Two sellers spent a whole day fighting for the number one spot on a leaderboard.
Not for likes. For verified revenue. One was at $112K for the day, the other at $109K, and everyone on the platform could watch it happen live.
That platform is Whop, and the Whop business model is one of the strangest and smartest things I've studied all year. Brett Malinowski sat down with Steven Schwartz, Whop's CEO, when Steven was 26 and the company was closing in on a billion-dollar valuation. I pulled the whole episode apart so you don't have to watch 65 minutes.
Fair warning: this interview is from late 2024. Watching it now is half the fun, because almost everything Steven describes as a plan has since shipped and worked.
From Sneaker Bots and Zelle Scams to Real Rails
Whop did not start as a grand creator-economy vision.
It started with sneaker bots.
Steven met his co-founder Cameron Zoub in a Facebook group when they were both 13. By the time Whop existed, they were selling their own scripts in Discord forums where the payment stack was Cash App and Zelle and the fraud protection was hope. People got scammed constantly.
So they built a cleaner way to sell their own software. That was the entire company: fix the problem in front of you.
Then they kept doing that, problem by problem:
- Store pages and payments, so sellers stopped juggling payment links
- A dispute resolution center, modeled on the eBay and PayPal flows they grew up with
- Dispute protection, so creators didn't get wrecked by chargebacks
- Then chat, apps, and a feed, once payments were boring
Steven's framing stuck with me. People kept telling them to focus, that they were doing too much. His answer was that every layer came from attacking one specific problem at hand, and the layers only look confusing from the outside.
I covered the other founder's side of this story in how Cameron built Whop. This episode is the CEO's view of the machine.
The Whop Business Model in Plain English
Strip the branding away and Whop is three stacked businesses.
The first layer is payments infrastructure. Anyone can spin up a product, set a price (one-time or recurring), and get a checkout link in about 30 seconds. Brett sells his agency work, coaching, and courses through it. Steven has been obsessed with payments since Stripe's first popup checkout window in 2011, and it shows.
The second layer is a marketplace with trust built in. Public reviews on every product. A dispute center that refunds buyers when sellers go quiet. Hundreds of products removed every single week for breaking the rules. Basically Amazon for digital products, except the trust system is the product.
The third layer is engagement. When someone buys, they land directly in a DM with the seller, plus a community with 30+ apps: chat, forums, calendar bookings, giveaways, trivia. Steven wants to resurrect every dead engagement mechanic from the old internet (HQ Trivia, Yik Yak, Omegle-style matching) inside paid communities.
When Brett asked about revenue, Steven gave the most CEO answer possible: somewhere between $1 million and $100 million a year. What he said without hedging is that sellers on Whop were collectively earning close to $1 billion a year.
The model in one sentence: own the rails, take a cut, and never compete with the people selling on them.
And it kept compounding after this interview. In February 2026, Tether put $200 million into Whop at a $1.6 billion valuation, and Steven now says more than 650 people have earned at least $1 million on the platform.
The Money Leaderboard Killed Follower Counts
This is the part that would terrify most platforms.
Whop shows how much money sellers are making. On the homepage. On product cards. On a live leaderboard with a 24-hour view. There's even a separate leaderboard for affiliates who just refer other people's products.
Steven's logic: "Would you rather have a million followers or a million dollars that is 100% verified?"
Most people have the followers and not the dollars. So Whop made verified earnings the status metric. You can opt out of showing your numbers, but almost nobody does, because on Whop the revenue figure does the job a follower count used to do.
→ Creators browse the leaderboard to see which offers are printing money today. Buyers use it to check if a seller is legit before paying. And sellers push harder because the scoreboard is public (remember the $112K vs $109K fight).
The same obsession runs internally. Brett says Cameron told him the average support reply takes around 38 seconds.
Why Whop Refuses to Build Email
My favorite fight in the episode: Brett has argued with Steven for hours about email.
Brett's case is solid. Around 25% of his sales come from email, so Whop should build a full email service provider. Every marketer would agree.
Steven keeps saying no.
His reasoning comes down to one operating principle: be your own customer. Steven looks at his own inbox and knows he has never once been excited to get a promo email from a creator. So he won't build a tool whose output he would personally ignore.
The deeper bet is bigger. Steven thinks the standard small business stack (a domain, a website, an email list) is legacy plumbing that normal people hate setting up. Whop replaces all three. Your store page is the website. Your community chat and DMs are the email list. The distribution problem email solves goes away when your customers already live inside your product.
I'm not fully convinced. My newsletter still outperforms most channels I run. But I respect a founder who turns down an obvious revenue feature because it fails his own sniff test.
(He's also thinking way past digital creators: gym memberships, apartment rent, the wine store he visited that managed its paid community through a close friends Instagram story. His point is that every one of those is a payments plus community business with terrible tools.)
The Affiliate Layer Is the Sleeper Feature
Every store page on Whop has an affiliate link at the bottom. Custom percentages, fully public, anyone can grab it.
Then they added content folders: a seller uploads raw clips, anyone reposts them with their affiliate link attached, and the platform tracks who drives sales. Brett compares it to the clipping system that made Andrew Tate inescapable, except now it's product infrastructure instead of a growth hack.
So a random 19-year-old can pick a product off the leaderboard, clip content for it, and climb a separate affiliate leaderboard without ever creating a product. Whop turned distribution itself into a job on the platform.
The episode ends with the best proof of the whole thesis: Brett reveals he joined Whop full-time three months before recording. The interviewer got recruited by the marketplace he was covering.
What I'm Stealing From Steven
I run a podcast and a paid community, not a billion-dollar marketplace. But four things transfer directly to any SaaS or creator business:
First: solve the problem in front of you, in order. Whop never picked a niche. Sneaker sellers showed up, then traders, then course creators, and the product followed the money. Most of the micro SaaS founders I've studied won the same way: one painful problem, then the adjacent one.
Second: make your customer's success visible. Whop shows earnings. Your version might be a changelog of customer wins or real usage numbers on your landing page. Verified results beat testimonials every time.
Third: be your own customer. Steven kills features he wouldn't use himself, even when customers with real data (like Brett) push back. That filter costs him some revenue and saves him from shipping a mediocre product.
And fourth: speed reads as trust. A 38-second support reply does more for retention than any loyalty program. When I paid $13K to join a mastermind while making $15K to $20K a month, what made it worth the money was how fast I got real answers from people a few steps ahead of me.
Steven also dropped one stat I can't stop thinking about: digital internet payments make up only around 10% of US GDP. His read is that the internet economy is still weirdly early. Mine too.
FAQ
What is Whop's business model?
Whop is a marketplace and payments platform for digital products: courses, communities, software, trading groups, and more. Sellers create store pages and get paid through Whop's checkout, and Whop takes a cut of transactions. On top of payments it layers a reviewed marketplace, community apps, and a public affiliate system, so it earns from the whole lifecycle of a creator business instead of just the sale.
How much money do creators make on Whop?
At the time of this interview in late 2024, Steven Schwartz said sellers on Whop were collectively earning close to $1 billion a year. By 2026 he was claiming more than 650 individual sellers had each made at least $1 million on the platform. Earnings are public by default on leaderboards, so you can browse real numbers yourself instead of trusting screenshots.
Who runs Whop?
Whop was founded by Steven Schwartz (CEO), Cameron Zoub, and Jack Sharkey. Steven and Cameron met in a Facebook group at 13 and spent years selling software, sneaker bots, and Shopify builds before starting Whop. At the time of this episode the team was around 80 people, mostly engineers, working in person in New York.
How does Whop handle scams and refunds?
Every product has public reviews and verified earnings, and buyers can open disputes in a resolution center modeled on eBay and PayPal. If a seller doesn't respond, the buyer gets refunded, and escalations go to Whop's trust and safety team. Steven says hundreds of rule-breaking products get removed from the marketplace every week.
If you want more breakdowns like this from founders actually in the arena, that's literally the whole show. Every week on the Profitable Founder Podcast I sit down with founders doing $100K to $10M a year and pull apart how the machine really works.
