When the Data You Need Is the Data You Can’t Have

Scrolling through comments feels productive until it isn’t. At a certain scale, intuition breaks down. Patterns blur. Signal hides inside noise. Creators sense that their audiences are telling them something important, but the tools meant to help them understand that feedback either flatten it into vanity metrics or block access to it entirely.

That tension had been building for years for Marc Weinberg.

“The information I want is all of the comments on my posts, with timestamps, likes, and shares. That’s it. My data. My comments. Comments on my posts.”

What sounds simple turned out to be anything but. Marc wanted to understand how people were actually responding to posts over time, not just whether they clicked a like button. He wanted to see patterns, recurring voices, moments of resonance, and moments of resistance. Instead, he ran into opaque policies, broken exports, and tools that stopped working as soon as platforms changed their rules.

“Access to that data wasn’t available,” he says. “I spent a lot of time asking for clarity about what creators are allowed to see, and the answers were never very direct.”

The problem wasn’t analysis. It was access.

Marc had spent much of his career building and working with large-scale data systems, long before today’s generative AI boom. He understood how to structure data, how to analyze it, and, just as importantly, how compliance shapes what can and cannot be built. So instead of continuing to fight platforms individually, he began building a system designed to work within their rules.

That effort became YourComments.ai, an AI-backed platform focused on large-scale comment (post) analysis. The product launched with YouTube, not because it was the easiest technical challenge, but because it was one of the few major platforms that allowed structured, auditable access to creator data when handled correctly.

“YouTube has a very open data policy, but you have to be compliant,” Marc explains. “Building a product inside those rules is very different from just experimenting.”

At its core, the platform aggregates and processes large volumes of comment data, turning thousands of individual remarks into patterns that creators can actually interpret. It tracks timing, frequency, and sentiment, allowing users to see how reactions change across videos and over time. The goal is not to replace creative instinct, but to give creators clearer feedback loops when instinct alone no longer scales.

“Likes and views are easy,” Marc says. “Comments are the most human layer of feedback, and nobody is collecting them at scale.”

That gap becomes more acute as audiences grow. Comment volume increases faster than teams do, forcing creators to hire people simply to keep up with community engagement. At that point, reading comments manually stops being insightful and starts becoming a bottleneck.

YourComments.ai is built for that inflection point. Not for hobbyists posting occasionally, and not only for creators with millions of subscribers, but for anyone producing content frequently enough that meaningful feedback gets buried by volume.

While creators remain the initial focus, Marc quickly realized the underlying problem extended far beyond YouTube channels. Anywhere people leave comments, insight follows. Product reviews, brand launches, public forums, and competitive research all generate massive amounts of unstructured feedback that most organizations never fully analyze.

“The actual business model is bulk comment analysis,” he says. “Anywhere there are comments, there’s insight.”

For now, the company is live and operating with beta users, refining workflows and onboarding processes before expanding access to additional platforms. Growth is deliberate. Claims are restrained. Much of the work ahead involves proving that once creators truly understand what their audiences are saying, they will consistently change how they create.

Marc relocated to Virginia Beach after decades in Colorado, drawn by family considerations and health, as well as a desire to reset. Hampton Roads does not define the company’s market, but it provides the space to build without chasing hype cycles or performative growth. The product is built for global platforms by a distributed team (three members in Virginia Beach), but the work is happening quietly from the coast.

There is no victory lap yet. Platform access remains uneven. Adoption still needs to be proven at scale. And the broader question that sparked the company remains unresolved.

When people are talking to you at volume, do you actually know what they’re saying?

Earlier this year, Marc Weinberg won Start Peninsula’s first micro pitch of 2026, a program that advances three finalists to compete for a $5,000 grand prize in November. Applications are now open for the next Start Peninsula micro pitch round. Founders interested in applying can learn more and submit their application here.