Why video-first

The trust gap

You scroll a campaign page on most crowdfunding sites. Slick photography. A fictional-feeling LLC name. A logo. No human. No face. No accountability.

You decide to pledge $200. The campaign disappears. Or the founder ships a year late, or never. Or the product is nothing like the photos. You have no recourse, and no idea who the actual person was.

What we do differently

1. Mandatory identity verification. Every founder verifies a government-issued ID through Persona. Their face on the ID is matched against a 30-second selfie video where they say their name, project name, and today's date. No bots, no fake LLCs, no anonymous campaigns.
2. Mandatory pitch video. Every campaign has a face-on-camera pitch. Recorded in our 5-screen teleprompter wizard right in the browser. We show real people because we only let real people campaign.
3. Public milestone commitments. Founders commit to four video updates — at 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% of their timeline. If they miss one, the campaign page shows it. Backers see the truth, not just the launch hype.
4. FTC-compliant testimonial rules. Founder videos can't make health claims, can't promise returns, can't disguise paid endorsements. CompliantWriter flags risky language before publish.

What we don't do

We don't infer your demographics from your video. The face-match check is binary: "is this the same person on the ID?" — nothing more. We don't estimate age, race, gender, or any protected trait. We don't use facial appearance as input to campaign approval. The audit log is public to admin reviewers, every decision is policy-citable.

Why this works

Trust is the scarcest resource in crowdfunding. Backers who can see and hear a founder are 4x more likely to pledge — and the campaigns that fail are also the ones where the founder hid.

Our bet: a smaller marketplace of fully-verified, video-first campaigns will fund at higher rates than a larger marketplace of anonymous LLCs. Smaller, slower, more honest.