Jabburr

We didn’t set out to build a social network. We set out to fix one.

We are Jonathan and Heather Bell — married, business partners, and, for a long time, two of the millions of people quietly frustrated by what social media had turned into. Jonathan had spent his career starting companies and selling them. Heather had spent hers on the creative side, building the things people actually see and feel. Between us we had watched dozens of small businesses try to grow online and get punished for it.

The pattern was always the same. A business would spend years building an audience on a platform, and then the platform would quietly decide that audience was no longer reachable — not unless money changed hands. A creator would post something good and watch it disappear for reasons no one would explain, to a support team that did not exist. And ordinary people would open an app to check one thing, lose forty minutes, and come away feeling worse than when they started, while their data was packaged and sold behind the scenes.
None of that was an accident. It was a business model. Every major platform runs on the same one: extract the attention, extract the data, extract the money, and charge people for access to relationships they built themselves. Once we saw it clearly, we couldn’t unsee it — and we got tired of waiting for someone else to build the alternative.
Building the opposite of what we didn’t like.

Jabburr started with a list of things we refused to do. No behavioral tracking. No selling user data. No algorithm deciding whose posts count. No pay-to-play reach. When a person deletes their account, their data is deleted with it. And when something goes wrong, a real human answers — fast, because someone’s livelihood is usually on the other end of that ticket.
Then came the harder part: making it a place people could actually live and work. Most people don’t need four apps — one to post, one to sell, one to message, one to run events. They need one that does all of it and doesn’t take a cut of their dignity along the way. So we built the feed, the short-form video, the messaging, the storefronts, the business pages, the event ticketing, the blogs, and the podcasts into a single app, and we made it possible to sell almost anything directly on the platform.
The measure we set for ourselves was unusual, and we’ve kept it: Jabburr is not built to keep people scrolling. It’s built to help them get what they came for and get back to their lives. We don’t win by keeping you trapped. We win by helping you live.

The moment we knew it was working

We built Jabburr in English, for a Western audience. Then one morning the feed was in Portuguese. People in Brazil had found the app on their own, told their friends, and started posting — with no marketing spend behind any of it. That was the first real proof that the thing we’d been arguing about at our kitchen table was something other people wanted too, badly enough to find it without being sold on it.

Where we are now
Jabburr has grown 24x in the last 18 months and is probably the fastest growing social app on the planet. We're not concerned with being the largest social app, but being the best for everyday users, creators and small businesses is non-negotiable.
Rather than being the next attention machine, we’re building the platform people use when they’ve had enough — one that respects their time, their privacy, and their livelihood. That was the whole idea at the kitchen table, and it still is.