Whop CEO Steven Schwartz on the CLI launch, $500M monthly creator earnings, and ephemeral internet entrepreneurship

Whop and the ephemeral business economy

Steven Schwartz describes Whop as a platform he and his co-founders would have been "addicted to at 15." The pitch is straightforward: the infrastructure needed to run an internet business, from payment acceptance and ad creation to money movement and finding freelance labor, accessible via a single API. Creators and developers on the platform are now earning $400–500 million a month in aggregate, and Schwartz says growth is "record breaking" and accelerating.

CLI launch

Whop's newest product is a command-line interface that exposes the full platform API from the terminal and makes every function callable by AI agents. Schwartz frames it as closing a gap that has existed since the company's founding: the API has always been more capable than the UX built around it. The CLI removes that constraint. In his telling, a user can now prompt the CLI to "start a hair cutting business for tech people with crazy hair, get me some customers" and have the agent handle distribution, ad creation, and even sourcing local labor, end to end, without touching a web interface.

“We're doing 400 to $500,000,000 a month in earnings and a lot of our takers are public, you can do the math. The CLI allows all the functionality to be brought into your terminal and to be called from any agent via API. People are earning — now $400, $500,000,000 a month on the platform and almost all that money is spent on ads.”

Whop Ads

The ads product lets merchants run programmatic ads across the broader internet immediately after receiving payment, without waiting for funds to settle. Schwartz positions it as a response to the friction of running Meta Ads and a natural extension of a vertically integrated platform. He describes it as a "very, very fast growing product," though he gives no specific revenue figures.

Clipping and human-in-the-loop work

Schwartz sees clipping, paying people to cut short-form clips from long-form content, as an on-ramp for people not yet ready to start a business. The same payments rails scale to data labeling, attendance coaching, and other tasks that AI cannot yet perform reliably. He argues the demand for human-generated data is underappreciated, with labs spending billions to acquire people's original ideas and creative output.

Gen Z entrepreneur sentiment

Schwartz says sentiment among Whop users is "overwhelmingly positive, beyond optimistic." His read is that the typical Whop user is already earning, which separates them from the broader cohort of first-time founders "vibe coding an app and praying for users." The ephemerality of internet businesses, one week it's a jewelry store, the next an AI education program, the next a data agency selling to labs, is a feature rather than a problem in his view. It floods markets with competition, differentiates products, and brings prices down for consumers.

Outlook

Schwartz says Whop is "exploding internationally" with almost no deliberate international motion, remains leanly staffed, and expects to require further investment to deliver on its mission. He declines to give specific forward numbers but says the platform is "underwater" in a good way, with something significant happening "every five minutes." No IPO timeline or fundraise details were disclosed.