Automated FTC-disclosure compliance monitoring that scans influencer and affiliate posts across platforms and produces audit-ready reports for brands running paid campaigns. · Influencer Marketing Compliance
DEAD SLOW · CAUTIOUS
5.4 ShipScore / 10
Automation strength; control weak — post data hostage to platform APIs, demand unproven.
Condition: Only build if 3+ brands or agencies pre-pay for a disclosure audit of live campaigns, and you can access post data at scale without depending on one platform's API terms.
Part I — The Verdict what the instruments read
01 — The ShipScore breakdown
Control
4
C4 — scanning Instagram/TikTok/YouTube posts depends on their APIs or scraping.
Entry barriers
5
E5 — no tracked rival or leader, but suites can bolt this on.
Need
5
N5 — zero Reddit, zero corpus rivals; category spend real but unproven here.
Time-freedom
7
T7 — scan-and-report is automatable; audit sign-off may need humans.
Scale
6
S6 — FTC is US-scoped; buyers are brands/agencies, not mass market.
What the five commandments measure
C — Control
Do you own the customer, or does a gatekeeper stand between you and revenue?
E — Entry
How hard is this to copy once it works? A rival's existence isn't the question — the durability of their advantage is.
N — Need
Is demand proven with money rather than vibes?
T — Time
Can income detach from your hours, or did you buy yourself a job?
S — Scale
How far does it reach without linear cost?
Scored on the evidence below, against CENTS as we've adapted it plus a Buffett-style moat reading of every rival — the same referee for every idea, including the ones we generate ourselves. The verdict follows the arithmetic: we never relabel a score to make it read better, and the weakest commandment is always named. The exact rubric stays in-house so the scale can't be written for.
02 — The pace test — $1M/yr
At $299/mo (assumed category price), you need 279 subscribers for a $1M/yr pace.
No tracked rivals with verified revenue to benchmark against.
Part II — The Evidence the receipts, good and bad
03 — Rival scan
No similar products found in the radar corpus — either genuinely novel, or too small to track.
@polsia's teased suite (Provecore, Cascade/CommissionFlow/PartnerPulse/Knudlink) — Same wedge — influencer FTC/AI Act auditing and affiliate tracking with built-in disclosure — already being teased.
Foxpenny (affiliate auditor for fraud/payouts) — Adjacent auditing tool that could extend from payout fraud into disclosure checks cheaply.
Impact (affiliate platform, casual mentions) — Owns the affiliate relationship and data; compliance is a natural free feature for them.
04 — Demand evidence
No radar-tracked products, no funded companies, no Reddit signals for these keywords — demand for this specific product is unproven.
X chatter is near-zero engagement (0 likes/views on most posts), largely one account's self-promos — sentiment, not proof.
Only substantive signal: research (arXiv analysis of ~2M videos) showing widespread YouTube FTC disclosure failure — a problem exists, but no one is shown paying to fix it.
Joint brand/creator liability is discussed, indicating a budget-holder (the brand's legal/marketing team) exists.
05 — Risks
Compliance is a feature, not a product — CreatorIQ-class suites and affiliate networks can absorb it.
Platform API access for post content is restrictive; scraping invites legal and technical breakage.
Detecting a missing #ad is easy; proving audit-grade coverage across ephemeral Stories/Reels is hard.
FTC enforcement against brands is sporadic — pain may not be acute enough to trigger recurring spend.
06 — Kill switches — what kills this with one decision
Meta/TikTok/YouTube API or scraping policy change — Cuts off the post corpus, leaving nothing to scan and no audit trail.
Major affiliate networks (e.g., Impact-type platforms) ship free disclosure checks — Bundles your entire value prop into software brands already pay for.
FTC enforcement stays quiet — No enforcement events means no budget line; compliance stays a checkbox nobody funds.
Part III — The Plan if you insist on proceeding
07 — What this scan can't tell you
Cannot tell whether brand legal teams or marketing teams hold this budget, or its size.
Cannot verify whether @polsia's teased compliance tools ever shipped or have any users.
Cannot assess technical feasibility of reliably scanning Stories/Reels and other ephemeral formats.
Scores judge the market and business model — not your ability to execute. Verified MRR = independently tracked revenue; reviews/upvotes = platform-reported. Judged 2026-08-15.
08 — The wedge & the next step
Sell to agencies with joint-liability exposure: a per-campaign, audit-ready disclosure report they can hand the client's legal team — priced per campaign, not per seat.
Cheapest next step: Manually audit one live campaign's posts for a mid-size agency this week and ask for $500 for the report — if they pay, the need is real.
Not quite it? Spin the model
Business-model variations of this idea, engineered to beat 5.4 — different vertical, audience, model, or wedge. Same harsh scale. Pro feature.
One evidence-backed gap a day, free
Close — but conditional. Every morning the engine files one mined gap, scored on the same harsh scale as this one. Free at 7am AEST, unedited.
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Monitor this idea
Weekly re-scan against the live corpus. If the market moves this ShipScore by a point, or flips the verdict, you hear about it. Free while we're small.