Michigan Business & Economy

The Walk of Shame Shuttle, started in Ann Arbor, debuted on VH1 this month

Michigan Public | By Stateside Staff

Published March 25, 2015 at 4:26 PM EDT

Kellyann Wargo began her Walk of Shame Shuttle business in Ann Arbor, while a student at the University of Michigan.

Listen to Stateside's conversation with Kellyann Wargo, founder of the Walk of Shame Shuttle.

Entrepreneurs can pop up out of anywhere.

TakeKellyannWargoof Ann Arbor.

While she was a student at the University of Michigan, her entrepreneur’s eye saw a business opportunity in the “Walk of Shame” so many students take on the “morning after the night before.”

She started charging five bucks to drive people home. That idea eventually turned into the Walk of Shame Shuttle, her business.

On the rides home, she heard stories. Lots of stories. Stories which have now led the Walk of Shame Shuttle to be picked up byVH1for a new reality series that premiered this month.

The fact thatWargowas the only person in her friend group with a car – the one always called on those “mornings after the night before” for a ride – led to her new reality filled with reality TV.

“I thought, ‘If I can make five dollars off of people I know, I can definitely make it off of strangers,’”Wargosaid.

That’s how her business was born. To help it grow, she then published a video on YouTube to advertise, hoping her friends and others would share it. The result? Production companies in California started calling.

“And I was like, ‘oh my gosh, what is happening?’” Wargo said.

The stories people tell on their mornings after that make the ride interesting.

“It’s oddly therapeutic sharing stories with someone who is kind of a stranger, where they talk about their friends and I have this fresh perspective, because I don’t know them, and just like really venting and being like, ‘Oh, I might not see you again, so I can just like let it all out, like this is how it is,’” Wargo said.

Typical scenarios include the following:

“Well, it’s not all one-night-stand stories,” she said. “I get quite a few, ‘Last night was my first time drinking,’ or ‘I ran into my ex-boyfriend,’ or ‘I got separated from my friends and I’ve just been awake all night, now I need to get home,’ ‘my phone died,’ ‘I lost everything,’ kind of stories.”