When you change jobs, your regulars shouldn’t have to find you by accident.
WIFFO gives you one number that stays yours for good. Hand it to the people who come for you. When you move, they know. That’s the whole idea.
Eight digits, said as two groups of four. Short enough to call across a busy room.
See the sign-up Follow someone’s number
Signing up is not open to the public yet. Everything below works — a phone is checked by an automated call that reads you a code out loud.
“They don’t work here anymore.”
“Hey, where’s Ruben tonight?”
“Ruben doesn’t work here anymore.”
“Oh no — what happened?”
“Ruben doesn’t work here anymore.”
That isn’t someone being rude to you. Most places won’t discuss a former employee at all, and they have real reasons not to. So the answer doesn’t exist anywhere. There is nobody left to ask, and a relationship built over years just stops.
You lose the person
The one who knew your order, your chair, your kids’ names, how you take bad news. You go back a few times hoping. Then you stop going.
They lose you too
Somewhere across town they’re starting over with an empty section, wondering where everybody went. It costs them more than it costs you, and they never find out why.
How it works
Three things, and only one of them is yours to do more than once.
You get a number
Eight digits, issued once, yours permanently. It is never reassigned to anyone else, even if you stop using it — because a number that quietly starts pointing at a stranger would defeat the entire purpose.
You give it out
Say it across the bar, the chair, or the desk. No spelling a username over music, no handing out a personal phone number, no adding customers as friends.
They follow it
When you change where you work, the people who chose to follow you find out. Nobody else does. You decide whether that goes out right away, in a week, or quietly with no announcement at all.
A business within a business
If people come for you rather than the sign on the building, you already have something worth keeping. Right now it belongs to whoever you work for.
- Bartenders
- Servers
- Stylists
- Barbers
- Tattoo artists
- Massage therapists
- Nail techs
- Personal trainers
- Poker dealers
- Mechanics
- Groomers
- Baristas
- Attorneys
- Physicians
- Dentists
- Nurses
- Therapists
- Chiropractors
- Veterinarians
- Accountants
- Financial advisers
It is the same problem higher up the ladder, just with more zeros on it. An attorney who moves firms and a physician who changes hospitals are in exactly the same position: the book of business is theirs, and the address book belongs to the institution.
Those fields carry confidentiality rules that a bar does not, so they do not get the same page with a different label. Regulated work starts private. For an attorney or a therapist, the people following you are clients or patients, so the shareable page that counts them is switched off until you decide otherwise. It is your call — it is simply not the default.
Not Facebook. Not LinkedIn.
Asking your bartender to be friends on Facebook is strange for everybody involved. You don’t need to see pictures of her kids, and she doesn’t need to see yours. And she isn’t going to build a LinkedIn profile either — she’s not a “professional bartender.” She’s a person working a job she happens to be very good at.
There’s a relationship sitting between those two, and most of us have a dozen of them. The one who knows your order. The one who cuts your hair. The dealer you look for when you walk in. You’re not friends, and you’re not colleagues, but you would like to know where they went.
That is the only thing WIFFO does. No profile to fill out, no bio, no résumé. Your name, your face, and where you work right now.
What WIFFO will never do
Most of what is wrong with this space is not missing features. It is the features other people shipped.
- No ratings, no reviews, no stars.Nobody grades you here. One customer having a bad night should not follow you from job to job for years.
- No public directory.You cannot be searched for or browsed. There is no map of who works where. The only way to reach your page is a number you handed to someone yourself.
- Where, never when.Your current workplace, and nothing about your shifts. No schedule, no “working now.” Anyone can see a bartender by walking in; no one needs to know which nights you will be standing there.
- No employer lookup.No company can look you up, at any price. If you want to show what you are worth, you send it. They cannot pull it.
- No algorithm.Everyone who follows you sees everything you post, in the order you posted it. No ranking, no reach to buy back.
- No selling your followers.We answer the question “where did they go” when someone asks it. We do not market to your old employer’s customers, and we do not sell a competitor access to them.
Nearly open
WIFFO is built. You can get a number, hand it out, post, move jobs and take your following with you — all of that works today.
Checking that a phone number is real works today, by an automated call that reads a code out loud — that is what keeps every follower count honest. Sending the same code by text would need its own registration with the mobile carriers, which we have not set up. Nothing is pending: it is a convenience we have skipped, not a queue we are sitting in.
Signing up is not open yet. When it opens, it opens here.
No email box to join, no countdown. This page exists so the idea can be argued with while it is still cheap to change.