How Whoggga created a seamless member experience that elevated their brand with Circle Plus
“Having a branded app is just so powerful. That's something that is really going to help us in our growth. As great as Circle is and us being on Circle was great, it's so much more powerful to say, ‘No, just download the Whoggga app. Download our app.’”
Gregg Pajak
Co-Founder, Whoggga
Overview
Challenge
Disjointed member experience that didn't reflect their premium $4,200 membership
Solution
Branded standalone app that created their ideal member journey—poised to scale
Meet Whoggga, the no-BS networking community for business owners
When Gregg and Adam launched Whoggga on Circle in 2021, they wanted to turn conventional business networking on its head by creating a community that was truly:
- Relationship-driven instead of transaction-driven—humans first, vetted business owners second
- Available 24/7—not only Thursdays at 7pm in your community business center
- By business owners, for business owners—no pay to play, yes to value alignment
Whoggga’s wild idea? You get to know business owners as people first. Then, if–and only if–there's a genuine fit, of course you refer business their way.
“I keep going to these seven o'clock meetings, and I'm forced to give referrals and I don't even know these people.”
Unsurprisingly, they quickly proved this concept when 100+ new local members joined for their no-BS networking approach.
Their members—all local business owners personally and carefully vetted by Gregg and Adam—were all tired of the impersonal, inauthentic, and ultimately, ineffective time-blocked networking that happened at dingy Chambers of Commerce offices.
The first question [when launching our community] was are we going to vet individuals? And the answer was, absolutely, yes. Just because your credit card clears doesn't mean you can join Whoggga. There's a vetting process where we want to make sure that you're a viable business, that you actually own a business.
Whoggga created a place for people who wanted to connect to others like them in a more modern way—without the facade of professionalism, and with all the empathetic guardrails that make good communities great.
I live my business 24/7, so why do I have to wait till seven o'clock once a week at a diner to exchange business? I want to be able to talk to my community or my networking group. I want to be able to interact with them on a consistent basis. If I have an opportunity for someone at 12 o'clock at night, why can't I just instant message them? Why can't there be some kind of a platform for this?
But almost as soon as they “found their people” and started growing their community, the growing pains started kicking in, too.
Challenges: A disjointed member experience that didn’t live up to their premium brand
As Gregg and Adam went through a branding exercise to revisit the values that led them to create Whoggga, they realized that parts of their member experience didn’t reflect what they wanted to portray to the world: an exclusive, premium membership in a deeply valuable, unique business community.
The initial friction they kept experiencing was that joining the community required a rambling conversation to download the Circle app before they could even pitch Whoggga.
“I’d hear, ‘I went on the app store, but I didn't find anything under Whoggga.’ It's like, ‘Oh no, you have to type in Circle.’ ‘What's that?’ And it was this whole 10-minute conversation because it's like I don't want to say anything bad about you guys, quite the opposite. So you'd be spending this whole time talking about Circle instead of Whoggga, and it just wasn’t that smooth.”
Explaining another app before you could even talk about the value of your community didn’t feel very “white glove” or 24/7 for people who would hopefully pay thousands every year to join ($4,200/year or $350/month, in fact.)
Plus, it was frustrating for Gregg and Adam to begin their pitch with an experience that didn’t live up to their own expectations—when they knew the massive value of their community was just on the other side.
It created a friction in their sales process before they even got the chance to make a solid first impression which they knew would make it harder for them to scale in the future.
Almost immediately after the lackluster introduction, prospects who were interested in joining would go through a lengthy, 5+ step vetting process—conducted solely by Gregg and Adam.
“We say that we're by business owners for business owners, but it's not just Adam and Gregg, the co-founders. We wanted to be truly community built and community led.”
For a community that aspired to be “by business owners, for business owners”, they didn’t follow their own ideals by giving their members any ownership over creating the culture they wanted from the get go.
“I know I've seen a lot of communities where it's kind of like, if you're in, you're in, your credit card clears, welcome to the community. Maybe they ask a few questions, but there isn't a thumbs up, a thumbs down kind of a process.”
There were two key issues in this member onboarding stage that contradicted the way they wanted to run their business:
- Members had no say in who joined the community, and
- Vetting new members took too long and wasn’t scalable as the community continued to grow
As seasoned business owners, Gregg and Adam realized that the same systems that were struggling at 100 members would break down completely at 1,000 members.
“As we started to grow from 20 to 30 to 50 members, we started getting into weeks where we would have three or four new members looking to join.
We kind of got to the point where we needed a way to give the community the ability to have a say in a word in how the community continues to grow versus just Adam and I looking at a member and saying, ‘Hey, they should join or they shouldn't join.”
If they were going to scale and live their values in the process, they needed more control to build the community experience of their dreams.
- Control over their member experience (without a different app as a middle man)
- Control over how their community functions (so that every touchpoint reflects their values from the get-go)
- Control over how people perceive them (as the kind of community that has a product and experience that matches the caliber of their brand)
That’s where Circle Plus came in.
Solution: A branded app that gave them the seamless, scalable member experience of their dreams
Before they could grow past 100 members, Gregg and Adam needed to smooth out the friction in their member experience to reflect the quality of and elevate the Whoggga brand.
Once they learned about Circle Plus’s unique features—especially the custom, branded mobile app that would give them full control over their marketing—there was no going back to the way they did things before.
“We say we're the opposite of traditional networking. We're breaking the mold. So our measure of success is a little bit untraditional as well.
Our measure of success with Circle Plus is: Is our onboarding experience better? Are our community members having a better experience online overall? And we're seeing that.”
“Having a branded app is just so powerful. That's something that is really going to help us in our growth. As great as Circle is and us being on Circle was great, it's so much more powerful to say, ‘No, just download the Whoggga app. Download our app.’”
No more explaining that you need to download Circle to access Whoggga—there’s now a straight path from discovering Whoggga to applying to the community.
No more clunky experiences, workarounds, or stitching various processes together—the Whoggga app is available 24/7 for whatever their members want to share.
“You see Whoggga on the app store, download it, and right from there they're in the vetting room.
It opens up the profile, they give us their information, and then the community manager reaches out to them immediately. And at the same time, the community gets a DM via automation to now vet them over the next couple of days to see if they're a business owner that we want to have as part of the platform.”
Thanks to Circle Plus, Gregg and Adam have turned their tedious vetting process into a simple, scalable, member-led practice that empowers members to feel like owners.
The co-founders turned…
- From being the sole, top-down arbiters of who can join Whoggga—to being stewards of a community-led networking group that really lives their values
- From overwhelmed with a burdensome, lengthy process—to empowering the community to build the culture they want to see
- From running their community contrary to what they aspired to create—to deeply aligned with their members in a way that adds massive value
Not only has the vetting process been removed from Gregg and Adam’s plate and freed them up for more strategic work, but they’ve also aligned the process much closer to their expectations of what a premium experience feels like for them.
“We have definitely streamlined and sped up our vetting process. Now, it’s so much easier for us to get a better picture of potential members. There's not as much of a lag time of collecting all their information and getting to know them.
Our members have a say in who's coming in, and let us know good, bad, ugly, magnificent things about these people.”
Plus, it’s given them a whole new advantage of pulling members deeper into the community by having a say over the quality of the members they approve to join.
“We've heard from existing members that they like knowing who wants to join because that was all really private [before].
And now, they appreciate knowing who's coming in because it gives every member a sense of ownership and belonging in having a say.”
By investing in a custom app with Circle Plus, Whoggga managed to create a seamless member experience that truly elevates their brand and represents everything they’ve been working tirelessly to build inside their community.
But that's not all.
With Circle Plus, they’re also invested in a solution that grows with them. While Circle powers continuous product updates behind the scenes, Whoggga's members see these enhancements as a reflection of Whoggga's commitment to innovation and progress.
This allows Whoggga to cement its status as a forward-looking, vibrant community—all without members needing to know that Circle is the engine behind the improvements, and without the hassle of managing their own mobile app team.
“When you guys roll out your monthly or quarterly announcements about updates coming to Circle, we highlight that. We’re like, ‘Here's how our Whoggga community is improving this month.’ And that says a lot to our community.
That says, ‘Wow, they're constantly improving this thing. It's getting better and better. When we said we wanted something, they took that feedback and then three months later, here it is.’
It's hard to quantify what's the value of that. It's tremendous.”
Results: Smooth onboarding, high engagement, ready to scale
With Circle Plus, Whoggga is ready to scale their elevated, aligned brand to as many members as they want—and they've future-proofed their operations to boot. Gregg and Adam can breathe easy knowing they won't have to switch tools or question whether their processes will break down the road.
Where they used to ask, "Can our systems handle 100, 200, or even 400 members?"
With their Monthly Active Users steady at 90% of their community—3x the average for a group of their size—they no longer have to worry about losing impact or functionality as they scale.
Their revamped, automated, and community-led vetting process and their seamless onboarding sets Whoggga up to confidently scale without stressing about frictions that don’t reflect their incredible community.
“I think [success] comes down to the execution of what we want the experience to look like for somebody that you meet at a networking event.
They walk up to you and say, "Oh, you're Whoggga. I've heard so much about you. How do I join?" And for that process to be smooth, but at the same time for the vetting process to actually mean something where the way we designed it. From step one all the way through when they're a member, for someone to engage within a branded version of what we're trying to create.”
