Stop chasing corporate ladders. The traditional career path of getting a degree, locking down a corporate 9-to-5, and hoping for a 3% annual raise is dying. If you want proof, look at Whop.
Led by 26-year-old Steven Schwartz, this internet business marketplace recently hit a $1.6 billion valuation. Even wilder, the company has already minted over 650 millionaires. We aren't talking about Wall Street executives or tech elites with advanced degrees. These are normal people selling software, niche communities, coaching, and digital courses.
The internet economy shifted right under our noses. While traditional platforms made it incredibly painful to sell digital goods by forcing creators to stitch together dozens of messy tools, Whop built an all-in-one operating system for the modern internet entrepreneur.
The Kid Who Sold Water on the Streets of China
Steven Schwartz didn't take a standard path to Silicon Valley success. Born into a military family of doctors, he spent his childhood constantly moving. He lived in Honolulu, Chicago, Springfield, and even spent a chunk of time in China.
He stayed hungry. In China, he sold bottled water on the streets to make cash. Back in Illinois, he worked as a hockey referee. He didn't wait around for someone to hand him an opportunity. By the time he was 13, he was hanging out in Facebook reselling groups. That's where he met his future co-founder, Cameron Zoub.
The two teenagers quickly realized that buying limited-edition sneakers manually was a fool's errand. They needed an edge. So, they started coding sneaker-buying bots. It wasn't a hobby. It was a highly lucrative side hustle that exposed them to the chaotic underbelly of internet commerce.
They saw firsthand how broken the system was. If you wanted to sell software or access to a group back then, you had to use one tool for payments, another for community management, and a third for fulfillment. Nothing talked to each other. It was an absolute mess.
Dropping the Corporate Dream for a Chaotic Startup
Schwartz eventually ended up at New York University's Stern School of Business. He studied Finance and Mandarin Chinese, checking all the boxes for a high-flying corporate career. He even landed a summer analyst internship at Accenture in Singapore, building chatbots for shipping companies.
He hated the lack of agency. He already worked for a New York hedge fund before even finishing high school, so the corporate structure felt like a prison. When he graduated in 2021, he walked away from the traditional path. He chose chaos instead.
Alongside Zoub and software developer Jack Sharkey, Schwartz launched Whop in 2021.
Whop Timeline and Valuation Growth
2021: Founded out of teenage side hustles
2023: Raised $17 million Series A (Led by Insight Partners, valued over $100 million)
2024: Raised $50+ million Series B (Led by Bain Capital Ventures, valued around $800 million)
2026: Secured $200 million from Tether (Valued at $1.6 billion)
The growth was explosive, but it almost didn't happen. Three months into launching Whop, the team nearly quit. They were sleeping on couches in Boston, scraping by, and wondering if anyone actually wanted what they were building. They even turned down an early acquisition offer that would have given them an easy out. They stuck with it because they believed in a concept Schwartz calls agentic income.
What is Agentic Income
Most people sell their time for a fixed salary. That's linear income. If you don't show up to the office, you don't get paid. Schwartz wants to obliterate that framework.
Agentic income is about complete personal agency. It means setting up a system where you monetize your unique skills, knowledge, or digital products globally, 24/7. Whop operates as the foundational layer for this.
The platform allows anyone to spin up a hosted storefront. You can sell access to private Discord or Telegram communities, online courses, software subscriptions, trading indicators, or web apps. Whop handles the merchant-of-record payments, user dashboards, and customer analytics.
They charge a flat platform fee of 2.7% plus $0.30 on transactions processed through Whop Payments. Compare that to the massive cuts taken by traditional app stores or legacy software marketplaces, and it becomes obvious why creators are flooding the platform. Over 50,000 new users join Whop every single day. The platform facilitates roughly $4 billion in annual commerce across 145 countries. That breaks down to about $300 million in monthly sales.
The Millions Being Made in the Micro Niches
You don't need a massive social media following to make seven figures anymore. The old creator economy model relied on millions of views to make a few thousand dollars from ads. The new model relies on deep monetization of niche audiences.
Look at Shelby Haas. She makes around $1 million every single month on Whop. What does she sell? She teaches remote sales. She found a specific, high-value skill, packaged her knowledge, and built a massive business around it.
Then there's Troy Adashun. He used the platform to scale Alpha Lion Supplements, turning health and fitness products into a million-dollar enterprise.
Every day, about 10 to 15 users on the platform earn their very first $20,000. It happens because Whop doesn't cater to broad, generalized audiences. It allows independent operators to find highly specific pockets of buyers who are desperate for specialized solutions.
The Strategic Partnership with Tether
In February 2026, Whop made a massive strategic move. They accepted a $200 million investment from Tether, the stablecoin giant. This wasn't just about adding cash to the balance sheet. It was a deliberate play to solve a massive global problem.
Traditional banking systems fail millions of entrepreneurs outside the US and Europe. If you're a brilliant coder in an emerging market, getting paid by international customers through standard financial networks is a nightmare. High transaction fees, currency volatility, and strict banking regulations lock people out of the global economy.
By partnering with Tether, Whop is building out a financial system that works anywhere. Stablecoins allow instant, low-fee payouts to unbanked regions. An entrepreneur in Southeast Asia or Latin America can sell a digital product to a buyer in New York and receive stablecoin payments instantly. It democratizes access to internet entrepreneurship on a scale we've never seen before.
How to Get Started on Whop Right Now
Stop overthinking your ideas. The biggest mistake aspiring internet entrepreneurs make is waiting until everything feels perfect. They spend months writing business plans and building complex infrastructure before making a single dollar.
You need to run three-month sprints instead of five-year plans. Here is the exact blueprint to start building your own stream of agentic income on Whop today.
First, identify your hidden leverage point. What is something you know how to do that other people struggle with? It could be setting up automated marketing campaigns, designing specific Notion templates, managing remote sales teams, or analyzing crypto markets.
Second, choose your delivery mechanism. Whop allows you to mix and match formats. You can launch a private community to share daily insights, host a library of video courses, or sell a simple software script you wrote. Start with the simplest format possible.
Third, set up your storefront. Don't waste weeks designing a website. Go to Whop, set up a page in minutes, and hook up your payment options.
Fourth, build your distribution army. Whop success often relies on viral marketing strategies like clipping armies. Find partners or affiliates who will cut up your content into short-form videos for TikTok and Instagram, driving traffic directly to your storefront in exchange for a percentage of sales.
Fifth, focus purely on customer retention. Give your early users an incredible experience. Listen to their feedback, refine your digital product, and let word-of-mouth do the heavy lifting.
The internet is full of money. The tools to capture it are cheaper and more accessible than they have ever been in human history. You can keep trading your hours for a corporate salary, or you can build something that runs while you sleep. The choice is yours. Go create your storefront and start executing.
