Reputation list for employers that don't pay contractors
Problem
Freelancers and contractors have no way to check whether a client or founder has a record of not paying or dragging invoices for months. The OP was stiffed on a fixed monthly contract when the client claimed an investor pulled out, then saw the same person fund other projects. Commenters confirm the pattern across industries (London media companies paying months late, companies rebranding to escape their reputation) and note the two real obstacles: verification and defamation risk.
Opportunity
A 'RateMyProfessor for founders/clients' built on verified evidence: court records, late-payment data, and anonymized invoice submissions rather than raw opinions, dodging defamation issues while giving contractors a due-diligence check before signing.
Market analysis
Chronic, well-documented pain (one Forbes-cited figure: 74% of freelancers report late payment) sitting on top of a graveyard of stalled blacklists. The real obstacles are defamation law and verification, not software; an evidence-first, public-records approach is the only defensible angle and it is operationally heavy for a solo builder.
Market · Freelancers and contractors doing B2B work, especially in media and dev services; broad pain, weak urgency to pay for a lookup.
Pricing · Comparable to background-check services (per-lookup fees or low subscription), but freelancer willingness to pay for due-diligence tools is historically low.
Pros
- + Massive, evergreen pain across industries.
- + Public-records basis (court judgments, liens) is defamation-resistant and hard to copy.
- + Natural SEO loop: people search company names right before signing.
Cons
- − Defamation liability is a live legal risk with opinion-based listings.
- − Cold-start: a reputation DB is worthless until it covers the companies users are about to sign with.
- − Verifying user-submitted invoices is labor-intensive and barely scalable.
- − Prior attempts (blacklist sites, Facebook groups) stalled or stayed tiny.
Existing / similar tools
Source
Hacker News (Ask HN)
The differentiator everyone claims and nobody executes is verification. Court records (small-claims judgments, liens, bankruptcy filings) are public, defamation-proof and structured: scraping them and matching entities to company names is the real product, and user-submitted invoices are merely a lead generator for it. The non-obvious risk is that the companies most likely to stiff contractors are also the most likely to rebrand or dissolve, so entity resolution across name changes is a core feature, not an edge case.