A College Dropout Built Wigo - A $14 Million Social Network • Reviews • WeRSM

Since last September, Wigo has become the hottest thing on college campuses. Brainchild of a college dropout, Ben Kaplan, Wigo is a new social networking app, somewhere between Tinder and Swarm.

Also Read: Ex-Tinder Co-Founder Is Getting Ready To Launch Bumble

Wigo -literally “Who Is Going Out?” – is an app that helps college students find out where their friends are going to meet up and party, study or do anything in fact.

.@Wigo is an app for college students to find out where their friends are going to meet up.

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Ben Kaplan explained that he had the idea two years ago while being a freshman at college:

[quote]I was looking at my friends and how difficult it was for them to get organised and decide on where to meet up and what to do. I thought to myself: there must be a better way.[/quote]

The app really relies on the network effect. On Wigo, college students can invite other students at a party (for example). They can reply “Go out” – which means they will come or “Don’t go out” – the polite way of saying No. And then they have the opportunity to invite other students to the party, creating a snowball networking effect. Wigo also offers in-app chat messages for users to get organized.

But what makes Wigo really special, what makes kids for wild for the app is that they cannot just download it and use it. They have to really want it and get hundreds to thousands of their fellow students to sign up on a waiting list to be able to “unlock” the app at their school.

You cannot just download @Wigo, your whole school needs to sign up and unlock it!

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Wigo even has “school ambassadors”, college kids who recruit others to sign up for the app until the school hits the magic number to be unlocked — somewhere around 5% of the college’s population.