Picture this: you’ve just landed somewhere far from home, your phone plan isn’t working, and then suddenly, you realize something you’ve always taken for granted – every little task is done on your phone, but in order for it to work, it needs an internet connection… something you don’t have at the moment.
Enter WiFi Map.
Started in 2014 by CEO Denis Sklyarov, the app is synonymous with “on-the-go” connectivity. The app shows you nearby Wi-Fi hotspots the second you open it, and with a map tied to your GPS. Simply tap a hotspot, check whether a password is needed (and available), and you’re connected.
The early version of the app encouraged users to share nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and passwords, so that the next traveler wouldn’t have to go asking a barista, or worse, they’d have to blow through all their roaming data to get online. And that’s all before they realize how much it cost them.
But never underestimate the willingness of people to share what they know with each other. In fact, WiFi Map was designed around that sense of community: users add hotspots, earn points, and climb leaderboards, both at the country level or globally.
As Denis puts it, “Our mission is to make internet access available to everyone, everywhere.”
And before the team knew it, travelers and digital nomads alike started to use and rely on the app, especially when WiFi Map added that all important feature: offline maps. After all, if you didn’t have connectivity, how could you use the app to find connectivity?
So to solve that riddle, offline maps launched, allowing users to download the information they needed ahead of time and locate connectivity later on, when their cellular service turned spotty.
Then came the first major signal that they were accomplishing their mission: WiFi Map reached 1 million downloads within its first year. And they’ve only gotten bigger since.
In spite of this scope, WiFi Map still operates like a scrappy project today: a small but decentralized team (under 20 people as of this writing) spread across various time zones.
But what’s gotten more intriguing is how WiFi Map has evolved its sense of community. In the current version of the app, the team uses terms like Web2 and Web3, essentially tech speak for describing how users can interact with WiFi Map.
If you’re a Web2 user, it’s the same story: you contribute and earn points, notching up higher on that leaderboard. But if you opt into the Web3 side of things, then those same helpful actions earn something else: a WiFi token (basically a digital reward), built on the Polygon blockchain (a system that helps keep record of said rewards).
But if you asked how the WiFi Map team describes its audience in more everyday terms: it’s anyone who needs affordable, reliable internet access; that’s travelers, students, and people in regions where paying for this kind of information isn’t really realistic.
