← The Digital Executive
The Digital Executive
Hunter Dickinson on Building Whop’s Creator Economy and Scaling Beyond Sales | Ep 1094
00:16:54
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Welcome to Coruscant 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 wap, 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's journey to wat began with the acquisition of his decentralized hiring platform Zentask, which he developed while leading the NFT community Zen Ape. Today he leads a cross functional team and steers WOP strategic partnerships with industry giants like Stripe and Iman Gadzi, cementing his reputation as a key innovator in the the community monetization and platform growth. A fact underscored by praise from tech leaders like Tinder co founder Justin Mateen. Well, good afternoon Hunter. Welcome to the show.
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Hey Brian, great to meet you.
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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 out of your day to jump on a podcast. Hunter, I'm going to jump into your first question. You went from building Zentask inside a Web3 startup to helping scale WAP to over 1.3 billion in gross merchandise volume. What were the most pivotal moments in that transition from founder to high growth operator?
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Yeah, for sure. I think when we were doing Zentask and Zen Ape more broadly, that was at a point in my life where I was at in high school, just transitioning into college 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, 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, 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 a great things. And so, 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 ego 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 a hundred thousand dollars startup or you could be a high growth operator and someone pivotal to hopefully, you know, a hundred billion dollar, ten billion company, which is what we're trying to do with wap. So I, 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. Because no matter how much you want to do that. David Goggins 4:00am to you know, 12:00am 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 is 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 a title determine how I do that? Probably not, is what I realized.
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B
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, 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 is great, but I really want to 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 got to sit down. Right, but 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 Wall 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?
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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 WAP or very early on. And I had a lot of opportunity to work with Cameron and I still work with Cameron today on a day to day the co founder and head of growth of wop. And I think for me, like there's only so much one person can do, right? 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 want to 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, was like, okay, I've never built a sales team. What are 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, 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 hire people as long as they know what they're getting into. And I think that's oftentimes where, you know, 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 they're 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. Two end up didn't working out that classic hired 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 deal 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?
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Thank you. I appreciate you breaking that down for us. And I'm glad to hear, gosh, I said 10 million. Now you guys are probably closer to a hundred million in sales now. But what I heard, and I'll highlight some things that you mentioned, you know, you did a great job as a salesperson there on your own, but then you had to learn along the way in 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 agenc sometimes to assist in finding great candidates is also very helpful. So appreciate that. Hunter, let's talk about Zentask a Decentralized job matching tool that became core IP for WOPS Marketplace. What was the original idea behind it and how did you evolve it into a scalable product offering?
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Yeah, for sure. So I mean Zentask was end up being an acquisition as well as an aqua hire to wap. 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, you know, 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 dox who they were and maybe put their full name on the Internet. And you know, there's obviously like people, especially crypto is a huge part of anonymity. We thought that there was a really good market gap for Zen Task 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 web three could request a job and then someone who's in web three and both of them falling by the heuristics of anonymity and the values of crypto 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 wap, me and a couple partners, we ended up joining wap. It was really, WAP 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 Zentas and the challenges that we found. We said, okay, we can apply this to WAP. And today, you know, I think the WOB Marketplace gets about 2 to 4 million visitors per week. And it's really focused on selling online digital products. And I think for us all marketplaces 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 expertise of, you know, trying to make it work, especially in a more fringe space to wap, which is going pretty successful for us.
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That's awesome. Appreciate the backstory on the integration. Obviously, Zen Task was acquired by WAP. You know, leveraging. You went into the Web3 space, which we love here. We talk a lot, we 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. I think that's pretty cool. I just love how the integration came along and leveraging your platform, your ideas, has actually helped accelerate WOP's growth. So I really like that. Hunter, the last question of the day I have for you is, is looking ahead. How do you see platforms like WOP reshaping digital commerce for creators, and what's your vision for scaling beyond the current gross merchandise value and product suite?
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I think the thing that wakes me up every single day is I had the opportunity when I was 19 with Zenith and Zentas, 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, you know, 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 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 going to make income? And I think what. What's really interesting for me about WAP 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 want to 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 sitting in with entrepreneur or a business owner and doing something you're passionate about. So I think the end goal is how can we take what successful businesses are doing today on our platform and generally broader around the creator economy 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 skill 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 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, 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 want to offer someone a podcasting SaaS. Right. And so we want to make that vertical sass, 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 business that entrepreneurs doing. So I think in terms of our product suite and how 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 going to do, what am I going to do with my future? I think it's incentive aligned, dynamic 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.
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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 going to 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. 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.
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That's good. Thank you so much, Brian, for having me on. Best of luck with everything.
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Bye for now.