Jumo

» see jumo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

260 days. That is the whole run, from the public launch on 30 November 2010 to the announcement on 17 August 2011 that it had been bought. Almost nothing on this site lived a shorter life, and very few things arrived with a louder introduction, because the person who built Jumo was Chris Hughes.

Hughes co-founded Facebook and then went to work on Barack Obama's 2008 campaign, where he built the online organizing side of it. Coming off both of those, the thing he chose to do next was a social network for charities. You would follow the issues you cared about the way you followed people, the site would surface the organizations working on those issues, and you would be able to tell which ones were worth your money. By the end it had 15,000 nonprofits indexed and sorted by topic, running from human trafficking to childhood obesity.

Money was never the constraint. Jumo reported 3.5 million dollars in donations and sponsorships before it had launched anything, including as much as 750,000 dollars from the Omidyar Network, which is to say from the man who founded eBay. It was set up as a nonprofit itself, which is the correct structure for what it was doing and also removes the one pressure that forces a product to find out early whether anybody wants it.

By the time I would plausibly have heard of Jumo it had already been sold, and its issue pages were somebody else's inventory. This is a category of death that barely leaves a mark. A well-funded product with a famous founder and a real problem to solve, which existed for under a year and was never used enough by anyone anywhere for one person to be able to say they missed it.

~ the case file ~

~ eight and a half months ~

The traffic numbers are the obituary and they are short enough to quote in full. 114,000 unique American visitors in December 2010, the first full month after launch. 8,500 in June 2011. Six months of the same slope with no scandal behind it and no competitor taking the audience, just a curve that went one direction from the moment the launch coverage stopped.

On 17 August 2011 Hughes announced that GOOD, a magazine and events company out of Los Angeles, had acquired Jumo and that users would be moved onto a single platform at GOOD.is. He said he would be teaming up with GOOD's chief executive Ben Goldhirsh to grow both. Terms were not disclosed, which in this case had a complication behind it: Jumo was a registered charity, so whatever was paid for its assets had to stay dedicated to charitable purposes, and the New York attorney general's office had an interest in whether the charity got a fair price for itself.

The problem Jumo set out to solve was real and is still unsolved. Working out which charity deserves your money is genuinely hard, and the organizations with the best websites are reliably not the organizations doing the best work. What Jumo assumed was that people would do that research socially, in public, following issues the way they followed friends. Almost nobody did. Giving turned out to be something people do quietly, usually because somebody they already know has asked them to.

~ the code went to the public domain ~

Seven weeks after the sale, on 5 October 2011, Jumo released its entire codebase into the public domain. Not open source under a license with conditions attached, the public domain, with the stated hope that somebody else would pick up the ability to build and curate content around 250-odd issue areas. That is a decent ending for a charity that raised 3.5 million dollars against a problem and did not move it, and as far as anybody can tell nothing was ever built on top of it. The domain jumo.com does not resolve today.

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