Verifies audience and engagement authenticity for influencer and affiliate campaigns, flagging bot-inflated metrics before performance payouts; sold to brands and agencies. · influencer marketing fraud detection
DEAD SLOW · CAUTIOUS
6.0 ShipScore / 10
Time strongest; control weakest — audience data hostage to platform APIs.
Condition: Secure durable data access (official partner APIs or licensed panel) and land two agencies paying $300+/mo for pre-payout gating within 60 days.
Part I — The Verdict what the instruments read
01 — The ShipScore breakdown
Control
4
C4 — authenticity scoring needs Instagram/TikTok/YouTube API or scraped data access
Entry barriers
5
E5 — only Snowball tracked at $2k MRR, no funding; lane open, moat unbuilt
Need
6
N6 — established paid category (brand safety/influencer vetting) but corpus spend stalls at $2k
Time-freedom
8
T8 — automated scoring pipeline, no per-campaign human audit needed
Scale
7
S7 — global brands and agencies, but buyer count narrower than consumer SaaS
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.
Nearest tracked rivals on that curve:
Snowball
$2k 2%
Part II — The Evidence the receipts, good and bad
03 — Rival scan — corpus tracks 1 similar, 1 stalled under $2k MRR
Platform API terms restrict follower/engagement-level data; scraping invites cutoff or legal action
Buyer inertia: brands often accept fraud loss rather than pay to audit it
Established vetting incumbents can bundle payout-gating as a feature
Verdicts must be defensible — false bot flags withholding creator payouts create disputes and churn
06 — Kill switches — what kills this with one decision
Meta/TikTok/YouTube API policy or rate-limit change — Removes the audience-level data the authenticity score depends on
Affiliate network / tracking platform integration refusal — Without payout-flow hooks, pre-payout gating cannot be enforced
Anti-scraping legal precedent or platform enforcement — Makes the primary fallback data pipeline unusable overnight
Part III — The Plan if you insist on proceeding
07 — What this scan can't tell you
Cannot tell whether Snowball's $2k stall is product-market failure or founder inactivity
No data on whether brands will pay to withhold payouts vs eat fraud losses
Unknown whether compliant data access (official partner status) is obtainable at this stage
Scores judge the market and business model — not your ability to execute. Verified MRR = independently tracked revenue; reviews/upvotes = platform-reported. Judged 2026-09-10.
08 — The wedge & the next step
Sit inside the affiliate/performance payout flow — gate the payment, not just the report; sell to agencies who are financially liable for wasted spend.
Cheapest next step: Pitch five performance-marketing agencies a paid pilot: send a manual authenticity audit of one live campaign's creators and ask $500 for it.
Not quite it? Spin the model
Business-model variations of this idea, engineered to beat 6.0 — 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.
Free forever · one email a day · unsubscribe in one click.
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.