Hi!
It’s the team at Wygo.
(The company helping you build communities and meet all the great people in your city. The one that’s been hosting ✨mystery events✨. You may have met us at the Socratica Symposium, maybe you found us through LinkedIn or Instagram or… some other platform).
Wherever you came from, we’re happy you’re here.
This about page will get you up to speed on who we are, what we’ve been up to, where we are now, and where we’re headed next. Let’s dive in!
Who we are
Wygo exists to support community builders (to make real world connection easier for all of us). We believe that everyday people are capable of building community for themselves and for each other, and that there is no shortage of great people who are worth getting to know.
We also know that in the absence of strong community infrastructure, it can be really hard to find belonging. People spend thousands of dollars on school tuition, apartments in big cities, and mental health supports in an effort to “find their people” — in the absence of pre-existing communities, especially when moving to new places, it can be nearly impossible to make new close friends.
Mass loneliness is a problem worth addressing, and we think supporting community builders is the answer: in the past 2 years we’ve seen a huge population of people emerge that want to join and start communities of their own, but we’ve also seen that it can be incredibly daunting and lonely to start from scratch.
Wygo aims to be a support system and accelerator for community builders — we provide a built-in audience and infrastructure for you to workshop, test, iterate, and scale your ideas so that you can turn the place you live into a place that feels like home.
We call people in the Wygo ecosystem “Worldbuilders” — people who channel their creativity into building a version of the real world that they can be excited to wake up to, participate in, and influence every single day. There are 4 Worldbuilder roles in the Wygo ecosystem, and all are essential to building the world we want to be part of.
Hosts, Helpers, Attendees, and Partners all collaborate to create meaningful experiences and develop communities through our three stages of community development — piloting ideas through mystery events, iterating on them through recurring event series, and scaling them into full-blown communities with the support of the Worldbuilders Network.
Through this system, we aim to make it easy for people spin up the communities they want to be part of in the places they live. Building belonging is something that needs all hands on deck — if you’re ready to build community for the people around you, you don’t have to do it alone.
We are all. right. here.
What we’ve been up to (Winter 2024)
Whewpf. That was a lot.
When many of you subscribed to this newsletter (then titled the Super Secret Early Access Mailing List), we were right in the thick of hosting mystery events and getting a lot of visibility from the Velocity Pitch Competition, the Spring 2024 Socratica Symposium, and the BetaKit Town Hall.
1. Mystery Episodes
We hosted three! We first ran a DIY film-festival — pulling random variables out of a hat, selecting props, and choreographing elaborate fight scenes. It concluded with an awards ceremony. Tears (of laughter) were shed. We then stormed Laurier’s one direction bingo night, which some attendees were very committed to winning and others abandoned in favour of intense card games. Finally, we ran a bootleg version of the Olympics, challenging people to channel their inner multi-sport athlete and compete across physical challenges including group yoga and culminating in dodgeball.
These events were awesome. No one knew what they had signed up for until they showed up — everything was on the table. Tons of fun to host, super friendly and openminded attendees, and lots of new friends made by the end!
2. Velocity Pitch Competition
This competition was the first time we had to stand up and declare that Wygo was a real thing, and qualifying as one of 8 teams (from a couple hundred applicants!) to the finals was a huge unblock mentally. Though we were quite early in our journey as a company and didn’t come out with the win, seeing our community come out to support us was hugely motivating and competing gave us a kick in the butt. Our biggest takeaway is that our business will be proven through strong execution — the best way to prove it’s possible to build a community of community builders is by doing it.
3. Socratica Symposium
We shared our thoughts in front of 700 people! Wild. Lots of great feedback. Deciding at the last minute to walk across the stage to “The Final Countdown” continues to be a top 10 life experience. Forever grateful to Socratica for being a supportive place to share works-in-progress before we’re fully confident.
What we’ve been up to (Summer / Fall 2024)
We moved to Toronto for the Summer! Though we originally intended to host events all summer long, we realized we needed to spend some time understanding the Toronto ecosystem before we started hosting things ourselves. We attended events hosted by just about every existing community imaginable, from running groups to startup communities to walking tours to writer’s collectives — getting a pulse on what was needed for hosts, attendees, helpers, and partners in Toronto.
1. BetaKit Town Hall
One of the biggest things that kicked off the Summer was speaking at the BetaKit Town Hall about the state of Canadian entrepreneurship. Joss joined three other Canadian entrepreneurs (at various stages of company growth) to discuss the future of Canadian innovation, and in particular what young people need from more senior industry players.
2. Misc. Unofficial Partnerships in Toronto and Waterloo
The Town Hall led to a series of partnerships throughout the summer. In Waterloo, Communitech and Anthea hosted the Kitchen, a drop-in coworking space for people working on their passion projects from 9-5 on weekdays. In Toronto, Shopify kicked off Builder Sundays. Sponsors started stepping up to offer funding and space to support the development of IRL communities in both cities. It was extremely encouraging to see how one conversation resulted in so much collective action.
3. Product Development
As we considered hosting mystery events once again, we realized that we needed to refine the Wygo system. Partnering with people to host mystery events was a fun idea, but we knew there was a larger mission behind it all. Through the development of our website, and through many many hours of trying to articulate our goals and drawing system diagrams, we’ve come to the beta version of our Wygo Ecosystem (outlined above): who the players are, and how they’ll interact to spawn up new communities. We spent the summer doing product design and development, ensuring that we had the tools and data visibility to build communities at scale going forward.
4. The Four Circles of Belonging
We were finally able to summarize the learnings from a year of researching loneliness and belonging in this two part essay. Wygo as a company aims to help people fill in their 4th and 3rd circles of belonging, making it easier for people to participate and feel like they’re part of something in the real world. We’re building community-level infrastructure so that people have starting points to build more personal relationships from.
Where we are NOW (Winter 2025)
This newsletter is going to be the first in a series, delivered to your inbox every 2 weeks. It’ll serve two primary purposes:
🚨 ALL EVENT TICKETS WILL BE RELEASED HERE FIRST 🚨
If you’re in a chronic cycle of deleting and re-installing Instagram (same), never fear. We’re committed to your anti-doomscrolling journey and want to make it as easy as possible to commit to spending more time having fun in the real world — because of that, this newsletter is the first place to look for tickets. All three of our events sold out quickly last spring, so keep an eye on your inbox to secure tickets!👀 Wygo, behind-the-scenes 👀
We’ve been getting a ton of questions about what we’ve been up to — we know many of you are entrepreneurship-curious, are interested in miscellaneous status updates and learnings, and would feel more connected to what we’re doing if the process of building a company wasn’t shrouded in a veil of mystery. Going forward, we’re going to be more transparent about what’s going on behind the scenes so we can all learn together.
If you’d like to lean in more to host, help, or partner, visit our website to let us know!
🚨 COMING SOON 💃🕺🎉✨
Hosting our next round of Mystery Events
We’ll be kicking off another round of events in January 2025.
Let your curiosity override your hesitation, and know that everyone else you meet will be the type of person who was brave enough to show up too.
We can’t wait to show you what we have planned :)
- Wygo Team :)
