CrossPolly Built on a corpus of academic research
CrossPolly

A thinking partner for problems search can't answer.

Describe a hard decision, a strategy you're weighing, or something you're stuck on. CrossPolly borrows how completely unrelated fields — ecology, negotiation, evolutionary biology, control theory — would approach it, and writes back concrete angles you wouldn't have reached on your own.

Try it free → First, how to ask
An example of the kind of result
The problem someone brought

“I'm a product manager at a 30-person startup. I can't get the team to prioritize technical debt — every quarter it loses to a shiny feature. How do I reframe the conversation?

What CrossPolly returned

From forest ecology · illustrative

Dead wood isn't waste — it's the substrate the next generation grows from.

Old-growth forests don't "clean up" fallen timber; the decomposing logs hold moisture, host fungal networks, and seed the next stand. Reframe technical debt the same way: not as cleanup deferred, but as the soil the next product surface will be built on. Stop pitching it as cost reduction. Pitch the specific feature it unlocks.

SCORE 87 / 100
How to ask

Specific prompts get specific applications. Vague prompts get vague ones.

CrossPolly works best when it has something to grip. The pattern that works: describe the situation, say what you've already tried, then ask the actual question.

✗ Weak prompts

How do I grow my business?
Marketing ideas?
How do I lead better?

✓ Strong prompts

I run a 4-person legal-tech startup. We've had 6 demos this month — prospects like it then go quiet. What am I missing?
I'm launching a paid newsletter for civic-tech PMs. I have 200 free subs. What's the right sequence to convert?
I lead a remote team of 8. Two senior engineers disagree publicly on every architecture call. How do I think about this?
The pattern that works Specific situation + what you've tried + the actual question you're stuck on
What it's for

Sharp on some problems. Useless on others. Honest about both.

CrossPolly isn't a search engine and it isn't an oracle. It's narrow in a useful way.

Best for

  • Strategy and trade-off calls where multiple framings could be defensible
  • "How should I approach this?" — open-ended judgment problems
  • Reframing stuck situations where you already know the facts but not the move
  • Creative and critical reasoning — questions that benefit from a foreign mental model
  • Pre-decision pressure-testing — finding the angle you haven't considered

Not for

  • Factual lookups — "How many eggs in a dozen?" is what Google is for
  • Questions with one right answer — math, definitions, dates
  • Coding help, debugging, technical implementation
  • Domain-specific recommendations requiring real expertise (medical, legal, financial)
  • Anything time-sensitive or factual about the present — CrossPolly doesn't browse the web
What comes back

Each result is a principle, scored, sourced, and applied.

You'll get a ranked list — each with a score for how strongly the principle resonates with your situation, the source it came from, and a concrete read on how it applies. (Below is an illustration of the shape.)

RESULT 03

82 / 100 — Worth what it changes your choices by

The right price for information isn't what it cost to gather, but how much better off you become by having it — measured as the dollar equivalent that would make an uninformed person equally happy.

Applied to your situation: Stop pricing your tool against feature lists. Price it against documented moments where it changed someone's choice — what a user would have paid to know the principle that solved their three-month-stuck problem in twenty minutes.

Source: a peer-reviewed paper, cited by its arXiv ID so you can verify it.

1
The score
How strongly this principle resonates with the specific situation you described — not a generic relevance score.
2
The principle
A domain-agnostic idea, distilled and stripped of jargon so it can travel from its origin field to your context.
3
The source
Real academic research with the arXiv ID, so you can verify, dig deeper, or push back on the application.
Questions

Things worth knowing before you ask.

Where do the principles come from?
A curated corpus of academic research — currently 2748 distinct principles distilled from peer-reviewed papers. Each one is a domain-agnostic mental model with the source paper attached, so you can trace any claim back to its origin.
How is this different from asking ChatGPT the same question?
A general LLM will give you a plausible-sounding answer drawn from inside your own domain. CrossPolly scores every principle in its corpus against your specific situation and surfaces the ones with genuine resonance — usually from fields you'd never have searched. The point isn't another opinion; it's a foreign mental model.
What does it cost?
A handful of free queries with no signup. After that, one-time credit packs — 5 queries for $5 or 20 for $15, valid 90 days from your most recent purchase. No subscription, nothing auto-renews. No data is sold or used for anything beyond running the service.
Will my prompt be visible to anyone?
Prompts and responses are stored only for quality improvement and to prevent abuse. They're never sold, never used to train external models, and aren't displayed publicly. The full data practices are in the privacy policy.
What if the answers don't apply?
Some will, some won't — that's the nature of a tool that surfaces unexpected angles. Treat each principle as a starting point for your own judgment, not a pronouncement. The scoring helps: higher-scoring results tend to be the load-bearing ones; lower ones are food for thought.
Can I use it for work decisions?
That's what it's built for — strategy calls, positioning, hiring questions, prioritization. Just don't treat it as a substitute for domain expertise on regulated decisions (legal, medical, financial). It's a thinking partner, not an advisor.

Bring it the thing you've been stuck on.

Start a cross-pollination →