From Zero to $500M+ GMV: How Hunter Dickinson Built Whop’s First Sales Engine

When Whop, then a growing e-commerce marketplace, acquired ZenTask in 2022, the now-leading social commerce platform wasn't just buying software or a set of tools to take their product portfolio to the next level. They were betting on the brains behind it, an engineering student in Australia who had already built one of web3's most influential communities and, as it turns out, would go on to supercharge their growth.

That person was Hunter Dickinson, initially Head of Strategy and now Head of Partnerships at Whop. Going from founder to operator, he was able to engineer (no pun intended) Whop's transition from a primarily product-led marketplace with no sales team into a sales-powered growth machine - to the tune of $130 million in monthly GMV, 70% of that coming from the sales organization that he built from the ground up.

Hunter's story is one of a little bit of hustle, a lot of tactical discipline, plenty of founder intuition, and the sort of hard work that helps turn good ideas into great infrastructure. Whop's product was already making waves, but Hunter proved that a strategic approach to sales could take a promising platform and turn it into one of the internet's hottest properties.

No Sales Team, No Problem

When Hunter Dickinson joined Whop as Head of Strategy in 2023, the company didn't have a sales team. The NYC-based startup, which was on its way to a $17+ million Series A funding round involving some of the top VCs in the business, relied almost entirely on product-led growth to scale its marketplace, with self-serve onboarding for creators and community owners.

All of that was about to change, and fast.

Whop had just acquired Hunter's startup, ZenTask, a decentralized job-matching platform, for $100,000. The product was folded into Whop's growing tech stack, and provided the foundational intellectual property for expansion into products like gated software, digital courses, and membership communities - more on last one later.

Part of his initial remit was to integrate and continue to grow ZenTask, but Hunter also had an open mandate to identify new growth levers. And, as it happened, outbound sales quickly became one of those said levers.

"Over the last 6 months, our sales team has closed $10M+ in sales," Hunter wrote on his LinkedIn profile, before providing the punchline. "The funny thing is, our sales team only consists of one person. Me."

That sounds like a flex, but it was actually the start of something a whole lot bigger.

Scaling the Sales Machine

By the end of 2024, Hunter had officially moved into his new (and current) role as Whop's Head of Partnerships, and was getting busy scaling the sales org that he had personally proven the need for. His own overall contribution to the business was also going from strength to strength, to date amounting to well over $100 million, a far from insignificant chunk of Whop's lifetime volume of $1.3 billion.

His fingerprints are all over some of Whop's biggest wins outside of straight-up sales, too. It was Hunter who helped Whop land their headline partnership with Iman Gadzhi, one of the internet's most influential education creators.

He also masterminded Whop's exclusive link-up with Splitit, and has brokered payments infrastructure deals with some of the biggest names in the fintech business, including Stripe, Klarna, Adyen, and Checkout.com.

Throughout all of this, he had hired a sales team that now numbers seven, in addition to four account management and four customer support staff bringing his own cross-functional org within Whop to fifteen strong.

Given that he was effectively the first member of Whop's entire sales arm, Hunter has built that entire function up from scratch - from the sales playbooks that the team have since used to bring in upward of $526 million GMV, to all of the processes that have made the team a contributor of more than 70% of the company's new monthly GMV.

His team's results have completely transformed how Whop operates, taking it from a product-led company to one that drives revenue predominantly through outbound sales.

Hunter himself works in close coordination with Whop CEO Steven Schwartz, planning out the company's strategy payments roadmap and ensuring product-market fit in a dynamic business that's right at the cutting edge of social commerce.

Strategic partner to the CEO as well as engineering, key driver of Whop's payments, product, and risk roadmaps, leader of the company's main revenue-driving force - so what exactly is the Hunter Dickinson origin story?

The Web3 Roots of a Sales Architect

To really understand the man himself as well as how he has become a nine-figure-plus asset to his employers, it's worth taking a trip back in time to 2021 and about 10,000 miles east to Canberra, Australia's capital territory and home to one of the country's top schools, The Australian National University.

Economic disruptions caused by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic had, among other things, contributed to the rise of cryptocurrency into the public consciousness. And not just crypto, but concepts like decentralization and blockchain-based technologies such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) were being discussed in coffee shops around the world.

NFTs have always divided opinion, and with the benefit of hindsight it's easy to assert that the majority of the projects in this area lacked any sort of substance, utility, or value. Even when the entire NFT space was on fire, many projects looked destined for disaster.

But one factor separated the projects that saw actual traction from the ones that crashed and burned: Community.

"In order to deliver and create long term value for your project, if you are not putting community first, you're missing the point," said Hunter at the time. "I believe being able to build a community of positive, like-minded individuals that are aligned with your values is the key to building a strong foundation for any project."

And build a strong project he did. Hunter co-founded one of Web3's most influential projects, ZenApe, steering the project's direction from the get-go and hiring its leadership team.

In amongst all the hype-and-bubbles chaos of the NFT scene, ZenApe offered actual utility by giving holders access to a private community. This community model garnered considerable praise from across the world of finance, including top Angel investor and Tinder co-founder Justin Mateen who credits Hunter personally for his work with ZenApe in unlocking real membership value from NFTs rather than just speculation.

However, founding and steering a thriving, decentralized membership community isn't the only reason the ZenApe chapter of Hunter's career is so notable.

Moving On Up

The fact is, ZenApe wasn't just a homebrew crypto project slapped together and thrown out into the digital world. Hunter and his co-founders formulated every aspect of the project in meticulous detail, and despite plenty of playfulness - the leadership group was called "Council of the Apes" - ZenApe was a proper, professional start-up.

This was reflected by its valuation, attracting an exceptional A$3 million in pre-seed funding, well above the going average for any sort of start-up Down Under and a figure achieved very much thanks to the sort of investor relationships that Hunter was able to establish.

Powered by their outstanding pre-seed round, the ZenApe project was able to proceed with NFT sales that brought in multi-million dollar revenues. With the "digital oil" cryptocurrency Ether then trading at around $4,000, the eight #3 rarity NFTs in the ZenApes collection sold for between 10-15 ETH each. The entire collection has a total trading volume of 3,000 ETH on NFT marketplace OpenSea.

Rather than sit back and enjoy the fruits of all of this success, Hunter was already moving onto his next venture. ZenApe was a proof of talent, in a sense - his own.

Experience hiring the leadership team, steering product direction, the decentralized ethos, and all of the other lessons learned at ZenApe were put immediately to use as he founded ZenTask - a sliding doors moment that eventually led to his joining Whop.

Soma Capital's Aneel Ranadive has highlighted Hunter's role in turning first ZenApe and then ZenTask into two of Web3's most influential projects, as well as their importance in making Whop what it is today.

Scaling Sales Is Just the Start

Hunter has personally driven close to $200,000,000 in sales since joining Whop in the wake of ZenTask's acquisition, and the sales engine he has built in less than two years now contributes $130 million to the business every month, accounting for 70% of new monthly GMV.

His work shows what's possible when the right person is unleashed in the right environment, going from student founder to the architect of a nine-figure revenue engine inside one of the most-watched creator marketplaces and social commerce platforms on the Internet.

Whop dubs itself "the make money app" today, and it's gotten to where it is thanks in part to Hunter Dickinson's understanding of the fact that acquisitions aren't just exits but also entry points. His sale of ZenTask to Whop wasn't a windfall, but it gave him the perfect platform to scale his work in a much larger ecosystem.

And Whop was able to reap the rewards, their organic growth being quickly levelled up by Hunter's dynamic approach to outbound sales and the quick establishment and scaling of his internal sales organization.