The Idea:
Steven Schwartz was 13 when he met Cameron Zoub in a Facebook group for sneakerheads. They were two Chicago-area middle schoolers, and both were sick of losing limited-edition drops to faster buyers. So they built Sole Sniper from Schwartz’s bedroom. It was an iOS bot that grabbed shoes before they sold out, and it sold for anywhere from $20 to $500.
It worked. The profits paid for the next idea, and the one after that. Over eight years the pair launched at least 22 side hustles, including a disappearing-message app before Snapchat and a burger delivery service at college.
They kept running into the same problem. Selling software online meant forum posts, middlemen, unclear pricing and scammers. With developer Jack Sharkey, they put together a free marketplace to fix it. Scammers took that over too. Schwartz’s own verdict: “It was trash.”
So they rebuilt it properly. In March 2021, the year Schwartz graduated from NYU Stern, the trio launched one place where anyone could sell anything digital and actually get paid.
This was the beginning of Whop.
The Execution:
- March 2021: Schwartz, Zoub and Sharkey launch Whop in Brooklyn as a marketplace for software, communities and digital products.
- July 2023: Whop raises a $17M Series A led by Insight Partners, with Peter Thiel and The Chainsmokers joining. At that point it had 1M customers, 3,000 sellers, $100M in transactions and 20 staff. Even TechCrunch’s write-up noted that listings leaned heavily towards betting picks and crypto schemes.
- August 2023: The company is bringing in $354K a month, two years after launch.
- 2024: Bain Capital Ventures leads a Series B of more than $50M.
- September 2025: Whop stops relying on other companies’ payment rails and launches Whop Payments. It routes across multiple processors and pays out in 241 territories.
- February 2026: Tether invests $200M at a $1.6B valuation. Whop now has 18.4M users, and transaction volume is growing 25% month on month.
- Spring 2026: Content Rewards, Whop’s pay-per-view clipping marketplace, becomes the music industry’s new growth hack. By April it is paying clippers around $40K a day.
- June 2026: Whop says it has created 650+ millionaires. It has 22M users, $300M in monthly sales and 120 staff. Trust is still a problem: reviewers continue to flag trading-adjacent scams on the marketplace.
- October 21, 2026: Whop raises a $200M Series D at $5.1B, led by Sequoia and Shopify Ventures. It is Doug Leone’s first deal since returning to investing. The valuation has risen 3.2x in eight months.
- Today: Roughly 25,000 operators generate $550M a month on Whop, across 185 countries. Its new Blueprints tool created 21,000 businesses in its first six weeks.
The lesson?