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Endgame

Where this ends up, and what 'done' is measured against.

Decision: ⚪ idea

Context

Today myPolitics is a Polish quiz platform: 4.5M+ users since 2018, ~1,000 a day between elections, hundreds of thousands of results per election cycle, and a track record of getting politicians, journalists and mainstream media (Onet, Wprost, Polityka, Do Rzeczy, Wirtualna Polska, Polsat News) to engage with it. The concept it belongs to - political compasses - is global. The product is not, yet.

Opportunity

The ambition: the largest international platform for political and psychometric self-awareness. A place where anyone can understand themselves, understand others, and build their own quizzes.

Four shifts get us there:

  • From Polish to international - The methodology is not country-specific; the interface and the question sets are what have to be localised.
  • From first-party to a platform - Today we author the quizzes. In the endgame the community authors most of them, and our job is the editor, the standards and the distribution.
  • From quizzes to a data platform - The answers we already collect become published datasets, analysis and reports - the layer that makes us a reference, not a toy.
  • From free-only to freemium - Psychometric quizzes are a monetisable product. A paid tier funds the mission that the free tier delivers.

Funding: freemium psychometrics

Eight years on zero budget proved the model works; it also caps it. International scale, real editorial capacity, published datasets and legal work on special-category data all cost money that goodwill does not cover. Psychometric testing is a category people already pay for - that is the funding source we intend to use.

The shape:

  • Free stays free - Political self-awareness is the mission. Taking a political quiz, seeing your axes and comparing with friends never goes behind a paywall, or the mission stops working.
  • Depth is paid - The premium tier sells what is genuinely extra: extended psychometric batteries, longer-form reports and interpretation, history and change over time, richer comparison, and serious tooling for people publishing quizzes.
  • The non-political side carries the pricing - myQuizzes is where a paid product sits most comfortably - personality and psychometrics without the political charge, and without the appearance of charging for civic education. Its business model is the detailed version of this.
  • Users pay, nobody else does - Revenue from the people using the product is the one funding source that cannot ask us for a position. That is what independence is protecting, and freemium is consistent with it in a way sponsorship or institutional money never could be. Paid does not mean advertising, data sales or targeting - those stay ruled out.

What 'done' looks like:

  • Users can create, publish and share their own quizzes at scale, with quality standards that hold.
  • The platform runs in multiple languages and markets, not just Poland.
  • Our data is cited as a source on public opinion, by media and by researchers.
  • Off-cycle usage is high enough that elections are peaks, not the entire business.
  • A freemium psychometric product funds the organisation - enough to pay for the people and infrastructure the mission needs, without taking money that comes with an agenda.
  • Still independent, still taken by figures from every side of politics, and the political quizzes still free.

Risk

  • Scale versus credibility - Community-authored quizzes are the growth engine and the biggest threat to the standard of what carries our name.
  • Poland does not generalise automatically - Party systems, axes and salient issues differ; the universality of the method is a thesis, not a fact yet.
  • Zero budget versus international ambition - The model that got us 4.5M users in one country may not stretch to many.
  • Mission drift - A psychometric platform that stops being about political understanding would be a bigger product and a failed mission - and paid psychometrics is exactly the pull in that direction, because it is the part that earns.
  • Paywall versus reach - Our growth is organic and share-driven. Anything paid that touches the viral path taxes the mechanism that got us here; the free tier has to stay complete enough to spread on its own.
  • Charging near a public good - Money anywhere close to civic education invites the accusation that we sell political conclusions. The line between free political quizzes and paid psychometrics has to be visible, not merely true.
  • A different business to run - Billing, subscriptions, refunds, tax and support are ongoing obligations, and a volunteer holarchy is not obviously the structure that carries them.

Decision

Yet to be made.