He built an app that pays people for the data the rest of the internet takes for free. Then he taught it to interview the shopper.
Open Pogo, link your location, walk into the right Wendy's, and the app pings you with a free breakfast sandwich. It feels like a coupon. It is actually a quiet revolution in who owns the trail of data you leave behind every day. Dom Wong, co-founder and CEO, built the whole company around a stubborn question: the internet has spent two decades monetizing your behavior without cutting you in, so why don't you get paid for your own data?
Pogo answers that question by flipping the arrangement. Users opt in - knowingly, on purpose - to share location, email, and transaction history. In return they collect rewards, cashback, savings on insurance, and a share of the value their data creates. Wong calls the early version "Honey for the real world." The browser extension Honey found you a discount code at checkout; Pogo finds you one while you are simply living your life, out in physical space, buying actual things.
Today that idea has matured into something brands pay seven figures for. Pogo sees roughly 1 in every 150 shopping trips taken in America, tracks $470 billion in transaction volume, and has more than three million users who actively chose to be there. Newsweek named it the number one loyalty app in the country in 2024 and again in 2025. Wong did it without turning his users into the product. They are the shareholders.
We can almost create Honey for the real world.
Most of the data economy runs on extraction. Cookies, trackers, brokers - a long supply chain that never asks permission and never sends a check. Pogo rebuilt the chain from the consumer outward. People opt in to each stream of data they are comfortable sharing: location-based offers, suggested insurance plans, market research participation, prescription discount scanning. Revenue flows from affiliate fees and from brands buying access to a population that said yes.
The result is the rarest asset in the data world - scale that was given, not taken. Three million people who knowingly raised their hands. That consent is what makes the next act possible.
Illustrative breakdown of how Pogo users participate. Source: Pogo public materials.
Build a rewards app people actually love. Pay them to share what they already generate.
Scale to millions and assemble a national, permission-based data asset no broker can match.
Let brands talk straight to verified buyers - and compensate the people whose data made it possible.
In 2025 Pogo turned its data asset into a product brands had never seen: an AI-powered qualitative research platform. It identifies a target audience automatically, writes the discussion guide, moderates hundreds of video interviews at once, and delivers insight within hours - all with people whose purchases are verified, not claimed.
Market research used to mean weeks, panels, and a lot of guessing. Wong's version asks the people who actually bought the thing, and asks them today.
Hershey. Chomps. Funko. Nestle Purina. The Trade Desk. Bojangles. Bain. The work ranges from catching packaging flaws before rollout to studying robotaxi retention and tracking how GLP-1 medications reshape the grocery cart.
Wong studied economics and music technology at Northwestern - a pairing that reads like a riddle until you notice both are about pattern, signal, and what people value. From there he ran a circuit of startup land that doubles as a map of how to learn the whole stack: product incubation at Google, data analytics at Syndio, operating roles, a VC seat at Lightbank, and a co-founded venture called BarLift.
The formative chapter was Zenreach, where as Head of Growth he founded the ads business and learned how location and customer data convert into revenue. Pogo is, in a sense, that lesson rebuilt with the consumer holding the keys.
Wong raised from the people who built the businesses he is reinventing - including the founders of Honey itself - plus a roster of investors and creators rarely seen on one term sheet.
Link your location and Pogo might hand you a free breakfast sandwich just for being out in the world. The reward you can taste, the principle you can't ignore.
His Northwestern degree fused economics with music technology - two ways of reading the signals people don't realize they're sending.
Pogo's edge isn't more data than the brokers. It's the only large data set in the world that every single person chose to share.
Reimagining the data economy by directly rewarding people for their data.