Projects

Our team is self-taught and has been coding together for nearly a decade. We incubate projects that we think people will find useful and entertaining. Our main focus is developing novel software and services for social media.

SocialEngine, released in 2007, is self-hosted PHP software that installs a social network on your website. With over 4,000 licenses sold, SocialEngine is already profitable and growing. With our upcoming version 4.0, we are now starting to explore additional growth opportunities: consulting, hosting, managed solutions, and other avenues.
Advious is our upcoming advertising management service. We think that owners of long-tail, niche community websites aren't optimally monetizing their social traffic with "one size fits all" options like Adsense. Advious works differently by automatically collecting demographic information from users and serving them more relevant ads. Advious is currently in private alpha.
BlogHoster is self-hosted PHP software that lets you create a unique blog network in the vein of Blogger, LiveJournal, Xanga, etc. BlogHoster was acquired by Splashpress Media in 2007.
IMS Pro is self-hosted PHP software that lets you add an image hosting service to your website. This project was acquired by Turnkey.org in 2007.

In addition to our own home-grown projects, we are now advising and consulting with other startups. If you're interested finding resources for your early-stage startup, we invite you to get in touch with us.

Our History

Webligo began when co-founders Alex Benzer and Charlotte Genevier met as high school students in 2002. The two quickly became friends and began learning to program together. They were surprised to find excellent teammates in one another, as Alex's eye for design and Charlotte's programming skills were instantly magnetic. Alex and Charlotte began deconstructing popular PHP software to discover how they worked and could be improved. Over the next several years, the two began developing and selling their own creations. They established their company as "Webligo", combining the web-theme of their products with the latin root "ligo" (meaning "together") symbolizing their unique cohesion as a team.

By 2005, Webligo was earning $90,000 per year in license sales. With dorm room offices and virtually zero operating costs, Webligo's savings grew quickly. In 2006, Alex and Charlotte began developing a new product - SocialEngine - seeded with their sales and the recent acquisitions of two earlier projects (BlogHoster and IMS Pro). SocialEngine, 100% bootstrapped without any outside investment, was launched in 2007 with great reception. With SocialEngine now earning nearly $1M/year, Alex and Char have built a team of seven developers and designers to grow SocialEngine and explore other opportunities.

Moving forward, Alex and Charlotte plan to continue building Webligo's identity as an incubator for web startups. Nothing thrills us more than experimenting and rapidly prototyping new concepts, and we firmly believe that this will define our culture in the future.