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PollyStop — A Language App With Its Own Content Factory

PollyStop is a language-learning app that blocks your phone until you finish a lesson. We designed it, shipped it to the App Store and Play Store, and run the three-agent content pipeline that fills it with fresh Spanish stories and vertical-video shorts every week. Our product, start to finish.

Client
Lanier (our own product)
Engagement
Product build + ongoing operation

This one is ours. PollyStop isn't a client engagement — it's a product we own, build, and operate. It's the clearest example of the thing we sell: a consumer app sitting on top of an unattended content pipeline.

The app

PollyStop is "Duolingo meets a screen-blocking app." You pick the apps you tend to doom-scroll, and PollyStop puts a shield in front of them. To get through, you finish a short lesson. The wedge is the block — the learning happens because the phone won't let you past it until you do.

It's built in React Native 0.81 on Expo SDK 54, with a custom dev client because the whole premise depends on native code Expo Go can't load: iOS Screen Time / Family Controls extensions and the Android usage-stats APIs. Subscriptions run through RevenueCat across both stores. Polly the Parrot is the mascot, and yes, the green matches.

The part that's actually hard

Anybody can build a lessons screen. The hard part is feeding it — every day, forever, without a human writing each lesson by hand. That's where most language apps quietly fall back on a static deck of content.

PollyStop runs a three-agent content pipeline instead:

  1. Research. An agent (Mebo) researches and drafts the week's story — a 7-day arc plus standalone library pieces, written across three CEFR difficulty tiers so a beginner and an intermediate learner read different versions of the same day.
  2. Review. A second agent (Pax) reviews it for accuracy and tone before anything ships. Nothing reaches a learner unread.
  3. Render + publish. The story goes into the app first, with a real story ID readable in-app. Only then does the rendering agent (Clyde) build the vertical-video shorts from it — dual-voice Spanish audio via ElevenLabs, caption timing synced to the characters, ready for social.

The rule is strict and deliberate: a short is never built from a story that isn't already live in the app. The app is the source of truth; the marketing falls out of it.

Why it matters to a client

PollyStop is the proof that we can build the rarest thing in our portfolio: a consumer product whose content engine runs unattended. The expertise isn't the lesson UI — it's the pipeline behind it. When a founder asks whether we can ship an app that produces its own content on a schedule, the answer is on their phone.

Want a consumer product with a pipeline behind it? Let's talk.