00:00:20 · Guillaume Moubeche, Steven Schwartz
[00:00:20] S1: Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Steven Schwartz, co founder of Whop. What started with a $75 sneaker bot on Facebook has exploded into a global platform where nearly 40,000 people now earn over $300 million every single month. Whop is redefining how to make money on the internet, processing nearly $1 million daily in physical sales alone. Steven, thanks for being here. Steven, can you tell me a bit about Whop and why did you started this company? [00:00:51] S0: Yeah. Totally. So I met my cofounder when we were really young, and we met on Facebook and built so many different businesses on the Internet. And it felt like everybody should have the ability to do that, but for whatever reason, not everyone had their own business, and it was pretty difficult for people to do that. So we first launched Whop as a way for us to sell our own software, and people saw it, and they're like, can we also sell on the platform? And we let them do that, and then it blossomed into a lot of people selling a lot of different things. And our mission now is to deliver everyone a sustainable income, and we basically sit here all day and craft ways that people can do that. And one of the ways is to start a business. Other ways include things like clipping and content rewards and data labeling, leasing apartments out, going live, stream yourself, and doing different things. There's all sorts of ways people can make money on the Internet. [00:01:52] S1: What was the first way you made money on the Internet?
00:01:52 · Guillaume Moubeche, Steven Schwartz
[00:01:52] S1: What was the first way you made money on the Internet? [00:01:55] S0: First way I made money on the Internet was by selling a sneaker bot in Facebook groups. So I would... My cofounder Cameron, when he posted, he said, I'm looking for an iOS developer. And I was learning how to program at the time, and I responded to his post, and we built a iOS app that monitored Twitter, Nike's Twitter, and it would automatically buy Yeezy's different shoes, Kobe when they came out. And we sold that to people in the Facebook group, and that's the first... I remember, like, $75 that I made on the Internet. [00:02:29] S1: How did you feel when you made, like, that first money? [00:02:32] S0: It was, like, very addicting. I think we never really spent the money. You know, mean, we never really, like, bought that many things. Cameron dropped out of high school, so he didn't really need any money. I think he only... The only thing he bought was, like, a really nice Tesla in, like, 2015. But then other than that, mean, he's wearing flip pops every day and shitty t shirt. And I think it was more like I think a good way to measure progress and make sure that people were happy with the products we built, more than it was to actually go buy watches or anything like that. [00:03:02] S1: And how did you first get started, you know, about, like, Whop... Like, what was the first vertical you started to address?
00:03:02 · Guillaume Moubeche, Steven Schwartz
[00:03:02] S1: And how did you first get started, you know, about, like, Whop... Like, what was the first vertical you started to address? [00:03:09] S0: So we found all these forums online where people were selling software, and it was a similar situation to what we had the reason Cameron and I met, which was very niche, downloadable software. You typed in a license key to use it. People were making those, and the first vertical of Whop was software. So desktop software, people could come on, and they could sell their desktop software. And some people wanted to sell alongside the software a video to learn how to use the software and a chat room that let everybody talk who was using the software at once. And then people were like, wait, we don't actually need to sell the software. We can just sell the video and the chat room. And then that unlocked all of the modern whatever course, all that... All of the... Those types of SKUs, and I mean, now we have almost a million dollars a day in physical product sales. So first vertical was software, and it quickly started to... We had a lot of requests for a lot more. [00:04:08] S1: And do you, like, help people who don't know how to make money make money?
00:04:08 · Guillaume Moubeche, Steven Schwartz
[00:04:08] S1: And do you, like, help people who don't know how to make money make money? [00:04:13] S0: We... You do help people who don't know how to make money make money. Our our mission is is important that everybody is able to make money, not just the smartest people that are already really savvy. So if you're not wanting to start a business, then you can basically go to our site, sign up, and we tell you easier ways to make money that are more structured and more in your control. For example, posting content or giving businesses feedback or whatever other interesting tasks, missions that businesses find valuable to them. Or, of course, you can start a business, and and we absolutely help you with that from the idea, target market, getting customers via ads, or figuring out which customers to message, what products release next, all sorts of that all that stuff. So, yes, we we definitely help people who who don't know how to make money make money. [00:05:03] S1: And how did you get your first customers? [00:05:05] S0: We were our first customers. So, we were the first sellers on the platform, and it was very easy to know what to build, because it was just like, we need this, or we're gonna build it. And we were the first customers, and it's still a very core principle of ours that we build for ourselves. [00:05:19] S1: And you built, like, a payment infrastructure also. No?
00:05:19 · Guillaume Moubeche, Steven Schwartz
[00:05:19] S1: And you built, like, a payment infrastructure also. No? [00:05:23] S0: We... Well, so part of making money on the Internet involves payments. Right? So we never are like, well, let's build a payment processing company. That sounds really cool. It's actually pretty lame, I think. I I don't think that's ever what we wanted. [00:05:32] S1: Don't tell that to Stripe.
00:05:34 · Steven Schwartz
[00:05:34] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think I think it doesn't really solve what matters anymore. There's so many payment processing companies. Every... There's, like, 50 different payment processing companies. And it's like, how many ways can you accept a credit card? It's like, you get it. You can accept a credit card. But because we have our goal of making people money, payments are gonna be important. And what happened was we had just grown up building all these different payment products. And before Whop, we had a little business, that wasn't really a business, it was more of a charity, we gave homeless people in New York a QR code that they could, it was laminated, had a QR code on it, and all it was was a QR code. People could scan it, and they'd pull up a profile of the the homeless person, who they are, what their background is, all that, and they could actually Apple Pay them, Venmo them, and Cash App them, and the homeless people could pick up cash from us in in Midtown. And we... We'd always been doing all these little micro payment projects, so we knew how to build payments well, and we did. And then people were like, alright, like your payments, and people love it. So that's what your question, would you build our own payment processing? Kind of. We have a bunch of embeddable components that you can use to accept payments in your website, in your iOS app, from your phone, whatever you want. And basically every single currency, and every single local payment method. You can charge people in a... If you ever been to to, like, Morocco or somewhere where it's gonna be hard to figure out how to broker deals with your cab driver, you can do that on Wab very easily.