OneRep is a fully automated privacy platform that removes unauthorized personal information from the internet. Pulse 2.0 interviewed OneRep founder and CEO Dimitri Shelest to learn more.
Dimitri Shelest’s Background
For most of Shelest’s adult life, he has been an entrepreneur. “At university, I studied IT, and after graduation, I almost immediately got into SEO consulting and my own web projects. I worked on a travel planner, a doctor search site, and even a food blog that my wife and I launched together. As is often the case, my early endeavors were an enriching experience that didn’t really flourish but prepared me for my lifetime project OneRep,” said Shelest.
Formation Of OneRep
How did the idea for OneRep come together? Shelest shared:
“Through my previous SEO work, I learned about data brokers (AKA people search sites) that use people’s personal information to attract traffic and resell data to other companies. You would be surprised by the amount of private information those websites collect and expose. New sites are constantly popping up. Many of them have intentionally difficult and time-consuming opt-out processes, and the information you have removed often resurfaces a few months later,”
“Back in 2015, there were only two ways to fix privacy damage caused by these sites: spend weeks and months going through a labyrinth of opt-outs or pay thousands of dollars to privacy and cybersecurity consultants who would take this burden off your shoulders. Only top-tier executives and celebrities could afford that, and, even then, the privacy problem wasn’t entirely solved as removal was done from a fraction of the people-search sites only.”
“This was when I decided to create my own company that would remove people’s names and other personal details from the biggest number of data brokers at the price of two cups of coffee, making it affordable for everyone. Eight years later, over 450,000 people have used our service. And last year, we launched a new product to help businesses and the public sector protect their employees’ privacy.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Shelest’s favorite memory working for OneRep so far? “Minimum viable product (MVP) and first sales. We started as a small team of like-minded people, and the first thing we did was create a simple MVP to fully automate the work of finding and removing profiles on numerous data brokers and people-search sites. We did it to test a hypothesis and see if people needed such a product at all,” Shelest reflected. “To be honest, few believed in my idea that anyone would want to pay $100 a year to remove their phone number and other details from people-search websites, especially since they can opt-out manually without paying anything. So we launched the MVP, turned on billing, bought some Google ads, and our first customers signed up just hours after that! Just imagine our surprise when we learned that one of these people was a top manager of a company who committed to an annual subscription. This was when the whole team realized that our approach was really what people needed.”
Challenges Faced
What are some of the challenges Shelest faced in building the company? “The biggest challenges for me have always been growth and operations. I’m a startup founder by nature, and I know how to create something useful and profitable with minimum resources,” Shelest acknowledged. “But I haven’t always been very good with the operational component of the business. It’s tedious work for me and I had to learn a lot to be able to do it effectively. I also learned to rely on other people. I think we’ve managed to build a strong team where people complement each other. But growth problems will never go away. After all, each development stage has its own challenges. But I do understand that these are good problems to have because they mean the company is developing and growing.”
Core Products
What are OneRep’s core products and features?“OneRep has two core products – 1.) A consumer protection platform that helps restore the privacy of individuals and their relatives, and 2.) A business solution that supports companies and the public sector in safeguarding their employees from unwanted personal information appearing on the Internet. These organizations activate OneRep as a subsidized or voluntary benefit to help their workers stay safe and protect their daily operations from breaches and other common security threats invoked by people. On top of those core products, we offer an API for our strategic partners who want to protect their users,” Shelest explained.
Evolution Of OneRep’s Technology
How has OneRep’s technology evolved since launching? “When we started OneRep, we were able to remove personal information from less than ten websites. Currently, we’re covering over 190 websites and counting,” Shelest pointed out. “Our removal system has been fully automated from the very start, but we never stop improving it to make it more efficient in terms of monitoring, adding new websites, and some other core features. We’ve developed our own API, which powers other privacy and identity protection services/products. We now have a platform for business that makes it simple to keep employee personal data from being used and abused.”
Most Significant Milestones
What have been some of OneRep’s most significant milestones? “Getting our first 100K users and continuing to empower consumers to take back their privacy. (We’re currently over 450K),” Shelest cited. “Developing OneRep for Business to be able to partner with other like-minded organizations to get our solution in front of more consumers and employees faster. Having removed 10 million profiles from the internet on behalf of our users and corporate clients. We recently hit this milestone, and it super-charged our team. (We’re currently over the 11 million mark).”
Customer Success Story
When I asked Shelest about a customer success story, he replied:
“There are plenty of stories I could share with you. On the consumer side, I was very touched by a story that happened a few years ago when we helped an anxious foster father who had a traumatizing experience as his family was located and harassed by the birth parents of one of the seven kids his wife and he adopted. They received a lot of angry messages with unfounded accusations and direct physical threats that contained their personal information, and were very worried about their own safety and that of their adopted children.”
“OneRep removed their personal information and made their names and addresses much less visible online. The man was very thankful–I still remember his words about no longer feeling like he had a target on his back as he didn’t have to stress about someone showing up unannounced at his house and potentially hurting his family and the kids in his care.”
“Another story is that of our business partner, a police department protecting officers and their families from retaliation and similar job-related risks. They partnered with us in 2022 to bring OneRep’s Corporate Family Plan onboard as a fully subsidized benefit for their entire department for a full calendar year. We’ve already removed over 57,000 profiles with personal information for their 700 officers. The agency is happy and planning to renew OneRep for year two.”
Funding/Revenues
Unlike some of OneRep’s competitors, they are independent and have no liabilities to investors. “OneRep is a self-funded company that has operated profitably without any outside funding since day 1,” Shelest affirmed. “Our customers stay with us for several years and often longer because we offer an affordable and quality privacy solution they trust. That happens largely because we’re on a mission to democratize privacy. That’s exactly why we have very simple, fair, and straightforward pricing. We deliver privileged service at a standard price for all. Having said that, our business model is also simple – we provide a subscription service directly to consumers. And OneRep for Business enables companies to deploy our solution in the form of a subsidized or voluntary benefit for their employees or an API to protect their users.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is OneRep pursuing? “Our customers are businesses and individuals across the U.S. Potentially, every privacy-minded adult and business/organization. We keep growing along with the growth of privacy concerns in our country. So you can say that our market depends on the general awareness of privacy violations and personal information exposure. That’s why alongside democratization, we see it as our mission to spread the word about privacy and educate the public,” Shelest assessed. “As for our business solution, we’re focused on organizations where employees are vulnerable due to the nature of their work–think healthcare, public service, the legal and finance-sector, Web 3.0 companies, and retail.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates OneRep from its competition? Shelest noted the following:
1.) Industry leadership – We do one thing, and we do it well. The 6-year track record and more than 11 million consumer public records removed make OneRep one of the most experienced and technologically advanced services available. Our engineering team developed a unique removal technology other companies use as an API to power their own privacy services.”
2.) Proprietary fully automated opt-out. OneRep was the first company to automate opt-out. Our platform scans 190+ sites monthly and resumes removal immediately upon new record(s) detection. No human will want to do this every month. Full automation coupled with years of focus on scrubbing personal profiles off the internet means we’re able to keep prices reasonable while offering potentially unlimited scale.
3.) We do what we say. Unlike competitors who may submit opt-out requests on behalf of a user and assume the job is done, we verify that the opt-out has indeed been completed. This means we keep re-submitting the same request until it’s actually honored, and then continue to monitor each website for re-appearance. If previously removed profiles reappear (15-20%), we automatically and immediately restart the removal process. In addition, we stay on top of newly appeared people-search sites and continually expand the number of sites we remove from. Covering as many sites as possible translates into a more efficient removal from Google search, making our subscribers less exposed.
Trends
What are some of the trends that Shelest noticed in his company’s industry?
“I’ve already mentioned that part of our mission is educating the public about privacy and the challenges of data removal. So I want to take this chance to highlight one of the major problems both people and platforms like OneRep are facing when they’re trying to remove personal information from data broker websites. Despite the current pro-privacy climate in the U.S., new, more profound laws regulating consumer privacy, and a higher level of privacy awareness, data brokers keep intentionally complicating the opt-out process for their services. Sometimes to the point that it becomes impossible for people to remove their information from these websites, even though the law obliges them to remove public records for anyone who submitted an opt-out request to them,” Shelest observed. “Such is a recent case with truthfinder.com, a gigantic people-search website with approximately 12 million visitors per month. The company ‘upgraded’ its opt-out procedure to include a complex identity verification process. It is now much more complicated to verify yourself in order to be removed from their site. Worse still, Truthfinder now forces you to share even more personal information claimed to be needed for verification. We don’t know for sure how this additional data will really be used. We think it’s important for consumers to know that websites like truthfinder.com are hindering their information removal requests–because Truthfinder is not alone in the people-search site landscape with such evolving practices.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of OneRep’s future company goals? “Right now and for the near future, we will remain very focused on two things: 1.) Expanding our business partner network of companies who integrate our platform into their own offerings for consumers and employees. 2.) Continue supporting consumers directly, helping them remove their personal information from unauthorized use on people-search sites,” Shelest concluded.
