How Verity helps parents organize text records for custody cases
Jacob Reed, founder of Verity, built a tool that turns exported text conversations into dated, numbered records for parents in custody and divorce cases. This conversation explores why messages stay on the user’s device, how search guides brought Verity its first customer, and why clear limits matter when software touches a legal case.
Listen closely to the people you want to help, then be precise about what your product can and cannot do. For Verity, keeping messages on the user’s device and describing the tool’s limits plainly became central to earning trust.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I spent most of my working life in construction and taught myself to build software at night. Verity started with a question from my own life: is there a way to actually see the patterns in how someone talks to you, instead of only feeling them? I first built that as an Android app. Then parents in custody cases showed me what they really needed: the whole conversation in order, every message numbered and dated, with the messages that matter marked, in a form their lawyer can read.
What makes Verity different is where the work happens. For parents, Verity reads the export inside their own browser, so the messages never leave their phone or computer. Once the page has loaded you can turn the internet off and it still works. When the conversation is the most private thing in your life, that matters more than any feature.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Not from ads. I tried small paid campaigns on TikTok, Facebook and Google, and people looked and left. What worked was answering the questions parents were already searching for: how long Snapchat keeps messages, how to export a WhatsApp chat, how to get records from a phone carrier. Our first sale came from a parent who found one of those guides.
Today most new visitors still come from Google, and a growing share from AI assistants like ChatGPT. Everything starts free: a text check where you paste a few messages, a two-minute check of whether your texts are ready for court, and a free preview of your own conversation. People can see what Verity does before they pay for anything.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
The decision: keeping every message on the person’s own device. It made the engineering much harder, because the reading, the numbering and even the pattern model all had to run inside the browser. But it is the reason a parent can trust Verity with their conversation.
The mistake: overclaiming. My early pages used big words like "forensic" and a dark, dramatic design. Feedback from parents was blunt: it felt intimidating and promised more than software can. I rewrote the site and the reports to say exactly what they do: what was flagged, what was not, and that pattern checks miss things and sometimes flag ordinary messages. The honest version is the one I would want if I were the parent.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
Two things changed. More of the apps people use now delete messages on their own unless you change a setting, so parents often learn too late that part of the record is gone. And people now ask an AI assistant what to do with their texts before they ask anyone else.
I adapted in two ways. I wrote plain guides for each app, built only from that app’s own help pages, covering how long it keeps messages and how to export them. And I built free tools that answer the first question without asking for anything: paste a few messages and see which ones match known warning patterns, or take a two-minute check of whether your texts are ready for court. A parent can start there and come back when they are ready.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
Do first: listen to the people you want to help, in their own words. I read about five thousand app-store reviews of co-parenting apps and their export tools, and several of Verity’s features came straight from those complaints.
Ignore: vanity numbers. Follower counts and launch-day buzz felt good and sold nothing. Ten people who arrive from a search for exactly your problem are worth more than a thousand views.
And in any field that touches someone’s legal case, say only what your product actually does. Trust is the whole business.
Thank you to Jacob Reed and the team at Verity for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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