Yeah I know, hence the first line of my post.
How do you build trust? It takes time and good will from a community.
I'm willing to jump through a reasonable amount of hoops to prove the validity to the community...but it's a catch 22...it'll take time to earn the good will.
You can start by removing whois protection and provide some real contact data. There really are too many anonymous businesses around here, the community should filter them out if we don't want history repeating itself over and over again.