Inspiration
A friend runs a small company. He hired someone to handle marketing, and within weeks the views were climbing — millions of them, across Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok. It looked like a huge win. But when we asked a simple question — "how many of these are actually real people?" — there was no answer. Not from him, not from the platforms, not from any tool we could find. Every platform will tell you the age, gender, and location of your audience. None of them will tell you what percentage of that audience is fake. We realized this isn't a one-person problem — it's an industry-wide blind spot, and we wanted to build the tool that closes it.
What it does
Verascope is a cross-platform authenticity dashboard for companies that pay for marketing and need to know if it's working. It connects — read-only, official APIs only — to a company's own Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube accounts, and scores incoming engagement using four signals: how fast it arrived, whether the engagement ratio matches the follower count, whether the accounts engaging look human, and whether the timing or location makes sense. All four roll up into one plain-language authenticity score — per platform, and overall — plus a live feed of flagged anomalies and a breakdown of who the verified-organic audience actually is, by age, gender, and geography.
How we built it
We scoped this as an Ideathon submission: a fully worked-out problem definition, a designed detection methodology, a complete business model, and a dashboard mockup showing exactly what the product would look like in a user's hands. We grounded the problem in real data — industry audits putting fake-engagement rates at 37–41% and marketer-reported fraud exposure at 81% — rather than assuming the problem existed. From there we designed the four-signal scoring approach, mapped the full Business Model Canvas (value proposition through cost structure), and mocked up the dashboard a company would actually use day to day.
Challenges we ran into
The hardest part wasn't the technical design — it was staying honest about what's actually novel. Native platform analytics already give you demographic breakdowns, and single-platform bot-detection tools already exist. Finding the real gap — one consistent, ongoing authenticity score across every platform a company posts on, not a one-time single-app audit — took several rounds of narrowing before the idea earned its place. We also had to design a scoring approach that could stay accurate as fraud tactics evolve, rather than one that would go stale the moment bots get smarter.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We turned a real, personal frustration into a fully reasoned business plan in a short window — a validated problem, a defensible technical approach, and a business model that could realistically support small businesses instead of only enterprise budgets. Seeing the dashboard mockup come together — the score, the flagged anomaly, the verified-organic audience — was the moment the idea stopped being abstract and started looking like a product someone would actually use.
What we learned
We learned how much of "solving fraud" is really about framing — the detection techniques (velocity, ratio, account signatures, geo/temporal patterns) aren't new individually, but nobody had combined them into one score, applied consistently across platforms, for the person actually paying the marketing bill. We also learned that a business model only feels real once you've forced yourself to answer all eight blocks of the canvas, not just the ones that are easy to talk about.
What's next for Verascope
We want to build the working MVP: starting with a single platform integration validated against labeled fake-engagement datasets, then expanding platform by platform. Beyond that — connecting authenticity scores to actual conversion data for real ROI reporting, a "vet before you hire" mode to check an influencer or agency before signing a contract, and an API so existing social media management tools can embed authenticity scoring directly instead of requiring a separate login.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.