It all started—and this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows a teenage boy—with sneakers. Specifically, the Nike Kobe 7 Easter shoe.
Like much of Gen Z, Steven Schwartz, a restless 13-year-old living outside of Chicago, and Cameron Zoub (ditto), met online, specifically in a Facebook group. Their first messages to each other were about those sneakers. Specifically, developing bots that could snap up and then resell them. They became business partners before they were old enough to drive.
As their peers spent their adolescences video gaming, skateboarding, and gorging on Chipotle, Schwartz and Zoub were launching fledgling ventures that included everything from a texting version of Snapchat—“That was pretty cool,” Zoub says—to iOS games to auctions to dropshipping. Recounting this, Schwartz casually explains, “We had a contact in China, and when we were 15 . . . .”
I stop him right there. They had a contact? In China? At 15?
“Yeah,” he says, laughing. “We were actually in China recently and we were trying to meet up with her. It’s pretty funny.”
Now 25, Schwartz and Zoub’s early-teen entrepreneurial adventures are a window into how they came to found a company today valued somewhere north of $100 million. That would be Whop—the name is “memorable, short, and sounded good phonetically,” Schwartz explains—an online marketplace the pair founded in 2021. Its goal: “Empowering everyone to be an internet entrepreneur.” More specifically, to be the digital Etsy, where basically anyone with knowledge or a skill to leverage can come on, make a pitch, and get consumers to pony up anywhere from peanuts to thousands for their expertise via courses or software.
On Whop, you can buy an algorithm that can day trade for you; procure insider sports betting picks; and purchase instruction on how to become a TikTok influencer. For $50 a month, you can subscribe to The Truth, which promises to “upgrade every conceivable metric of your life as a Man and allow success to come naturally.” The site offers a menu of skills big and small, all served up digitally. “It’s all about aggregating all these different experiences that these creators can sell to create this SaaS-like environment,” says Schwartz, the company’s CEO. “Think about everyone coming together, making a storefront, adding their offerings, then buyers come and get a little taste of it before they purchase.”
Whop gets a cut of each sale—anywhere from 3% to 4.5% plus a transaction fee, depending on the merchant and price point. The budding entrepreneur gets a marketplace which handles cybersecurity, payments, as well as a dashboard with promotion and sales tools as well as analytics.
Today Schwartz and Zoub are almost Saturday Night Live–worthy caricatures of the tech bro: Each has a trademark mane of wild curly hair, pale skin, wiry build, and hoodiefied sense of style; it’s as if someone put Mark Zuckerberg through a human copy machine. But while they may look like they’re in the bedrooms at midnight playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (and they might be), Wall Street has long adored such geeks, and the Whop guys are no different. This past summer Whop closed a $17 million Series A offering. They company’s 30 employees just moved into shiny new headquarters (in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, naturally), replete with all of the set decoration toys, games, and snacks one would expect of such an enterprise. All the pieces are in place. Now it’s on to the serious business of growth. “We think there’s a lot of value right now,” Schwartz says, “in creators teaching other creators.”
The creators selling their wares on Whop are overwhelmingly male and also young, mainly 17 to 25, and they’re hungry for two things: to be their own boss and to make serious bank. “Right now, we’re really just targeting creators who have a niche audience, and helping them to build a really strong product around that,” says Zoub, who serves as chief growth officer. “This is young, savvy entrepreneurship. They like to go off the beaten path. If you go on TikTok, they’re the types of people creating the content. That’s our demographic.”
The internet continues to evolve at warp speed. (If you need proof, think of how antique the very idea of two 13-year-olds meeting on Facebook seems today.) To stay a step ahead, the Whop boys are constantly scouting for budding entrepreneurs online, reeling them in with a promise of exposure and potential riches.
Like many Gen Zers, both Schwartz and Zoub laud the virtue of transparency, then evade like mad when you try to pin them down on how much money they’re making. What we do know is this: Last year, Whop processed almost $300 million in payments, and it’s grown revenue eight times year over year. One reliable estimate says they’re pulling in more than $4 million annually.
So, it’s safe to say this: They can afford nice sneakers.
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