Jellybean

The argument

Every click, like, share and post creates data about a person. That data is collected and sold, and the person has no say and no share.

Two facts about that market carry the thesis. Two companies hold more than half of a digital advertising market projected at $400 billion. And the tracking methods the market runs on are being removed by browsers, by regulators and by platform policy at the same time. Brands lose accuracy, people lose trust, and both sides get worse results.

Jellybean Software, Inc. is an Austin, Texas company incorporated in March 2021, co-founded by Frank with two partners. Its tagline is the shortest statement of the position it takes: New Game. Fair Rules.

What a member gets

A privacy and data asset manager on the phone. A person signs up and the account is instantiated so ownership is recorded rather than assumed. From there they control what is shared, with whom and on what terms, see which buyers are paying, and get paid into a wallet. The app is always free to the member.

• Practical privacy tools around it: tips and scripts for locking down accounts outside Jellybean, and granular controls inside it.
• The repository grows in waves rather than in one grab. Direct profile input through gamified surveys, social connections through an agent, banking and geolocation if the member turns them on, and data supplied by business partners under a share agreement.
• Each wave enriches a master digital portrait: a single verified source of truth about that person, built with their knowledge rather than behind their back.

The Authenticator, which is the piece that makes it spread

A secure OAuth2 sign-in that third-party applications adopt. When a member logs into another app with Jellybean credentials, their data-share rules travel with them. The deck calls it Traveling Trust, and it is what turns a privacy app into an ecosystem: the member sets the terms once and every app that accepts the sign-in inherits them.

What a brand buys

A data products exchange. Verified, consented, first-person data sold as subscription feeds, custom reports and blended data products, with the member's share carved out before the business takes its revenue. That order matters: the member is paid from the top of the transaction, not from what is left at the bottom of it.

Go to market was community first. Member acquisition through influencer communities and organizations already working on digital ethics, then charter brands bringing their own audiences, then integration with the larger data platforms. A data exchange with no members has nothing to sell, so the sequence was never negotiable.

How it is built

An AWS platform with five components: a mobile application, an OAuth2 authenticator service, a member data repository, a data products exchange and a wallet.

Blockchain is used where ownership needs to be recorded, and nowhere else. It is the mechanism for the one claim the product cannot afford to have disputed, which is that this person owns this data and granted this access on this date.

• AWS
• OAuth2
• Mobile application
• Member data repository
• Data products exchange
• Wallet
• Blockchain ownership records

How it was taken to investors

The company was taken to institutional investors across two cycles, seed and Series A, with investor decks for each and a named advisor from the marketing world. Frank is named co-founder and CTO on the 2021 investor deck and co-founder and CEO on the later brand-facing overview.

The capitalization figures in the deck are plan targets, not money raised, and we say so rather than let a reader assume otherwise.

State today, stated plainly

The company, the brand, the decks and the architecture exist. The product was not built out. Frank wants to finish it and fold in the civic wallet identity work, which was aimed at the same problem from the other end.