Heroes in Business - Ross Cohen Cofounder of BeenVerified

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

Stay in the know, constantly. Ross Cohen Co-Founder of BeenVerified is interviewed by David Cogan founder of Eliances and host of the Eliances Heroes Show. Broadcast on am and fm network channels, internet radio and online syndication.  

Welcome back to Alliances Heroes, where heroes in business align. To be part of our super community and find out more about Alliances, visit www.alliances.com. Now, back to our super host, David Kogan, founder of Alliances. Thank you, Money Radio. That's right, this is David Kogan. Please tell me this morning will never end because it has been an amazing morning. That's right, we have heroes. And as you know, these are ones that are creating jobs, mentoring others, starting and expanding companies. In fact, we just started the show with, he was the former co-owner of Authorize.net.

He's the one that made and brought Authorize.net, made the IPO, made it go public and all of that. Ken Collis, who's now a CEO of TLK Fusion, who's working with the Kardashians and Ryan Sinkrest and others. Then we just had John Fisher, CEO, founder of CrowdOptic. He was revolutionizing, is revolutionizing how we see the world as a founding partner in the creation of Google Glass. And before I tell you who our next hero is, I'm going to tell you who we're going to be ending the show with. And that's right. He's a hero who's been in over 1,200 acting and modeling jobs, including roles like, well, Gotham, House of Cards, Law and Order, and so many more. But with that, we're going to go ahead and I'm going to introduce you to our next hero. And I guarantee you, if you've ever watched TV, you've probably seen

the commercials. He is the founder of BinVerified. That's binverified.com, Ross Cohn. Good morning to you, Ross. And thank you so much for being here this morning because we're going to learn a lot about you and a lot about Ben Verified. Thanks for having me, David. Glad to be here. Okay, now I know what Ben Verified is, but I need you to share with our Money Radio listeners what exactly is Ben Verified and who should be using it. verified and who should be using it? Yes, so Been Verified is a collection of public record data. We aggregate data from multiple sources for everything from social networks and the internet all the way down to criminal records and bankruptcy judgment and liens that we source directly from courthouses. We've created Been Verified for the average everyday consumer and allow those consumers to use public data in their everyday lives. So think of it from dating for your daughter in a carpool and you want to see who's going to be driving your children.

the way down and in between to the average person looking for criminal records about an individual or people within communities that you're potentially meeting and buying and selling online. And we've got endless amount of use cases. And let me understand. So someone can, and again, we've got, you know, the founder of binverified.com. You can go to it going binverified, V-E-R-I-F-I-E-D.com to check it out. Now, what is it that someone needs in order to be able to do, is it a background check? Is that what it is? Yes, so it is a background check, but there are plenty of people who use it for reconnecting. So you're adopted and you're looking for your mother, all you need is a first and last name and some general location. So city, state, and that's enough to get you started on the site. You just go in, type in their name, and we'll give you a

list of individuals closely matching the city and state and the age, and you can narrow it down from there. Now, people need to know too is, has it been verified, your apps have been downloaded over 7 million times and you've run over, is this right, 40 million background reports? in downloads at this point. Yeah, and definitely, you know, when we launched the service, you know, we weren't sure if people were out there were actually looking for the information. And we just felt like the internet was changing. And it wasn't this anonymous place. And people were buying and selling, and you wanted to know who you were dealing with. And since our day of launch about nine years ago, at this point, I mean, the demand has been incredible. Now, this is quite an accomplishment. I wanted you to take me back to day one when you said,

okay, we've got this idea. We're going to do something with background checks. What was going through your mind at that particular moment? It actually started in a little bit of a different place. So the thesis was Josh and I had actually went to high school as my co-founder together. We were always the internet guys, if you will. Him and I had been talking probably about a little bit after

college and said, hey, let's start something. Let's do something together. So him and I kind of went back and forth brainstorming ideas. We were also just kind of at that time, if you take it back nine years ago, there was a stigma associating with online dating. And we just felt that between people buying and selling on eBay, between the dating that we thought would be, we knew that dating would essentially be more prevalent and marriages would be more prevalent from people meeting online than they would actually in the real world. And so the thesis was, can individuals come to our site and actually run third-party verifications on themselves, and then either use it as a

marketing tool, potentially, if they were looking for a job elsewhere, or if they were going to be, you know, joining a dating site, or think of it almost as like a verified resume. And, you know, we worked on that model for quite some time, about three years, and, you know, just really didn't see the demand on people looking to verify themselves. But what we did learn was a lot of people were interacting with other people online and wanted to learn more about them and shifted our focus and pivoted, if you will, to a model that allowed people to search other people. And the model, you know, the business went from there. I mean, that's incredible. And you're listening to Alliance's Heroes on Money Radio, AM 1510 and FM 99.3. Are you a hero in business? Are you doing something for the community, creating, inventing, building, growing, expanding?

Go to alliances.com, E-L-I-a-n-c-e-s.com the place where entrepreneurs align and we have the co-founder of binverified.com i remember i've seen your commercials all the time on tv i'm like oh that's pretty cool do you have people that are running their own checks you know people going in saying hey you know i want to make sure maybe my identity hasn't been compromised or that running their own checks, you know, people going in saying, hey, you know, I want to make sure maybe my identity hasn't been compromised or that, running their own checks too. Is that okay? Yes.

So that was definitely one of the things about, you know, after we had dove into the business a little bit and learned about public data, aggregating all this data, matching and understanding it, one of the things that we saw was that there's potential for, you know, some small inaccuracies potentially in the data itself. And one of those reasons that we built Inverify was to allow individuals to see what's out there about them as well. And, you know, we do see a good portion of the people that sign up just searching themselves or starting with themselves before they move over to what their potential use case is, such as online dating. Ross, I need to know what the feeling was when you saw that commercial run on TV, because that's huge for a startup. Somebody was going, you know what, we've got

this dream, that commercial, I know you were glued in front of it, probably with others, all holding on tight, sweating. What was going through your mind? I actually have a really great story on the first time I ran a commercial. So there was probably about five of us in the company at the time. We had raised a really small angel round, and we're getting low on our funds. It was just about the time where businesses were really pushing marketing more towards online marketing and less towards TV. And we saw an opportunity for the advertising rates to be really low and test television. And I actually have a good friend who was a writer-producer at MTV at the time,

helped us produce the commercial and write it. We said, you know, with probably our last couple bucks, said we're going to put a television commercial on TV and see if we could educate the public about this data and the use cases. So we ran our first television commercial. I remember it being June. It was on Comedy Central. It was a Halloween episode of something in the middle of June. We run the television commercial. Nothing happens. We're all looking at our servers and our unique visitors. And about a minute goes by of us kind of look at each other and say, all right, well, oh, well, that was a failure. All you see

is hits after hits, probably got up to about 18 to 20,000. And then bam, lights out, the server dropped. But, you know, it was a bittersweet moment where we knew we kind of solved the demand. And we also knew that we needed more servers for the infrastructure. Now, you've talked about two. And again, we have the co-founder of BinVerified, binverified.com, amazing things going. You've talked about pivoting. You've talked about taking chances in that. What, if you can give one single advice for others that are looking at starting their company,

going through the sweat and the tears and all that, and certainly with any business, people think, oh, am I doing, am I in the right business? What kind of advice can you give? You know, you're successful. What kind of advice can you give to them? You know, I think the biggest lesson that I learned, especially in the early days, is that your purchasing power is pretty much everything. So, you know, you have to, everybody is trying to ask you for money along the lines when you're negotiating for hosting, when you're negotiating for just even graphic designers and freelancers. And I think the biggest thing that I could teach someone is

that, you know, you have to be frugal with the dollars that you have. There's only a certain amount in the very beginning until you're able to find that minimum viable product. So negotiate everything. I think that, you know, nobody's asking prices, the end price. And those, I think, few dollars that we saved along with every negotiation was the critical reason that we were able to sustain and hold on to see success. Wow. Well, absolutely critical information. I got time for just one last question for you. And I could talk with you for hours and hours because you're so interesting in the journey that you had biggest influence in your life biggest influence in my life I'd say was my father my father was an entrepreneur he started his first business I think at 18 you know and I

think he always told me never put a feeling over my head and and start my own business and push me to be who I am today. Excellent. Well, thank you again, the co-founder of Been Verified, Ross Cohn. And when we return, we're going to have a hero who's been in over 1,200 acting and modeling jobs, including roles like TV hits, Gotham, House of Cards, Law & Order. Thank you again, David Kogan with E-Liances.