CEO of Whop: Building A Billion Dollar Company at 26

0:00how much is making now is almost making a billion dollars a year uh well people on are making almost a billion dollars a year um our revenue is somewhere between1 and $100 million a year that's pretty good yes you're probably the most successful person I've had on the podcast at this point wow that's I'm I'm honored but that you think that I'm honored okay so I really want to break down why because last year when I had you on the podcast you had a lot of ideas a big Vision you had a kind of remnant of this product but now literally everything you talked about last year has now come to

0:41life and your business has like 1020 xed and you've actually created this like huge wedge in the market of the Creator economy not only is a Marketplace payment processor you also are a full-blown Discord apps courses Community you can host all of these products on your platform and now it's like a social feed like kind of like an Instagram Shopify type of thing so I'm curious how you got to this point because three years ago you guys were just sneaker Bots and now you're borderline a social media and on the cusp of a multi hundred billion dollar business if you execute correctly so now the stage is set how do you how do you

1:25think about all this yeah I I think people have always told us that we need to stay focused and maybe some people have said you guys are doing too much or what is really and um I think every single time we've been trying to attack a specific problem at hand so when we first started we were actually the first sellers on our platform and we found all these forums on Discord where people were selling little scripts that they made they they sold sneaker bots so um they would sell desktop software and um they would cash up each other and zel each other um people were getting scammed it was

2:02really shitty system so um and we we started selling our own software in these groups as well so what we did was we built and it was a way that we could sell our software in a way more streamlined way so that was the first problem that we had tackled when when we started and I think that as as we evolved we kept attacking Problem by problem and when we last spoke a lot of the problems were around the basics of building an internet business so I mean when we first started we made it so you could build your store Page you could start accepting payments you

2:31didn't have to get V moded things um and then we started building a customer resolution center when we had people not so happy with their purchase and um we built a lot of dispute protection so that creators didn't get completely screwed when people open disputes and um we just started chiseling away at all these problems and I think over the past year what we realized is that the ultimate problem really comes around engagement people are um fighting for attention in today's internet economy so I would say that when we last spoke was all about payments and storefront setup and making sure that you could look at who you was purchasing your

3:07product kind of like Shopify um and I think that this past year we've been really lasered on trying to figure out how we can hack engagement for all of the creators who want to make money on our platform um and that's where we get into the Social Media stuff and I think uh when you layer these problems on top of each other it seems at first glance that it's a really complicated and confusing product but when you're actually using it and you're going through the flows it makes a lot of sense that you're going to get a customer they're going to pay and then they're in your chat and then you can

3:35talk to them and you can link them with the other people that are also paying um maybe you can run prizes and and run Raffles or run uh giveaways or or run videos or give them um information that that you're selling and it's all aggregated in one spot and um they obviously have a mobile app they can get notifications and whatnot because I think that the Journey of relationship really just starts at the purchase and that's what we needed to figure out at the beginning but now that we've um have a somewhat good system there it's about what happens after purchase and how do these creators really make a sustainable

4:09income and not just make a bunch of money one day and and never really figure out how to Captivate the audience's attention again it's amazing like when some when you buy when someone buys a product now there's immediately a DM with your customer on the platform and it can be a group dm with your team so now like my agency is on WAP I also sell my coaching and my courses on WAP and so you guys are creating in my opinion this thing that's like giving every Creator everything they could need or possibly want to sell to Their audience and engage with them directly in one platform and it's really this is

4:42why people probably say it's complex but if you think about it it's kind of like I always describe it like this like Facebook moment of the Creator economy like there's these platforms like Discord there's for gamers there's other community platforms for Education there's other community platforms for different genres and niches on the internet but not there has not been one like sucks every single community of people and gives them one place with every single tool all of them can use in a cohesive way and so it seems like you guys are going to win the Creator economy well I think we have a long way to go and I think we have a lot to prove

5:12but um but yeah I would say that we grew up building Shopify stores and Wix stores and woocommerce and and WordPress and we would go and look on Facebook groups and figure out customers to sell into we would send them our Shopify link um and we would get some random person email that we had no idea if they were in the Facebook group where they came from and then someone later would comment on a Facebook post saying I just purchase your product but um there's absolutely no connection between that and the person who actually bought on Shopify so I think that yeah me the internet is extremely fragmented and

5:46people are trying to figure out do you post on on YouTube do you post on Tik Tok do you post on X do you post on Instagram do you make a link tree do you make a Hobie do you make a a newsletter that maybe you your customers will figure out a way to pay you $10 a month for but then you realize you need th000 customers and you're only making $10,000 so I think um yeah it's super fragmented and um in a lot of ways we're trying to make it a little bit easier for not just the the Creator but also the consumer because um they don't know what to trust

6:14and and they get they can scroll all day but um I'm not sure that's the best way to consume what's on the internet you mentioned truss and I think that's like one of the biggest problems in the greater economy right now especially with people who sell courses like I think course I think if there's one thing in the world is Pro to make people's lives better it's like education and knowledge and informing yourself growing but for some reason everyone who sells a course is like deemed as a scammer it's like not a respected thing which probably holds a lot of people back from actually sharing their knowledge with the world and so

6:43you guys seem to be tackling that with the marketplace your Marketplace is a lot like Amazon but for digital products and now they all have public reviews and you guys are even doing one of the craziest things I've ever seen with the leaderboard and literally showing how much money people have made in the last 24 hours to their product so you can literally go on there and see any product any outcome anything that people are selling and see how much money they're making today and so you can kind of get ideas for your own business as well so what's the thought process on the marketplace yeah so um internet's a

7:14scary place and there's a lot of scammers we've been scammed our whole entire life after 12 13 years old so I think that um having some validation of who you're buying from what they're track record is if they actually have made any money um and of course what other customers are saying those are kind of table Stakes so I think that we aren't necessarily ones to tell people what they should create but at the end of the day um if there's a good feedback loop for you can go and try to scam somebody but if the customers you're scamming aren't having a good experience one we're going to make sure that their

7:53money gets back to them and two nobody else is going to purchase because the reviews are right there there and um the money that you're making is probably going down so I think that because we know people are going to try to scam people how can we set up our platform in a way that allows for a feedback loop to be completely transparent on the intentions of the creators so that's like some of the things we're doing as a platform but I think that that's kind of like um table Stakes so we're going to do those things and we're going to make sure we continue to um iterate on on how

8:25we take people off the platform and um give customers the best possible experience but I think that more philosophically if you look at what college is today there's there's no main difference other than the historical track record of producing a degree than some random person trying to teach you on the internet like you don't know who your professors are they they actually hire a lot of really shitty professors in universities and by the way it costs $70,000 per year um which is a lot only to find out that a lot of times you don't even get a job after you graduate so I think at a more

8:58philosophical lens is like this huge educational realm that has been scamming people in a lot of ways not I went to college and I think that there's a lot of amazing things that come from college but the same logic is applied to people that are teaching people things on the internet and that's just for courses it's also like people pay financial advisors who literally have no idea what they're talking about at Big Banks and and so on and I guarantee that the 22-year-old who's super tapped into every single movement that's going on in China right now probably knows a little bit more than that than the the older

9:28person mayor Lynch who is looking at some basic screen and just following consensus move moves on the S&P so I think there's like a pretty big shift in all of learning and um and advice and um education and uh information that's being democratized from these larger institutions who are doing absolutely nothing different than the individuals are today um and I think that there's like the illusion of scamming and then there's actually scamming and the illusion of scamming I think that that is something that the world will um adjust itself to but the reality of scamming I think our platform should protect against absolutely and you guys

10:07are doing refund guarantees across the board correct yeah so if you get well so we have a dispute resolution center so kind of like original eBay we we grew up selling a lot of things on eBay um and one of the things we remember pretty well is they had feedback on eBay and if you got to a certain level of feedback you got your account shut down um and if a customer ever had a problem with a purchase similar to PayPal you go on the platform and you open a dispute on the platform and when a customer goes on their platform and opens a dispute the

10:33merchant has time to respond and if they don't respond then they get a refund and if they do respond um the customer can either accept or deny and if it gets escalated then it'll come to us and um our trust and safety team will make a a final decision and um and yeah oftentimes it will result in the customer getting a refund so that's a big problem solve in info business Creator business in general you guys will handle that for people and you're protecting both sides at the same time now I'm curious then it's very interesting that you were saying that a lot of schools have bad teachers and

11:06that oftentimes a 22-year-old might be better than even a Wall Street banker and I do think that's why your Marketplace is so key because just because let's say there's a Trader who's made the most money trading in the world he might not actually be the best teacher for that and there is a subset of people who are actually like really good teachers and so the marketplace will be like a good filter for who is actually the best at synthesizing information teaching other people and making sure they get results because then the best products will actually rise to the top then people can like actually understand that if I join this

11:34group there's 500 other people based on the reviews that actually got the result that was promised so I think that's a really important thing that's not really been possible before in the information world yeah well I think that also people have a common misconception that is mostly about education and um is not mostly about education it just so happens that one of the easier things to get up and running uh if you're going to start a business isn't educational business but um WAP started in software land and that was from like a productivity lens how can people use software to um purchase e-commerce items like that was what w really started out

12:07as and um all I have to say is when we're looking at the customer lens um our goal is to make sure that they're happy with their purchase and obviously after you purchase something if you could snap your fingers and get your money back everybody would do that but is if we can make sure that the products people are purchasing and the products that are surfaced on the top of our page are the ones that are most likely to give people a satisfaction of what they purchased that's amazing um so I think it's it's yeah I completely agree with you in the marketplace um over time

12:39should create this really awesome feedback loop to both protect consumers and sellers because if you're a consumer and you you do come in a chat and you start spamming it and being disrespectful then that's not really a customer that anybody wants to have in their in their micro business so um so yeah I I agree with you the payments thing is so interesting with what you guys have because you have such a variety of businesses that sell on obviously I'm in like the info world so that's like what I speak to but so many different types of businesses sell on WAP agencies coaches Consulting literally gyms could be on WAP like so

13:10many a such a wide variety but because you guys have this like payment layer it's essentially like anything you can do on stripe you can do on you can even like send your friends money and so I'm very curious why was the emphasis put on payments when you guys started this like three years ago um I think that for whatever reason every single business that we always started always had such an in integral payment piece to it even if it was that fact that we had to actually just go Jerry r a payment set up and send links out in Facebook um that we just had a pretty good

13:41understanding of payments and I mean when stripe came out um in like 2011 or whatever I I remember um programming and like seeing this magical little pop-up window and um being able to input your credit card and and just charging a card and that that was really special and I think that throughout high school and throughout College um we were pretty deep in crypto and and payments stripe brain tree and all the processor so we just had a pretty good understanding of it and I don't think that we found a lot of difficulty in setting up a pretty robust payments infrastructure it's so nice dude I can literally just go on

14:12there like if I have meet anyone in the world who wants to pay me for like an hour of my time or if I have a client that wants to do like a custom package I literally in less than 30 seconds go to set the price recurring one time whatever it is and then like instantly have a checkout link send it to them get paid in my bank account I don't know how you guys did that like it seems like that's like a full-blown business in and of itself but you guys have like all this other stuff on top of it and so the apps I love the calendar booking app

14:37I've sold a lot of one- hour Consulting calls with the calendar booking app have you that's awesome I actually have yeah tons um so I'm curious like what is the vision for apps because this is something we talked about last time a little bit but it's actually starting to be fleshed out you guys have like over 30 different apps now and it's pretty much everything I could possibly want to sell as a Creator on YouTube um so what's just the the thought process there yeah I think the real long-term idea and vision of of apps is that you don't have to be a software developer to

15:04create really magical and unique experiences that you can give a user base and um typically a lot of these things that you're describing they're not new right so so calendar bookings you can of course go to calendly I think they even have a payment setup um chat we're not the first person to build chat there's literally hundreds of chat platforms and um you can go and use those platforms for chat uh forums has been done hundreds of times um so those are like table Stakes apps and I think that we need those apps so that there's a baseline of Engagement set up and that people can actually engage with other

15:34users you can engage with the Creator Creator can engage with the users um and that's like phase one phase two is figuring out how we can really hack the engagement of a community so that the Creator can drive up their LTV and ultimately have a blossoming community that they can sell more things into and um develop relationships with people and have a sustainable business so those apps are where if you're a developer you typically be able to make these things but because most people are not developers and um apps are getting a lot easier to make and there's a huge AI beam right now which makes everything

16:06easier um we are going to have a lot of really cool mini apps and games and contest apps and trivia apps and um whatever specific niches that you can imagine so if you're at a gym maybe there's like a weight section app and you can have contests around who's lifting the most weight and it's super adaptive UI around that so that's like a little bit more further out and these types of apps are really again to hack the engagement and to give the Creator all these different tools that they would have to normally be a software developer for to see your daily active users on your own platform that's a not

16:41a normal thing and and we obviously have that now in our dashboard um that everybody can look at so it's just bringing the power of developers what it feels like to be a developer to people that are not developers so since software has gotten like so easy to develop with AI you're able to build like all these different apps and it's almost like you like wh labeled these apps for people to sell to Their audience and it's like quite literally every possible app of critic want to sell it feels like you're completely replacing the need for zapier for me cuz I can do my newsletter I can take my

17:08payments I can get literally any app I can message my team I can message anyone on the platform like I can just do everything here is the App Store going to be opened up to like other developers like kind of like shopify's app store where you can like a person like we we've developed an app for one of my friends who's a big Creator and it's like a Shopify AI store Builder and that's on the App Store of Shopify and then he sells that and that's a multi7 million or multi-million dollar business so are people going to be able to build apps and then sell them to graters on W

17:37or what's the what's the vision there yeah so so we have a public app development portal right now it's pretty shitty but um it does exist and long term we I am extremely passionate about supporting developers make income because that's what that's what I did my entire childhood and and I think it developers are are pretty um creative and um a lot of times they just lack the clarity on exactly what to build and maybe how they can get dist contribution to it so absolutely we're going to bet big on the developer ecosystem um and I think that we're still in very early stages like I said of building these

18:06table Stak apps and um really making sure that there's at least a foundation to do the basic things that you can do on other platforms um but yeah you should definitely not need need zappier anymore um and I think the other thing to add maybe is that because we've grown up on the internet and been so chronically addicted to every single thing since Instagram when it came out um we've gotten pretty good grip on what type of apps we can bring back to the internet and and those are things like HQ trivia like Yik Yak um there was stumble upon back in the day and um I

18:37think that this Ask FM and all these little quirky things that um drove so much engagement that have completely fallen off the internet because they lack the network and um these were all silid Omegle like right like imagine being able to randomly meet somebody who's actually interested in the same topic as you like that that's pretty cool and I think there's a lot of connection that can come from that um it's a lot more exciting than just endless in on an Instagram feed um so we're going to bring back all these all these Legacy apps I would say that that have kind of fallen off the beaten path

19:06so how does the feed come into this because you have all of the apps you have payments you have a Marketplace but you guys are also doing this like feed where all of like the most engaged with apps are like on like a home feed like a Twitter feed or something like what is this thought process behind this CU this is where I kind of get lost so we don't want people to be in one we want people to be in 100 wops and the reason why that is is because um wops should be very much focused on one problem that they're trying to solve a company that tries to

19:37solve a bunch of problems isn't solving any problems and um when that happens there's a lot more wops that you should be in because life is full of problems and and you should be in all these different types of Ops and um what we found is that people are naturally used to scrolling on something um but what we've also found is that a lot of the platforms today they don't actually have a detail view um when you're scrolling so if you think about Instagram you're really watching as a user on Instagram you're watching you're not really playing a game um in land all the apps they can Surface content and

20:11activity to the feed but when you click in one you're actually going to be playing and you're going to be watching actual video taking a quiz talking to people um playing a game doing a contest all these different things so the feed is really just to bring about what's relevant in all these communities or groups that you're in um and surface it in a in a traditional feed yeah that's so cool so basically like if you're in like five different Discord servers instead of having to like jump into each one scroll go to all the different channels it's just like the three or four most engaged with posts from all

20:42the communities that you're in are like on your feed correct so that way you can just kind of check really quickly correct this this kind of makes like a full-blown social network in a way because you have the DMS they have profiles there's a feed is that like the vision for it um yeah I think I think a lot of this is is uh I think like people have gotten in the habit that all the social media platforms um when they first came out they were very social right you message your friends you knew your friends on on Facebook um and then as the influencer era started to grow

21:18you had all of a sudden you weren't following any of your friends you're only following people that you don't know um and then the next thing that you notice is that they're all trying to sell you um and I think that when Facebook first started their goal was obviously to connect everybody and um now that they connected everybody there isn't really a way to conduct transactions um but in reality Commerce is actually the Bedrock of connection um and I think that yes we could be a social network called a social network because we have a lot of social features but I think that we're really a Commerce

21:49platform but we just know that the best way to build a business is actual connection um and really understanding who your customers are your customers have a sense of who you are and and um it feels like a ancient Market that you go to every single day and you really know everybody in the in the stands and um you you trust them and um you also know other people that are buying from them it's an era of specialization it's like a farmers market or like a farmers market is a great word or a digital mall or something and I guess the thing I that is like do people go to the market

22:20and is everybody silent like no not not at all people are talking right like so is that a social media platform or is that a market um and I think that it's a market first and foremost and um one of the key parts of a market is that people can talk about what they want to buy and and they can talk about how their purchase was and they can talk and do Pottery together if they just purchase pots so so it's um connection is important if you're building a market the money focus is so interesting to me because like this is kind of something that other platforms like VI is taboo or

22:50like it's really not been a thing but like you're literally putting front and center how much people are making on the platform you even have like a like a different different leader board for different types of products or different types of ways people are making money like there's an affiliate leader board so not the creators but actually people who are just making money referring the actual products on the marketplace to other people and you can see a leaderboard there it's like a really gamified transparent experience so I'm very curious on your thought process behind just putting the money front and center yeah I think um I think that

23:21people need to have some type of scoreboard in some ways and and I think that the real reason for that is because it's very hard to know if someone's legit and you don't really know if someone is completely bullshitting everybody um or they actually have some type of success to to back it up and I think that I mean our whole goal is to make people money so um if we can't establish a very clear way that people know how they're progressing on that Journey then we're not doing our job right it's very interesting because every YouTuber especially in my world like first thing they're saying in their

23:58first 30 seconds of their videos how much they made I made this amount in the last two years in e-commerce or something and so this seems kind of like the evolution of that where it's like in the near future if you're not showing that publicly it's going to be a red flag and it's almost like the marketplace will be forcing that upon people is that yeah I mean would would you rather have a million followers or a million dollars that is 100% verified because it's based by the platform right um and I think most people would rather have a million dollars and I think that most people today have a million follow

24:29and not a million dollars and that that's pretty pretty crazy um so yeah I think the goal is about money it's not about some arbitrary number that doesn't actually mean anything so on WAP your your followers is basically just how much money you've made correct that is crazy bro that is so crazy to think about have people had like that is actually so crazy but I I like it just literally feels like we're on the cusp of like a whole new era of the internet if this is as big as you like what is your vision like how big do you think this actually is I think that most people don't even

25:01understand that well actually it's funny because um I think I have a real answer for you and it's that um Global GDP is 100 TR trillion dollars and um the amount of Digital internet payments that contribute to that um is way less than you might think in the US um Digital internet payments only make up 10% of the GDP um so so that all that to say is like I think the internet is still really weird weirdly early um and that people are about to undergo massive massive change in work and I mean you already have more businesses and and um more Freelancers than ever you have more

25:39layoffs than ever you have um elon's coming in he's about to fire 80% of the government and that's like a pretty meaningful amount of jobs just in the us alone and and now that you have all these other countries that can also tap into the internet economy and take advantage of purchase power in the US um you have so many people that um are basically waiting for something like this so how big do I think like it can get I mean I don't even know if if anybody knows how big the internet can be when you really have a couple billion people in a room and you let them all

26:11pay each other but you're building for that scale like that you're literally making the product for the entire gig economy yeah and with AI taking probably a lot of people's jobs by 2030 the Creator economy is only going to get bigger I feel like a lot of people will view like a little Creator business as like a good way to make a few three $4,000 a month totally I think so too I think it really unlocks a lot of time and I think that um I'm not as bullish on AI just making it so that nobody has to think anymore um I don't know I I um

26:45some of my smart friends try say otherwise but I still think that there's a lot of human in uh whatever Ingenuity Ingenuity um that that is uh that other people want to pay for um so I'm I'm pretty bullish on humans and I think that people can can uh be way more creative than they think and um when you don't have a job and there's a place you can go to quickly spin up a a store and offer some type of value I think that is pretty exciting for people so I think it can get really big and we're definitely building with that in mind we want to um we want to

27:24build a really impactful platform and we make long long term decisions so that's something I've really I have I've known you for like probably two and a half three years now and that's one thing I've always I always try to give you guys as much feedback as possible you guys are so aggressive with talking to creators about how to make the platform better which I really admire but we've had a lot of push back in our days and one thing I've always noticed is that you never like sacrificed the shortterm you never sacrific the short-term product for the long-term Vision uh most recently I think we were arguing about

27:58emails like I think I have this belief that like 25% of all my sales come from email and so should be making a full-blown email service provider for me and you have a very specific point of view on that that we have argued about for hours and I'm curious where that is like why you're thinking that way um yeah I think I mean a lot of if you really reduce that to the problem like you want more sales and um the way I see it is that I'm looking at my phone and looking at my email and if I got an email and it said hey did you know you

28:32could buy this or or even in a much more subtle way I'm never getting sold in an email and I I look at my own customer experience as um a pretty bit High weight in what we should build for our platform and we have a saying that's like be your own customer and I think um a lot of that is like what do I actually want to get sold into as a customer and it's not email um I totally get that people want a way to contact and connect with old customers new customers existing customers and so on um but email is not the place to do that I I

29:07just don't think that people get excited when they when they get an email like oh my God I can't believe this personal touch that that this Creator had sending me an email to go buy some more from them like I just I think there's a lot of better ways that we can do that and um I that's what I would say it's almost like your thought process is betting on that everyone's going to be on the platform if we make the most engaging app they're going to be on this platform anyways and so an email is like not a waste of time but like uh they're

29:35just going to why not just make the dming feature better so you can talk to your customer on the app directly right yeah I I think actually one way to say I was with um I was with some I was with um I was with a uh a um one of the big let's just let me just say one of the big website builders that you'd probably know of one of the founders of that and he said that their business um took over because it provided a domain a website and an email and that's the traditional set of tools that people think they need to run a business but in reality those

30:11are actually pretty complicated and annoying for everybody involved if you want to start a business do you really think that the average person is going to go to a domain Provider by a domain hook up the DNS to another website and then set up a custom email on G Suite or even if they all they provide all of it in one roof great the UI is all convoluted it's all messy and they have to add another email to their phone and and when they get a new phone they have to sign in all all these emails again um that's not a good experience just because it's the accepted consensus

30:42today um so I think in a lot of ways WAP actually replaces the domain email and website um and those are things that every single business that I've ever started um with Cameron have required those three things yeah and now it's you guys just launched this new mobile app and you can do literally all that and like I I tried it out for like 60 seconds and I had a full-blown product link ready to take payments a store Page ready to send people and an actual product created essentially all for my phone that's exciting it is very exciting okay so there's so many different ways to like make money on the

31:21platform and just sticking with this long-term Vision you guys have mentioned to me that you're trying to build for like physical businesses as well like a gym or an apartment or something and like I see you're like you're thinking so many years ahead is this like another reason like why you don't like make the short-term decisions to bring emails because like certain subsets of like okay course creators want emails but like we're building for gyms Apartments these other physical businesses or what's your just your thought process on where this could be going yeah well I think also on the email Point like we actually have emails

31:59and your customers automatically get an email when you make a forum post for example um but there's just not like an email editor and the reason again is because most people they don't want to go and like even if they say they want to go and customize their emails I don't think they actually that's a kind of I don't like I don't want as a business owner I do not want to do that that's a really annoying thing to do um so guess I'll just say that on the email point but um as far as where goes um when you look at again if you think about

32:27it as a components you have a website you have no need for a domain you don't really have any need for email and that's the stack of every single business that's used today so if you're a coffee shop you're on Yelp you have a Shopify that you sell your beans on you have an Instagram page you probably have a couple other social platforms and then you have a square reader that you're tapping your phone on um you have no idea who your customers are when a customer's coming up you don't know if it's their birthday and be pretty awesome say hey Jeff happy birthday um here's a free coffee and um then if they

32:58buy something on your Shopify you have no idea if that's um the same person who has also come in every single day for the past two months um and it's all disconnected so I don't actually think there's a whole lot of differences that are required to support some of these businesses and I mean obviously we're going to have to make a little bit of adjustments here and there but um even rent payments like most portals where you go and pay rent especially in New York where we are um they're pretty shitty MH you have like a weird help desk that um nobody knows how to use and

33:31when something doesn't work in your apartment you have you have no you have some shitty Forum that looks like it's a Craigslist that you can maybe go and sell if you're moving out on with all the other neighbors in it um you have to sometimes wire money maybe you can pay by by uh you type in your routing an account number to pay or maybe you have to give a check um you don't really understand if the building's actually legit and good before you sign a 12 year lead to 12 month Le and um I think a lot of these problems are solved with pretty basic

34:01things I mean you can if you're an owner of a residential building you can literally spawn a group chat with all the residents in a couple seconds you can accept Bitcoin with for rent like that's kind of crazy um you can accept uh Apple pay and you can buy out pay later you can do so many different things that um it's pretty messy right now so I don't actually think there's a lot of difference between again just website email and domain being eradicated in our context for these businesses yeah you have like all these like 30 you have like these 30 apps that are all like basic functions and so like

34:34a gym could do their gym memberships they could check in at the desk with one of the apps they could do an event schedule if they want to do pizza on Fridays they can message any members directly like there's just a direct line of communication and the payments and it's just literally every possible I mean I'm sure Jims would probably like it if they could all of a sudden let any of their current people refer a friend and make money like that's that's pretty crazy they all have affiliate programs but they're like there's some random person at the desk with a pamphlet that's multiple pages long and I I went

35:06to a a um a spa a couple weeks ago and they had they had a a mess of QR codes on their desk and they had one QR code that was like join our membership to get um a free session each month and and it's like a it's a insane how shitty and clunky that that process is um so they're obviously leaning into it I also saw I went to a wine store a couple weeks ago and um they had to join the community and um get a free wine bottle each month and I asked them if they had a group chat for their for their

35:37community and they said oh that's a great idea but no we just actually manually add everybody to our close friend's Instagram story and that's how they communicate so like yeah I don't think there's actually that big of a jump to get to some of these physical businesses and um I'm pretty excited to try it yeah it's like everyone says to build an email list CU like you own your customer but if they just joined a not only do you get their email but now they're in your and you can talk to them forever you know and you can talk to them with like through a text Ex you

36:04lit send them money like it's exactly it's pretty nuts all these different pieces and like I will say one the affiliate stuff is so cool and I want to talk about that in a little bit but I just want to take a step back and like how the heck did you end up here in this Vision because three years ago like I said earlier you guys were like a sneaker bot trading thing and then you went into like this nft Discord bot and then went to like Discord payment Bots and there's a Marketplace and kind of like slowly but surely you just like piece this together now there's a huge

36:35wedge in the yeah I think it's it's um worth noting that I don't know how much we've ever quote unquote chosen our niches that we're serving it's always been people coming to the platform and um getting creative with what they have to offer and um someone makes a bunch of money and then everybody kind of copies that person so I I don't actually know how much we were like oh let's let's go into to trading or let's go into sports betting or let's go into um some of these more popular Trends on social media right now I think it's kind of natural if you're going to scroll on Tik

37:06Tok and you only see people betting on sports then all of a sudden someone want to say oh wait I can actually make money on this as opposed to just posting anist on Tik Tok and watching my follower account go up which doesn't actually do anything for me um and that I think is what happens more often than not but maybe they answer your question um a different way I I I think that again like I met Cameron when we were 13 years old in a Facebook group and we basically spent all of our life building a Shopify website finding a Facebook group selling that Facebook group things we built on

37:36Shopify and um I think we just know how easy that is to do and um we put it all together in a streamland product we can bring that to people that don't know how easy that is and um they can make money so I I think we have a very deep history of hanging out online and and getting to know all the different platforms getting to know all the payment stuff and um understanding how engagement really works and then trying to Parlay all that into a platform that we would really love to use ourself um and then leaving it up to people to see what they

38:07create it's just such a cool platform dude back to the affiliate links like the affiliate links are now at the bottom of every single store page so for any Creator business any gym anybody who sells on whether even an agency if you just want to do like a 20% referral if someone refers a customer anybody can just find an affiliate Link at the bottom of your store Page and custom percentages it's public you even want to step further and added like content folders so a lot of I don't know I'm sure this is pretty well known now but Andrew Tate became the most famous person in the world

38:35through this little content distribution system he just had a thousand people taking his content and reposting it with the incentive of an affiliate link and now that's just like built into the product I can post all of my shorts from I can post this podcast in there people can clip it up and then if I have a product to sell use my content put that link in the bio and make money themselves and there's a leaderboard for them too which is crazy so it's like really the make money app like you just go on the if you want to make money which sounds like a huge

39:02um which doesn't sound like it would be true um but that's our goal and if we're not doing a good job with that then you can see on our homepage now so so I think it's it's kind of funny I mean that's just a ballsy move like to put how much money people are making on the homepage and on each one of their cards like it is super interesting because creators are just going to go on there and now just look what is a hot offer right now what's working I mean I think it's like also if you don't want that to show up you can of course opt out and

39:32and and not have that show up but um I think it's I don't understand why I just think it it's um back to the vanity metrics of followers like nobody cares about that anymore um they want to know if you're a real business that's operating and how much influence you actually have essentially a correlation to that that is so interesting because it is much more like intriguing like instead of just like a sales graphic on your Marketplace store it's just like as a Creator you just want to go see who's making money today what are they selling you can make $100,000 a day doing this like literally two day two people today

40:08were fighting for the number one spot and they're both doing hundreds of thousands in a day crazy it was like 112 to 109 and you could I wonder if that like encourage them to like push harder if they saw that and then they have a w ranking overall too yeah it's just a New Era bro okay so I will say you might be one of the most connected people I've ever interacted with like you casually name drop not name drop but you casually are just like around some of the coolest people that probably give you some of the best guidance in the world you have a lot of advisors is this

40:39something that's like encouraged by your investors like is it something that you like pursued yourself because you don't have to have like you give I'm sure you give these people like a little bit of equity or something for their guidance is this something that you do consciously or is just like a normal thing in the VC World um I'm not sure how other companies do it but for me I love to learn so much and I um I feel like I've moved around so much as as a kid and I always got to meet new people and um hear their perspective and um I really value the stories that

41:15people have if they have something that I haven't seen yet and um I definitely get a lot of help from the people that we already have supporting us um in that they introduce me to other people that they think we should meet um and so on but I think that I would say it comes down to um I I just I love to learn and I love to meet people who have cool insight and even when we have Uber Eed drivers come in and we'll stop them and ask them about the our product and what they think of our our new text and um I talked to a FedEx guy yesterday and he

41:47signed up on so I think it's like I don't necessarily know if it's constrained just to quote unquote successful people I I um I'll talk to a homeless guy for like an hour you know like people in the elevator and I just I just like to meet people and um learn where they're coming from and and learn what problems they're facing and I think it's it's pretty fun for me to do that so one thing I noticed about a lot of the people on your team is that super developer focused like heavy team like a lot of really quality Engineers just in a big room over there and something I've

42:18noticed is how many one like how quickly things get done I think I saw at one of the Town Halls that you had a this graph of how many how many like different people ship and then same thing with like bugs like how do you guys go about organizing like fixing bugs or shipping product um yes I I think that our product is so vast and and so wide um that it's very hard to maintain and um that sometimes leaves a lot of bugs in our product and um we obviously try to test things and um sometimes we prioritize speed and um that's obviously to make sure that customers use the

42:57things that we're creating as soon as possible um and we're pretty hard on ourself about how fast we're shipping and um and that spirit I think is is really really important to have for a consumer product because we don't actually know if something will work we have to ship it try it and then very very very quickly iterate on it um and that's pretty prone to bugs so I think I mean we we um I I don't think we figured out necessarily how to do it perfectly yet but what we do do is we have a big list of things that that need to get done and and um on some period right now

43:30releasing a lot of things so we have a pretty ironed out list of bugs and enhancements that have come in from customers come in from us as we use it um and some have come in from crash reports and so on um but generally we'll sit and think about what we want to ship and um people will will own these different initiatives and projects and um and build them so I uh yeah I think we have a lot of bugs and that's a big focus of ours right now is to polish the things we have and not necessarily um continue to make it wider although we

44:02obviously will make it wider and add more exciting functionality to to our platform um but I think that we're in like a weird spot right now because we have a skeleton not a weird spot we're in a great spot right now because we have a skeleton there we have all the frames in and now it's just a little bit of um polish that's going to take us a long way you guys are at a pretty huge scale like you have 80 employees you have one of the most insane offices I've ever seen I think you're getting the whole floor now like you're about to have four times bigger office how does

44:31this compare to like two years ago um I think it's the same type of energy it's it's way different problems that are happening I mean two years ago I was programming all day and I mean part of me wishes I was still doing that I've been spending a lot of time in in um engineering room the past week or so and um it's so much fun so I I think that two years ago same energy we were we were say lot of was Same Spirit let's ship ship ship give things to customers ask what they think um yes it'll have bugs but we'll quickly fix them very very fast customer

45:07suggest something we'll jump on it and I'll manually message them and say hey just fix this for you or hey just added this um and I think now it's it's um it's hard to align everybody on on one thing when there's so many people and um when there's so many different things going on but I um it's exciting as hell and um I uh am a very adventurous person and I love to look at Uncharted Territory and I think that um we're we're definitely on the on the right track and and I um I'm learning a ton each day and I uh yeah I I don't know

45:39what else to add I'm very curious you guys seem if I look at the product now that I'm thinking about it it feels like you in my mind built things backwards but that's probably my flaw in thinking like when I talk to you you have like the most like I don't mean this in a bad way but stereotypical like Tech founder why combinator type of general advice saying that's like huh how could you is that insulting I'm sorry okay okay but like you have like the philosophy of like the tech Elites and I guess that's I mean you're attempting to build a multi hundred billion dollar business

46:07I'm assuming and so I'm very curious because you built like the payment infrastructure and then you built the dispute resolution and customer service like you had that stuff down like down like the like it takes 38 seconds or something like that I think Cameron told me for someone to reply to a support message on and it's like these are like very difficult ult not like objective problems to solve and it seems like you like really focus on building that infrastructure first before building the flashy apps or the store Pages or anything like that like and you're so product focused like you are like developing yourself so much of this

46:44product in the weeds constantly like critiquing the way Everything feels so is this just like to you like the innate way for me as a Creator I just like making videos and getting eyeballs and stuff so it's fun but like is the product f is like an innate thing for you was this like a something you learned early on or like where does this come from for you yeah um I think even outside of product it's like we and I I maybe I think Cam and I just really love the best most spectacular things of life and um when we go and and stay at a

47:16hotel and and there's bad customer support or service um it's pretty obvious and I think that that's not how we want to that's not what we want to stand for we want everything to be the absolute best that means that we are we have an amazing engine to ship product we have A+ customer support we have amazing design and obviously we we have got ways to go on everything but I think that the me mentality of like it's Day Day Zero day one and we aren't yet I think is is pretty helpful in that um and that leads into product of course it's like I'm staring at the product and

47:55I have built so many apps before and I've used so many different products that I kind of have a good idea I think of what the bar is and um every time we ship something it's a new bar and and it's like well how is this the greatest thing that we've ever seen before and if it's not let's go back to the drawing board and figure out how we can make it so um and then when you put all these things together then it's like wait how do they just do that and it's is literally just being obsessed with pushing the the limit on every single

48:25detail that that is there um always so I'm curious what the root of that is you guys I honestly think it's just how much that like I'm going to speak personally I've just I've seen a lot of things in my life I would say U I moved around so much when I was younger my parents sent me to China when I was younger I lived in Singapore to work I went to to NYU I live studied abroad in Paris um I went to a really I was didn't grow up wealthy at all uh my parents were in the military before I was born my dad was a

48:55doctor mom was a nurse and um moved around a lot I went to like a pretty Inner City Middle School then I went to a really prestigious private high school um and I'm very grateful for my parents for um putting me through that so I guess all I like to say is like I've just seen such a spectrum of experiences that I think give me a pretty good Benchmark on what is great so you just know what greatness looks like and you want to like and you want to just make something great yourself because of that I think so yeah I think I um I I grew up

49:25jailbreaking my my iPod touch and um iPhone and watching all the Apple videos pretty cliche but um that's definitely definitely real um and then getting to watch Instagram grow and Snapchat grow and Facebook grow and stripe grow and brain tree grow shopy grow um and paying pretty close attention to that just like Amazon grow and um Robin Hood grow and and these are all companies that I very much look up to and um just watching what they what they went through and and um hearing stories and being pretty close to the ground as they as they've been growing the last 10 years so I think I just have some idea of what it

50:04takes to get to that scale and have you always had the self-belief that you could do that like build that level of company I don't know I I I don't necessarily think like that I think that in in like the when you compress all of the the things you have to do it becomes not so hard so I think I have like a pretty um weird look on on these things where it's like that's just doesn't actually seem that hard um in a lot of ways and when you like I'm not every day thinking like okay how are we going to be as big as as Instagram like that's

50:35not that's not what I'm thinking about I'm like what do we have to do today let's solve this and then does this match our Five-Year Plan and if so great if not let's try to reject it a little bit um and continue to deliver the value to to customers just make it all about that um so I I don't I mean can I do it like I'm trying um I I'm pretty I'm pretty confident in myself I um I think I'm pretty resourceful and and um you can drop me in a lot of places and hopefully I'll I'll I'll be fine I um yeah it does make it's observing from

51:12afar it like didn't doesn't make sense to me how you got here but when you say it like that it's like you're just showing up today doing the best thing you can do to give this customer the best experience today and then you're building for them taking their feedback and bu for what's the next thing they need tomorrow and then over time you buil all these little different pieces that now tie together perfectly into an actual huge vision for that same person but that's because you were still focused on that one type of customer and constantly building for them and making sure they were having a good time

51:41exactly and and a lot of times I customer is myself wow so when you came up with this I like concept you guys raised money like three years ago correct two years ago for the first time for the first time yeah was the pitch way different um or was the five that's a good question uh we so we when we first raised money we had an acquisition offer from another company that just raised a lot of money we were bootstrapped we didn't have any money at all um and we the pitch is like it was like it was like we have this this uh sneaker bot

52:15Marketplace and um people are are buying aggressively like it's growing pretty fast and I don't think that our First Investors is really really um they weren't like what's your 10-year vision and like how are you going to get there it was more like you guys are crazy I like you guys let's um let's figure out how we can work together um and then like we met Peter teal and that was he was asking the most simple questions ever is um it was pretty awesome it's just like what makes you guys different and like what do you guys want to build and and um I think that they thought

52:50that we were a good fit to solve this problem given our background um and I guess the problem we were pitching was it was it wasn't as far off as you as you'd imagine I mean I think that we we wanted to have um things like in-game currency to be sold in our Marketplace and and really build like more more software tools I think was the intention but like I said earlier I don't think that we've ever tried to tell people what to sell on our platform um and we've always stuck to building the rails and and making sure that the infer is good um so people can create what they

53:24want and yeah I'm not going to lie to you say that 3 years ago we were like let's build a a platform that you can go on and and set up a business in in a couple in like a couple maybe a minute or so on from your phone um but the ethos was certainly there so it was like still just a marketplace with payment infrastructure I think I'm trying to think of the original it was definitely like digital Amazon was a was a phrase we used um the other phrases were um I think our first tagline was like damn that's a good question um Marketplace for Marketplace for cool

54:00internet products like silly taglines and and to be honest nobody really knew what we did um and I think only now they even remotely starting to get it and I mean some people obviously um are are closer on the investor side and they they definitely get it and they're very very excited about about this and um supportive of us but I I actually don't think people did understand it for for a while hopefully I can help with that yeah yeah marketing's never been our been our our thing is there actually a product that like wouldn't make sense to be on the marketplace now yeah we take

54:32like hundreds of products off every single week oh really yeah for anything that breaks our terms so like you can't sell illegal no NSFW um we we're pretty um like we have Daily Review of all all the products and um they get removed so I've seen that you guys have had like athletic Greens on on the marketplace is that like do you plan on going have like physical products actually too or is that like well athletic yeah so I mean totally um I think that all the DTC brands are doing exactly what I said which is they have a Shopify store that actually isn't that good and it's confusing to have so many

55:08different products on it just like sell your product and then they zappier all these people into some random Facebook group and it's a nightmare so I'm I'm actually really bullish on on physical products and I think that um I think we can improve that whole business C line pretty significantly would you categorize everyone is a Creator like it's that's like on WAP like it's like everything a Creator could possibly want to sell whether it's merch physical product digital product yeah I mean our our goal is to support all the business types like people have a different knack for different things so some people are really good at making content some

55:39people are really good at trading crypto some people are really good at surfacing jobs from random corners of the internet some people are really good at booking travel some people are really good at finding vas some people are really good at running a gym um and that person who runs a gym probably isn't good at programming software but that doesn't mean they both can't be creative so um that's the word we've Chosen and I think that um during Co that was like a pretty taboo like I'm not going to I'm not a Creator I'm not going to go make dancing videos on Tik Tok but I think that

56:07nowadays it's gotten a little bit more um ubiquitous and in that people are just creating value for other people yeah I will say one of the coolest things about that is not only is that who's on your platform but also like half the people here in your office our creators have made money online like there's a lot of people out there who literally make had made millions of dollars online in their 20s and now they're joining and working here how is that happening how are you getting these literally 20-year-old millionaire cracked kids to come work here I I think it's more fun to work with other people than to work alone and

56:42um I think that it's I mean a lot of people have wops here internally and and there um there's no better way to build a product than to use a product every single day that you're building um and that's like one of our core operating principles um and I think people will see that like they see how much impact they can make when they come from the space and they come from using our product they come from understanding our ethos um and now actually getting to take that product and do something with it um and I think it's like a pretty inspiring and and fulfilling thing to do do you actually

57:18like do you encourage your employees to have yes for we have literally have a we have a leaderboard um and we do contests on who makes the most money internally um but I think it's weird because like everybody's so so damn busy that nobody really has a lot of time to do it I think that we'll see that a lot more next year um but I mean we're we're generally in like War mode so that everybody else can make a lot of money um and we'll figure out ourselves a little bit later is how I like to maybe think about it especially for myself because like I mean in theory if I

57:50wasn't doing this I would definitely be building wops or the equivalent of of them um so I think one day we can all sail off in the sunset and is is fully feature complete and um maybe that will never happen but but yeah I uh totally if someone wants to make a and people have wops and and um I think some people make a lot of money on their and they work here that's so crazy to me that's so interesting but is your is your retirement plan you're building the product that you can sail off into the sunset yep just make 50 Grand a month online

58:22exactly you just have to finish it that's f have to finish near complete okay then do you feel like do you feel like you're building towards something like is there something you wanted to do in your life that you're like this is like a means to that or is this like you're I know you're very caught up in your day-to-day obviously but like do you have like a deeper thing that you want to explore in your life yeah well I mean okay wow um I think my life is has always been about in some ways productivity I I would say and um productiv is about time which is

58:57like saving people time and I think that's my life purpose is to save people time and if you think about what people spend their time on today um they spend their time working commuting and sleeping that's basically it um so I think I'd like to solve those things um and I'm pretty passionate about um obviously like work I think that um there's so much room to innovate on work and that's obviously what WAP is all about um more esoteric I I think um I love flight and Aviation and you were hanging out this weekend and um flying my little plane um but I I love that stuff and and that's really

59:40fascinating for me so travel's pretty interesting um but I don't I don't um I'm like really lasered right now on stuff and I I think I think that there's just so much that's going to happen over the next three to five years that is going to basically make like the most obvious in hindsight invention um and I'm I'm that's all I'm I'm focused on right now you're not really thinking about future Ventures but you would probably get Transportation like you would actually like on it and just go like I um I don't think I can I I don't like I don't think about that that much

1:00:16I um I think it's really important to focus and um if something can expedite our mission related to walk then great I'll try to do it but um otherwise I don't I'm going to to finish out this Mission like strong like we are going to make people a lot of money um which is what our mission is um make people a lot of money um and that's what I'm here to do so I uh that's it why did you go the VC route why did you raise money um I think that because we I think there like a why do we raise money um having I think we just like to go big

1:01:10and um I just don't think we can actually do the same things if we don't raise money and I don't think that we were the type to want to go to like Bali and and be on our computers and and chill on the beach and just work on our little projects I think that it was really fun growing up watching all the all the how much impact these companies made and um I think that we wanted to build something really massive and you definitely don't need VC money for that but um when you get a lot of support from great people and um you can kind of

1:01:40get expedited on like having some amazing expert who built some massive platform get to speak with them and and learn a lot of the mistakes that they made I think it's pretty invaluable and um I haven't seen quite yet any um negatives of doing it I think um given that we have so much pressure like we're our biggest critics and um because of that it's a little bit hard to get out critiqued I don't I think um and we love the criticism that's like the most exciting thing ever and I think there part of that like the accountability system is pretty awesome um but I think we just want to go big

1:02:18and um we want to make something that is is is really generational and and enduring business and um we decided to raise venture capital and you guys do everybody in office right yeah every most people are in office like 80 90% of our team's in office every day why is so um because we're working together it's like I I think it's it's kind of crazy that people um would want to be staring at a screen and and only getting to know people remotely I think it's just like it's not how people are supposed to operate together um and I mean during Co when Cameron Shar and I weren't in the

1:02:57same spot I was in Hawaii and they were in Austin Texas and um we would be hanging out in Zoom calls 24 hours a day so not 24 hours a day every single waking moment we'd be in the call so we always had each other's presence and if we needed each other we could just say yo cam Sharky um can we talk about this real fast and um nowadays people are like email here's an as I'll look at this I'll review this asynchronously um they come back and the next day they have a a question about it it's like so nothing got done um when you could have

1:03:30just met synchronously for 5 minutes um and gotten it done like that's it's pretty remarkable how much faster um things move when it's in person okay so I feel re really weird talking about you guys because I've been here for the last three months I decided to join full-time I'm fully bought into your vision I think this is going to be one of the biggest companies in the world and you have been such an interesting leader to observe like this is just like in my mind like the upper echelon of startups and you seem like such a natural fit at leading like all these town halls and how you're

1:04:04navigating all these conversations all these people you just juggle so much so utmost respect to you damn super glad to be here bro damn um yeah damn I'm excited to do some marketing so sick yeah I I I am like speechless at how thankful I am to get to work with you and U very honored for what you you just said so I really appreciate it um I think we're going to have the most fun adventures ever together and we already have had some Hilarious Moments um three months ago we were you basically redesigning all of our all our new product and it's about to be ready and

1:04:39um now it's actually go time we're going to tell the world we built dude you had a funny a funny funny tweet cuz people like talk to your customer and then you was replying like hire your customer and I love that yeah it's the best dude we're like on the same wavelength always you know like before this I was like look at the brand book and like it's ingrained in my soul it's like yeah we're all the same it's it's amazing it's just an intuition and it just creators for creators by creators for creators I think we're building something special I'm excited to be a part of it thank you for coming on here

1:05:09and sharing this with the world thank you for the product You're Building thank you for doing it for the right reasons but dude let's go let's go hell yeah