The nurses had a good reason to send the messages. A hospital needed blood; a central blood bank needed to know how much remained. Nathan Eagle and his students in Kenya built a system that joined those two facts with a text. It worked. Then the messages dwindled. Within a month, participation had collapsed. The design had overlooked the person buying the message.
- Jana paid users in mobile credit for engaging with advertisers.
- Carrier billing connections made the reward usable beyond the sponsored app.
- In 2017, the company shifted its attention to an ad-funded browser.
The bill nobody counted
Sending daily updates cost the nurses money. A public-service tool had quietly become a recurring deduction from their wages. Eagle added reimbursement, including roughly 10 Kenyan shillings to cover a text and a small thank-you. Participation returned. The useful discovery was embarrassingly practical: people might welcome a service and still be unable to afford using it.
That experience supplied the premise for Jana, co-founded by Eagle and Benjamin Olding in 2009 as txteagle. Its early business divided work into small tasks that people could complete on mobile phones. Participants received compensation, including airtime. The name changed in 2011, and the commercial emphasis moved toward consumer research and advertising. The payment mechanism survived the change of wardrobe.
Imagine the ordinary advertisement from the other side of a prepaid account. Loading it consumes data. Trying the app consumes more. The marketer records an opportunity; the prospective customer records an expense. Jana’s idea was to put some of the marketing budget into that customer’s phone account. A brand could help finance the encounter it wanted to have.
The advertiser picks up the tab
mCent made the exchange visible. Users chose sponsored activities, including app trials, and received airtime or data credit. Brands bought a route to an audience; Jana kept a share of the proceeds. Named advertisers and developers included Amazon, Flipkart, WeChat and Zynga. The consumer got something rather more tangible than the usual promise of a relevant advertising experience.
“They can use the data for literally anything.”Nathan Eagle · March 2016
The last part of the bargain mattered. Earned data could be used beyond the app that sponsored it. Jana distinguished that freedom from Facebook’s Free Basics, which offered access to selected services. One arrangement selected destinations. The other subsidized a balance. For someone budgeting every online session, the ability to spend the reward elsewhere was part of its value.
The difficult work lived behind this simple offer. Credit had to arrive in a real prepaid account, across operators and countries. GSMA’s case study described relationships with carriers, aggregators and service providers, plus technology that could switch payment channels. That is a less glamorous asset than an app screenshot. It is also the asset that makes a promised reward worth believing.
Publicis Groupe invested $15 million in July 2013 and planned to introduce Jana across its agencies. The logic was straightforward: an advertising group brought brand relationships; Jana brought a way to deliver rewards. In February 2016, Verizon Ventures led a $57 million Series C, with Spark Capital and Publicis participating. Jana planned more international expansion, sales capacity and engineering work.
Capital for expansion. An investment figure, not proof that the economics would always hold.
A browser replaces the bargain
By March 2017, Jana was preparing another front door: mCent Browser, launching first in India. The initial reported allowance was up to 10 megabytes a day and 70 a week. Advertising would offset browsing costs. Competitors for that daily habit included UC Browser and Opera Mini. Instead of repeatedly asking people to try another sponsored app, Jana wanted a place in the activity they already performed.
The pivot carried a cost beyond a redesigned screen. Jana cut 19 percent of staff while moving away from its app store. A new product direction could preserve the mission and still make parts of the old organization unnecessary. The browser was a bet on a different pattern of use, rather than evidence that app rewards had solved every problem.
There was an economic wrinkle, too. Falling data prices might seem to weaken a business built around expensive connectivity. Eagle argued in 2017 that cheaper data could make Jana’s subsidy go further: the company bought data from operators. That argument depends on advertising receipts paying for enough useful browsing. “Free” describes the user’s cash charge within the allowance; it does not remove the underlying cost.
The Boston office offered a revealing companion story. Jana announced an expansion from 5,000 to 18,500 square feet in 2015, with art from countries where its users lived. The company also made concrete choices about employees: eight weeks of paid parental leave and, in April 2016, waivers releasing existing staff from non-competes. Office snacks are easy to advertise. Freedom to leave is a more interesting benefit.
The useful lesson is on the receipt
By April 2018, Eagle was emphasizing the browser and India. The broader ambition remained subsidized connectivity, but the product carrying it had changed. Jana’s history is useful precisely because a good premise did not dictate one permanent interface. The business kept revisiting the route between a sponsor’s money and a user’s online activity.
For a product team, the practical exercise is to list what participation costs the customer: data, time, setup, recharge money. Decide which expense your business can cover, then test whether people return after the reward. A trial creates an opportunity to earn loyalty. It cannot make an unwanted service desirable, and a subsidy needs a payer whose own budget survives the exchange.
Jana belongs at that intersection of mobile marketing and household arithmetic. Its story began with a system people stopped using despite its obvious purpose. The question worth carrying into another business is wonderfully undignified: before asking customers for more engagement, have you checked who gets the bill?