About us
The big idea
So what's the big idea?
Well, it's simple. Wigadoo is the place to organise a group of friends when money is involved. It could be because you need to book festival tickets, a ski chalet, a group holiday, theatre tickets, a stag or hen do... whatever it is, we're here to make it easier.
Without Wigadoo, organising friends when money is involved is always a bit of a nightmare. If you're doing the organising, you need two things from your friends: meaningful commitment and cash. Unfortunately, both are always tricky to come by. In the first place, you can never be sure how many people to book for. Then there's always a risk of people dropping out at the last minute and leaving you short, or forgetting to pay you back or just not paying for ages. You also have to keep track of who's paid and who hasn't and it's so easy to be left out of pocket. All in all, it's a problem that needs a solution. Now Wigadoo is here to help.
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How it works
So you've got the big idea, now you want to know how it works?
As with everything these days, there are three easy steps...
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Propose an idea to your group
You fill in a quick form that creates an invite for you to email out to your friends. As well as telling your friends about the idea, you also tell them how much it will cost, how many of them you need to sign up and when you need to know by.
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Friends back your plan with a payment pledge
Everyone whose interested signs up and pledges to pay however much you've asked. This means that they give their credit or debit card details but no money is taken - and no money can be taken - unless enough people sign up by the deadline. If the group doesn't get enough people by the deadline, no money is ever taken and the pledges are all cancelled.
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Collect the money and off you all go
If the plan gets enough support, you can collect the money and then pay for the plans. The money gets collected into an online event account. Each online event account comes with a Wigadoo Virtual Prepaid MasterCard® that means you can pay for things instantly online or over the phone. You can use this as soon as you've collected the money to book or pay for anything you need to for the group. And then once it's all booked, you're away!
It's that easy.
Wigadoo also makes it easier for your friends to say "yes!". It's human nature that people don't like to sign up to something before they're sure that their good friends are also going. Wigadoo not only lets them see who has pledged so far, it also has a feature called "I'm In If You're In". This means that they can sign up to go if, and only if, a friend that they name also agrees to go. It makes it much easier for friends to sign up early to an event.
So, with Wigadoo the pain really is taken out of organising a group of friends to do stuff together.
Our mission is to make it so easy to organise your friends that everyone ends up doing more stuff, with more friends, more often. We hope it helps you!
For more details, with a few prettier pictures, you can head to the section snappily titled How Wigadoo Works.
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An example
Examples always help to make things a bit clearer. So if it's still not crystal clear, read on.
Let us tell you a story about a guy who used Wigadoo.
Meet Dave. He's a good guy. Very popular. Always the first to buy a round at the bar. He decides to invite ten friends skiing.
He finds a ski chalet online for 6 - 8 people which looks great. So he then comes to Wigadoo to get his friends to fill it.
He creates an invitation page by filling in a short form and then emails a link to the page to a bunch of his friends. He asks them to sign up and pledge to pay £120 each.
John, his best friend, thinks it's a great idea and pledges straight away. Even though he gives his debit card details, no money leaves his account yet.
Sarah then also signs up because she can see that Dave and John have both pledged. That means they'll definitely be going if it happens so it's bound to be fun.
Satish wants to go but sees there are no other beginner skiers going yet. He doesn't want to go unless he has someone else to learn to ski with. Fair enough really. He secretly pledges using "I'm in if you're in", asking Pete to also sign up. Pete likes the idea and also pledges. As soon as he does they are both reserved a spot. And then there were 5!
Jack, Mary and Ayesha now see there is a good group confirmed and it's likely to happen and so sign up and pledge as well.
By the deadline that Dave set, he has 8 people signed up which is great news for them all. Because there are 8 people, and not 6, the cost per person has come down from £120 to £90. And because Dave used Wigadoo he can process £90 from each person without needing to go back to them.
Dave chooses to go ahead and collect the money and it flows into the online event account for his trip. This event account comes with a Wigadoo Virtual Prepaid MasterCard® that he uses to book the chalet, the hire cars and the ski passes.
There's no handling cash or chasing friends for money and at no point is he at risk of being left short of cash.
And they all have a brilliant time and live happily ever after.
The end... well not quite, because a month later they use Wigadoo to book a weekend surfing in Cornwall.
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What are the benefits?
There are lots of benefits. Here are just some of them...
Wigadoo means no one gets messed around. No one person has to pay up front and risk not being paid back. No one has to spend hours stressing about everything and chasing friends for cash.
It's so much easier for your friends. Paying online gives them the convenience they're used to and makes them more likely to pay up as soon as you invite them.
Groups organised through Wigadoo are more successful. If you use Wigadoo there is a higher chance that your plans will actually come off. Using Wigadoo means groups of friends start forming earlier, grow faster and get bigger.
Because Wigadoo groups normally get bigger, this often means a lower cost per person.
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What else can you do on Wigadoo?
There are two other main features on Wigadoo.
The first is a section that we call Inspire Me. It's packed with great ideas for things to do in groups. It's got funky stuff that you'd never consider and links to get your research on it's way. It also has a directory of UK based activity suppliers and a database of places where you can get group discounts. If you're wanting to organise something fun with friends, it's not a bad place to start.
The other nifty little feature that we haven't told you about yet is the Wigadoo Vote. This is a tool to help you quickly and easily find out when your friends are free or what they want to do. You enter some options and then your friends vote on which ones work best for them. It's very simple, but also very effective and quickly getting an answer. It's free to use and incredibly easy so why not give it a go.
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Who are the people behind Wigadoo?
Wigadoo is all about friends getting together, and that's exactly how the company started. Three friends were fed up of not doing enough fun stuff with each other so they got together and decided to do something about it. Now they are dedicated to making it as easy as possible for groups of friends to get out about to enjoy themselves more often.
The Management Team
Andy Cockburn, CEO
Andy previously worked as a strategy consultant for Bain & Company where his area of expertise was consumer experience in the retail and consumer services sectors. He has a BA from Cambridge and an MBA with distinction from INSEAD.
Andy loves all things to do with sport, and is a bit of a nut for endurance sports like triathlons. When it comes to organising, it's probably fair to call Andy an "occasional organiser". He's big on organising evening trips for groups of friends to the theatre or comedy shows... but would normally shy away from organising a weekend away for everyone. Until recently that is, when he's started organising loads of weekends away with Wigadoo. Just don't ask him about the weekend surfing in Wales that he organised, because he won't stop talking about it.
John Connolly, COO
John spent seven years at Accenture and then moved over to the world of venture capital, joining the tech and telecoms team at Apax partners in London. He has a first class honours in Engineering from Queens University, Belfast, and an MBA with distinction from INSEAD.
John loves four things in the world more than anything else: his wife, his son, food and technology (although not necessarily in that order). It's fair to say that John is not a social organiser and is firmly dependent on his brilliant wife to sort him out. That said, since Wigadoo has been around he's managed to get groups of friends out to the theatre every week... and he's loving being able to do fun stuff with friends without the usual hassle of organising it.
Uma Rajah, CMO
Uma spent ten years with Mars Inc. (yes, the chocolate bar people) before joining Wigadoo. She did lots whilst at Mars but spent most of her time in Supplier Management and Product Development, focusing on consumer driven product design. She has an MEng from Cambridge and an MBA from INSEAD.
Uma is an uber-organiser. Not a week goes by that she isn't arranging a social event for one of her many groups of friends. Her greatest piece of organisation ever was when she managed to hire a private island in Indonesia for 35 friends. Not bad going!
Edmond Bramhall, Lead Developer
Edmond has a decade of experience making the world a better place by creating revolutionary websites. Now he's leading the development of Wigadoo to help make the world more fun and better organised.
Ed is also a part-time rockstar (which is probably why he wears shades in the office!) and he uses Wigadoo every week to get the money from his fellow-band members to pay for the venue they practice in. He's also tried to use Wigadoo to arrange pub crawls but it seems that no matter how much money he collects off his friends in advance, there's never enough money in the kitty.
The Board
We have some very impressive people supporting the management team.
Charles Cotton, Chairman
Charles Cotton has been at the forefront of successive waves of technology innovation – computing; broadband communications; information services; digital mapping and location based services; and Web 2.0. He is a Director of Library House; Cambridge Enterprise; Solarflare Communications; Feeva Technology; property research portal Terabitz in the US and founder of Terabitz Limited in the UK; a Supervisory Board member of Tele Atlas, the Euronext Amsterdam and Frankfurt Exchange listed supplier of digital maps; an investor in and adviser to venture capital firms. Previously, he was Executive Chairman of GlobespanVirata Inc. the NASDAQ listed, New Jersey based semiconductor company. Prior to the merger with GlobeSpan, he was CEO of Santa Clara based Virata Corp. He took Virata public on NASDAQ, in 1999, raised $682 million across six financing rounds, executed five acquisitions and established and ran a venture fund.
Matthew Witt, Investor Director
Matthew was COO of Active Hotels. He joined Active Hotels at its very inception and was part of the management team that took Active from a start-up in 2000 through the trade sale to priceline.com in 2004, to becoming the number one European online hotel retailer in 2006. During this time, he has held roles in Sales, Distribution, Technology Development and Marketing. Following the merger with Bookings BV in 2005, he continued as Chief Operating Officer for Active Hotels, overseeing the integration of the 2 companies' technical and management systems, and the creation of a single operating business, Booking.com, with gross bookings of $1.9Billion in the year to 30th June 2007, and over 600 employees.
Dylan Schlosberg, Non-Executive Director
Dylan founded internet marketing company Herotech in 2001. He helped launch ThinkBingo.com, the UK's first online bingo community in 2004 and he proceeded to pioneer the space in the UK with the launch of two further online bingo brands and his own portal OnlineBingo.co.uk.
As CEO of Herotech, Dylan was also responsible for Gambling.com's online marketing strategy and instrumental in turning the portal into a pay-per-click search engine.
Debbie Wosskow, Non-Executive Director
Debbie Wosskow was the founder and joint Managing Director of Mantra. At Mantra Debbie built an award winning PR agency with an unrivalled reputation for delivering corporate, consumer and financial PR campaigns across a range of sectors. She has extensive experience in corporate profile raising and for a range of businesses from blue-chip companies to start-ups. Debbie sold Mantra to the Lowe group in 2007. She was chosen as one of Management Today's top 35 Business Women and is a representative on the Wall St Journal Europe's Women in Business Taskforce.
The Investors
Wigadoo is currently backed by a number of high profile angel investors, most of whom were previously highly successful internet entrepreneurs from the travel and leisure space. These include Andy Phillipps of Active Hotels and Brent Hoberman of Lastminute.com.
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Where did the idea come from?
Andy, John and Uma were all studying together at INSEAD business school. Uma was organising things all the time: group ski trips, beach trips, hiring villas and chalets, nights out in Paris... you get the picture. We were all having a great time of it (although Uma was spending hours and hours organising things!) Then one weekend, John's wife volunteered him to organise a canoeing trip. John never organised anything and so this was all a bit new to him. He sent an email out inviting everyone and then mayhem ensued. He could not believe how difficult it was to collect money off people and work out how many people were actually going to come. So many people dropped out at the last minute, he ended up way out of pocket. Being a bit of a techy, he started to think that there must be a better way to do things. John pulled Andy and Uma in to work out exactly what the big problems were and how they could be addressed... and before we knew it, Wigadoo had been born.
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Where does the name come from?
Wigadoo is about you and your friends going and doing more stuff together. In other words, its about when "we go do" fun things together. We liked the sound of "we go do!" but Wegodo looked a bit naff so we messed around with it and spiced it up a bit and... and Wigadoo got picked out of the hat.
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