Whop: from teenage sneaker flipping to a $5.1 billion startup

Transcript

At 13, these two were reselling sneakers. At 26, Shopify and Sequoia just value their company at $5.1 billion. Meet Steven Schwartz and Cameron Zube, the co-founders of WAP. In 2012, Cameron gets $10 a week in allowing, but the sneakers he wants cost $300. So every Saturday, he drags his whole family to the mall at 4 a.m. to camp outside Finish Line and flips the shoes for profit. Then he posts in a sneaker reselling Facebook group looking for a developer to build him a bot, a 13-year-old named Steven replies. Together, they sell sneaker bots on Shopify and by 15, they're making hundreds of thousands. Cameron drops out of high school to go all in, but for years, nothing else takes off. Then in 2020, they see people getting scammed renting bots on Discord, so they build WAP to fix it. It's a tiny market, but they realize there are thousands of others just like it. Four months in, Arrival offers them millions. Cameron cries for a week, but they say no. Soon, 10 of them share one Brooklyn apartment, and Cameron sleeps under the stairs for two years. They work 16 hour days, and for months, Cameron answers every customer message himself, and it works. Today, anyone can build an entire online business on WAP from the website to the payments. The company makes $400 million a year, and Shopify and Sequoia just put in $200 million, valuing the company at $5.1 billion.

Transcribed automatically from the video, so small errors are possible.