Venture Concept No. 2

Venture Concept Description Take II

Opportunity. The opportunity my venture seeks to capture is a very unfortunate opportunity that has arisen out of the influence of the internet on society. The interconnectivity of the web is good for sharing valuable information across geographical boundaries but, on the flipside, it is very harmful when someone uses that interconnectivity to try and ruin someone's life. The opportunity I want to help solve is the issue of people having content on the internet that they don’t want out there. Specifically, when someone posts nude pictures or videos of someone in an effort to publically humiliate them.

 This opportunity is, unfortunately, huge. There are hundreds, upon thousands of victims of revenge porn out there with very little options or legal protection. Only 26 states in the US have laws criminalizing revenge porn. My market isn’t really defined geographically since anyone can post revenge porn from anywhere but this tends to happen in more developed countries, such as the US, Canada, and Western Europe. Demographically, the victims of revenge porn are overwhelming women, ranging from 14 years old to women in their 50s, though men can certainly be victims as well.

There are only a few options out there for survivors of revenge porn: ask the website owners to take down the content, report it as inappropriate to google, or get your nude photos or videos trademarked and issue the sites a DMCA takedown notice. (Or, if you live in one of those 26 states, take the person who posted the picture to court. Though that doesn't guarantee they will be taken off the web.)

Since revenge porn can be on thousands of sites in the worst case scenario, the first option isn’t really an option. Reporting it to Google is a necessary step in trying to solve this issue, but Google can’t force sites to take down the content and there are many other search engines where the photos could still be lurking. Google can only make sure it doesn’t pop up on a search. Lastly, getting your pictures trademarked is an option, except that it costs 300-400 dollars a year to maintain that trademark and still some sites can host the photos without facing repercussions because of the anonymous nature of the web.

As of right now, I have found only one other company that is trying to solve this issue. More may arise so this window could be closing.

Innovation. My innovation is a service for victims of revenge porn whereby my company wages an online campaign on behalf of the victim to get their revenge porn taken down. At the same time, my company will be doing online reputation management by using search engine optimization to create a positive online presence on our client’s behalf. My company’s site will also host an online forum for survivors of revenge porn and will provide free legal information about victim's legal options.

The service works by using advanced technology that combs the web for the revenge porn’s unique address. Once found, Post Back’s employees contact the website owner and request it to be taken down or, with the client’s permission, issue a DMCA takedown notice on their behalf after the process for getting their photos trademarked is started. The service costs $150 and there is a crowdfunding option on the site so that other victims can help people who struggle to pay the cost. Post Back will also offer payment plans to help with the cost.


Venture Concept. My innovation attempts to solve this opportunity by providing a service to people who critically need it and who are very often times taken advantage of by sites promising to take down the photos for large sums of money. My venture will actually help these people who have been violated for the world to see.

There is only one other company that currently provides a service to victims of revenge porn. This means that there isn't a lot of competition for the immense amount of demand. What's my advantage over them? After contacting sites that are campaigning to end revenge porn, I have found that they have never heard of my competitor and thus my advantage over them is my connections to non-profit organizations which will help market my venture.

To start out, I am considering using crowdfunding to fund this venture. I think people can really get behind this idea so having it be funded by people seems like a no brainer.

I imagine this company to start out with 5-10 employees and grow to around 20-30 over time. Starting off, I'll need a technology director, a marketing director, and customer expert. This is because the customer experience is a critical part of Post Back that also gives my company an advantage over its competitors. The goal of Post Back is to give our clients peace of mind and to show them that someone cares about what happened to them and is doing something, anything, to make it better.

Since the company will be entirely online, the location of it is entirely flexible. It could be anywhere. In 5 years, I don’t see myself still running this business. I think this industry will have many competitors in the coming years so I doubt I will be able to an edge in it. On the flipside, I could see this business transitioning into other services for women or anyone who has been harassed on the internet. Don’t know how to do this exactly, but that’s where I could see this going. As an entrepreneur, but really just as a person, I want to enact positive social change in the world. I see this venture as a start to this.

Feedback from students: The feedback I have received on this venture concept has all been really positive. Almost all of the students talked about how passionate I was for my idea and how they thought I had really thought through it, which is true. The only thing that was recommended for me to change was that I would probably be doing some crowdsourcing to raise funds for this venture. Other than that, I didn't receive any other feedback about changing my venture concept.

How I changed my venture concept: I added in the crowdsourcing bit and I tried to shorten the concept so that it was more concise. Other than that, it's basically the same as before.