How Whop Hit $1.2B GMV Run Rate with Just 20 Engineers

You're doing $1.2 billion in GMV run rate. You've hit 5 billion in creator views. You're at massive scale. Like instead of scaling up team, like you're gonna be scaling back.

I really enjoy working with very talented engineers right now because they can take AI and they can split up their project and get it done in 5 to 10x the time. I don't see a world in where big organizations really need junior engineers as much to do it. That's why my advice to junior engineers is don't even try to fit that mold. Just go build your own shit and you'll probably be way more successful than you ever could have been being a junior engineer at an organization.

Jack Sharkey, welcome to Sorcery.

Thank you.

It feels like just yesterday we were on the Startup Westward panel with Dylan of Saturn and the team at CrowdVault. How are you doing?

Doing great. That was, um, just what, 6 months ago? Wow. I think so. Time has flied.

Thanksgiving.

Yeah.

So you guys have been crushing it. You guys are at a $1.2 billion GMV run rate and you've reached over 5 million views for your creators.

Yeah, creators are having the best time of their lives using our platform to really run their online business. Like you said, we're hitting month-over-month highs each month. Last month we processed just over $108 million on behalf of all our creators. And then you touched on content rewards. We've done over 5 billion views generated in the last like 8-ish weeks.

8 weeks?

Yeah, the product's really taken off, probably the biggest growth we've ever seen organically in a product.

Okay, so can you give the full WAP breakdown? Just start from the beginning. I wanna know everything.

Yeah. At its core, WAP's mission is to make people a lot of money on the internet. That's it. Um, we grew up, me, my 2 co-founders, Cameron and Steven, and even half the people or more that work there grew up on the internet selling things, making money, selling software, building SaaS, all these different things. So a few years ago during COVID when everyone was home and trying to sell at-home workout equipment or baseball cards or GPU chips, everyone was trying to buy a PS5. We were in that market. We were those people. And we built a platform that really allowed people to prosper on that. So at its core, WAP is a platform that allows people to make online money. Most of the products people sell are digital for now. And yeah, people run communities, they sell software, they sell courses, they sell live streams, they have long-winded forum posts, they sell information. Pretty much whatever you can imagine is kind of sold on the web.

You guys have had tremendous unlock in the last couple months, probably last year. What exactly was that? Because I remember in the beginning you guys were shoes, right?

Yeah, so we started with software that facilitate people to buy sneakers, um, or clothing or any of those goods. So like I said, we kind of grew up on the internet. I started in high school selling sneakers and clothing and hoverboards and headphones and all these things online. In order to get a lot of these items that are hard to get, you need to use something called a sneaker bot. So during COVID when everyone was trying to get a PS5, 'cause everyone was home and quarantined, they were selling out instantly and they were selling out because people were using these same sneaker bots to sell them. So we found a Discord forum of people buying and selling software license keys as if like you were buying a Microsoft Word license key and someone sold it to you. Very discombobulated forum. People were scamming each other. It was Venmo and it was Cash App, it was PayPal. So we were like, okay, this is not good. This is a very discombobulated market. Let's quickly build a quick website. So we built an Airbnb-like website where you can buy and sell and actually rent out software for a duration of time. And in our first month, we processed, I believe it was like $14,000, just simply moving that form over to our website. Month 2, we did about $50,000. And from there, we just kept building everything that people kind of wanted.

And how did you and your co-founders come together? You're the CTO. Talk about the team.

Yeah, so I'm the CTO. Stephen Schwartz, our CEO, and Cameron Zabba is our CGO, Chief Growth Officer. Cameron and Steven started working together when they were very young, around 13 or 14. They met in a Facebook group building sneaker bots, and they kind of went through that whole trajectory too. I met Cameron online when I was about 16, also in a Facebook group selling sneakers. We were kind of friendly at the time. We never really worked together. And then a few years passed as COVID happened. I was working with Cameron and Steven on a separate business. They had a consulting company. I was kind of just hacking away, developing for it. COVID happened. We tried a few startups. I believe we had like 4 in 1 year that all kind of failed.

4 startups?

4 startups. We were just trying random shit we can find on the internet. And WAP happened to be that 4th one, and it just kind of took off from there.

One of the things that I've been having trouble finding on the internet is how much you guys have raised in total and by who. So could you share more about your funding to date and your investors?

Yeah. So we've raised about I'm going to say about $80 million in total Series B up to so far. Some of our earliest investors were people like Justin Mateen, founder of Tinder, Justin Kan, founder of Twitch, Peter Thiel. And then we had our first Series A raise led by Insight. And then lately our Series B was led by A*STAR and Kevin Hartz, founder of Empright, as well as Bain Capital.

Can you share anything on the valuation?

The latest valuation was $800 million.

That's public?

I believe so. Okay. I think so. I think we got leaked by someone on Twitter. We try to keep it— we're so heads down building all the time and we're very not like a pompous out there company. You can even look at kind of like the brand we've portrayed over the past few months. It's very not like this is WAP and this is what we do. It's very like, here are the people that kind of use WAP empowering A lot of the entrepreneurs and creators that use it, so our brand and our perception also kind of matches that. So we weren't like raised around go immediately to TechCrunch tell everyone. It was like okay we have this like keep them in our back pocket for later. Let's just keep heads down building. We almost like forgot about it, and then someone on Twitter leaked it a few months ago, a few weeks ago.

You know where to go for your Series C sorcery.

Sorcery.

I want to talk more about WAP's mission because you've also created a little bit of a cult. Following. People are obsessed with WAP. Like, it's a true thing and it's real. And then even with your new product, Creator Rewards, like, that's creating even more WAP. I don't, I don't know what you call WAPers. You call them WAPers?

Not yet.

Gotta come up with the name for that.

But we do call them— you have a WAP.

You have a WAP.

Like, if you were sold on WAP, you have a WAP.

Okay.

But we didn't frame that. We actually noticed that people on Twitter kept calling, referring to their thing, their thing they sold on WAP as their WAP, and we just kind of took it and ran.

So what's your mission?

Our mission is to make people a lot of money on the internet. We also sometimes say is that we want to make people sustainable income on the internet. We believe that sustainable income is around $2,000 a month. Our product basically makes it so you don't need to worry about payments. You don't need to build up your own payments integration. You don't need to worry about building out your own landing page or your own checkout. You don't need to worry about like your backend business dashboard. You don't need to even worry about like connecting to different integrations to chat with your customers or to go live to your customers. We have all that in a product. All you really need to do is come to WAP and just provide whatever value it might be. And then a lot of different people, it's a lot of different forms, or that might not be you. You might not be a creator. You might not be an entrepreneur that's ready to have a following and start taking payments. So we have other ways to earn such as like content rewards, which is the fastest growing way that We have seen earners come. They're coming on the platform and they're helping some of our biggest creators or brands or whoever it might be market and really unleash their audience. So our mission is to make people a lot of money.

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So any user that onboards, they have to, they sign up and you actually can't even use our website anymore if you're not signed up. And that was a conscious decision to try to make it a higher intent community of people on WAP. So once you sign up, you go through our basic onboarding, verify your email and stuff, and then you actually have to join your first WAP before you can even use the platform. And that is, it's a confusing platform. Like we know it's, there's a lot going on and there's a lot of, with a lot of functionality and features and abstractions, it's hard to actually simplify it and tell you what we're doing. So our thesis is let's put people in one or 2 ops when they join, let them land on a populated home feed that shows you who's talking, who's commenting on long forum posts, who's even live, who's paying off for content rewards or different things, and let them experience it. And then from there you might stay as a user, you might join other ones from our marketplace, or you might go and become a creator yourself and just hit the new WAP button in the top right and create a Molly's Podcast. And on there you're just bringing your audience, you're sending out links to your friends, you're using WAP to drive your own distribution so you can just focus on what you do best and that's it.

So you mentioned that you originally started as a sneaker bot. went to a marketplace, now it's its own platform. Could you break down the entirety of the different products you're offering?

Yeah, I think to break down the products we offer, it's very, the best way to do it is to explain how we got here. So like I said, back in February of 2021, we started building this platform to buy and sell software. That's essentially what it was. So you can come on, you can pay $30 a month, and once you bought, you get access to a downloadable zip file and a license key. And that was it. And then everyone was selling the software that we called Sneaker Bots, but no one knew how to use a Sneaker Bot. It's like, what is it? It says some software made by some 16-year-old developer in their basement making $100 grand a month, but like they're not, they don't know how to use it. So what they did is they sold alongside their software, a Discord community, a community of all their members where people would share success stories and how-to tutorials and they could ask questions with tickets and all this stuff. So our creators, the software creators would come to us, we're like, They're like, hello, can you please allow us to sell Discord? We're like, okay, fine. So we built a quick Discord integration. When you paid, you got added to a Discord server. When you stopped paying, you got removed and so on. And from there, that really opened up our market to non-developers. Now people that were selling just like information or a fitness community or teaching people how to flip sports cards or NFTs were getting kind of big at that time. We had now expanded our entire market to people that were selling access to Discord servers and communities. And what is a Discord server? It's a Big chat room. It's a member directory. It's maybe some long-winded posts with a bunch of crazy reactions and they can go live and so on. So we built that out. And at this point we just kept listening to our users. They were like, hey, I wanna sell access to a Telegram group. We're like, okay, fine. Here's a Telegram integration. They're like, I wanna sell access to a multi-step course. We're like, fine, here's a course integration. I wanna sell access to files here, web apps here. And they kept asking us all this stuff. And like our secret sauce is we just kept building it. Like whenever anyone asked, we just kept building. So I would say about a year or 2 years progressed, we were processing about, let's say $30 million a month. And we kind of took a pretty big stance that the user experience kind of sucks. Like you're coming to WAP, we're driving traffic, we have this beautiful one-click checkout with 8 different payment options. You can use crypto, card, whatever it is. But as soon as you buy, now you get kicked off platform to Discord and where you now need to onboard to Discord. Verify your email, do like 8 captchas, understand how Discord works just to see something, just to see what you're trying to buy, just to like, maybe people are selling, teaching you how to sports bet and you want to know how to use a unit system and now you need to go through all these freaking hoops just to figure that out. We're like, okay, the user experience is kind of bad as a company. We don't really, we can't do much because all the consumption is done off platform. So we kind of took a step back and we're like, okay, let's build out our own way to provide on-platform consumption. How do people chat on WAP? How do they go live on WAP? How do they engage their customers on WAP? So what we did was we took a pretty big bet, arguably too big of a bet at that time, but it's coming back now, is we kind of built, invested in this developer ecosystem, a way where developers can come on and they can build, we call them experiences for our creators. They can build out chat, they can build out games to engage your customers, they can build build out ways to solicit feedback from your biggest customers. So we kind of went deep on this around October 2023, and we got a little over our skis, but we released something called WAP-3 at this point. There's actually a crazy Apple-like keynote that Steven and Cam did. And over the next year, all through 2024, we kept working on our apps platform. As a result, we by accidentally built chat, like we were just kind of messing around on a weekend project, and all of a sudden we now had chat. We kind of built this forums, and over the last year, We've really been working on getting a really nice chat up to par with iMessage and Discord and Telegram, the experiences you imagine, making it so you can drop a forum post and everyone gets notified and you can do a bunch of reactions. We've had people drop a post, like get 10,000 people in a second and kind of doing that. We've built out live streaming because people wanna go live to their members. That's what they do on Discord, or they might host a webinar or live coaching or stuff like this. So we went really deep on this on-platform consumption. We did it through the lens of developers. We built out a lot of these tools internally, and now here we are about a year and a half later after starting that endeavor. And we have almost all of our organic creators, our signups are using our on-platform apps. We've moved a lot of our traffic over from people that were selling on external integrations onto Wapp. We are finding ways to really give you more data as a creator, like who's your most active engaged customer? Who's chatting the most? Who's making the most money in your WAP? How do you solicit feedback? You can now automate DMs. So after someone joins, it's like, hey, welcome to Sorcery. I would love to have you. Here's what Sorcery does. If you wanna DM me, you can DM me. We built on-platform DMs and all this stuff really to make the user experience better and also give you or whoever the creator is more building blocks to build something fantastic. So that's kind of how the product progressed and how we kind of got here.

And you've reached massive scale in a very short amount of period of time. So one of our sponsors, Brex, is all about performance. They're the modern finance stack. They help you spend smarter and ship faster. You're shipping incredibly fast and your metrics are incredible. I'd love to go deeper into your metrics. How do you look at that from a high level and what are you really kind of observing to determine success?

So At our core, once again, our mission is to make people money. So our top-line metric that we really care about is how much are our users and our creators earning through our platform. So like I said, last month was about $108 million, but that's cute. But like, are we really making a difference? And one of the biggest things that we look at is how many people are earning on our platform? How many earners are we having each month? How many people are coming to WAP and actually seeing a difference made in their lives? I think last month We wrapped up to about 28,000 earners, which is an all-time high. Every month is getting obviously an all-time high after each one. And one of the biggest things that we're trying to do that we deem success is when you come to the platform, are you earning in your first 7 days? We know that if you come to WAP and you earn in your first 7 days, you are 3x likely, you are 3x more retentive to stay than someone who does not. So it's in our best interest to, from the moment you sign up, to get you earning money. We've been able to do that very efficiently lately through Content Rewards because we have thousands of, probably over $1 million in budgets now that are waiting to be depleted from brands that are either offering you money to clip their content or create native UGC for them. What's really cool with Content Rewards is it's very democratized. So you can be someone from Northern Africa that has a relatively modest internet connection and a low internet and a low computer and in a poor region, but you can come onto WAP and you can actually find some aspect of financial freedom because you can come on. We have companies like Windsurf, for example, that are offering real cash for people to come on and tell them how they vibe coded their software. And I've seen people from like Nigeria come on and make UGC content about how they vibe coded their app through Windsurf. And have now made over two, three, four hundred dollars just through that one video. So the way it works is they make their UGC, they put it on TikTok or Instagram or Twitter, whatever the the creator is looking for, and they just submit a link, and we automatically pay them out for their views. So there's no like back and forth as if you're working with an influencer. There's no there's no hassle. All they do is they put in a budget, and then we forget to plead, and it gets depleted by real people. And You spoke about growth. Where we're seeing the most growth right now is because our goal is to make earners and it's so easy to earn with modern-day content rewards. We are seeing a massive explosion in global growth. Sure, WAP works well for US and Western world capitalists that are used to this, but it's even more powerful for the global economy, people that don't have an easy way to earn income where they're at. So we've seen massive growth from platforms like India and Pakistan and Morocco and South Africa, which is really, really cool because our mission's actually becoming something that's actually important now.

How are you reaching those countries? Like, how did you end up going global?

Funny enough, we put most of our marketing budget into content awards. We've spent over, I don't know, $150,000, $200,000 to generate probably over 200 million views by now, telling people that they can earn on our platform using Content Rewards. So we use our own pro— we, one of our keys to success, and I credit Steven, our CEO, to this, we dogfood our product more than, or at least we try to, more than anyone else out there. What does that actually mean? I told you about a year and a half ago, we had a, we built our own chat by accident. It was actually, we actually stumbled into it. But what did that mean for us? We were on Slack at the time. And Stephen was like, nope, we are moving to WAP. And that was crazy because the first 3 months, like, we couldn't even communicate. Like, our chat was so bad, it was broken. Um, but that started like, we don't have Slack anymore. All of our communication company-wide is on WAP. There's a WAP engineering WAP, there's an internal WAP, there's a growth WAP. Um, that kind of speaks to the level of which we're trying to do dogfooding. So you asked how we're going global. We put all of our money into Content Rewards because we know that product works. And as a result, we are spreading the message that, hey, come on to WAP and we'll help you earn. And we have our own funnels. We have WAP Clips or WAP University, our own maintained WAPs that have thousands and thousands of people that we sponsor and we run that teach you how to make a living on WAP and how to earn on WAP, how to be power users. And we've really gone on to that. So I would say that's one of the big things. And yeah, we can talk about brand a bit later, but I'd say brand's also a big one.

Would you say you have an infinite TAM now?

I would say our TAM is $8 billion plus.

Wow.

The entire world, which is, it's funny 'cause I told you how our platform progressed and I think I'd be lying if I sat here and I said we had this vision 4 years ago. I actually, I think visions are kind of bullshit, especially from early stage startups. Like no one's actually sitting there. If they're sitting there before they have any users, they're like, I wanna change the world and like, here's my crazy vision, they're probably not gonna do anything. I think the most successful startups kept iterating and iterating and iterating and building, listening to their customers, which is one of our early success stories. But you asked about TAM, and I say that also because when we were first starting back in April 2021, we actually applied to Y Combinator to try to get funding, and they denied us because they told us our market was too small, which in their eyes, like, fine, we were just a sneaker bot rental marketplace, but As we've progressed, our TAM is now $8 billion plus. Can we get the entire world on WAP transacting, consuming, being social? It's a way more— it's so much of a better way to spend your time. Like, we believe that— we say internally that financial freedom, like, why does it actually matter to make money? Is really because you get your freedom of time back, and time is your most valuable resource in life. And I've seen, like, I've been growing up building startups my whole life. You're building your own thing right now. You might work harder than your average 9 to 5, but that's because you're so much more passionate about it. And as a result, like, you find people that are like you, you spend more time on it, you're way more invested, and you're probably gonna make more money 'cause of it. We kind of believe that everyone should be that way. I mean, we're in New York. You see how many people hate their job here, right? Like, they're in investment banking. They can't wait to get out at 5 and go hit the bars and get shitfaced to come back the next day. We don't really relate to that. Like, our team doesn't really relate to that. We grew up starting our own shit. Like, we sell our own things and we want to spread that to the world, and we believe we really can.

I want to talk about the technical sides of this. You are the CTO. I'm sure there's like incredible engineering challenges, but you're also scaling incredibly fast and maybe breaking a lot of things. So like, what are— what's the process for you and how have you started to scale up the product suite?

Yeah, so that's a great question. So building these products is no joke. Like we have many, many startups within Wappamos. Like our live streaming feature is a feature, yet you have platforms like Twitch and Kick that are built off it or Instagram Live. We have chat, which is a feature, but you've seen platforms like Discord and Telegram and Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, whatever. We have other things like our notifications, like We send out over 40 million notifications a day sometimes. So these are no joke systems. And we've started to really realize the difficulty and honestly the awesomeness, like we love solving problems in scaling some of these problems. So payments, I would say, is the first major challenge we did. How can we make it so people can come on, they can drop their link to a Twitter following of 100,000+ and the website not go down? That was a challenge. The website has gone down several, several times, but we've been able to kind of progress that and now we can handle flash drops of over a million or 2 million even at one point. I would say over the last year, we've gone into some crazy technical challenges with how to build chat. We've built chat 4 times now. We've built our notification system 3 times now. We've built our real-time feed where we serve you content 3 times now. We're starting a new one next week. This kind of all speaks to the problems that we have to solve, but it also speaks to our team. Like, we're not the team that's going to sit back and whiteboard for 4 weeks and figure out what is the ideal solution? Because frankly, you don't know the ideal solution until you try it. So the way we operate is we move really fast. We ship a lot of code to production. It has its drawbacks. Some things might be broken sometimes, but we care a lot. We work hard. We'll fix them very quickly. And I would say we took that mentality from early on. And now we're just applying that to bigger and better challenges.

How's the team structured on the engineering side?

Our team's about 15 to 20 people, a mixture of full-stack web, iOS, Android engineers. We don't really believe in kind of middle management or rewarding staff engineers with scope and junior engineers need to do tickets. It's very much a come-and-take-it mentality. We encourage all of our engineers to be very product-focused. We're not going to spoon-feed you PRDs or sometimes even designs, which we're working on, but we expect all of our engineers to be able to take a project, a product, an idea, and turn it into something beautiful. And that's why we also really push on people to be, be a creator, be a user of WAP so you can really put yourself in those shoes. And our team actually company-wide, I would say over 50, 60% of our team we found on the internet. We found them on Discord servers. They were early users. They were— we DM'd them on Twitter and said, hey, move across the country. Like, I can name of our founding 10 team, one person was a customer support specialist that dropped out of school at Duke. 2 people moved across the world from Australia. Someone moved across the world from Spain. And like, they didn't go through traditional interview, technical interviews. They were like, you get our product, you get our customer, you want to build it, come along. And we've kind of really, really tried to embody that mindset. So. To answer your question directly, our team's about 15 to 20. It's a mixture of a bunch of different types of engineers at all different specialties, and anyone could come in and lead a project at any given time. We reward success and so on.

Do you have a platform team?

We are actually just building out our platform team now. So, this has been my focus for the past 1 or 2 months. I'm obsessed with platform right now. I'm obsessed. My goal as our CTO is to make it so our engineers can ship at the highest quality possible at the highest velocity possible. People think quality and velocity is a trade-off. I think they're both requirements. So with the platform team, the goal there is to empower our developers to do that. So we're investing heavy into local development. We're investing heavy into our monorepo. We're investing heavy into AI and agents to come in and be able to one-shot features or help onboard new engineers, making it easy so you can push to production within 5 minutes. And if it fails, it rolls back, or you can roll it back. You have the tools you need. So We're currently building out our platform team. We're trying to hire like the best of the best people that know what it's like to build out tooling for other developers, care deeply about developer experience and patterns and naming and all these type stuff. And this is kind of currently what I'm obsessed with.

I can't help but catch you mention AI, and this is a really hot topic, but how do you think about the future of engineering with AI coming in, vibe coding, automating everything, What's your view?

I love AI and I've seen it's a very polarizing kind of place to be in engineering because some people think they're better than AI, which is naive. Some people are intimidated by it and some people rely on it way too heavy. So here's what my takes are. I have found that AI I think I'm a good engineer. I've been doing it for a long time. I always have room to grow, but like, I like to think of myself as like, I was a pre-AI engineer, so I understand kind of how to build systems. It makes someone like me 5, 10x more productive because I can just go back and forth with a robot and like explain my ideas and watch it kind of get built out. That's the same way I used to work with maybe more junior engineers on our team, but it would, It's way more laborious on me when I have to explain tasks to someone and they might not get it and I need to go back and forth. And with a robot, if you point them in the right direction and I can break down a problem well, they're going to do it pretty damn well. So I have found that it has enabled me to ship 5 to 10x faster. I have found that AI, at first I thought it was just a tool. I thought it was just like the tab button you hit to write your code. I've learned recently it's way more than that. It's a It's another, it's almost like, it's almost like another person in your organization. Like they can answer questions for you, they can look up information, they can use your codebase. So how we've been leveraging internally is we built like this monorepo, which basically takes all of our code and puts it into one big folder. And we added something called Claude Code and some other agents. And now engineers are coming on and in their first day they're able to solve tickets or solve problems that would've taken weeks or would've taken time from other engineers on the team to answer questions. So I can say, hey, how do I— someone yesterday was like, I didn't know how to end a livestream in the code, 'cause they were trying to make it so when you end a livestream, it sends a notification. So they just went to Claude Code, the robot, and they were like, how do I end a livestream? And within 5 minutes, they had a PR up. That's incredibly powerful. So I'm banking on that. And then my other hot take with AI, as you asked, is I don't think there's a world really for junior engineers at big organizations. I think there's a major split here on what should happen is If you're a junior engineer, you should not be trying to get an engineering role at a company. You should be building your own software right now. You should be using the millions of tools on the internet that allow you to make designs and code, and you should just trying to build as much shit as possible because it's never been easy, easier. And that's also like why I'm so excited about WAP is cuz we also are building out a developer platform that allows anyone to basically build out an agent or build out a SaaS tool and easily throw a paywall on top of it, easily Make a community of your members. But why that's important is the fact that I really enjoy working with very talented engineers right now because they can take AI and they can split up their project and get it done in 5 to 10x of the time. I don't see a world where big organizations really need junior engineers as much to do it. That's why my advice to junior engineers is don't even try to fit that mold. Just go build your own shit and you'll probably be way more successful than you ever could have been being a junior engineer at an organization. Wow.

So what does that mean in terms of org structure going forward? Like, what percentage of the engineering team do you think will be AI?

That's a funny question. I want to keep our team lean. Like, I think we can 10x our volume, go up to, I don't know, $10 billion plus GMV run rate with 10 to 20 people. Like, I don't think you need many more people at this stage. I think the days of tech companies scaling to thousands of engineers are behind us because what I've found is a smaller, more compact team of very talented people that understand how to break down problems and naturally use AI to go faster. They won't need that much help. So I'm pretty bullish on a very lean, very smart staff-plus level team of engineers that have solved these problems at scale. that want to do it again and really keeping that team small. So that's kind of how we operate internally. I wish we could do— we always want to do more with less, and especially in a modern day with the modern-day tools we have.

Yeah, I ask that because like one of the leading questions that a lot of people have is, can you build a billion-dollar business with one person and just using lots of tools? You already have that and you're doing $1.2 billion in GMV run rate. you've hit 5 billion in creator views, like you're at massive scale. Like instead of scaling up team, like scaling, you're gonna be scaling back.

That's the goal. Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah. It's just easier to do more with less, less context sharing, less communication overhead, less, I mean, it's beautiful, right? Like, and especially if you can, If the way that AI is progressing, the way that agents are progressing, how much smarter they're getting, how much more context you can feed them, how many tools are being built to write code, review code, all these things, if you can leverage that correctly and you can bank on making it so every time you have a feature idea, if you could say, you know what, stop, can I prompt this out and see where it gets stuck? And then instead of just fixing it, solving the root problem, so like giving it a prompt to solve it, We can get pretty damn far. And then like my end goal is like, what if I can be like, hey, why is the website slow? And it can query our performance dashboards and look at slow queries and look at, watch sessions of users and be like, you know what? It's slow because this PR was merged 2 weeks ago that adds this amount of time to loading this page. And it's causing these users in India to have a 50% degraded experience. Like that's not that far off. It's just making systems talk to each other. So that's why I kind of think you can do more with less these days.

So there was a big migration not too long ago. Toms of Rome, one of Sorcery's favorite fans, had a question about this. How did you do it and what takeaways do you have for other teams going through transitions and migrations like this?

For context, we recently moved our database provider. So we were on a database called Postgres and we moved it to PlanetScale. Why is that important? Well, first of all, we have a fuck ton of data.

Yeah.

It was like 800 gigabytes of data. Any downtime for our company means lost dollars for all of our creators, or even if it's not lost dollars, it's now all the customers that just bought something can't access what they bought. So downtime wasn't really an option here. So I'll kind of tell you how we did it, and then I'll kind of tell you my philosophy on how I think migrations are. Actually, I'm gonna start with the latter. Let me tell you about our philosophy. We don't really believe in refactoring over rebuilding. What that means is like a lot of companies might always try to refactor their code and make it nicer and prettier and make little tweaks. We don't do that. We're like, you know what? Like this system's here. It's, it was built upon assumptions that were made 6 months ago. We have massive new revelations. Let's just throw that out and rebuild it again. So we've always been on the mindset of rebuild over refactor, which has enabled us to kind of get this mindset of like, running through a wall. It's almost like we've adopted a little bit of this YOLO mindset over the past few years where we kind of just got to send it. And what that really means for this example is our database was breaking. We came back from December break, so January 2025, and we had incidents every single day. The website was going down every single day. I remember I was actually, it was Saturday night, 9:00 PM. I was on a date and I get a call like, the website's down. I had to leave the date midway to go fix this. Oh no. Yeah, it was crazy. And after that moment when we're like, there's something you have to give, and the database for us is the most complex piece of software there is. Like, that's the full backstop. Like, if the database isn't working, the rest of your shit isn't working. So we wanted to move to a more scalable, reliable platform. So we chose to go to PlanetScale. From like a technical standpoint, that means like you're moving from one database, which was called Postgres, to another one called MySQL. Which is like not one-to-one. You can't just like export import. You have to do a lot of crazy transformations midway. So we kind of worked on it over the— so we had to basically make it so we can move between 2 different databases between like Postgres and MySQL. For anyone that doesn't know, it's like moving data from your Windows to your Mac computer. We need to do it without any downtime, without any flaws, with fully flawlessness, while also allowing your team to continue to ship code at the exact same velocity, if not higher than you want. So how we did it is our backend is a Ruby on Rails codebase, which is another hotly contested debate, but I personally love Ruby on Rails. And what that allowed for us is it was very easy for us to swap out basically Postgres to MySQL. There's a thing called ActiveRecord, which makes it, which is basically the layer on how you query your database. And what made that nice for us is we basically spent the first month making our codebase run on 2 different databases. So in production on wop.com, You can either plug in a Postgres database or a MySQL database and the code would've worked. So we spent our first month like basically refactoring everything, making it so all of our tests passed with MySQL. Once that was done and that first chunk was over, the next step was basically getting all of our data to flow from this Postgres database to this PlanetScale database. Like I said, it's 2 different types of databases and Postgres and MySQL, so we needed to basically build this intermediary layer that would every time like a user signed up on our website or a payment was processed, it would take this payment, it would take this row in the database and push it through to the other database that we basically spent like a month on that, getting both of our databases stood up, fully replicated all the data in there. 'Cause you obviously can't have any data loss otherwise. Like, I mean, it's obvious you can't, people are gonna be like, where's my money? So we spent about a month and a half there. That was pretty very, very challenging to get working. And once we got that, we basically tried to do the migration like 3 times. And the first 2 times we had to cancel it because we found issues. But the 3rd time was about 6:00 AM on a Monday. We got everyone, actually it was like 5:00 AM, everyone got to the office and we basically conduct like a high level, almost feels like you're defusing a bomb. There's like a procedure. You're like, I need you to do this, turning this off, scaling this up. We have an issue. But we ended up doing it from like 6 to 6:30. It went pretty smoothly. There was no downtime. We had no issues to the website. Everyone kept processing. And that's how we moved about 800 gigabytes of data with zero downtime from Postgres to PlanetScale.

And you didn't use millions of dollars worth of consultants?

No, we did it all internally.

Wow, that's big.

So also, it was also our 3rd database migration in 3 years. So we've had our practice. We've been scaling fast and we've been kind of adapting to it, but it was very fun and it's an extremely fun technical challenge.

Okay. So given that, what are your tips for teams?

Yeah, so I was reflecting a little bit. I was actually talking to Sam, who's the CEO of PlanetScale, and he's like, he was telling me why he admired us and our migration. And pretty much the epitome of it was you just kind of sent it. So like a lot of people, they'll get stuck on the details. Like I had so many people ask me like what the rollback plan was. And I'm like, there is no rollback plan. Like, you know, we're not going to spend an extra 8 weeks building a rollback plan. We're just going to do it well and nail it the first time. We also started to notice like these issues are really hard and I'm not trying to stand up a team of database administrators to come in and solve our issues. So like, I like leaning on tools. I think it's great if I don't have to worry about this problem. Now we have an entire team of engineers that work at another company upstanding our database. But I think my number one motto is like, don't be afraid to rebuild. Like the decisions you made 3 months ago, 2 months ago, 6 months ago are probably wrong and you'll probably get new information. And sunk cost fallacy is so real in startups. Like everything is a sunk cost. Decisions you made yesterday that were wrong, who cares? Like gone, goodbye. So we kind of realized that we were like, you know what, we made 3 wrong decisions already on our database. Let's try a 4th one. I might be wrong again, and if I'm wrong again, we'll just move again. But you kind of just got to keep moving forward. My co-founder Cam was like, you just got to be like water. You just got to keep moving. And I see a lot of people just get stuck on— it gets cloudy and scary and what if the website goes down? Who cares if websites go down? Just fix it. So that's kind of the mentality that we adopt.

Just keep shipping.

Yeah, just keep shipping. You saw my tweet?

I saw your tweet. Yeah. So I want to talk broader about the culture that you've created here. You've hinted to it a couple of times. Throughout the conversation, but you also tweeted about one particular thing that I'm gonna read verbatim. All right, so you said, most companies ban side projects. We kicked 4 engineers out of a standup today because they didn't have one. Every engineer needs a personal WAP with 15+ users to stay. If you can't build for yourself, you can't build for anyone. How does that transform into the culture.

So first off, that is a true story. I got a lot of hate in the comments, people thinking that was rage bait.

You had 300 comments.

That is a true story. And I'll show you the message. I actually told people that, and I'm not— it's true. Like, there's no way you can build a platform for creators if you're not a creator. Like, how would you expect to do that? It's like building a podcast, but you don't watch any podcasts or talk to any people. It's like, you're not gonna be able to do that. So Our culture is very much like we have a value and it's be your own customer. And I have a WAP, you can join it's wap.com/sharkey. Stephen has one, it's wap.com/stephen. And so many of our people at WAP either started as creators, customers of our platform, and now joined us. And like I said in the beginning, that's kind of who we are. Like we are entrepreneurs, we are creators ourselves. So I tweeted that, Because it's true. We had a standup and we were trying to build all these flows and like no one had any, not no one, but there was a limited amount of intuition on what these flows should look like because people weren't using the platform as a creator. So we encourage people to go on and make a WAP, get people in it, friends and family, tweet it, throw it on WAP Marketplace, send it to your, send it to your mom and get people in. And it actually worked. Like we had everyone showed up to standup except for those 4 people. with a WAP in it. And now we are seeing people are using it. They're going live every day and live coding. They're selling access to all their knowledge on how the most successful people on WAP are creating. They are teaching people how to use our developer platform. And one of the comments was, which I found so ironic, they're like, what happens if one of these side projects takes off and they leave? I'm like, That's fucking great. Like if someone can make a side, a project on WAP, a side project nonetheless, and generate enough income to where they're walking away from their normal job because they're doing it on WAP, that is the dream come true. Like that is so cool. And the amount of insight they'll learn during the process, the amount of tools to build for themselves. We can't get to where we want to go unless people are actually, actually using our product to the most extent. So what better way than requiring people to have a side project on WAP?

I love that. Yeah. Hardcore.

Hardcore.

It kind of bleeds a little bit into your brand. Like, your brand is really strong. So how do you think about branding?

So we didn't do any marketing until December of 2024, 6 months ago. Like, wow, we had no marketing team. It was, it was one of our worst qualities as a company. We didn't know how to market. We brought on a marketing team. We brought on this guy named Brett who's incredible, and he basically helped us build out our brand. And we're not taking an approach that most companies are taking. Like, we're not taking our features and our product and putting it on our Twitter, like from the WAP branded Twitter or on our YouTube being like, here's how you start a thing. Like, that's not what works. People want to see, they want to, they want to feel something. They want to know the lifestyle behind WAP. Who are the people that are using it? So if you watch our YouTube channel, which—

Is killing it.

It's killing it. And I think it's at Probably over 75,000 subscribers now. Austin and Nick are two of the most talented people I've ever met, and they're not trying to like show off to people. They're just trying to show the behind the scenes of the most some of the most successful creators entrepreneurs in the world. Like this is what they go through. This is the real life struggle. Like this is how they got here. It wasn't all Lamborghinis and rainbows. Like they were, and that story is so powerful. And why our brand's working is because we're not trying to just Put a WAP logo in your face all the time. It's like, no, these are real people and here are their real stories and here's like actually how they're doing it. Because we want to inspire people. Like, I want to inspire people to go and start a business. Go start. I don't even care what's on WAP. Just like go start your own thing and see the beauty of it. And that's kind of what we're trying to do with our brand and it seems to be working.

Is that the kind of advice you'd give to creators on the platform? Create an authentic voice and brand and not shill Lamborghinis?

Exactly. So Brett. Who I just mentioned, we do an event called, we did an event, we just had our last one called 3K in 30, where anyone that makes $3,000 in their first 30 days gets flown out to NYC for a 2-day event where we put their logo on Times Square, we do a dinner, we teach them from some of our internal people like Brett or Cam, like how to scale a business. And we just did an event and Brett's biggest advice, he's like, be authentic. Like don't make YouTube, Instagram content and like try to hold it all behind a paywall. Like, people aren't going to do that. They're going to join your community. They're going to pay because they want to be with you. So be authentic. Like, don't share your trade secrets. Tell people what's going on. Give it to the masses. Like, reinvent yourself and you'll see people come. So 100%, don't just like throw a Lamborghini and expect people to join. Like, actually show them the value you provide and they'll come.

Your go-to-market strategy has also shifted into partnerships. I've seen you've Really, like, you've collaborated with some big names online. Could you share more about who you're partnering with and how it's set up? Like, what's the structure?

Similar to how our engineering team believes we can do more with less, so does our partnerships team. So rather than scale our partnerships team to go phone to phone calling people trying to close deals, we can turn every single person in the world into a Watt partner. We can Onboard anyone to say, "Go refer your friend onto WAP and get a portion of their earnings for life." Like that's the beauty of it. So we're very much backing into that. We're building out pretty crazy programs in like WAP University and our affiliate program. Everything we can do to try to get people to turn themselves into a WAP partner. We've recently done a very—I'm sure you saw online—a very big partnership with this gentleman named Iman Gazi, who's one of the most successful. Online sellers in the world. And his goal is extremely aligned with ours. It is teach people how to make money on the internet on WAP. Like the incentives cannot be more aligned. So as a result, like we're trying to make the product as simple as possible. We're trying to make it as global as possible, supporting markets all over the world for pay-ins and payouts. We're trying to make it really good content so you know how to get started. So our goal and always will be our goal is to get as many people earning on the platform. And we will do that through incentivizing everyone, to get people on the platform to earn, making it as easy as possible to earn and really following that structure.

How did you incentivize him to come work with you? I'm sure he's already making a ton of money.

Yeah. So he believes in the mission. His story is also really authentic. If you watch his YouTube, he's been doing it for over 10 years now and he really believes in being an entrepreneur and starting your own thing. So he was attracted just to join us, and the incentives made sense for both parties. And he's been an incredible partner after meeting him. I didn't actually know that much about him until I met him. Super humble, super smart, charismatic, very authentic person that really speaks truly to our brand.

So you're attracting a lot of talent from all sorts of angles. Are you hiring?

We're always hiring. We're always hiring in very, very smart people. So I'll tell you a little bit more about who I'm looking for right now. Maybe if you're out there, you can come find me. So for context, we're hiring mostly senior staff plus level engineers that have built real systems at scale, know how, what it's like to scale things like chat and payments and live streaming and real-time feeds. Our tech stack, it's a Ruby on Rails backend hosted on a PlanetScale MySQL database. Our frontend's all Next.js and React and TypeScript. And then we have a Swift app and an Android app in Kotlin. We're hiring across all 4 of those. Our team is about 80%, hopefully soon 100% in person out in New York. We work outta Williamsburg outta the Domino Sugar Factory. We very much value the in-person energy and all that stuff. So if that sounds like something you might be interested in, come find me.

That's fantastic. As we wrap, I'll have 2 more sections, 2 more questions. One, what are you most looking forward to this year?

So I'm not gonna give away our trade secrets, but I'll tell you some of the things I am most excited about. We're going way deeper into payments, making it so you can get paid in or paid out anywhere across the world, either in fiat or crypto, offering more solutions for our creators to get access to capital or even spend their capital. We want to go way deeper on our consumer features, our Discover. We should drive all the distribution you ever need. You should never need to go outside our platform to get customers. We're going way deeper on that. We're gonna simplify our product so much that you can understand it when you come on, building things like real-time feeds and efficient notifications and going deeper on live streaming, a lot of these really awesome consumer features. And then I would say the cherry on top that I am personally most excited for right now is we're going heavy on our developer platform. It's easier than ever to create software, especially with all these different AI tools. What's still hard though is how do you get paid for it? How do you get your customers in? How do you distribute it? How do you keep retaining value for it? We've solved all these problems. Now we can easily do it for developers. Now you can easily spin up an AI agent and have it integrated into the WAP platform to buy and sell and receive payments. So you can make a SaaS tool, embed it right on WAP and have people have to pay to get access to it and then talk to your customers. So we're going really deep on our developer platform. And I'm personally excited because I'm going to use it and I'm going to make a fuck ton of money just selling my own software. So that's what I'm most excited for.

That's amazing. Well, I love wrapping up with these outlooks and I also love wrapping up with predictions. So I want to go to Kalshi and just go through a couple different topics and get your opinion on them.

Let's do it.

I think you're also— I think Kalshi is one of your creators, right?

Yeah, they, um, they're a user of Content Rewards.

This is great. Double collab. Okay, number one, I know you're a big sports fan, so pro baseball, who do you think the final winner is going to be?

It's, it's, it's obviously going to be the Mets. I'm a massive New York Mets fan. Funny enough, I'm actually starting, or at the point this episode have aired, have already launched my own Mets community with one of my friends, Max Wiener. So if you're out there and you're a Mets fan and you want to join the biggest Mets fan club on the internet, Hop on wap.com/mets. That's my answer.

Amazing. And then what about, uh, pro basketball?

I'm also a Knicks fan, so, uh, let's go Knicks, baby.

All, all New York across the board. I think there's some crypto— are there crypto enthusiasts on— I just feel like there's got to be some overlap.

Of course there's overlap. So there's been crypto people since the beginning, um, selling whatever it might be, trading, um, coins, NFTs, like whatever it might be. We have crypto pay-ins and payouts. You can pay with all different types of cryptos. We had crypto subscriptions for a while, so we definitely are, are very familiar with that space.

Okay, then we're gonna go, we're gonna go right into this next one. How high do you think Bitcoin will reach this year?

At least a million.

A million?

At least a million.

You're gonna lock in at a million?

I'm gonna go at least a million. Okay, a million plus. Uh, I mean, I don't know why I wouldn't.

Why would you? Why wouldn't you? Yeah. Um, lastly, this is the last one, okay? I want your take as an engineer, as a CTO. What will the best AI this month be?

I'm bullish on Gemini right now. I use it.

You're bullish on Gemini?

I use it for a lot of my code right now, and I go back and forth, and it's really good at not being delirious. Like, at the end, it circles back to what you asked, which is beautiful. So I'm bullish on Gemini. That's what I'm coding with right now. Um, yeah.

That's really interesting because I've had other people go right to ChatGPT, but this is the engineering perspective.

You know, I use it for all different things. Like, I use Chat— I, I do. I'm a ChatGPT voice user more than a lot of— I use it a lot. Like, I'll just go back and forth with ChatGPT on voice mode refining my ideas. I find it very useful for synthesis of ideas and helping with writing or helping with clarity of thought. And then I've been using Gemini for most of my code. But usually what I do is like, I'll take a problem and I'll put it in 4 different LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, even Groq sometimes, and just look at all the solutions and then choose my favorite and then iterate. So I don't pick favorites.

Okay, amazing. Well, Jack, it was awesome to have you on. I learned so much and I'm so excited for WAP this year.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Shout out Sorcery.

Shout out Sorcery. Shout out Staples. Shout out Staples. Yeah. Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter sorcery.vc where we deliver a once-a-week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today and don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.