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| Executive Summary for company Jerk.com Online reputations are critical to social and business interactions. eBays growth was as much fueled by its credible reputation management as by its marketplace. Buyers today can review feedback related to transactions. This enables millions of buyers and sellers to build relationships based on trust. On Amazon, product reviews establish trust for otherwise unknown products and authors. However, this trust is brokered: we trust Amazon reviews and eBay reputations not because we believe in the participants but because we believe in Amazon and eBay. Several vendors have made attempts to establish vendor reputation and major social networks provide the infrastructure for a pervasive consumer reputation platform but in neither area has a clear leader emerged, especially since eBays retreat from tracking buyer reputation in 2008. Jerk.com provides consumer reputation management. The site is currently in an early-stage alpha release. It offers a framework for posting praise and disputes, computing ratings, and gathering feedback and comments; the system provides for users to include photos and personal information. Designed to offer Wikipedia-like information on doing business and for social interactions on the web, the content is growing organically from the users themselves and reflect the view of the people who have personal first hand knowledge of the profiled individual. As we achieve market penetration, first targeting stranger-stranger transaction venues such as eBay, PayPal, Amazon zShops, and also the online dating space, Jerk.com ratings will become the ubiquitous reputation service across the net. On Jerk.com employees can praise or critic their bosses while those considering a new job opportunity may be able to find what a person is like to work for. Online daters are able to post and read feedback about what a person is like to date. Other vertical applications are abound. As vendors and intermediaries integrate it into their services offering settings for negative or neutral ratings, users will be more incentivized to integrate a Jerk.com widget into their personal web presence to solicit positive ratings from friends and associates. The Jerk API will allow site developers to mash-up a reputation component in their sites. The Jerk score, integrated through the Jerk API, can re-create recently-deleted buyer rankings in eBay and provide an aggregate reputation to even thinly-trafficked sites on the web. This integration will be provided free of charge to site owners in order to gain widespread adoption. For example, looking at the Jerk.com value added in the dating space, surveys have shown that as many as 40% of men registering on on-line dating sites are in a committed relationship. Jerk.com, by allowing participants to rate each other in a venue that exists longitudinally across the net, offers daters the opportunity to rate their dates in a way that will stick with them in every thing they do. Many relationships end with a desire by one party or the other to protect others from the negative aspects of their dating experience, whether it be quirks, personality flaws, or major deceptions. Once again, by focusing on the "jerk" aspect, filing a report on Jerk.com provides a simple, easy interface for a benign form of vengeance. With the dispute resolution steps, the majority of false reports will be easily dismissed while the accurate ones will stick with the offender. A Jerk.com score will stick with offenders, providing a benefit to dating sites who integrate the Jerk widget into their interface and also a third-party reference check for users of those sites that do not. Used in commerce, Jerk.com extends the proven functionality of Ebays seller and customer ratings across the web. Extending the model proven by Ebay, Jerk.com adds several key functions. Ratings are weighted by each raters positive scores: users with terrible feedback have little ability to rate others. While anonymous ratings are a part of Jerk.com, with partner sites, buyers and sellers are connected through a transaction and participating in certified transaction ratings are also given extra weight. By combining these two factorscomputing each users Jerk score giving weight to ratings by well-regarded users and also to certified partner transactionsJerk.com provides a strong incentive to participate formally in the Jerk.com network. Vendors who participate can embed a widget on their site that will unobtrusively invite site visitors to join Jerk.com if they have not already done so; for those who do participate, the users own and the vendors score will be displayed. This benefits both parties by giving users confidence in vendors and vendors will be able to learn the scores of users who visit their site and also get a reading on those who make purchases. It is conceivable that some vendors might, like they did on Ebay, require a certain rating and a certain number of feedback results from a user before completing a transaction or a transaction of a certain size. Topologically similar to dating, the massively-multiplayer on-line role-playing games ("MMO's") such as World of Warcraft involve on-line participants forming groups, often with long-term commitments and with opportunities to profit from deception. As with dating, those victimized by bad actors will be motivated to submit a Jerk Report, resulting in a permanent stain on the MMO character, and, possibly if the connection can be made, the player who controls the character. However, even if the real-world connection cannot be made, users invest substantial amounts of time in developing their characters and should these characters find themselves earning a bad reputation in a public way, the consequences will be real and difficult to escape without starting their MMO experience over from the beginning. Revenue Model In its start-up phase, Jerk.com is establishing its free consumer service and building its userbase to whom it will later offer value-added services. In the initial phase, Jerk.com will provide reputation services via the web site and the API to partners for up to a set number of transactions per hour free of charge. Once a partner goes beyond half the default minimum, the partner will be required to choose from among the basic and tiered plans, offering either a free or flat-fee base number of monthly transactions plus a small per-transaction overage charge. Note that one option will be to keep the service free up to the default minimum but to establish a payment option for use beyond that threshold. Through the initial phase, use within the Facebook platform will be offered free of charge without limit and eBay use will be charged to sellers and not eBay (aggregated across all products offered; note that for most eBay sellers the service will be free). This revenue model, based on that offered by Craigslist and Googles App Engine platform, will most efficiently drive adoption. Other potential revenue streams include advertising as well as subscriptions services. For example, users may be charged for access to dispute resolution or other premium and for fee services. Market Market The buyer ratings on eBay were a powerful quantification of online reputations. With the deletion of this feature, originally introduced in 1995 and removed February 20th, 2008, a dramatic void in e-commerce reputation emerged. While many e-commerce aggregators include a variety of on-line tools for vendor ratings, no single tool has achieved the reputation or credibility of eBay ratings and most are tainted by their failure to restrict shill voting on the rated entities. Other vertical applications in social networking, dating, or employment opportunities also lend themselves to the use of the Jerk.com model. Compelling Investment Thesis From a business perspective Jerk.com offers a powerful positive potential for a high impact and profitable business model: |
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