New social planning apps seem to be cropping up left and right recently. And in theory, the trend makes sense—we use technology to communicate, but have yet to figure out an ultra effective way to make casual get-togethers happen with friends. But here’s the thing: Most of those apps eventually fail. Why? According to Wigo founder and CEO Ben Kaplan, they never manage to get popular because they haven’t figured out how to best leverage the "network effect."
“If three of your friends are using it, you’re probably just going to text them,” he explained in an interview at Paul English's Fort Point startup foundry Blade. “But if everyone’s buying into the system, then it becomes a super useful tool."
Over the last year, Wigo grew to have over 50,000 registered app users spanning over 1,300 colleges and universities.
And Wigo seems to have figured out the secret sauce. The app launched last year with a straightforward mission: helping college students answer the question “who is going out?” Users can post where they're going that night, and friends from their school networks could join in. There’s also chat functionality, and the option to send other users push notifications indicating that you want to see them at X place. A la Snapchat, the app wipes everything clean the next morning, including all chats and the places you went the night before. Over the last year, Wigo brought on over 50,000 registered users spanning over 1,300 colleges and universities. But it all started when Kaplan launched the app at his own college, Holy Cross, where half of all iPhone users had the app within three weeks, and of that 50 percent, about 90 percent used it.
Last spring, Kaplan met Kayak founder Paul English, who had just established his highly selective startup hatchery Blade. English connected Kaplan with MIT graduate and engineer Giuliano Giacaglia, who came on as Wigo’s cofounder and CTO, and the startup moved into the Blade space. With that, Kaplan opted to drop out of Holy Cross and focus on Wigo full time.
"I can guarantee you this will be an app with a million users," English told BostInno back in August.
English’s prediction for Wigo is starting to look like a very real possibility.
Going beyond college campuses
Earlier this month, the startup made a few major announcements. For one, an .edu email address is no longer required to download and use the new Wigo Summer app. Remember when Facebook ditched the student-only policy? It's a move that comes with immense potential. Plus, the timing couldn’t be more perfect. As graduates move from campus to the real world, Wigo is coming with them. In its first week, Wigo Summer added more than 20,000 new users to the platform.
“By launching one campus at a time, we were able to create a really loyal user base that came back every single weekend,” Kaplan told me. “Now it’s all about transitioning that loyalty into larger cities.”
For the Wigo summer app, Kaplan says the five-person startup is focusing specifically on building the user bases in Boston and New York.
“They’re great places to launch an app like this because there are so many interns that can spread the word at their schools, and young professionals that are moving into those cities for the first time,” he added.
Additionally, the app itself got some major updates—like a geolocation feature, which allows users to see local events posted by Facebook friends as well as suggested friends of friends, based on mutual chats and event attendance.
Making Wigo more intuitive
There’s another challenge the startup is eager to overcome.
“No one is going to create a Wigo event when they’re three beers deep at 10 p.m,” said Kaplan.
Which is why, in a few weeks, Wigo is about to get another facelift. And while Kaplan deliberately avoided the word “pivot,” he did reveal that the app is going to become far more chat-focused.
“Right now, Wigo is very event-centric,” he explained. “Am I going out? Yes. OK, where? With who? In theory, that makes sense. But in real life, that’s not how humans interact. You send a text that says ‘yo what are you up to?’ After some back and forth, you’re on your way there and then you get another text that changes your plans. Humans don’t plan the way computers would. It’s not code. It’s human interaction. And what we’re about to do is make Wigo all about people.”
"Humans don’t plan the way computers would. It’s not code. It’s human interaction. And what we’re about to do is make Wigo all about people.”
To date, Wigo has pulled in just over $2 million. When the startup first joined English’s foundry, it banked a $500,000 seed round from Blade, Rue La La founder and former CEO Ben Fischman, Vince Wilfork of the New England Patriots, James van Riemsdyk of the Toronto Maple Leafs, Tinder cofounders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen (who are also acting as advisors) and Slow Ventures Managing Director Kevin Colleran (one of the first ten employees at Facebook). Then, in February, the company added another $1.5 million from Great Oaks Venture Capital, Greylock Partners, GGV Capital, Blade and KEC Ventures. And with that, the valuation went from $4.5 million to $14 million. Kaplan tells me that Wigo still has about $1.4 million in the bank, so for right now, they’re not raising any more.
“Blade is an awesome place to start a company,” he said. “Unlike a lot of accelerator programs...it takes a really hands-on, almost cofounder approach. And the reason our burn has been so low is that Blade takes care of almost all of the overhead, all of the hassles that inhibits a lot of companies. For example, legal stuff—a lot of founders get caught up in intellectual property patents, and we have someone here who does that, so I can focus on the product and the marketing.”
In examining companies that set out to ease and improve social planning, Kaplan calls out Foursquare as one of the first that tried to tackle the challenges involved. Undoubtedly, the app had a solid team of execs from top tier companies as well as hundreds of millions of dollars in funding behind their effort.
“I would argue that they still didn’t really solve the problem,” he said. “Honestly, what we’re trying to solve is extremely hard.”
Photo courtesy of Wigo, screenshot via iTunes App Store.
