Building the infrastructure for a new generation of community organizers
The rise of the community organizer
Something is shifting. After years of isolation, people are actively seeking in-person connection. The U.S. Surgeon General has declared loneliness a public health crisis. Gen Z and Gen Alpha are pushing back against screen-dominant lives. Attendance at grassroots events, coworking sessions, and local meetups is surging.
Behind each of these gatherings is a community organizer. They are the people who book the venue, sell the tickets, promote on Instagram, manage the guest list, and show up early to set up chairs. Most do this on nights and weekends, stitching together Eventbrite, Stripe, spreadsheets, and word-of-mouth to make it work. Very few can turn it into a living.
A fragmented market with no real infrastructure
The tooling available to organizers today was built for transactions, not careers. Eventbrite handles ticketing. Meetup handles discovery. Neither helps an organizer build a sustainable business across events, memberships, bundles, and coaching. The result is a ceiling: most independent organizers cap out at a few hundred dollars a month, burn out from operational overhead, and eventually stop.
This is not a niche problem. Eventbrite alone processed over 270 million tickets across 5 million events last year. There are hundreds of thousands of independent organizers running recurring series who have no professional-grade infrastructure to grow.
Founders who have lived this problem
Wygo's co-founders, Joss Murphy and Chris Oka, did not study this market from the outside. They built it.
Joss has been organizing communities since age 14, when she launched a youth volunteering network across 16 schools. At the University of Waterloo, she and Chris significant contributors to Socratica and UW Startups, growing the community from 20 people to over 3,500 attendees and 100 hosts across 30 locations, hosting more than 200 events. Joss raised over $70,000 to fund that growth. She knows the exact pain of managing a community with fragmented tools because she has done it at scale, for nearly a decade.
Chris brings deep product and engineering capability. He solo-built and maintained websites for multiple creative collectives reaching over a million visitors, and brings a rare combination of full-stack development skill and user experience research instinct. Both studied Systems Design Engineering at Waterloo.
Together they are building Wygo: economic rails, professional networks, and a discovery layer to help organizers professionalize in-person community building as a sustainable career.
N49P x Wygo
We are excited to announce our investment in Wygo's pre-seed round alongside Garage Capital, Stand-Up Ventures, and notable angel investors. We believe the professionalization of community organizing is an inevitable macro shift, and Joss and Chris are the right founders to build the platform that powers it.
If you are a community organizer ready to turn your passion into a sustainable career, Wygo is building the platform for you. Sign up on their website and join the movement.
