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.
00:07:02 · Guillaume Moubeche, Steven Schwartz
[00:07:02] S1: And from that, know, like payment infrastructure, most companies are trying, you know, to increase the fees and make like a huge markup on top of it. From what I've heard, you reduced the the margin a lot. Can you, like, explain, like, the reasoning behind it? [00:07:20] S0: We think that the payments piece is super commoditized, and it's like we're not trying to play a game of raising to the bottom, because, like I said, there's 50 companies that can help process payments. So for us, the faster we can get it to zero, at least that part of the business, the better. So we we are not trying to make our money from pure payment processing. That's why we have a cheapest. [00:07:44] S1: And how do you make money? [00:07:45] S0: So there's there's a lot of other things you can do on Whop and accept payments. And some of these things right now, you can can invest in in Bitcoin. You can invest in in tokenized securities. You can issue cards pretty soon. You can run ads, and we make more money on those. You can accept financing, buy now, pay later, and make more money on that. So those are... That's that's how we make money. [00:08:14] S1: And do you feel now you're more like a a global infrastructure for a business? [00:08:19] S0: I do feel like that. I feel like our number one priority right now is to make sure that we're onboarding as many businesses and platforms as we can. And through that, we we wanna focus, first and foremost, on business owners and people that have their own business.
00:08:19 · Steven Schwartz, Guillaume Moubeche
[00:08:19] S0: I do feel like that. I feel like our number one priority right now is to make sure that we're onboarding as many businesses and platforms as we can. And through that, we we wanna focus, first and foremost, on business owners and people that have their own business. [00:08:34] S1: And I think recently, you've made, like, a partnership or fundraise with Tether. [00:08:39] S0: That's right. [00:08:40] S1: Can you explain, like, why you did it, and what's the goal with it long term? [00:08:44] S0: Yeah. So Tether is the biggest stablecoin company in the world, and they basically are the predominant currency for maybe almost 10% of the entire globe. And I think they have five fifty million people a month that use Tether. So we are, a lot of ways, relevant to that, because how are people actually making the money? And if people can use Whop to make the money, and use stablecoin rails, and use Tether to facilitate transfers, and all the cool stuff that people wanna do with their money afterwards, it's a really awesome partnership. So they they agreed to invest in in Whop, and they've invested in Whop. And we are very close with their team, they're awesome awesome people. [00:09:24] S1: That's really cool. And congrats with the partnership. It's it's really inspiring. Thank you. And whenever you you want to build, like, all this functionality and features, like being able to get a credit card, etcetera, I'm assuming in The US, you have also, like, a lot of legislation. And... So how exactly do you tackle these kind of problems?