Show IH:built an FTC compliance checker for influencer marketing after watching brands get blindsided by $53,088 fines here's what I learned
Six months ago I started noticing a pattern. Brands spending thousands on influencer campaigns, content goes live, then weeks later they're dealing with FTC violations that could have been caught in 2 minutes before publishing.
The average FTC fine is $53,088 per violation. Per post. Most brands have absolutely zero process for checking compliance before content goes live.
So I built Valen Sentinel.
What it does:
- Compliance checker - paste any YouTube URL, upload a video file directly, or paste an Instagram or TikTok caption manually. Get a compliance score in under 2 minutes with exact violations and exact fixes.
- ROI predictor using real YouTube channel data with fake follower detection before you sign any contract
- Full collaborative workspace for brands and creators
- Milestone tracking and legally binding digital agreements built in
The hardest part wasn't building it - it was figuring out that YouTube blocks transcript extraction from cloud server IPs. Spent days debugging that before finding a third party transcript API that actually works.
Launched on ProductHunt this week. Currently at $99/month.
Happy to answer any questions about the build
or the compliance checking logic.
Smart angle, the pain is real and most teams only notice disclosure issues after a campaign is already live. What worked best for me in compliance tooling was checking the exact claim plus placement and wording of the disclosure, not just whether "#ad" exists somewhere. Tradeoff is false confidence, if the checker feels too definitive, brands may skip legal review on the edge cases that actually matter.
Really good point, that's actually something we thought hard about. Sentinel flags placement, timing, and clarity specifically, not just existence of the disclosure. But you're right that no tool should replace legal review on edge cases. We position it as a first line of defence, not a substitute for legal counsel on complex campaigns.
Blindsided fines are brutal for brands love the FTC checker build! As you scale, have you thought about how branding or trust identity plays into that first impression for compliance tools? A domain like SafeAIy could help a ton. Keep building..
Thanks, Yeah blindsided fines are exactly the problem we're trying to solve - most brands don't even know they're exposed until it's too late. On the branding side we're pretty locked in with Valen Sentinel as the identity for now, but appreciate the thought. Excited to keep building this out
Valen Sentinel sounds solid. Makes sense you're locked in.
Out of curiosity, as you scale to bigger enterprise clients have you seen the brand name itself making any difference in how fast they trust the compliance signals?
Honestly yes, we've noticed that when the tool surfaces clear compliance signals, brands move faster on decisions because the uncertainty is removed. Trust in the tool name itself is still early stage for us, but the data doing the talking seems to matter more than the brand name at this point.