Jumbo, which debuted in 2019, made a promise to make the process of securing and safeguarding your privacy easier.
The iPhone and Android software would enhance your privacy settings on websites like Facebook and LinkedIn with a few touches, regularly delete your Google search history, and keep an eye out for data breaches in your email address. Without soliciting sensitive information from consumers or bombarding them with advertisements, it accomplished all of this.
But when Jumbo pushed its biggest features behind a membership paywall over the past three years, it became sluggish. Jumbo's subscription plan only had roughly 25,000 subscribers, and the app's growth eventually stopped.
“I think we made a mistake, to be honest,” Pierre Valade, CEO of Jumbo, stated. “We ended up putting more and more stuff behind the paywall, so that we could increase the consumer subscription business. And at the end of the day, there were very few things left in the free product.”
Jumbo is now returning with a fresh business strategy. Instead of charging users, Jumbo will try to sell premium features to businesses rather than its previously paywalled products, which now include identity theft insurance. Valade intends to make its solution more appealing to businesses that want to protect their employees by fostering customer enthusiasm.
"Because it's free, we can finally give the product away to many more people while still generating money on what is the best business model online, which is B2B SaaS," Valade added.
New modus operandi
Jumbo's offer of "up to" $1 million in identity theft protection is the key to its free product pivot. For example, users can utilise insurance to cover their losses if their credit cards are stolen as a result of a data breach. (However, in situations when the user is at fault, such as when they fall for a phishing attempt, this does not apply.)
However, consumers initially only have access to $25,000 in identity theft insurance. An additional $25,000 in protection is given to them for each user they refer to Jumbo.
The app makes overt attempts to spread like wildfire. Jumbo offers to check not only your own email address but also the email addresses of your contacts for security flaws. Then, tap on each contact to invite them to the programme and obtain your extra identity theft protection.
However, Jumbo's benefits go beyond its ability to prevent identity theft.
The coolest skill it has is that it can help you traverse websites' confusing privacy options. For example, you can block Facebook from displaying targeted adverts with a single tap and stop other LinkedIn users from knowing whether you have browsed their profiles. Even without letting you wait 180 days, as Google's own auto-deletion service does, Jumbo can wipe your search history on Google.
Similar to Lockdown, Jumbo also provides a tracking protection option that uses a local VPN to prevent access to well-known tracking websites. This goes further than Apple's own anti-tracking tools, which just allow you to ask apps to hide your specific advertising ID.
More consumer-facing services, including those that didn't make sense when the business was primarily focused on selling subscriptions, are also coming, Valade explained.
Futuristic approach
Jumbo hasn't yet made any announcements about its business offerings, and it won't do so until later this year.
But the idea is that Jumbo will provide further capabilities to safeguard users' personal accounts from hacking. Jumbo can check if users are using security measures like two-factor authentication without being unduly intrusive because it doesn't collect any data from users' accounts when it scans their security settings.
"The companies that we talk to in our research, they don’t want to have anything to do with employee data,” Valade concluded. “They want to help employees be safer, but they know they need to have the trust of their employees."
The new business model is also, in a way, a necessity for Jumbo, which has never been in favour of making money off of its products through advertising and data mining. Valade concedes that a lot of visitors skipped over Jumbo because of paywalls. He now appears reenergized about creating a product that anyone may test out without charge.