Hunter Dickinson Podcast Transcript
Hunter Dickinson joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast.
Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Hunter Dickinson. Hunter Dickinson is the head of partnerships at Whop, where he built the company’s entire sales organization from a one person operation himself into its primary growth engine, generating over 526 million in gross merchandise volume.
An entrepreneur at his core Hunter journey to Whop began with the acquisition of his decentralized hiring platform, Zen Task, which he developed while leading the NFT Community Zen Ape. Today, he leads a cross-functional team and steers Whop strategic partnerships with industry giants like Stripe and Iman Gaze, submitting his reputation as a key innovator in the community, monetization and platform growth. A fact underscored by praise from tech leaders like Tinder co-founder Justin Matte.
Well, good afternoon, Hunter. Welcome to the show.
Hunter Dickinson: Hey, Brian, great to meet you.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it making the time. You’re in New York City and I am in Kansas City, so we’re an hour apart, but what’s most important is you taking the time outta your day to jump on a podcast. Hunter, I’m gonna jump into your first question.
You went from building Zen task inside a Web3 startup to helping scale Whop to over 1.3 billion in gross merchandise volume. What were the most pivotal moments in that transition from founder to high growth operator?
Hunter Dickinson: Yeah, for sure. I think when we were doing Zen Task and Zen Ape more broadly, that was at a point in my life where I was at in high school, just transitioning into college and in my first year of college, and it was a very exciting time starting a company, especially in Web3 during that period of time in college where it was a new technology.
It was something that, you know, was innovative, it was something different. Like when you looked around at the college. Uh, you know, I was at an Australian National University in Canberra. There wasn’t really anyone doing anything like it, and I think for a while there it was really exciting to be a founder and it was novel to wake up every day and be like, I have responsibility to work on this thing.
I have responsibility to make it better. But I think after doing that for a couple of years. I realized that I wanted to crave something more and be around people like me. And for Zen Task, I think it was, I was surrounded by people that were, you know, kind of along the ride, but there wasn’t really people that were like me and driving it and wanted to do really cool stuff.
And so I think for me. Probably one of the most pivotal moments was me realizing that in order to do something great, I need to be surrounded by people that are equally as passionate as me. And I think whether it’s being a founder, whether it’s being an employee, whether it’s being a, you know, a high growth operator, I think it’s all like.
One of the biggest things for me was realizing, wow, I need to be surrounded by like-minded people that also want to do, uh, great things. Um, so I would say that’s the first thing that really, really shifted for me. And then I think tandem to that, a huge part of it is, you know, you have to put your egos to the side and, you know, realize that okay.
Yes, I could be a founder, which is a very nebulous term, but you know, you could be a founder of, uh, a hundred thousand dollars startup, or you could be a high growth operator and someone pivotable to hopefully, you know, a hundred billion dollars, $10 billion company, which is what we’re trying to do with Whop.
So I would say the two biggest things for me was, one, realizing that in order to do great things, you need a team of people. ’cause no matter how much you want to do that, David Goggins 4:00 AM to, you know. 12:00 AM Day of grinding, you need great people. Then the second part of that is death of the Ego.
Where that realization that, okay, wow, and this was coming towards two years into it of running Zen Task. Wow, I need to, being a founder and having that title is cool, but what actual real value impact do I have on people’s lives and does the title determine how I do that? Probably not is what I realized.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. I really do. You know, you started out really young. I really like your story, Zen Task, leaving high school, going into college, and you’ve got a lot of energy. I can tell when people, I have guests on the podcast, I can hear it in their voice. I just love your story and then obviously at some point you’re like, gosh, you know, being a founder’s great, but I really wanna grow and do something different, maybe even be more great than I already am.
And what you’d found is, you know, you need to surround yourself with like-minded people, people that are actually there that share that same energy and also push you a little bit. Right? So, but I like how you put your ego aside. I always say put your ego in your back pocket and sometimes you gotta sit down, right?
But, um, that’s so important. And again, building a great team requires great people. And I just really love the culture that you’re building there at wat. Hunter, my next question, you were the only person on the sales team and closed 10 million plus on your own. How did you approach building a scalable sales engine from scratch, and what were the first systems or hires you put in place?
Hunter Dickinson: Yeah, for sure. I think we’re coming up on a hundred billion now, which is really exciting. I think for me, I had the opportunity, I was, I mean at the time I think I was, I think maybe fifth or so employee at Whop or very early on, and I had a lot of opportunity to work with Cameron and I still work with Cameron today.
I’m on a day to day the co-founder and head of growth of Whop. And I think for me like. There’s only so much one person can do. Right. And, and at the time there wasn’t like any like AI augmentation. And still to this day, I don’t think it’s that great for one person to output more than a hundred people’s output.
Right. And I think that sort of was like, okay, I’m crushing it in sales. We wanna make this really big. I think that was the first initial push to be like, okay, we need to build something and we need to build a sales team. And so for me, I’d never build a sales team, but I think there’s some core heuristics to that.
I found that, you know, it was like, okay, I’ve never built a sales team. One of the core principles that I need to do to build this sales team, and one is you need to hire people. So you have to get good at interviewing. You have to really, I think it’s funny. Interviewing has also helped me in my dating life as well, because at the end of the day, it’s just asking questions and listening and then asking more questions, right?
So I think it’s interviewing, and then secondly, it’s do I actually enjoy this person and working with this person to be able to coach them? And then obviously three, you know, how much context gap is there between the day-to-day of selling. And what this person currently has. And so I think once you have the heuristics of, okay, what are the first principles that I need to do to make this work?
I think that made scaling pretty easy. And so what that looked like was that looked like, okay, if I need to hire well. I have to get a good at interviewing, but also I need to get good at getting candidates. And I think that led to the first system, which was, okay, who are all of the people in our network?
And then who are the recruiting recruiters or firms that maybe are interesting we can use to then be able to say, okay, here’s our jd, here’s our job description. How do we mass, you know, distribute that? And I think if you have a really good job description that you know, says. Hey, this is what, exactly what the role is.
Here’s exactly what’s expected, and that actually matches what the actual role is, which I think is one of the hardest parts. Then it makes it very easy to interview and and hire people as long as they know what they’re getting into, and I think that’s oftentimes where. Maybe the hiring process fails is that you maybe add a bunch of fluffy content to your job description and you, you make your system a little over complicated than it needs to be.
When reality is, okay, how do I get qualified candidates? How do I talk to those qualified candidates? How do they determine their good? And then how do I hire them? And I think from there, you know, we started with. Three people that we originally brought on to end up in working out that classic hire slowly and fire fast.
If they’re not a fit, we end up just going into, you know, cadences around reporting. What are actually the important metrics, you know, a sales rep needs to move day to day? Is it activities? Is it the amount of phone calls that they’re having? Is it the actual amount of deals and the value of those deals they’re closing?
You can build those pretty easy from there, but I would say. Honestly, the biggest thing for me was how do I get the right people in the door? And I think that was arguably probably the most important system that we’ve made. How do we get the right people in?
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate you breaking that down for us and I’m glad to hear, gosh, I said 10 million and now you guys are probably closer to a hundred million in sales now.
But what I heard, and I’ll highlight some things that, uh, you mentioned, you know, you did a great job as a sales person there on your own, but then you had to learn along the way and building a great sales team and that those core principles you mentioned were interviewing and hiring people. Do you really enjoy working with this person or the people that you hire?
And then how much content gap of selling and what the knowledge that that person actually possesses. Also, last thing I just leveraging outside agencies sometimes to assist in finding great candidates is also very helpful. So appreciate that. Hunter. Let’s talk about Zent task, a decentralized job matching tool that became core IP for Whop’s marketplace.
What was the original idea behind it and how did you evolve it into a scalable product offering?
Hunter Dickinson: Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, Zen task was end up being an acquisition as well as an aqua hire to Whop, and so I’ll touch that on after. But I think the original idea was really just like, okay, if you think about what getting a job is today, it’s really just like.
You either build a personal brand, you get some sort of word of mouth referral, or you’re on LinkedIn and maybe you get picked up by a recruiter. Right? And so I think, I think for us, we were like, okay, those are the three different mediums that exist. How do we, how do we make it so we can bring that into, you know, Web3 context where, you know, maybe people.
Especially with the rise of aliases that were happening at the time and like nicknames and usernames where, you know, maybe individuals didn’t necessarily want to dock who they were and maybe put their full name on the internet. And you know, there was obviously like people, especially in crypto, was a huge part of anonymity.
We thought that there was a really good market gap for zen tasks to exist where how do we, for example, take different data points that. You know, maybe are not necessarily doxing, the credentials of an individual. What are those data points? How do we map them? And then how do we give like a two-sided marketplace where, you know, someone that was in Web3 could request a job, and then someone who’s in Web3 and, and both of them following by the istic of anonymity.
And the values of crypto and, and Web3 at the time, how could they find each other really easily? And so it started off as that and there was some interesting things like community functionality associated two-sided marketplaces. And then when we came to Whop, me and a couple partners via, we ended up joining Whop I, it was really, Whop already had a, the skeleton.
Of here and there some marketplace. But what we really did was we really bootstrapped a lot of what we learned about the supply and demand of Zen Task and the challenges that we found. We said, okay, we can apply this to wap. And today, you know, I think the Whop marketplace gets about two to 4 million visitors per week, and it’s really focused on selling online digital products.
And I think for us. All marketplaces are, are kind of the same. AirBNB for example, has gone through 30 different iterations of their marketplace. But I think we could bring over a lot of a, the core tech and then two, obviously just like our, our expertise of, you know, trying to make it work, especially in a more fringe space to Whop, which is going pretty successful for us.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. Appreciate the backstory on the integration. Obviously the Zen Task was acquired by Whop, you know, leveraging it. You went into the Web3 space, which we love here. We talk a lot, a lot of guests here. But obviously unless you’re out there, as you mentioned, building your personal brand or referred by a colleague or a friend or a LinkedIn recruiter, you wanted to make it easier for folks to be found without having to put all their personal information out there.
And I think that’s pretty cool. I just love how the integration came along and and leveraging your platform, your ideas has actually helped accelerate Whop’s growth. So I really like that. Hunter. The last question of the day I have for you is looking ahead, how do you see platforms like WAP reshaping digital commerce for creators, and what’s your vision for scaling beyond the current gross merchandise value and product suite?
Hunter Dickinson: I think the thing that wakes me up every single day is I had the opportunity when I was 19 with Zen Ape and Zen Task to do something I was passionate about and make money from it. And I think like when we look at today’s current landscape, right? You have AI constantly accelerating. You have people that are like, okay.
What happens if AI does get smarter than me? What happens if companies, you know, choose and are choosing to, you know, no longer hire, you know, maybe more junior people and, and really it’s only, you know, senior and people with deep expertise with AI that are able to thrive. I think that has the question of what happens to the future of jobs, especially in America.
Like what happens to, how are people gonna make income? And I think what, what’s really interesting for me about Whop and just creators in general is that it’s really a movement towards a sort of unification of between income and passion. And I think for us, like. We wanna make it as easy as possible, similar to maybe how Uber gave an outlet for people that were interested in driving or in general, they kind of created a new category of job.
We think that exact same thing can happen with being a creator, which I would say is synonym with entrepreneur, a business owner, and doing something you’re passionate about. So I think the end goal. How can we take what successful businesses are doing today on our platform and generally broader around the creator economy and and small businesses and entrepreneurship, and how do we make it so that we can almost standardize that so that if someone’s interested in, you know, podcasting like yourself, you can say, okay, I’m interested in podcasting, and then we can give you a feedback loop of giving that sort of skillset set.
Here is the information or here’s the things you need to post, or here’s the different things you need to do on your landing pages to maybe make an income or sustainable income. And so I think for us, that’s the end goal. And working backwards from that and and increasing GMV and increasing our product suite.
I think that really starts off with one nailing payments because people can’t make an income if you can’t. Accept or receive currency. Right? And so for us, you know, we’re doing a huge launch here in a second where we’re able to pay out to 241 different different countries we’re able to pay out. In crypto.
You’re able to receive money from almost all those countries besides maybe sanctioned countries. And that’s the first step. And then from there, it’s okay, what experiences do consumers want to have? Well, maybe it isn’t just a course, maybe it isn’t just a forum post, or maybe it isn’t just a community.
Maybe you wanna offer someone a podcasting SaaS, right? And so we wanna make that vertical SaaS, as we’re calling it, easy as possible, where a developer can build a SaaS and they can do distribution within our platform, and you can sell that. And then layering on top of that is a marketplace where people can discover these amazing different businesses that are entrepreneurs doing.
So I think in terms of our product suite and how it’ll evolve, I think that’s expanding into new things. Events SaaS right now, we’re a lot in information products. I think that’s nailing payments and how people can accept money and commoditizing money, and I think it’s really making it, people start to question what’s going on?
What jobs am I gonna do? What am I gonna do with my future? I think it’s incentive aligning and taking advantage of that to enable people to make money off what they’re passionate about and what they’re skilled off of, which today I don’t think exists for the majority of people.
Brian Thomas: This is awesome. I really like this.
The time that we’re living in, it allows for so much here, especially in the US as you know, but I really like your story. You were able to really make an income starting out, doing the thing that you were loved, that you were passionate about, and I like the idea of that term. You use unification of income and passion, right?
Being a creator. And what I like about your platform is you’re gonna provide that feedback loop to those creators so they can grow and improve. And by doing this, creating this, I call it a creator economy, helping these creators with the tools that they need to be successful. And I think that’s just amazing and I’m very much pro your platform right now, so I appreciate all the insights you’ve provided us and our audience today.
It was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Hunter Dickinson: That was good. Thank you so much, Brian, for having me on. Best of luck with everything.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Hunter Dickinson Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
