Scrubber

After a couple months of back and forth on whether or not I was being flown to NYC and finally settling on sending a camera crew to my home, Scrubber was Good Morning America.

Here's the piece: Do you need a social media clean-up?

Fun fact about GMA: they will not share URLs. They never mentioned the URL in the live piece, nor did they link to the site in the accompanying article. Still, thanks to our SEO, over 8,000 people found Scrubber on their own in the subsequent 36 hours.

We received our first disputed charge on Stripe. It was only a $9 charge, but I was bummed because we've always been really good about refunding money when people ask. I didn't want to cause any trouble, but I was worried it could be a stain on our reputation with Stripe so I challenged the dispute.

I learned a lot. Probably too much to put here, but one thing that really surprised me was the amount of information asymmetry involved in the process.

Let's say that Mike signs up for Scrubber. He connects his Facebook account, Twitter account, and Instagram account. He then pays. He then disputes the charge. As an admin on the site, I can see that the names on the Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounts match Mike's. I can see that the email address on his Twitter account is the same email address that he signed up with. I can see that he opened the emails we sent him and clicked links in the emails. This confirms he owns that email address.

So when Mike says he didn't authorize the charge, I have a pretty good case that he did.

Right?

Not so fast. When a dispute comes in, I am not told who actually owns the credit card. Mike could have stolen that card, and the card owner -- not Mike, who is a card thief -- could be disputing the charge. In that case, I actually WANT the dispute to resolve in the card owners favor because why should they be out money? But if it resolves in their favor, I'm out $25, not just $9.

So what's a business to do? In every case that I end up challenging a dispute, I try my best to explain this. Unfortunately the process is very much a black box. You send in your information, and the you hear back 90 days later.

Every single dispute I've ever challenged has been resolved in my favor, but I have no way of knowing what actually happens on the other end. It's a very unsatisfying experience, but thought it was worth sharing.

In late 2016, I got an email from an agency that "represented a major international brand" and wanted to work with Scrubber. Never expecting it to go anywhere, but wanting the experience, I took the call and set out on a multi month process to build a white labeled version of Scrubber for Brita.

On January 11th, 2017, three days before my destination wedding in Mexico, sitting in a robe in my room drinking a Corona, we closed the deal.

The campaign was called FilterYourFeed.com. The domain has since been released and purchased by a new company, but for 6 months, Brita was pushing traffic to their white label. Once FYF found posts, users would have the option to then tweet out animated gifs of Steph Curry playing with puppies. There was even a mention of it on late night TV w/ James Corden.