Learning Sticks Better When You Do It With People You Know

01 /The Concept

"The more time we spend together, the happier we become" – that's the pitch Easylii leads with when introducing its "social learning platform."

The platform's purpose is to help family members, friends, or friend groups find shared activities they can actually do together. Cooking classes, sewing, crafts, music lessons, pet training – anything that works for a group and makes for a more engaging way to spend time than another dinner out.

Activities are available both in-person and online, which matters in a world where families and friend groups are often spread across different cities or even countries. Online options make participation possible regardless of geography.

The "learning" angle isn't incidental. Showing up to do something together with no particular goal gets old quickly; wrapping shared time in a skill or activity gives it structure and meaning. Whether you actually care about learning to make pasta or just want an excuse to spend a Saturday afternoon with people you like – either is a valid reason to book.

Easylii includes tools to help groups identify topics that everyone finds both interesting and useful, not just one person's pet hobby. Preferred topics can be saved in-app, and the AI then automatically surfaces upcoming events in those categories – no manual searching each time.

The AI also analyzes the calendars of all group members to identify events that work for everyone's schedule, or at least for the majority.

The result is a single-button experience: tap "Let's get together," and the app proposes relevant upcoming events at times that work for the whole group. Book through the app, and the event drops into everyone's calendar automatically. Easylii appears to monetize through commissions from activity organizers.

Easylii was founded in September 2022 and has just closed its first funding round of $2M.

02 /Why It Matters

There's no shortage of platforms for discovering events, classes, and courses. What makes Easylii different is that it isn't really an event discovery tool – it's a relationship maintenance tool. The events are the mechanism; the goal is sustaining existing bonds.

In that sense it resembles Flamme, [covered here](/review/zhizn-posle-potrahushek) when it was still called Sparks. Flamme takes the same idea but scopes it to couples specifically – helping partners find restaurants, activities, and experiences to enjoy together, not to meet new people, but to keep their existing relationship alive and interesting.

The loneliness angle matters here. Despite – or perhaps because of – the rise of social media and always-on digital communication, more people report feeling lonely than at any previous point in recorded history. The US Surgeon General's 2023 advisory famously labeled the situation an "epidemic of isolation and loneliness."

The mechanisms are layered. People are forming fewer deep in-person connections with new people – follower counts and social network friends aren't the same thing as human relationships. Meanwhile, existing relationships are quietly fraying – not from conflict, but from neglect. The natural occasions that used to sustain friendships and family bonds have thinned out. People haven't become less interested in connection; they've become less practiced at creating the conditions for it. Showing up "just because" – especially in person – has started to feel awkward and logistically complicated.

Easylii's answer is to remove the friction: give people a fast, low-effort way to find a meaningful reason to get together. Learning something together is a particularly good format because it provides both a structured occasion and a natural conversation topic.

This reframing of education as a social activity is interesting in its own right. A [related review](/review/sledujushhij-fejsbuk) from summer 2021 covered Saturn, which raised $44M building a social network for college students organized around class schedules – the idea being that students who want to connect or maintain relationships choose to attend the same classes, turning academic life into a social infrastructure.

03 /Opportunities

The trend toward "education as social glue" has been building quietly for years. An early signal: when running a business course for teenagers several years ago, parents were invited to participate and help their kids with assignments. Feedback revealed that many parent-entrepreneurs valued the program primarily as a structured way to spend quality time with their kids – something more substantive than movies, family dinners, or the obligatory "how's school going?"

If this is a real trend rather than a one-off observation, it will grow. And if it grows, there's a business in it. Startups worth building are the ones positioned ahead of shifts that are already happening – in markets, technology, and human behavior.

The practical direction: build services that treat education as a social activity designed to forge new connections and maintain existing ones.

That could mean creating group-friendly courses that families or friend groups take together, or building platforms for more spontaneous shared learning experiences along the lines of Easylii.

The category feels underbuilt relative to the genuine unmet need. The practical entry point is to start with an underserved relationship type – adult siblings, long-distance friends, multigenerational families – where the scheduling and discovery friction is highest and the alternatives are thinnest.