E097 - The New Way to Make Your First $100,000 Online (Whop)

0:00We want to change the world. We want to do really big shit. We are fighting on behalf of a greater mission of helping a ton of people make money on the internet through WAP. Not only is WAP a marketplace, you also are a full-blown Discord app, forces, community. We had someone reach out who is making a bunch of money in these forums selling sneakerbots. Cam started to sell software through that forum. If you had one of these pieces of software that could buy a PlayStation 5, if you could buy 10 in a day, you made$10 ,000. So you could rent that piece of software out for a day for$1 ,000. We're making a lot of money.

0:27Let's just structure this really well and make an actual website that we can sell this software through. Everybody sees the shiny trophy and the lifestyle which they aspire to have, but they don't really know what it takes and the sacrifices we have to make. I'll cry from time to time. It's intense. This shit's hard and we care about it a lot. We have a lot of problems and we get in a lot of fights, but they're all out of passion and they all bring us closer after the fight's done. Do you have any enemies or people coming after you? now before we jump into today's episode i just want to mention that this podcast is brought to you by me and everything that i have built to help you guys level up if you want to transform your physique build muscle lose body fat build strength then you have the thirst app this has everything inside that you could possibly need to get yourself in shape to hold yourself accountable as well i also have the digital playbook which is a step-by-step guide to help you guys build a following monetize the following and also build a strong personal brand this is everything which i have done over the past nearly 10 years to allow myself to live a life of financial freedom and also geographical freedom i can basically do whatever i want life is good and i also have my newsletter which has been revamped where i'll share exclusive podcast insights my raw thoughts on business fitness and much much more so if you're interested about any of those, check out the description.

1:47You'll find the links to all of them. Let's get cracking with the episode. What's up guys, welcome back to First Things Thirst. We are in New York and we have the Watt boys in the building. How are we doing? Great. Very excited. How did you guys meet each other? We met each other on Facebook. We were like 12 or 13 years old and he made a post in a Facebook community about shoes and I responded to it. He was looking for an iOS developer and And I was learning how to program iOS apps, iPhone apps. And I messaged him. He was like a kingpin in this Facebook community about shoes. So he would sell Yeezys and Jordans and all the crazy stuff that people wanted.

2:27And he was like the biggest personality in this 2 ,000-person Facebook group. But he was like 12 or 13 years old. So I didn't necessarily know that. But I saw him everywhere. He was the shoe plug. Pablo Escobar. How did you get into that? I had a buddy named Charlie in middle school who's wearing these sneakers one day and I wanted to buy them when I got home. So I went and looked them up and they're LeBron 10 Platinums. They were like$300. I was like, holy shit. Like that's, I don't have$300. They get$10 a week for allowance. I was like, I got to start saving up. So saved up, took my, I started by going to the mall.

3:00So my mom, dad and sister would come with me 4 a.m. Saturday morning. We'd camp out outside of finish line. Wait six hours just to make like$50 profit on each pair of shoe. but then I found out that you could buy shoes online. So I was like, this is so much easier. So then tried buying them online, sold out instantly, found out that people build software to buy the sneakers before they sell out, kind of like high-frequency trading, but for sneakers. So then I made a post one day and Stephen responded and we started building together. No way, how old were you both then at the time? We were like 13 years old.

3:2913? Yeah, so you knew how to code. I was learning how to code and I think I learned a lot through working with Cam. And yeah, I was building like a Mandarin study app for my phone and my parents maybe speak Chinese. And yeah, I think I was always into jailbreaking my iPod Touch and iPhone. And I was just pretty infatuated with like the whole Apple ecosystem and read a bunch of books. And my parents got me a laptop after a while of begging. They didn't really let me have any like video games or anything like that. but they got my laptop and Googled my way to knowing how to code a little bit. No way.

4:11So would you say that coding is quite a useful skill to have? I think so. I think if you know how to program and you know what people want, then I think it's a superpower. So what happened after that? After that, we started building together and it started out, we just had an iOS app. After we finished building, we started selling it. So it was an app that you could download on your phone and when sneakers would come out, if a sneaker was$200 and it was going to resell for$400. You can make$200 profit. So we would sell the bot for a call at$100 where people could pay for the software. Sneakers come out.

4:41It automatically adds it to your cart, puts in your credit card information and purchases the sneakers for you. And then we started scaling that. So the evolution. It would monitor Nike's Twitter. And when the second they tweeted a link, it would click it. And then it would buy the shoes before anybody else bought them. And we'd package that iOS app up. We built like a, maybe like a shitty WordPress website. and we started sending that WordPress site into the Facebook group and people bought it and then we would send them an email with the file and maybe they'd pay us on PayPal or something. And then that started to work out.

5:17We made a little bit of money and we were like, what the hell, this is kind of crazy and kept building other things from there. We built a bunch more sneaker bot software. We built some games. We built some messaging apps. We built some other marketplaces. We built agencies. we built some SaaS companies you kind of name it and I think it was pretty fun yeah learning some internet money going back to the the first business the sneaker bot thing was that just primarily for sneakers or could that be used for something else like you say for example if somebody's throwing a show and like it's guaranteed to sell out really quickly could that be used for something like that or was it just for sneakers to begin with people did a lot of ticketing stuff but I don't think we ever really got into that I think that that was like we were mostly focusing on on sneakers i think it's like a little bit um not as allowed to do tickets for whatever reason i actually don't know why um but i think it's a little bit more difficult weirdly red tapey yeah exactly people did it with like supreme clothing back in the old days so um it was like clothing and playstation 5 consoles anything that's limited demand i mean certainly even reservations in new york we actually have um little software here and there that can make reservations in new york still um so things like that are pretty cool but ticketing we didn't really do so much people do that but um we've never really been into that yeah okay so that was doing well made you a bit of money did you was that a business that you could sell or did you just have it running in the background um yeah it wasn't necessarily maybe look we didn't sell it maybe looking back we could have sold it but um it was it was a full-time focus i'd say for probably we might run 13, so probably until like 16, 17, 18, around that time, that's when we were working on it.

6:58We were really focused on selling the software. So we just continued scaling. If there was a big release, the goal would be to sell to 10 ,000 people or 10 ,000 people give us their email, their address, their credit card, where we run the software automatically for them. So it definitely wasn't a background thing either. We weren't really able to sell it and I don't think it was a background. It was very intoxicating focused and it was really a lot of work because you had to wake up basically every night a release happened and set everything up and then there's bugs flying everywhere and you got to like fix them within the span of minutes otherwise you missed the entire release.

7:36So I think it was a good exercise to, I mean, he dropped out of high school shortly after we started because I think it was a full-time thing. He was making so much money from selling all the shoes. I definitely wasn't making as much and my parents were a little bit more strict and maybe we go to school but he dropped out of high school And I think from there, we just had so many, many encounters of what it looks like to build internet businesses. All of our childhood, we did that. And then, yeah, I mean, I guess up until COVID, basically. And we had an agency at the time, and we were like, this is not really that fun anymore.

8:09We're having to deal with all these clients. And we're basically building a bunch of apps and web apps for whatever, like random companies. And we were like, let's just build a website builder. because that's what we're doing already. That's automated. And we built that for Twitch streamers. And I think that was really fun. And we were like, wow, we have all these users randomly signing up. And then that became... Because streamers didn't, they needed a, they didn't have a website. They were just streaming, but they had no like... Yeah, exactly. And all they had to do, they would just put in their Twitch URL and it would make a website for them automatically.

8:42So it was like Squarespace, but for streamers. Ah. And we would just go into people's Twitch chats and be like, hey, I love you so much. like i've made this website for you yesterday and they'd be like what the fuck like you made this website for me it was like all custom designed to them um and that was like the first inkling of like building a piece of software or someone um it's kind of like it's i think there's a lot of that's evolved into what a lot of what wap is today but it was just someone signs up they put in some information and they have a website and a storefront kind of thing where they can send traffic to it was the biggest streamer that i just haven't gotten that side i don't think it was that big you see a bunch of like random 20 viewer streams and we'd be like hey what's up I'm a huge fan and they'd be like what the hell nobody's ever done something like this for me so you gave it to them and then they would would they actually pay I don't think we worked on it for like a couple months and then we had a better idea yeah it literally sounds like you tried doing everything I think we may have we tried a lot what were the things that in the early days didn't work didn't work at all I think I mean we tried to build a messaging app I think it was a good example I mean but I think even then there's so many learnings you know so i wouldn't look back and say regret any different experiment that we tried because they were all we all we learned something really valuable for each of them but there's one app we made um it's called secret text and it was a way you could uh but before snapchat had had um disappearing messages and they only had photos we built like a um it would you could send a text message and it would it would uh self-destruct and it would be encrypted and um and you could send messages to your friends and i think um like mark cuban released a app called CyberDust at the same exact time and we're like, alright, this kind of sucks.

10:19It's tough, but I think that's probably a good example, although in that moment we learned how to build a messaging app. That's a pretty cool learning and maybe how hard it is to scale. That's an ambitious task to take on a messaging app, competing with all the other big timers. Yeah, totally. We are getting another look at that now in WAP land. so okay yeah i think growing up it was really like we were delusional and like the best way possible it was just like we were going to try everything and i think um a lot of those learnings have just tied into what we're doing now with all these ideas and projects was this startup cost ever an issue or when it comes to coding and building apps like it's actually not that expensive because in my experience i mean i have a fitness app and to get the basics put together does come at some initial cost and a lot of people they want to have their own app but it's not free obviously it depends on how many coders you're going to need to actually build the thing did it cost much for you guys or were you just doing it all yourself I think it was helpful I mean Stephen was I think the I would usually market it and sell it and Stephen would program it so like there's like we used Heroku in the early days and even if it seems like you have to pay for something I think there's a lot of ways to be really scrappy and to figure out how to be extremely resourceful and get things accomplish the same outcome without building your own app or without outlying a lot of cash and if you have the ability to do that, fantastic.

11:44But I think it's like, people are like, maybe I want my own app, but it's like, why do you want your own app? And it's like, maybe because you want to host your community, it's like, okay, well then use Discord. And like, people don't actually really care. It's like, oh wow, I'm in this one specific app versus another app. They don't really give a shit at all. It's more of like a, it's the perceived perception from the creator, I think, a lot of times. And that's like a random example, but I guess my point is that we would, I mean, we'd sold shoes to make a couple extra thousand dollars and just make it work, I guess.

12:12So I don't think that the startup, I don't think the cost of getting started is ever that real. I think it's always, there's always a way to not pay a high cost. So when did the origins of what come about? During COVID. We were doing this website builder for Twitch streamers and then that started to become a drop shipping SaaS I don't know how it actually went from Twitch Streamers website builder to SaaS but it did and then we were building this thing called Frosted it was like a it would arbitrage Amazon to eBay products so you could go and link your eBay account and then you could sell Amazon products for a couple dollars extra so people would be buying on eBay and you'd be ordering it on Amazon and delivering it to their house people would pay for that software and we were doing that for a little bit and then we had someone reach out who was making a bunch of money in these forums selling sneaker bots.

13:13So they would go on and same kind of shit we did when we were younger, they'd be like, hey, I have this software available for$10 a day. Anybody want to rent it? Is that the same thing we should? Yeah, exactly. It's the same thing that we did when we were younger and we started to sell, Cam started to sell software through that forum and we were like, okay this is we're making a lot of money like let's just structure this really well and make an actual website that we can sell the software through and um we did that and then it was way easier and people people liked it yeah so during covid people everyone was reselling sneakers and supreme growing up and then during covid things like playstation 5s retail at 500 everyone's sitting at home all day they want um outdoor pools they want playstation 5 so 500 playstation was reselling for 1500 so the software was in so like such high demand um for people buying from like Best Buy and Walmart, all these companies.

14:02So the market just spiked again. And if you had one of these pieces of software that could buy a PlayStation 5, if you could buy 10 in a day, you made$10 ,000. So you could rent that piece of software out for a day for$1 ,000. Very niche, cool market. Super niche. Well, in COVID, when people were spending online, what were the dominant platforms back then? I guess Amazon. Amazon was huge. Best Buy, Walmart. I think it's highly concentrated at that. I mean, maybe like a long tail of Shopify stores, but I think definitely Amazon won COVID. So summarize for me again, why was, first of all, how do you come up with the name?

14:41We just had a bunch of domains that we bought when we were younger for any project. And this was next on the list. And we just went in, it was WAP.io at first and sounded cool, four letters. We had a cool W logo. And then - On random nights, Stephen would just buy expiring domains. So on GoDaddy back in the old days, you can see all the domains that just expired. And that's WeHelp offers pop. You help what, sorry? Offers pop is WAP's standard. Yeah. Okay, so when did it start to build some traction? So I think the biggest thing with WAP is that we were trying to solve our own problem. So we were just building software that we needed to sell our software.

15:19And we experienced traction pretty much immediately because we were actually selling things. And we had the sell side covered. So it was immediate traction. And, I mean, a couple thousand dollars a day at first. And I think that became a couple of$10 ,000 a day in the next couple of months. And then all of a sudden it was$100 ,000 a day. And six months later, and people were basically coming on. How are you getting people to, where are they coming from? Yeah. Like, were you advertising? Yeah. Well, the first thing we did, back to your question on like startup costs, we had a product, the dropshipping tool that had about a thousand users.

15:50That was the same users that were using that product would be people who would buy and sell sneaker bots. So we added a wheel to that product. Like Stephen mentioned, we had the initial software. So with the marketplace, you have supply and demand. So we were the sellers initially. We added free to this product at a thousand people a day. You could go on and spin a wheel and 30 people a day would win a free bot from our website. So that's how we jumpstart. We didn't run any paid ads. We didn't pay anyone for posts. We just had these users and we gave away the product for free out the gate where we covered it.

16:17And then every day you'd get 30 new signups. And then it started to come out from there. So we found all of the sneaker reselling communities where people were actively buying and selling sneakers. and we just, you would focus like one day you'd be like, okay, we have 100 customers, we have 30 sellers, we need more sellers. So we'd go partner with a community that had 2 ,000 sellers and give them a promo, like some sort of incentive to go sign up. And now we have more sellers and buyers. So we'd go find another community that had 5 ,000 buyers and say, the first 100 people to use this code get$5 off there.

16:45And you just kind of like balance out. And who's doing that? I was just messaging every single Discord owner, yeah. Yeah, okay. Was it just you two or who was the first few employees that you got? No, we have another co-founder named Jack, and Jack and I would program, and Cam would go to town on connecting the dots with customers and trying to figure out who could use it. And then we worked with someone named Jackson, who is another programmer as well, and I think he was doing customer support, and a pretty tiny, lethal group of people. I feel like I need to make more friends with programmers.

17:28so what to begin with what was the first few things that were was selling on there was it sneaker community that came on or was it yeah it was the only sneaker community and it was maybe like uh adjacent like tangential it's like um uh resellers generally so people that are selling on amazon people that were selling um heaters during covid and ps5 pools for people's backyard um all that crew so a lot of software developers actually would come on because they were the ones who built the software um and that was the first product line that we really supported because if you look at wop it's like we're a discovery layer so people can find what they want to buy and then we're a payments layer so people can pay for what they want to buy and the last part is that people can actually consume what they want to buy so if it's software then they would get that software delivered to them automatically they wouldn't have to worry about authenticating with the software and that was the first type of product that we supported so a lot of developers would come on on the sell side and um quickly that became uh the seller the sellers were like, hey, can we also add Discord access and let people join the Discord automatically when they buy the software?

18:30And we're like, sure, it makes sense. Maybe you want to have a community with your software on top. And that's what people did. And then I think people saw that and they're like, wait, we don't actually even need to have software. Why not just sell a Discord community and put a lot of content in there and make it worth paying for? And that's what happened. And I think that if you look at the barrier of starting a software versus a Discord server, is quite different, right? Anybody can go on discord.com and start a Discord server, but not everybody can go and program a software, especially not in 2021, which maybe now is a little different.

19:01And I think that started to become even more lower barrier. It's like, okay, then you can also go and add your courses. And then now you can go and create your own chat on the platform. You don't even need to go to Discord. And I think that that's kind of the mindset that we have is just trying to eliminate the barrier to entry. So going back to your question, I mean, the first people that used it were software developers and that became entrepreneurs generally. And I think that as we continue to grow and build out more functionality or less functionality, in some cases, to our platform, we can attract a broader base of entrepreneurs.

19:30How did you go about the payment processing? So I think actually a lot of our prior projects throughout our high school days were around payments. I think we're pretty deep in payments. I think we've been deep in crypto for quite a long time. And I think it's somewhat of a passion project markets and how people pay. So I think we just had a lot of expertise in payments already. And how do we go about it? We programmed a lot of payments infrastructure and used the tools that we knew existed from when we were younger, when we first started. So most people are paying through which means? Credit card.

20:06Credit card and debit card and crypto, PayPal. We try to have it all. And payments is a real problem for people, right? You have a lot of people that can't accept payments for whatever reason. There's a lot of monopolistic behavior that big banks have. And I think that that's perhaps even more real in other countries. If you're a government in a smaller country, and you're going to prevent people from accepting payments, that's a very real problem. And that's not even talking about people that can spend money. So you have a problem on both sides. And to that point, we want to be a very accessible payments platform and support a whole lot of different options.

20:50So from day one, we built payments infrastructure that is pretty adaptable, and it's not overly built into one service or anything like that. So yeah, people can pay with crypto, PayPal, credit card, debit card, Cash App, and Venmo, and Apple Pay. So yeah. So literally everything. Literally everything. Have you ever thought about getting into that world? A payments world? Payment processing platforms. Yeah, I think, I mean, some people probably consider us a payment platform very much. I think we look at it as a very critical part of the business stock. So it's not that we want to be a payments platform, but we want to be a platform for people to earn money and to start businesses and have success as an internet entrepreneur.

21:38And payments is a very critical part of that. But I don't think that we wake up and say, we're really excited to be a payments platform. I don't think that that's, I think it's only one part of the bigger stack. Yeah, I think on that note like we, when we first started WAP you could only rent out SneakerBot. So it was like we only had the billing support to pay for like a five day rental. And then there was a company called Gaten Jens, random SneakerBot company that said, hey I want to actually use this to sell monthly subscriptions. So it was never like we're going to build a massive payment process.

22:06It was just like solving real customer problems. Like this customer doesn't want to sell a license key for five days they want to sell it for 30 days renewing we didn't have that functionality so i think looking back we built a lot of payment infrastructure but it was really like steven said if you want to run an online business payments is one of the key pieces that people struggle with so through solving customer problems we've built like just a pretty robust payments network okay um and talking about courses because i think i can't remember what year was whether it was last year or the year before but like online courses became very popular and there was the emergence of school sam owens he created that and then at one point i remember everybody was on school but they had the issue i don't think they had their own payment processing built within it i think that was one thing that was an issue with them so you guys on what you also sell courses it could be a platform for putting your course on there yeah people can host courses on WAP.

23:02You can go and you can film and you can upload and you can create quizzes and you can have a chat underneath the course and yeah. Tell me about, there must have been some headaches or things which have gone wrong. Yeah, I mean, I think so much. I think a lot of it is just trying to convince yourself that you can figure out what to do and there's literally tens or hundreds of problems every single day and there always have been and I think it's it's whenever we have problems i mean i mean we have to just like they get harder and harder but we have to kind of just run through through the wall and um and fight the problem head on so i think i mean there's been like tactical examples our site goes down still you know like we've got the biggest streamer that's already used the platform stream today and um the chat messages are flying everywhere people are going crazy in in the messages and that kind of took down that that one area of the site so that happened all the time too many people too many people sending chat messages okay it's like and it's not everybody on the platform would experience an outage it's just for that screen but because there's so much happening in the in the ui it actually is difficult to um people's computer to handle that so there's like little things like that that are very detailed and then there's like higher level problems where it's like okay how are we going to um enter this new market and how are we going to build make sure that we're building the right product and um i think it is when we first started the problems were like how we're going to make sure that everybody gets a customer support ticket answered if there's a thousand people on the site and we have three people and two of them are coding one of them is getting all the customers like what are we supposed to do um and i think that's still the problem now we have like 25 000 30 000 tickets a month um people that are opening customer support queries and i mean someone has to answer those and this is for either the site not functioning the way i want they want it to or people who've had issues with buying a product yeah both um it could be it could be either it could be people that are they're just wanting to talk it's just kind of crazy and when you're dealing with uh internet and like public people can do a lot of different things and they um it's really fascinating to learn about all that stuff and things you never really expected um to come up come up with more usage and i think that those are really the source of our problems But of course, we want more users.

25:18It's also a problem. It's kind of like... I think there's also... I think back to the early days, like about a year in, when we were building this, NFT started blowing up. And we... To your question of like problems that have happened, I think in the early days, we would see these kind of like shiny objects and lose focus and jump on them. So we built like a ton of NFT infrastructure. And NFTs were very popular for a year. And then it was like, like our core product was you could verify ownership of an NFT to get access to a Discord server. And we also let people mint NFTs and WAP. And it's like, it's amazing you see a ton of growth.

25:44But then three months later, it's like all that growth is gone. Like it was practically we did a bunch of work for nothing and you learn a lot throughout the process. And I don't think we look at it like a negative experience, but I think it's fun because it's the, and there's always a million things you can focus on. Like there's always a million things you can do, but what is like the number one priority that's going to drive 80 % of the growth? And I think this time around, like there's, I feel like there's more distractions in the world now than ever, but going through those experiences of like we tried to do everything, we realized, okay, let's just do a couple of things and be the best in the world at it.

26:10And those things are the things that will drive the most growth. so there's also it's just like fun shit like that happens where you spend six months building something that is just okay this actually did nothing for the business at all like this episode is brought to you by whoop the all new whoop is here the only wearable that turns your health and fitness data into personalized guidance now seven percent smaller with 14 days of battery life i've been wearing whoop since 2021 and i've been wearing it every single day it's a device which i have used to improve my training, improve my sleep, and stay away from the things which are definitely not good for me.

26:45It's been a game changer. Now, Whoop includes a heart screener with on-demand ECG readings, so you can check in on your heart anytime and share results with your healthcare provider. It also includes a health span, a new feature that demystifies the aging process and shows how your daily habits impact your pace of aging, as well as hormonal insights for personalized guidance throughout your cycle or pregnancy it's the only wearable that gives you a truly comprehensive view of your body designed to help you improve your performance longevity and overall health so you can join now at join whoop.com forward slash first things thirst to get your first month for free let's get back to the episode did you guys think that like nfts were going to be around for a while because i was always very skeptical about it i mean i think at least one moment we're like, wow, in five years, people aren't even going to be using their house keys anymore.

27:38They're going to be using an NFT. But I mean, I think, to Cam's point, I think we kind of just got lost in the sauce for a couple months. But I also think that we met a really amazing group of people through that, and we learned a lot of interesting technical things, and I think that I wouldn't have gone back and not done that. I think it's like a, everything's obvious in hindsight, but the problems that you go through are very valuable to learn and go through a little bit of... Did you guys buy a load of NFTs? We bought a fair share. What was the most expensive one? Yeah, maybe Bored Ape. I don't know.

28:21Yeah, probably Bored Ape. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's weird. I luckily didn't get too caught up in it but um it's hard you mean it's really hard to know because a lot of these trends come and go and with the way the world is at the moment it's like who knows like right direction every day is a completely different day like who would have thought ai would be coming along as fast as it is right now who knows if that's not another nft thing and and all of a sudden people are like wait um i don't know if that's like as likely they are but um you never know right it's always like wait till quantum computing comes out and then there's um everything's kind of rendered useless and who knows?

29:00I think technology is surprising. Have you been using it to help with the coding process? Definitely. Yeah, a lot of... For someone who is mentally challenged like me, try and explain how you would do that. I think you can, I mean, you literally can go on to any AI chat GPT and just say, how do I program? I think you have to know what you want to build and I think that's actually the harder part and that's kind of what AI is showing is like even though you can program anything with AI, like you still need to program something. And like, what are you actually programming? So what do you want to build is the first question I would ask you.

29:38And that needs to be extremely clear. And then you can simply say, hey, AI, I want to build, what do I start? And then it can kind of tell you what to do. But what about, for example, you who is already a wizard of coding? How would you use AI to take it to the next level? Yeah, it could say things like, hey, make this page have a bigger headline. I don't know. Make this button look cooler. Make a sound when you click a button. Or maybe give me a bunch of test data so that I can simulate what this page would look like. Or hey, make this button work. Make this button actually pop a pop-up view.