7. What's Missing: The Gap Between Built and Paid, Renewed, Referred

Assumption: nothing is built yet. So these are gaps between the plan and a business.

7.1 Gaps to pay

Gap	Why it blocks payment	Fix
Unverified buyer	Nobody has confirmed venue coordinators pay for this	The day-45 kill test: 5 venues at ≥$49 for the hands-on service (08).
Free incumbents	BCS (25 vendors) and TrustLayer (50) are free, with AI reading	Don't compete on the free job. Sell the event workflow at a flat price per venue, and show the maths: 400 vendors a year on per-vendor pricing vs $79–149 flat.
Pricing model	Undefined in the brief	Suggested (verify with 15 coordinators): Venue $79/mo (1 venue, unlimited events and vendors), Venue Pro $149/mo (multiple spaces, requirement sets per event type, host-policy check, booking sync), Group $349/mo (up to 5 venues). 14-day trial, no free plan, 2 months free on annual, $19/mo off-season pause.
No quantified value promise	"Track COIs" doesn't justify a card	"Every vendor cleared 3 days before the event, without you writing an email." Measure hours saved and the share of vendors cleared by T-3.
Owner vs coordinator	The coordinator feels the pain, the owner pays	A one-page monthly report to the owner: events covered, gaps caught, hours saved.
Trust	Venues hand you their vendors' insurance documents	Security page, data-retention settings, US data hosting, clear "we check documents, the policy governs" wording.

Gap	Fix
Seasonality (winter cancellations)	Annual plans (2 months free), the $19 pause plan, and a winter job: next season's requirement letters and preferred-vendor list refresh.
Low switching cost	Accumulated history: every event's audit pack, the regional vendor profiles, requirement sets. Leaving means losing proof of past checks.
Coordinator turnover	Venues change coordinators often (analyst judgment). Onboard the owner too, and make the product survive a handover (shared login roles, event history).
Alert noise	Weekly digest by default. Real-time alerts only for vendors still missing at T-3.

Gap	Fix
Nothing visibly shareable	Every request a vendor receives is branded: "Upload for [Venue], powered by CertTrack. Already on file for 3 other venues."
No free hook	A free vendor-insurance requirements letter generator for venues, and SEO pages for vendors ("what insurance does a wedding DJ need", "how to add a venue as additional insured").
No vendor-side reason to spread it	Vendor profile reuse: "your certificate is on file; share it with your next venue in one click".
No referral economics	One month free for each referred paying venue. Planners who bring 3 venues get a free Venue Pro.

Missing entirely from the brief for venues. The catalog's channels (brokers, property-management and construction trade shows, Yardi/AppFolio/Procore) all point at the wrong buyer.
Channels that fit: venue websites (most publish a vendor policy, so the list builds itself), state and regional wedding and venue associations, planner communities, SEO on vendor-insurance questions, the vendor loop.
Channels that burn cash: paid ads to "event businesses", wedding directory advertising (priced for venues selling to couples, not software).

Current (as described): "COI tracking for vendors, subcontractors and tenants". Generic, and identical to BCS, TrustLayer and COI File.
Better: "Vendor insurance sorted before every event. Flat price, no chasing."
One sentence, one buyer, one outcome.

Venues: founder-led calls for the first 20, then trial-led with a recorded demo and a setup wizard.
Groups (5+ venues): light sales, only after 30 single venues retain.

Area	Requirement
What a COI is	ACORD 25 says a certificate "confers no rights upon the certificate holder" (general knowledge; re-read before launch). The product reports what the document states. It never says a vendor or the venue is covered.
Wording	Banned in product and marketing: "compliant", "insured", "covered", "guaranteed". Use "document check passed", "missing", "flagged for review".
Human in the loop	Every AI-read field shows its confidence. A coordinator confirms or overrides flagged items, and each override is logged with a reason.
Terms	Limitation of liability to fees paid, no warranty of coverage, the venue decides entry. Have a US lawyer draft them before the first paying customer.
Your own insurance	Tech E&O / professional liability before launch. Cost unverified; assume $2–4k a year.
Insurance referrals	No commission on event-insurance referrals until a lawyer confirms whether a producer licence is needed in your states.
Data privacy	Certificates contain business names, addresses and policy numbers, with little personal data. Still: CCPA/CPRA if you have California venues, a retention setting, deletion on request.
Email and SMS	CAN-SPAM for vendor emails (they're transactional, but keep an opt-out for reminders). US business texting rules (10DLC) if you add SMS.

Not provided. Minimum: one full-stack developer comfortable with email automation, PDF handling and an extraction API, and one person with venue or event-industry access (co-founder or paid advisor). Without the second, the day-45 test is unlikely to pass.

Minimum set: events per venue per month through the product (usage), share of vendors cleared by T-3 (outcome), coordinator emails avoided (proxy for hours saved), vendor profile reuse rate (network), M1/M3 retention, winter churn, annual-plan share, trials by channel.