WAP founder Steven Schwartz on building a stealth 'future of work' platform for Gen Z entrepreneurs

Summary

WAP (pronounced as its acronym, stylized as "WAP") is a commerce and community platform built for digitally native micro-entrepreneurs — the kind of people selling software in forums, building UGC businesses, and running one-person e-commerce brands. Founder Steven Schwartz started the company with his co-founder Cameron, whom he met in a Facebook group at age 13, after the two spent years building and selling iOS apps, games, and chat products together. COVID accelerated the thesis: a generation that had always made money online watched the rest of the world wake up to what they'd been doing their whole lives.

The platform started as what Schwartz calls "retail Stripe meets retail Shopify" — a structured way to sell digital products without needing to manage payments across forums or Discord servers. Users started asking if they could sell their own products on it, and WAP expanded to accommodate that. It now handles digital commerce, chat, forums, and live streaming in a single environment. Schwartz describes it as building the parts of Discord that actually matter, then wrapping payments and community around them.

Content rewards

The newest product is content rewards, a UGC marketing system that Schwartz says delivers CPMs 5 to 10 times cheaper than conventional ad platforms. Sellers reward creators — often high schoolers who are good at social trends — for making short-form content that promotes their products. WAP has already paid some individual creators more than $10,000 through the program. Schwartz frames it as the lowest rung of the earnings ladder: people get a taste of making money online, build out a KYC payments account, learn what works in content, and eventually graduate to running their own businesses on the platform.

Live streaming

WAP has integrated live streaming as both a point-of-sale tool and a post-purchase engagement channel. Schwartz draws a line from QVC to HQ Trivia to TikTok Shop and Amazon Live — the format is not new, but it scales cheaply and generates clips that can be repurposed. He argues live content is the highest-bandwidth way to communicate with an audience and sees it as the future of both brand building and customer retention.

Business model and fundraising

WAP takes a cut when sellers make money, so revenue scales directly with seller success. The company was bootstrapped for its first six months, had a near-acquisition it declined, then raised external capital in rounds it chose not to publicize. Schwartz says WAP has had profitable months and could be cash-flow positive now if it stopped reinvesting, but is currently burning to fund growth. The fundraise was leaked roughly a year ago; Schwartz declined to confirm details, saying their customers don't care and that fundraising announcements are more distracting than useful.

Who WAP is building for

Schwartz is explicit that the tech industry is not WAP's customer — venture-backed founders chasing scale aren't the audience. WAP generates millions of social media views per day and hundreds of thousands of YouTube views per video, all targeted at scrappy young people who want to start something small and make it work. Schwartz sees Gen Z entrepreneurs as fundamentally different from millennials in one key way: they prioritize fun and are comfortable building a sustainable lifestyle business earning $3,000 a month while traveling, rather than treating a $200,000 salary as the only valid outcome.

AI tailwind

Rather than treating AI as a threat to its seller base, WAP sees it as a demand driver. AI courses, AI software, AI-generated ads, and avatar video messaging are already among the fastest-growing product categories on the platform. Schwartz's view is that as long as people still need income and purpose, there's a market for a platform that helps them build it — and AI creates more of those people, not fewer.

Team

WAP hires almost exclusively from its own user base. Schwartz says the company runs entirely on its own platform — no Slack, no external tools — and recruits people who use the product daily and are already building features or doing marketing for it organically. The internal principle is "be your own customer."

WAP sits at an unusual intersection: real revenue, a large and loyal user base, minimal mainstream tech-press coverage, and a deliberate posture of staying quiet. Whether that posture holds as the platform scales is the open question.