WiGo: An app with Burlington roots

BOSTON – Burlington native Ben Kaplan, 22, was playing Division I college hockey as a sophomore at Holy Cross in Massachusetts when he recognized a hot career opportunity. Now he's elbows deep in a rapidly expanding app valued at $4 million.

Kaplan, WiGo founder and CEO, was initially prompted to start the tech company by a simple question asked repeatedly in his circle of college friends, "Who's going out?"

WiGo—pronounced wee-go, is an acronym for, who is going out.

Holy Cross holds a Shark Tank competition in the entrepreneurial studies department every year. Kaplan pitched WiGo to a panel of alumni judges his freshman year. WiGo took first place.

Shark Tank is a reality TV show where entrepreneurs pitch businesses to a panel of millionaire investors.

"I credit this with giving me the initial confidence to push forward with my idea and get the pilot version built," Kaplan said of the Holy Cross competition.

More than half of the student body downloaded the app within three weeks of WiGo's January 2014 launch.

The free smart phone application is also advertisement free. "We're not focused on monetizing the app any time soon," Kaplan said. "Rather, we're one hundred percent committed to creating a beautifully addicting app that college kids can't function without."

What's covering expenses? More than a half million dollars in seed funding Kaplan has raised.

Hometown boy

This young entrepreneur grew up in Burlington's New North End near Leddy Park, attended C.P. Smith Elementary, Hunt Middle, and Burlington High School before heading to boarding school at St. Paul's in New Hampshire. He now resides in Boston.

Kaplan dropped out of college this summer to tackle running his new tech start-up. "I was only one of four hockey players from the whole state of Vermont to be playing Division I college hockey this past year," he said. "So leaving Holy Cross also meant quitting hockey. Obviously, the decision was extremely difficult."

Kaplan's parents, who after graduating from Yale went on to be doctors, clearly placed a high value on education in their own lives, Kaplan said. However, they fully supported his decision to step away from campus to pursue this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

"I feel extremely grateful to have had their full support," Kaplan said of his parents. "I think it's a bit ironic that an app I created to help facilitate social interaction on campus ultimately drove me away from college."

Shortly after WiGo caught on, Kaplan met Kayak.com co-founder Paul English, who recently founded Blade, a consumer tech start-up foundry in Boston.

English offered Kaplan and WiGo a spot as one of Blade's first incubated companies. From there, English introduced Kaplan to Giuliano Giacaglia, 24, an MIT graduate who decided to turn down positions at Facebook and Microsoft to start his own company. The chemistry was immediate, and Giacaglia joined Kaplan as WiGo's chief technical officer and co-founder.

As of late September 2014, WiGo has garnered more than 50,000 users from over 700 schools, and continues to grow at a rapid clip.

We spoke to Kaplan on Oct. 9.

Burlington Free Press: How did you create the app?

Ben Kaplan: I originally commissioned a software development company to build the beta version used for the Holy Cross launch. Once it started to explode at Holy Cross, I raised my first round of financing, partnered with Kayak.com founder Paul English, and hired an amazingly talented team of developers and designers who came from companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Zappos. We now have a team of eight people working full-time on WiGo.

BFP: What were you hoping to achieve before you created WiGo?

BK: I had designed my own major entitled society, technology, and innovation — which sought to answer the underlying question: How has technological innovation transformed our society, and how will it?

Only about 2 percent of students at Holy Cross design their own major, as it's a long and highly selective process, which culminates with a vote of approval from various department heads at the college. My major had actually just been approved a few weeks before I dropped out.

BFP: What were you thinking when everyone at your school jumped on board?

BK: It was an amazing feeling watching it go viral at my school last spring. It also gave me the confidence to push forward and take WiGo national. Launching it at one school first and listening to the initial user feedback is something I highly recommend to people that come to me for advice with their new app idea.

WiGo has changed so much from Holy Cross to what's being used at over 700 campuses today. We were able to study which features worked, which didn't, and create a more optimized product for the rest of the nation's college students.

BFP: When was the first time you were out and the app worked phenomenally well? Could you describe that night?

BK: Wednesday nights are big going out nights at Holy Cross. However, there are a few bars in Worcester that are popular among the Holy Cross student body and nobody ever knew which one would have the best turnout on any given Wednesday. They're all a few miles away from campus and all spread out, so it was agonizing to take a cab all the way to Mahoney's, only to find out Greyhound was the place to be.

The first 'aha' moment I had using WiGo was when the app told me most of my friends were headed to Mahoney's and sure enough, when I got there, there they were. Seeing a couple thousand lines of code actually dictate the whereabouts of hundreds of people, in real life... that was it.

BFP: Did you dream it would have grown so rapidly?

BK: I had no idea it would spread so quickly at Holy Cross, but the real surprise came watching it grow beyond 700 colleges across the country in our first month this fall. There are even three universities in Hawaii that are on WiGo. I get ten emails a day from college students in Canada, Brazil, the UK, and more, asking me when WiGo will open up at their schools. We're focusing 100 percent on U.S. colleges this year, but have ambitious growth plans for the future.

BFP: Where is WiGo in Vermont?

BK: We've only unlocked two schools in Vermont so far. We unlock schools when enough students sign-up. The rest of the schools are on the wait list.

Twenty-three percent of the student body at Saint Michaels College is already using WiGo, and around five percent of the University of Vermont student body is on board.

BFP: How is WiGo different from the popular Foursquare app?

BK: We don't consider Foursquare, nor their new Swarm spinoff, competitors at all. They are check-in apps, we are a social planning app. Here's the main difference:

• WiGo helps college kids decide which bar/party they're going to go to, based on what their classmates are doing.

• Foursquare/Swarm let's people broadcast where they already are, it's essentially glorified bragging. Once you're already there, it's too late.

Speaking from personal experience, once college students get to the bar or party, their phones are in their pockets and they're socializing with friends, getting drinks, dancing, meeting new people, all the stuff that makes college so fun. WiGo helps you get to the right place, the rest is up to you.

Another main difference is WiGo is 100 percent exclusive to college students; we create separate, private, and closely monitored networks for each school.

BFP: How did you meet Paul English?

BK: Paul and I met through a mutual contact in Boston in late April. He had just sold Kayak for $2 billion and was looking to get involved in a few new companies. I was warned to brace myself for hearing ten reasons why WiGo would fail.

After introducing myself, I took out my iPhone and showed him the live WiGo app being used by Holy Cross students. Within five minutes, he had offered me $250,000 in seed funding and the opportunity to join his brand new start-up foundry Blade. I've never looked back.

Paul has played an instrumental role in WiGo's success to date. The first thing he did was introduce me to Giuliano Giacaglia, who is now my co-founder and CTO at WiGo.

Giuliano, 24, got his bachelor's degree from MIT in computer science and just finished his master's in computer science and artificial intelligence, also at MIT. Put simply, he's the smartest guy I've ever met. From Sao Palo, Brazil, Giuliano came to Paul this spring pitching the concept for a mobile payment app he'd been working on. Paul hated the idea, but loved Giuliano, and promised he'd find him an exciting company to join. WiGo was lucky enough to be that company.

BFP: How does WiGo make money?

BK: WiGo is a free app and is 100 percent ad-free. We're not focused on monetizing the app any time soon. Rather, we're 100 percent committed to creating a beautifully addicting app that college kids can't function without.

For company expenses, we've raised over half a million dollars in seed funding to date from angels like Paul English, Kevin Colleran who is former head of sales and employee number seven at Facebook, Ben Fischman who is founder of Rue La La and LIDS, Vince Wilfork who is pro-bowl lineman for the New England Patriots, James van Riemsdyk who is a U.S. Olympic hockey player, currently with the Toronto Maple Leafs.

BFP: What is WiGo's business model?

BK: The app currently doesn't make any revenue. We've turned down requests from hundreds of bars who want to advertise on our platform because we want to keep the user experience as positive as possible, especially at this early stage.

The half million dollars we've raised is going straight into the company, 90 percent to payroll and 10 percent to our marketing efforts.

Hiring world-class programmers and designers from companies like Facebook and Microsoft is certainly not cheap. We're not going to even entertain the idea of monetization until we have one million users.

There's a huge price tag on being in 18- to 24-year-old's pockets, on their phones. Instagram, for example, was bought from Facebook for $1.1 billion with zero revenue and no real monetization strategy.

A new app also focused at the college demographic, Yik Yak, has a $40 million valuation, although they have zero revenue to date as well.

(The Yik Yak app is a local bulletin board of sorts that allows anyone to connect and share information with others without having to know them.)

Contact Lynn Monty at LynnMonty@FreePressMedia.comand follow her on Twitter at www.twitter.com/VermontSongbird.