As Wigo app reaches $15M valuation, students leave school to join team
![The Wigo team (L-R): Tyler Swartz, Giuliano Giacaglia, Ben Kaplan and Claire Uhar.](/https/www.usatoday.com/gcdn/-mm-/da8232979901468ee2bd6497a5248825a43b8ed5/c=0-148-1716-1113/local/-/media/2018/08/14/USATODAY/usatsports/screen-shot-2015-03-11-at-11-14-05-am.png?width=660&height=372&fit=crop&format=pjpg&auto=webp)
Since its release in September, the start-up app Wigo has immensely transformed the social lives of college students across the nation. Some students are so engaged with the app that they even dropped out of school to join the movement.
Wigo — short for “Who Is Going Out” — is a hyperlocal event-planning app designed by 23-year-old CEO and co-founder Ben Kaplan, a dropout from College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. The app allows students to see who at their school is going out each night and where they are going.
University of Maryland students Tyler Swartz, 20, and Claire Uhar, 20, became so interested in the the app that they decided to leave their daily routines of classes, homework and Greek life to move to Boston, where they joined Kaplan and co-founder Giuliano Giacaglia as full-time Wigo employees.
“It was a no brainer decision,” says Swartz, who studied communications at UMD.
Swartz became involved with the app last fall when he acted as UMD’s campus ambassador during the initial launching stages of Wigo. His efforts in promoting the app to his peers caused UMD to become the first school to reach 1,000 users, and then led to an unpaid internship with Wigo over winter break.
“I sat at a desk and helped grow the company in terms of downloads,” says Swartz. “I was just reaching out to schools and it was a really fun experience for me, and then I contacted other friends at UMD and that’s how Claire got involved.”
Uhar, who knew Swartz through Greek life, began helping Wigo by reaching out to other large universities to spread the word. As the two began to succeed in working together, Kaplan offered both of them full-time positions at the company.
“My family works a little bit with technology, and I always wanted to get involved with the marketing and communications side [of it],” says Uhar. “It sounds kind of cheesy but this is my dream job. And [the opportunity] came, so I had to take it.”
Now, as a team of four employees with hundreds of unpaid campus ambassadors, Wigo has had the ability to grow exponentially in both popularity and internal product design. Hundreds of schools — both big and small, from the East Coast to Hawaii — have taken part in the Wigo movement. Almost 1,300 universities are on a waiting list to “unlock” Wigo, which can only be done once 3 to 5% of the campus population downloads the app.
READ MORE: Is Wigo revolutionizing the way college students socialize?
"We spend a lot of time trying to figure out what exactly makes a school love Wigo and we're having a hard time because it's so random. There's not one recipie for success," says Kaplan. “The unlocking feature leads to a lot of initial growth because people are wondering what’s behind the door."
Yet, Kaplan says that Wigo is in no rush to unlock more schools, despite the high demand.
"We're 100% obsessively focused on continuing to tweek the product and making it something that every college kid can't live without," Kaplan explains. "So, until we get to that point, we're rapidly — every week or two — pushing out a new build to the app store, tweaking things or adding new features."
Some of the features that Wigo has added since their launch include "Highlights," which allows users to upload event photos to then be "up voted" or "down voted" by fellow event-goers, and "Rewards," which gives event hosts the opportunity to earn cash if their event reaches 100 or more attendees. Wigo will also introduce a "private event" feature in the near future, which will allow users to make secret events that students can only attend if they are invited.
Additionally, Kaplan has announced that the first annual "Wigo Summer" will be launched this year, allowing college students living in big cities for the summer to use Wigo as a "Tinder-like" app for going out. Wigo Summer will launch in New York City, Boston and possibly D.C.
Although Wigo has raised over $2 million in funding and has an impressive valuation of $15 million, Kaplan explains that the app is not bringing in any revenue. Yet, with so many features being added, he hopes that "the price of eyeballs" — or continued loyalty between Wigo and its users — will help monetize the app.
"In the aggregate, nobody's making money from Wigo. It’s just being a part of something cool," Kaplan explains.
For Swartz, accepting a job with Wigo was never about the money or valuation of the company.
“I wasn’t doing it for money. I was doing it because I really felt like I was being useful,” he says. “Connecting to so many different people at so many different schools [and] knowing that we're affecting change is the most amazing feeling.”
“We are all three kids who, our sophomore years of college, decided to take a risk and be part of something bigger, and nothing gives us more joy than helping people [who] want to be involved in the company,” says Kaplan. “None of us have years of experience in the working world, but we're trying our best and it's a really fun, fun process to be involved in."
Kristin Musulin works for USA TODAY College while studying journalism at University of Maryland. Follow her on Twitter @kristinmusulin.
This story originally appeared on the USA TODAY College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.