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

Speaker 1: Yeah. That's very cool. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Speaker 2: Great to see you. Thanks for having me. Always fun.

Speaker 1: We'll see you soon. Cheers. Let me tell you about Console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70% of IT, HR, and finance support giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Our next guest is here with us in the TBPN UltraDome live. How are doing, Steven? Welcome to Steven's co founder and CEO of WAP.

Speaker 8: How are things going

Speaker 1: with WAP?

Speaker 7: Things are going great

Speaker 2: with WAP.

Speaker 7: Thank you guys for having me here. This is super cool.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Welcome.

Speaker 7: Yeah. It's a crazy time for for the whole world right now. Okay. And, you know, I I think a lot of the the work we've been doing over the last several years is now coming to light in a way where there's a bunch of themes converging

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 7: And, you know, you have I mean, you have all in in conjunction with AI, you have a lot of people trying to figure out what they're gonna do for work, what they're gonna do with their jobs. Yeah. You have an existential question of how to get value accrual

Speaker 2: Mhmm.

Speaker 7: By spending money on tokens. Sure. I think a lot of the infrastructure we've built is trying to answer a lot of that. Yeah. So things are going well. And it's exciting times.

Speaker 1: At its best, you're bringing like small scale entrepreneurial opportunities to people at a very very broad basis.

Speaker 7: I think that's one way to look at it. I mean, we we grew up, my co founders and I, building businesses on the internet Yeah. Piecing together a ton of different platforms. And at times we'd have like three or four businesses running at And we were always the weird ones. No one else was doing that. And now it's pretty normal. Yeah. And I think we are trying to build a platform that if we could go back in time, we would be addicted to as a 15 year old.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 7: And I think that technology is there now where there's virtually no excuse to not have a really awesome income stream, especially from starting a business. And, yeah. So so I I would say it's pretty cool. Yeah. I want

Speaker 1: your reaction to this take from Aporia about Gen Z entrepreneurship. As they say, Gen Z entrepreneurship increasingly looks like running a portfolio of asymmetric coos rather than betting on one serious long term project. They they go on to explain that half the people I meet at beach clubs in Saint Tropez and Marbella are doing exactly this. One year, it's crypto, then an Amazon brand, then an AI lead gen agency, then solar panels or some subsidized renovation. And this was the interesting line. I used to think this was unserious entrepreneurship, but some of them have become genuinely good at it. Their real business isn't crypto, AI or solar panels. It's being early.

Speaker 7: That's one of my favorite takes I've heard in a long time. And I think that the reality is the businesses are getting so ephemeral that one week, it's a jewelry store. The next week, it's a education program teaching people how to use a new AI tool. Yeah. The next week it's a UGC marketplace. Mhmm. And then the next week it's an agency that's selling data to labs. Mhmm. So the amount of trends that people are tapping into to start businesses is through the roof. Yeah. And when that happens, you do get what resembles a portfolio almost imagine like a crypto portfolio. Mhmm. But and and if you look at our new homepage, it actually looks like a crypto portfolio, but it's not tokens, they're businesses. Sure. And it's completely up to you to drive the business income up. Yeah. And we try to figure out ways to tell you exactly what to do next in order to do that. Yeah. So I think that's a fantastic So does affect an exchange and,

Speaker 2: yeah. If you if if if you were able to talk to the to the you know, take you today and you have the younger version of yourself, what what advice would you be giving on like where to start trying to make money on the Internet?

Speaker 7: I would simply look at what is working on the Internet today and copy it. And I think

Speaker 2: So so when you were getting your start, it was trading sneakers and maybe having some bot tracking supreme drops. Like, what was it then and what what what is actually happening now?

Speaker 7: Well, I think that you the your question's interesting because you said if if they want to make money, that's one thing. And if they if they I think when we were building businesses, it was never really for the money. Mean, my co founder Cameron dropped out of high school at 15 years old and had virtually unlimited money for a 15, 16 year old. I think the only thing he bought was a Tesla. And other than that, he would be wearing flip flops and t shirt and be working all day. And it was never really

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 7: About the money exactly. It was always about I mean, we have a hoodie, it's just building cool shit with your friends. And I think that is much more the spirit that we get excited about. And in many ways, we want to make it actually not about the money and take out money from the equation to building up to worry about money. But it is there's like the advice I'd give to

Speaker 2: That's sort of the unique luxury of being a teenager where it's like if you if you hit it out of the park and make $5,000, you feel like Yeah. The king of the castle.

Speaker 7: Yeah. Yeah. Totally. It goes a long way and you have a

Speaker 1: lot of

Speaker 7: time and and you just have nothing else to do other than to experiment with different businesses. And it's it's after roadblocks, what are you what are all the kids supposed

Speaker 1: to do?

Speaker 7: Yeah. And and I think that's how we approach it, trying to build a very gamified arcade version of entrepreneurship and pursuit of building products for other people.

Speaker 1: Talk about looking at what works and what's making money on the Internet because I feel like there are layers to that onion. Sometimes, by the time I'm seeing Instagram reels of somebody driving a super car and they say they made their money on Facebook ads, like the Facebook ad arbitrage might have closed and that person might now be selling a course to get you to sell a course to then sell Facebook ads. There are like four levels of abstraction. What is the correct way for young people to actually go and find the real opportunities and not the things that have been abstracted into at this point?

Speaker 7: Yeah. Well, I think the infrastructure in every single one of those businesses is always the same. So when you when you go and experiment with one business and then you go to the next one, a lot of that carries over. Sure. And I I mean, what I would suggest is is we try to do a very good job on WAP showing which businesses are actually working really well Sure. And which models are working really well. So my my advice would be to go do do that. But I think it's ultimately just there try to experiment as much as you possibly can and and don't feel like you're wasting a lot of time because the only real risk is not doing anything. And my probably overarching advice to young people would be just to try things out and see what happens and fuck around and find out if you will. So I think that that's very that's the spirit of where we are now in businesses and and how ephemeral everything's getting and how much experimentation you see when you open your Twitter feed. Mhmm. And that's that's a good thing. It brings Mhmm. It floods the market with competition. It floods the market with people that are trying to differentiate ever so slightly from the prior iteration and Mhmm. That ultimately brings a lot more value to end consumers and makes everything cheaper and makes everybody a little bit more money. So I think that's a pretty good thing.

Speaker 1: Talk about the CLI.

Speaker 7: Finally, we have a CLI. Yeah. So I I think

Speaker 1: Why is that important? Well, yeah. So Websites are pretty good. APIs work in many ways. What's the point of the CLI?

Speaker 7: I think people have historically found WAP to be relatively confusing of concept. Okay. And I think the reason for that is because the UX

Speaker 2: that Yeah. We've built made me feel like a boomer. I went I was on there I was I was trying to spin up content rewards back in the day very early with the show and I was like, I feel old. Yeah.

Speaker 7: I I think like the the UX we've built has never really caught up to the API we've built. Sure. And I think that we're we're a very fundamentally API first company. Yep. We have a very engineering led team.

Speaker 1: Yep.

Speaker 7: And that results in a fantastic API

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 7: That has I mean, when you look at the functionality that our API supports, it is literally every single thing that you could possibly need Mhmm. To programmatically run a business. Mhmm. That's payment acceptance, it's ad creation, it's money movement. You can even find people in the real world to do labor for you, clipping and whatnot, all via the API. That is very difficult to build a UX around. Very, very difficult. And the CLI allows all the functionality to be brought into your terminal and to be called from from any agent via API and that results in way better experience. So this CLI is very cool So so you can yeah.

Speaker 1: Hypothetically, if I start the three of us start a hair care business together since we have wild hair

Speaker 3: There there we go.

Speaker 1: Are a number of steps that I'm going to take to promote my business. The the classic one that I would go to WAP for might be clipping. I might film a whole bunch of content, you film some videos about your hair care routine, all of a sudden we have

Speaker 7: Hopefully not.

Speaker 1: An idea of a business. I like it. It's it's a style. And and we want to take that to social media, so we want to engage with WAP broadly. Now I could use an AI agent to interact with the API, the CLI. Does that just make it easier if I'm doing the programming, or is there a world where I'm actually finding a programmer on WAP to help me with that side of the distribution?

Speaker 7: So the old adage is that ideas are easy and execution's hard. Sure. And we're seeing that be flipped on its face in in real time. Mhmm. And I think that what we actually prefer is that that you know, there's a saying that's also like every business begins with a secret. Yeah. And a lot of times the secret lies in the execution. Yeah. But we want the secret to be all about the idea. So we want the extent of that launch to basically be we wanna start a haircut business Yeah. For tech people with crazy hair.

Speaker 1: Okay.

Speaker 7: And that's the whole business.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 7: Yeah. And every other part of the execution is handled. Sure. And that is a way better world than what it is today where you actually have to think through everything from even making content. You make the developer. That's all semantics. It shouldn't even be a conversation. Yeah. So that's what you get at the CLI. I mean, for you you can literally go to the WAP CLI today and say, start a hair cutting business Yeah. That's meant for tech people with crazy hair. Get me some customers and and you could go so far if it was localized to say, find me a person to cut the hair. Interesting. And the CLI will end to end do that via any agent that you want.

Speaker 2: Okay. Cool. Yeah. Are are the youth hitting it big with SMB AI transformation? So everyone knows big big consulting shops

Speaker 1: I just I just saw real about this. It was like, if you want an s f 90, go to someone's real estate listing and like take photos, turn it into a beautiful website, go sell it to the real estate agent for $500. You're like, go to go tour a $30,000,000 property that that they're trying to sell, but they don't have a nice website for. They're just on MLS. Make a beautiful website, sell it to them for $500.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Even even back in our day

Speaker 1: Something like that.

Speaker 2: You could even when it was easy to build a website, there were still business owners. I remember I remember, you know, like a friend's parent at one point was like, if you can build me a website, I'll give you $500. Yeah. Yeah. You can just find a template for like $20. But that's times

Speaker 1: when people don't want to prop themselves. Yeah.

Speaker 7: Yeah. I mean, that is, I'd say, what it looks like to find all these hyper niche markets and call them arbitrages Yeah. And then capitalize on them, then go to the next one.

Speaker 1: Yeah.

Speaker 7: And there are so many more than anybody can remotely imagine. I mean, I remember when I guess eight, ten years ago, I was making websites for people and doing that exact tactic. Now it's like you have all the leverage in the world and it's basically limited to your creativity and grit.

Speaker 2: And now you can just go You can find 10,000 small businesses in your state, let's say. Make them a brand new website. Show them the website and say, do you want this? I'll give it to you for $200. Yeah. And I think a lot of them would be like, looks good. I'll I'll send you $200. Even though you just ripped it with like Codex or whatever agent you

Speaker 7: Totally. Totally. Totally. Totally.

Speaker 1: Talk about ads, WAP ads. What is the shape of product? How does it fit into everything else?

Speaker 7: Yeah. Don't know if you guys have ever ran Meta Ads before, but it's a pain in the ass. We have. And it's a it's a very difficult to go on and navigate simply the the UX of that platform. Yeah. And that's coming from, like, for for us, we grew up running meta ads to Shopify stores. That's all we did. Yep. And when we look at our platform and our merchant base and what people want to accomplish on it and how we believe that the more vertically integrated it is, the easier it's going to be for agents and for users to use it. The next obvious jump was to say, okay, people are earning, I mean, now 400 $500,000,000 a month on the platform and almost all that money is spent on ads. And because of that, why don't we let people programmatically run ads Yeah. Immediately after getting the payment? You don't have to wait any days for it to settle. Sure. You get all the all the data and what's working can iterate on the fly. And it's not just meta that you're running ads to, it's actually the whole Internet.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 7: And that is the ads product that we have available and it's pretty cool. People like it and I mean, that's a very very fast growing product.

Speaker 1: Take us through your reactions to all the trend pieces about clipping this year.

Speaker 2: Better late than never. Wait.

Speaker 1: When so what I'm referring to is like there's been a number of trend pieces sort of like breaking down the clipping economy heavily driven by some of the kick live streamers like the Clavicular among others that sort of crossed the chasm and got profiled in the New York Times. And so there was a there were knock on pieces about this idea that you create a lot of content like we do on a three hour show, we clip it. Or you do an eight hour, twelve hour livestream, you clip it. And your business has been very integral to that boom. But when did that start for you? Like, when did you realize the power of clipping? Like, how has that evolved?

Speaker 7: Yeah. I I think people overestimate how intentional we are about some of these markets that have come up. And I think it more happens to us because we have such a good API It's just and that's a and it's just a platform. And and people come up with all these crazy business models. They explode. People exploit them. Mhmm. And then it becomes so saturated that it's actually not even that cool anymore. Yep. And I think what's what's happening with clipping is it is still a very, very, very powerful instrument

Speaker 3: Mhmm.

Speaker 7: Because of how much money is going into it, because of how inherently, like, so much value can be gained by brands and companies, etcetera, you're gonna have a lot of bad actors and people trying to exploit different people and and all all sorts of different bad stuff. And I think that's where a lot of the what what people are are potentially saying on the the pessimistic side of clipping. On the optimistic side of clipping, we look at it as yet another way to earn income on the Internet for a huge amount of people. And especially if they are not sophisticated enough to potentially start a business yet, they actually start with clipping. And that's a very great way to learn how to make content, learn how to help other businesses create real value, and all the payments infrastructure, it scales super well so that people can actually earn a sustainable income by doing something like clipping. That can be extrapolated to data labeling, can be extrapolated to attendance coaching, can be extrapolated to all sorts of things that we're starting to see on our platform, other platforms integrate and pay out via our our rails which is simply creating more ways like clipping to earn money while still hopefully being value accretive to businesses. So that's what I would that's what I would glean from clipping.

Speaker 1: Have you talked to any legacy media organizations about clipping? I'm thinking of like Fox News produces so much content. Local News produces a lot of content. ABC, NBC, CBS, like, there are basically content farms that are effectively live streaming. It's a very different motion for these organizations. Would you recommend they get into Climb?

Speaker 7: Yeah. I mean, our focus is trying to build the infrastructure and the platform.

Speaker 1: And then whatever happens happens.

Speaker 7: Yeah. Whatever happens happens. I think as long as it's it's it's by the by the terms

Speaker 1: Of course.

Speaker 7: Say. And I I think in the context of a local news station, they're very under resourced Sure. And if we can make it so easy where they actually can, a couple clicks or even one click or even one prompt, spawn a bunch of Clippers to amplify their media, that's great.

Speaker 1: That can be great.

Speaker 7: As it stands today, it's a little bit too difficult. And I think that's where you have agencies fill in the gap and create these fill these arbitrage opportunities.

Speaker 1: Sure. Sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2: How would you how would you rate sentiment among WAP users? Are the is there because WAP users are not necessarily reflective of, like, all of, like, the next generation of of entrepreneurs and people that are starting careers. It's certainly selecting for people that are have higher agency. They're trying to figure out how to make living online or just make, as you say, make cool stuff, with their friends. But is there a feeling that there's a ton of a ton of opportunity and that now is like an amazing time to be like coming online? Or, is there at all the same kind of like vibe session that you see among people? Maybe college students that are trying to find jobs and feeling obsession.

Speaker 1: Oh oh, like like the vibe recession?

Speaker 2: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Oh, yeah. Okay. I thought you you were mashing up vibe and obsession. You're obsessed

Speaker 7: with vibe. I think that the the sentiment is overwhelmingly positive. Like beyond optimistic. And I've I've actually never seen it inside into this level. I think where you look at a lot of the people that call themselves entrepreneurs, people that build they're trying to build a business. WAP users are unique because likely they're gonna be earning money. Mhmm. And that's very different than trying to launch a vibe coded app and praying for users. So I think that what we see is that when when we talk to our users and businesses on the platform, either at in person events or via our chat on on the platform, they are so excited about building their thing. And they're actually equally as excited about experimenting with other businesses like we were talking about earlier because it feels like the the possibilities are completely in your control, you know. You have so much opportunity right now. There's so many micro markets that can be tapped into and exploited arbitrage wise and I think the young kids realize that and they're going crazy right now. I don't think there's a apprehension at least in our user base as to what they're gonna do post AI. I think that that's a very exciting thing for them and they feel like they're grabbing by the horns and taking control of their destiny which is exactly what's gonna happen.

Speaker 1: What's the state of WAP enabling sort of human in the loop AI companies? I'm thinking about your partnership with Replane, Poke, cal.com. It feels like there's a potential to launch something that the agents aren't quite there or it has to interface with the real world in some way. But if you can bring some extra humans to bear in a particular workflow, especially for consumer, there's like an opportunity to build businesses there.

Speaker 7: Totally. I I think one of the largest markets that is being talked about but perhaps not enough is just the demand for data right now is so crazy. Sure. And when you look at especially developing countries Mhmm. One of the most lucrative piece ways to to earn money on the internet is by submitting data and by recording themselves through day to day tasks. Mhmm. And I think if you look at the the broad base of human in the loop applications especially around money Mhmm. Of course you can start a business, you can sell your time on cal.com, you can build a really cool website in Reply and and build a business. But if you want to think in the clipping construct and perhaps clip you can think of clipping as act one of this Sure. There is a lot of things people can do to that AI cannot. Mhmm. And that largely pertains to data. I mean, there's a huge crisis right now I think where people are realizing that the AI doesn't actually have the level of original thought that is needed to And lift anything off the what are they doing? They're spending billions of dollars to get people's ideas. Yeah. And and that is not I mean, in some way, that does economically get to the person, but I think we can do it even better. And the human in the loop we view is actually the most critical piece of any business and any real economic output because it does start with someone's idea and creative ingenuity than versus an AI being, oh, let's let's build a business that does haircuts for tech people. I mean, that's not necessarily I don't think it's happen anytime soon. Maybe it does now because it's already out in the ether, but

Speaker 1: Last question. How's the business growing in 2026? What's the financial plan? Do you wanna raise more money? Do you wanna raise a bunch of money? Do wanna IPO the company?

Speaker 7: Well, I think we we wanna deliver on our mission and I think it's it's the most confidence we've ever had that we actually can.

Speaker 6: Mhmm.

Speaker 7: And I would say there's going to certainly it's going to require investment. Mhmm. And there's clear prospects. We're exploding internationally right now with very little real motion that we've established intentionally internationally and we're under invested across the board. We have a very lean team still. The growth has been really record breaking. Posted a tweet last week, like we're underwater right now. It's really crazy. I mean, I I we can't go five minutes without something crazy happening in in a good way or bad way. I think it's part of building building a business at our scale. Right. So growth is phenomenal. Mean, I don't really know if I can talk about it a lot publicly, but

Speaker 1: You can. You can say whatever you want. You can give us all

Speaker 7: the numbers. Yeah. Yeah. We're accelerating growth at

Speaker 2: a We pretty want.

Speaker 1: Massive

Speaker 7: massive scale. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if if we're doing 400 and $100,000,000 a month in earnings and I mean, a lot of our our takers are public, you can do the math. Yeah. It's it's getting it's getting a lot more serious and we we take that response. We don't take that responsibility lightly.