Oklahoma City’s WeGoLook is an innovative business success story
It’s exciting when a young Oklahoma company signs up Fortune 500 companies as customers — Hyundai Motor Co., Ritchie Bros., the world’s largest industrial auctioneer, eBay Motors and JPMorgan Chase.
It’s even more exciting when that young Oklahoma company is at the leading edge of a monumental shift in the way the world works. That’s the story of WeGoLook, a company that started in 2009 and in June hired its 100th employee.
WeGoLook is a sharing economy platform that dispatches thousands of “lookers” to physically go to a particular location to inspect a homeowner’s insurance claim, a building that’s up for purchase, a giant piece of road-leveling equipment or a used car that’s for sale, just to name a few. Lookers — there are more than 26,000 of them now — earn an average of $25 to $40 per job, with some reaching $200 or more per look.
“As the sharing economy business model trends upward, we are light years ahead,” said co-founder Robin Smith. “We are on a new frontier. WeGoLook is able to add any kind of workforce or skill set into our community. We are adding licensed drone operators. We have bilingual lookers. If one of our clients needs someone who speaks Mandarin to do a task or capture data, we have a person we can send on demand.”
Enterprise companies are utilizing on-demand workers to augment and supplement their own labor force. While WeGoLook’s first customers were folks who wanted to verify that the items that they were buying on eBay or Craigslist were as advertised, the company has evolved into a mobile technology business and moved solidly into the enterprise space, with the well-earned attention of Inc., Forbes, and others.
Companies use WeGoLook’s technology to create customized requests for information and then engage WeGoLook’s vetted and expert lookers to go out and capture the data.
“Say you are a company that needs a national footprint to go out and look at cellphone towers or residential sites. We can put those data fields into our platform tonight, and tomorrow our lookers have the app and go out and capture that data anywhere,” Smith said. “Our customers are amazed. I’ve had executives tell me that it can take six weeks just to get a meeting to talk about changing a mobile app.”
WeGoLook is staying ahead of the curve, adding mobile target technology and more. Part of the “more” is going global, and another aspect is the company’s human side. The looker roster includes many veterans and military families — and these lookers receive first notification of a new look opportunity.
This is what innovation is all about. With a better idea, a better technology that offers better service to the consumer, and Oklahoma values, WeGoLook is disrupting the inspection marketplace — and becoming a leader in the sharing economy. Scott Meacham is president and CEO of i2E Inc., a nonprofit corporation that mentors many of the state’s technology-based startup companies. i2E receives state appropriations from the Oklahoma Center for the Advancement of Science and Technology and is an integral part of Oklahoma’s Innovation Model. Contact Meacham at i2E_ Comments@i2E.org.