EXCLUSIVE: How Whop Hit $1.2+ Billion GMV Run Rate with Just 20 Engineers
CTO Jack Sharkey | 5B+ Creator Views, 28K+/mo Earners, $100M/mo
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Whop’s Billion-Dollar Rise
Whop CTO Jack Sharkey reveals how they built a $1.2 billion GMV run rate business with just 20 engineers, processing $108 million monthly, & 5+ billion views for 28,000 creators worldwide. Whop has raised approximately $80 million in total funding, most recently at an $800 million valuation.
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Early backers include prominent angels such as Justin Mateen (Tinder), Justin Kan (Twitch), The Chainsmokers, and Peter Thiel. The Series A was led by Insight Partners, while the Series B was backed by a syndicate including Bain Capital Ventures and A*.
Jack shares controversial takes on why junior engineers should skip big tech to build their own projects, how AI is making developers 5-10x more productive, and Whop's radical culture of requiring employees to have personal side projects with real users.
Full deep dive below.
Highlights
0:00 - Jack Sharkey/Whop Intro
1:30 - Whop's Mission, Origin Story & Hyper-growth
4:43 - Whop's Funding & $800M Valuation
15:22 - Key Metrics & Global Growth
22:48 - Engineering Challenges & AI Philosophy
33:26 - Database Migration Deep Dive
40:07 - Company Culture & Side Projects
48:40 - Future Plans & Kalshi Predictions
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From Sneaker Bots to a Billion-Dollar Creator Platform
Whop has emerged as one of the fastest-growing digital platforms for online entrepreneurs, achieving a staggering $1.2 billion GMV run rate and enabling over 28,000 monthly earners. Originally launched as a niche marketplace for renting sneaker bots, Whop evolved rapidly into an all-in-one platform that allows anyone to sell digital products—ranging from SaaS tools and courses to communities and live streams.
This transformation, driven by relentless iteration and user feedback, has been powered by a small, elite team focused on creator empowerment and global accessibility. Whop now processes over $100 million per month for its creators, all while scaling with a lean engineering team and a clear mission: help people make sustainable income on the internet.
Origin Story
Whop’s founding story is gritty & relentless. CEO Steven Schwartz and CGO Cameron Zoub met at age 13 in a Facebook group building sneaker bots, CTO Jack Sharkey joined a few years later through the same online sneaker resale ecosystem. All three co-founders were teenagers hustling on the internet—flipping sneakers, selling Discord access, and hacking together tools during the early days of digital commerce. By the time COVID hit, they had already launched and nearly failed at four startups together. Whop was their last—and the one that stuck.
*Source: CNBC
This authentic, ground-up experience isn’t just a backstory—it shapes everything about how Whop is built. The founders are product-first, deeply technical, and still operate in the trenches. They’ve resisted Silicon Valley theatrics, rarely publicizing funding rounds (even their $800M valuation was leaked on X). Instead, they let product velocity and community obsession lead.
Product Evolution and Platform Strategy
Whop’s product journey reflects a deep user obsession. Starting as a digital license marketplace during COVID, the team rapidly expanded into community integrations (like Discord and Telegram) and eventually built out a native ecosystem with chat, forums, live streaming, and developer-built experiences. This pivot from integration to end-to-end on-platform consumption created a seamless, sticky experience for creators and users alike.
Whop's “Whop 3.0” platform now includes tools for payments, messaging, real-time feeds, and native monetization—allowing creators to launch their business in minutes without touching a line of code. Their internal mantra: if a user asks for it, build it.
AI-Powered Engineering & Lean Team Dynamics
Led by CTO Jack Sharkey, the company leans heavily on AI to boost developer productivity and reduce the need for junior engineers. Whop uses Claude and Gemini for code generation, onboarding, and debugging, with Sharkey suggesting modern AI agents make him "5–10x more productive."
Their engineering philosophy centers on speed and pragmatism: rebuild over refactor, ship fast, and embrace mistakes as part of iteration. This culture allows Whop to tackle massive infrastructure challenges (like migrating 800GB of data between databases with zero downtime) without slowing down.
Whop’s engineering team is famously small—just 15–20 developers—and incredibly high-impact. Their philosophy? Hire elite generalists who can own entire features, and give them the freedom to move. Sharkey describes it as “come and take it” culture: engineers aren’t handed PRDs—they’re expected to use Whop themselves, understand the customer, and ship like creators.
They’ve built Twitch-level live-streaming, Discord-style chat, Telegram-like DMs, and a real-time feed serving millions of notifications—all with a team smaller than most startups’ QA departments. That’s because they lean hard into AI tools like Claude and Gemini to boost productivity.
Junior engineers are rare. And a role Sharkey sees disappearing from the industry all together, very soon. “If you’re junior, you shouldn’t be applying—you should be building your own shit,” says Sharkey. This no-hand-holding, full-ownership mindset filters who gets hired—and who sticks around.
Platform Team
In 2025, Whop began investing heavily into a dedicated platform team—the infrastructure that powers fast, high-quality development. This includes everything from a developer monorepo and instant rollback pipelines to AI agents that help onboard new engineers and one-shot features from prompts.
Sharkey’s personal obsession right now is improving developer experience. His goal? “Make it so any engineer can ship at the highest velocity and quality—no tradeoffs.” That means empowering creators, developers, and internal teams alike with better tooling. Even with increasing technical complexity, they refuse to slow down: the internal motto is "just keep shipping."
Whop is Hiring!
Whop hires from Discord DMs and Twitter replies—no fancy resumes or FAANG credentials necessary. Their founding team includes a Duke dropout, two engineers from Australia, and a dev who flew in from Spain. What they have in common: they were already building things, already users of the product, and didn’t need to be told what to do.
The company looks for staff+ level engineers who’ve shipped real systems—chat, payments, feeds, or video. But more than technical chops, they’re looking for “builders who think like creators.” In-person culture is key: the whole team works out of the Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. Sharkey is explicit: “If this sounds like you, move to NYC and come find me.”
Creator Monetization & Global Expansion
Whop’s core metric isn’t revenue—it’s how many people are earning on the platform. Through tools like "content rewards" (UGC-driven campaigns), the platform has created an accessible entry point for users worldwide to monetize content creation.
Whop now sees explosive growth across markets like India, Pakistan, Morocco, and Nigeria. The product’s low barrier to entry combined with localized payouts in fiat and crypto unlocks economic opportunity for users globally.
Partnerships with creators like Iman Gadzhi and initiatives like “3K in 30” (earn $3K in 30 days, get flown to NYC for a two day event where they put their logo on Times Square) reinforce the brand’s grassroots, earn-first ethos.
→ Earn Sourcery Content Rewards on Whop
The Whop Culture: Build, Share, Repeat
Whop’s internal culture reflects its user base: entrepreneurial, fast-moving, and creator-first. All engineers are expected to build and maintain their own live Whop (personal micro-businesses on the platform), embodying the “be your own customer” philosophy. The company discourages hierarchical management, instead rewarding initiative and product ownership. Branding efforts focus less on features and more on storytelling—highlighting the lives and struggles of real creators rather than pushing product logos. As Sharkey puts it, Whop doesn’t just support entrepreneurs—it builds them from within.
As such, Whop isn’t built for creators—it’s built by them. Over half the team started as Whop users, and every engineer is required to run a personal Whop. “If you don’t have a side project with 15+ users, you can’t stay,” Sharkey tweeted—drawing both applause and outrage. But he means it. The company lives its product. Engineers sell access to coding tutorials. Designers run niche fan communities. Even Sharkey has his own Mets fan club on Whop.
This requirement to be your own customer drives deep product intuition. It also powers a “dogfooding” loop few companies can match: Whop runs entirely on Whop. No Slack. No Notion. Internal comms, customer onboarding, product updates—all happen through the Whop platform. This full-stack commitment makes the team sharper, feedback faster, and product quality higher.
Product Breakdown
Whop has evolved from a niche marketplace into a vertically integrated platform for digital commerce, enabling individuals to monetize content, software, and community-based experiences. Its core offering spans a comprehensive toolset designed to remove friction from the creator monetization stack—combining payment processing, customer engagement, content distribution, and platform-native applications under a unified interface.