A while back we abolished our last secret.

It wasn’t a spooky, life-or-death, Dan Brown-style secret. We discussed it openly around the office and with our friends. But we didn’t blog about it or talk about it in public.

The secret concerned what StepRep was. When we launched, we told everyone StepRep was a free reputation monitoring tool. And of course, it is a free reputation monitoring tool. But that’s only part of it.

The big secret was how we were going to make any money off our free reputation monitoring tool. People wondered, were we going to start charging a subscription fee? Would we make our users look at ads? Sorry, we said. Can’t tell you yet. It’s a secret.

That went on for months, and it sucked. We’re not naturally reticent people. But we had to keep it on the down-low while we built the product so that, instead of telling people what StepRep was all about, we could just show them. (Also, we were worried that someone would come along and steal our great idea.)

We’re not quite done building. But we’re far enough along that we no longer have to act all mysterious and vague. Now when people ask what StepRep is all about, we tell them to go try it for themselves. They quickly see that it’s not just a free reputation monitoring tool.

It’s a better way to advertise.

I’m glad we no longer have to hide this, because transparency is essential to what we’re trying to do. We want to be transparent about how we make our money, and we want to bring the benefits of transparency to the advertising business.

Whenever a StepRep user pays a reward to a customer, we take a ten percent transaction fee. That’s it. That’s our revenue model. Maybe someday in the future that percentage will change, but if it does, we’ll always be upfront about it.

We want every transaction in our system to be that transparent. Say you’re a realtor. Jenny’s selling her house. Her friend George suggests that she get in touch with you. When Jenny looks at your StepRep profile, she sees 1) how many people trust you, 2) how many of her friends trust you, and 3) how large a reward you’ll pay.

Jenny knows that she’ll be splitting the reward with George. She knows whether or not George’s advice can be relied on. When she looks at the list of her friends that trust you, she makes the same assessment for each of them – can I depend on this person’s judgement?

So Jenny hires you. You sell her house right away, because you’re awesome. You take your fee. You pay the reward to Jenny and George. We take our ten percent of the reward. No secrets, no surprises.

Isn’t it great when we’re all open with each other?