an audience.

That said, the "next-generation social network" pitch depends on a critical mass of creators and consumers materializing. Whether that happens at scale – even with today's simplified tools – is genuinely unclear. Though, as always, "you have to try"

What actually grabbed attention in Questas is the parenting angle. The founder mentioned building quests for his kids. That raises a real question: what would motivate a parent to build an interactive experience for their child? Parents are lazy like everyone else.

The only compelling answer: education. Lectures don't work on kids. But kids will happily spend hours on a phone or tablet absorbing... whatever's there. The insight is that a parent could create something playable that delivers the lesson they're actually trying to get across

Yes, that's more effort than giving a lecture. But a lecture's ROI is usually zero. An interactive story at least has a chance – and some parents will find that worth the effort.

Zooming out, this points toward a broader opportunity: quests as an educational format, applicable to school curricula, online courses, corporate training, anywhere. The advantages stack up:

- Quests are inherently more engaging than passive lectures.

- They're active learning, not passive consumption. Active learning is consistently more effective.

- Players don't fear taking the "wrong" path – it's a game. But they do see where wrong paths lead, which makes the lesson stick.

A quest, at its core, combines explanation and comprehension testing in a single format – wrapped in something people actually want to engage with.

And building one doesn't require starting from scratch. ChatGPT can already generate a learning curriculum for any topic. The logical extension is a platform where you upload a textbook chapter and the AI produces a quest from it – complete with explanations, visuals, branching paths that lead to different conclusions.

03 /Opportunities

The trend is clear: interactive quests are starting to move into education, because they can now be generated at scale with AI.

They're particularly well-suited for younger learners who haven't developed the intrinsic motivation to push through boring material. But adults are fair game too – there are far more people who enjoy playing than people who enjoy studying.

The specific opportunity, then, is platforms for generating educational quests from uploaded learning materials. Over time, this category could replace significant chunks of the video-lecture-and-quiz format that dominates online learning today.

The online education platform market sits at roughly $350 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $1.3 trillion by 2032. That's a very large, very much alive bear whose territory is up for grabs.

So – does building an AI platform for educational quest creation sound like the right move?