When Hunter Dickinson was studying for his Bachelor of Engineering at the prestigious Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, he could easily have been forgiven if he’d spent all of his free time enjoying the laid-back local culture of sun, surf, and sport.
Instead, Hunter was developing his understanding of the importance of community in a rapidly-evolving, increasingly internet-native world, and how important it could be to the success of any endeavor.
“In order to deliver and create long term value for your project, if you are not putting community first, you’re missing the point,” he said back then. “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.”
Inspired Beginnings
Zen is a word that’s complex in origin but inspires thoughts of simplicity. Literally translated, it means contemplation, absorption, or meditation. But it also signals awareness, and in 2021, the worlds of technology and finance were colliding, and cryptocurrency and its many derivatives and applications were all the rage.
Unlike most, Hunter was very aware of this trend early on. He also had a strong understanding of both this exciting and volatile new technology as well as the heartbeat of its core community.
What resulted from his understanding and entrepreneurial instinct was ZenApe, a NFT (non-fungible token) powered private membership community project that raised the bar in pre-seed rounds in Australia by pulling in A$3 million.
ZenApe’s stand-out funding even prompted plaudits from top Angel Investors like Justin Mateen. The Tinder co-founder credits Hunter as a first mover of note who built a thriving community model combining NFTs with membership access.
The project wasn’t just a star in the eyes of Angels and VCs, either. The group, whose inner circle was cheekily known as the Council of Apes, was able to run NFT sales that netted multi-million dollar revenues.
The collection has also seen almost 3,000 ETH in total volume on NFT marketplace OpenSea, which tells its own story since ETH itself was trading at around $4,000 when ZenApe launched. The #3 rarity NFTs in the collection, eight in all, were each sold for between 10 and 15 ETH.
In addition to developing the crucial investor relationships that saw such pre-seed success, Hunter steered ZenApe as a project and led the hiring of the initial leadership. Meaning, with the knowledge that ZenApe was in very good hands, he could direct his considerable creative energies elsewhere once it was up and running.
The Road to NYC
Keeping true to his entrepreneurial roots by incorporating the influence of zen and the philosophy of decentralization, Hunter’s next brainchild was a job-matching tool called ZenTask that started drawing industry attention very quickly thanks to its applications and his own growing profile.
In the meantime, there was something big brewing in New York City. Whop, today one of the internet’s leading social commerce platforms, was on its own growth journey mileposted by a $17 million funding round involving some of the biggest names in the VC game.
Joining forces was always going to be on the cards, with Whop’s vibrant, community-first attitude a perfect match for Hunter’s own energy.
Whop’s 2022 acquisition of ZenTask for $100,000 quickly followed, and with it the addition of Hunter and some of his key staff at ZenTask to the Whop team. Folding ZenTask’s tooling into the Whop marketplace stack was the aim, and Hunter came on board full-time in 2023.
He initially joined Whop as Head of Strategy, with the goal of integrating and continuing to scale ZenTask while also hunting new growth levers for the business as a whole. ZenTask has given Whop the foundational IP enabling product expansion into areas like gated software, digital courses, and of course membership communities.
Hunter, however, was about to give the company a whole lot more.
Hitting New Heights
Today, Hunter Dickinson is Whop’s Head of Partnerships, and the company’s sales team started with him – and from zero. Starting from scratch has its benefits, though, and Hunter was able to build and then scale the Whop Sales division in his own image, hiring staff and writing his own playbooks.
In the beginning, he had to plough a lone furrow, but that wasn’t about to stop him. $10 million closed in six months working alone, to well over $100 million in GMV generated personally to date – a very significant portion of Whop’s $1.3 billion in lifetime volume.
More than 70% of Whop’s new GMV comes from sales as a direct result of infrastructure, processes, and strategy implemented under Hunter’s founding and leadership of this part of the business. His hand-picked team has contributed over $526 million in GMV to date, underlining his achievement of transforming sales from a virtual non-entity to a primary growth driver.
As Head of Partnerships, Hunter’s remit goes beyond just sales. He oversees a revenue organization numbering 15 team members in all, extending into the account management and customer support functions.
The role naturally sees him handle all partners, including business-critical ones such as Stripe, Checkout.com, Klarna, Adyen, and exclusive new fintech link-up Splitit, which he personally spearheaded. Hunter was also the direct driver of Whop’s deal with Iman Gadzhi, putting his fingerprint on a major milestone for the business and scoring one of the industry’s headline creator partnerships.
Hunter works directly with Whop CEO Steven Schwartz on a daily basis, planning out Whop’s payments strategy roadmap and marketplace expansion to ensure that the business continues to retain its product-market fit and competitive advantage.
All told, Hunter’s impact at Whop transcends even the very significant measurables across his achievements, and those are all the more impressive given that they’ve been managed in less than two years with the company.
His platform leadership and hundred-million-plus impact give the backing of scale to all of the recognition he’s rightly received. Soma Capital’s Aneel Ranadive is another of several VCs who’ve hailed Hunter’s contributions to Whop’s growth as well as for etching ZenApe and ZenTask into the history of Web3.
Hunter’s belief in the power of community has found the perfect ally in Whop, and it’s no coincidence that since his arrival, Whop has become a magnet for creators and entrepreneurs alike and grown from strength to strength on the back of his and his hand-picked team’s efforts.
Now positioned as a key figure in the company’s story and one of the most influential figures in the world of social commerce, the next chapter in Hunter Dickinson’s story may be an even bigger one.
