Been There

Blueprint

The need

When you are about to bet your savings on a visa, a shop or a career jump, you want to hear from someone who actually did it, recently, in your situation. Forums are full of confident strangers who never did the thing, and agents and experts know the rules but not what it felt like or what it really cost. Chidi in Enugu has read 300 comments and still cannot tell which ones are real.

What exists and what is new

Closest: JustAnswer (credentialed experts, not lived experience) and Reddit (unverified). Expert marketplaces sell professional opinions and forums give free but unprovable stories. New: every answerer proves the experience first with a redacted document checked by AI (issuer, date, name match), the file is deleted and only the claim is kept, and answerers earn per answer the asker accepts.

The data it runs on

Answers written by verified users, and the redacted proofs they upload once (decision letters, business registrations, resignation certificates). The system keeps only the derived claim ("Visa granted 2026, Health and Care Worker route"), a check date and a confidence level. Asker questions, follow-ups and accept or reject signals train the matching and ranking.

1. The mission

Make lived experience a trusted, paid source of knowledge. Anyone facing a big life move can hear from people who provably did it last year, and those people get paid for the hard-won detail they carry.

2. Why people can't resist it

Certainty in a scary moment. The stamp ends the "is this person real?" doubt that ruins every forum thread.
Being asked is flattering, being paid is better. Answerers feel like the experts they now are, and the money arrives per answer.
Specifics beat advice. "What surprised me" and "what it cost me" are the details people hunt for and never find.

3. How it works for real

Question intake: a fast cheap model (Gemini Flash or DeepSeek via OpenRouter) extracts the claim needed: route, country, year, role.
Proof check: the answerer uploads a redacted document. A vision model (Gemini 2.5 Pro or GPT-4o class) reads layout, issuer wording and dates; a deterministic check compares a hash of the name against the answerer's ID verification (done once through an identity partner). Missed fields are auto-blurred. The file is deleted after the check; only the claim, date and confidence are stored.
Matching: embeddings over claims and past answers rank answerers by similarity and recency, then invites go out in waves.
Answer quality: a frontier LLM (Claude or GPT) checks each answer for identifying details and for off-topic filler, and drafts the structured cards (surprised, differently, costs).
Payments: email login with a smart wallet so crypto stays invisible. USDC on Base, gas sponsored by a paymaster. Each accepted answer is a small payment, and x402 lets partner sites buy answers per request.

4. Cost per use

Proof check: about $0.02 to $0.05 per document (one vision call plus a small reasoning call). Matching and answer checks: about $0.01 per question. Gas: under $0.01 per payout on Base. A solo builder runs a full question with 5 answers for about $0.10.

Free: browse public answers and ask with one free answer per month. Paid: askers set their own price per answer (typically $5 to $15); Been There takes 15 percent. Answerers keep 85 percent and cash out to local banks through off-ramp partners.

5. Growth loop

Every asker who gets their visa or opens their shop is invited to verify and become an answerer, so each success creates the next supply. Shared answer cards ("I asked 5 people who actually did it") pull in the next asker from the same group chat.

6. Risks and guardrails

Forged proof: layout and consistency checks, a name match against ID, random human review, and permanent bans with clawback of earnings.
Privacy: documents are deleted after the check; answerers show first name and initial only; askers never see documents.
Advice risk: answers are lived experience, labelled as general information, never legal or immigration advice; each answer links to official sources and suggests a regulated adviser for complex cases.
Scams: no contact details in answers, no off-platform payment, and agents selling "guaranteed visas" are filtered and banned.

7. MVP build order

Question form and answer cards with a simple per-answer USDC payment on Base Sepolia.
Redacted document upload with one vision-model check and automatic file deletion.
Claim badges on answerer profiles and matching by claim type and year.
Follow-up questions and answerer earnings page.
The "while you were away" timeline and push notifications.