After building a $14 million company in 13 months, college party app Wigo is dead
The app became a sensation earlier this year by making college kids wait to use it, and deploying several other smart tactics make the app go viral, such as signing on user "ambassadors" at each school.
When it was 13 months old, Wigo raised $1.4 million at a valuation of $14 million from tech industry stars like Kayak founder Paul English and Tinder cofounders Sean Rad and Justin Mateen. It was also the first tech investment by Instagram comedy stars Elie Ballas and Elliot Tebele.
Now, the company has stopped working on the app and shut it down.
But the Wigo team, led by its 23-year-old charismatic cofounder Ben Kaplan, has landed on its feet.
They are joining the other college app taking campuses by storm, Yeti Campus Stories, Kaplan tells Business Insider.
Yeti is six months old and known as an "X-rated Snapchat clone" where the kind of sexual and violent content banned on Snapchat is A-OK. It insists that its users be at least 17 years old and warns of mild profanity, violence, alcohol and drug use, and "Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes."
Both Wigo and Yeti were building social networks at specific schools. Whereas Wigo focused on helping friends plan their social time, while also documenting it, Yeti focuses on sharing snaps of those fun times, and helps college kids find the party, too.
"Yeti is like a Snapchat story on every campus, but it's completely moderated by the students who go there, not by us. Because of this, Yeti shows what it's really like to attend that school, showing a side of the student body not seen anywhere else," Kaplan tells us, adding that because it was growing faster than Wigo when the teams joined up, the Wigo app was ditched.
For the past two weeks, Yeti has been the fastest-growing social networking app on the iTunes store, according to App Annie.
We understand that Yeti's growth is attracting the attention of VCs, and the young company is trying to raise funds at a shockingly high valuation. Stay tuned for more news on that soon.
In the meantime, the situation reminds us of that Adobe TV commercial, "Are you on Woo Woo?"