Building Politiface in public: a Duolingo for understanding how government actually works

Hi IH. First post, so a quick intro and then what I'm actually doing.

I'm a builder and, unusually for this place, a field sales operator. My day job is running a telecom field sales operation in the Greater Toronto Area, which is about as far from the typical founder origin story as it gets. I build software in the margins around it.

Last year my co-founder and I shipped PubQ, a scheduling tool for Substack Notes. It's a live product with a real pricing page and real users. I learned an enormous amount shipping it. But I built almost all of it heads-down, in private, and only showed up once it felt "ready." I think that was a mistake. I missed out on feedback when it was cheap to act on, and I missed the accountability of having people watch.

So I'm not doing that again. My next product I'm building in the open, from the first commit, and I'd like this community to hold me to it.

Here's the thing.

It's called Politiface. The one-liner: a Duolingo-style app for actually understanding how government works, not memorizing trivia. Most people (me included, until embarrassingly recently) can't cleanly explain the difference between a cabinet department and an independent agency, or trace how the court system actually connects to the rest of the structure. The information exists, but it lives in dense org charts and Wikipedia tables that nobody learns anything from.

The core idea is to take the real structure of government, the actual hierarchy, and turn it into a map you progress through. You start at the top with the three branches, and you light up the map by mastering one piece at a time. Master "the President" and the cabinet and the independent agencies unlock beneath it. The structure itself becomes the game board.

Before writing a line of product code, I spent a few days on design research, because the genuinely hard part of this category is progression design and other people have already done the hard work. Three lessons I'm building on:

Duolingo retired its old branching skill tree for a single linear path to reduce confusion, and a chunk of their users revolted because they lost the sense of the whole map. Lesson: keep the map visible.

Khan Academy gates new material behind demonstrated mastery rather than time spent. Lesson: you unlock things by proving you know them, not by tapping next.

Path of Exile has the most famous skill tree in gaming, and it's so vast that most players just copy a build off the internet instead of exploring it. Lesson: total freedom is its own kind of prison. Guide the path.

What I landed on is a fully visible map where you only ever see your current frontier plus one level ahead, and you advance by mastering each node through three tiers: recognize it, understand its role, then reason about how it works.

Where I honestly am right now: I have a working clickable prototype and a full build spec, and zero product code. It's going to be iOS first, Flutter on the front end, Supabase on the back, with the progression rules enforced server-side so the app can't cheat its own state. I have not written the first real screen yet. That's exactly why I'm starting the log now. You get to watch it get built, including the parts that go sideways.

What I'll post, roughly weekly: what I shipped, what I broke, real numbers once there are numbers, and the decisions I'm not sure about, because I'd genuinely value this community's read on some of them.

Two things I'd love from you today:

If you've ever built a progression system or a skill tree, what's the one thing you wish you'd known before you started?
Does the core idea land for you? Would you, or someone you know, use an app that finally makes the structure of government click?

I also write longer-form about building and selling over at Risala(Substack) if that's your thing, but the week-to-week build log is going to live here.
Thanks for reading. See you next week with the first real screen.