Already hosted at
A Whopathon is a free, 3-hour experiential event where students build AI-powered online businesses. No capital needed. No experience required. Your students leave with a live business they can keep growing.
Already hosted at
How It Works
Whopathons work alongside your existing programs. Think of it as a new category: experiential business creation that complements pitch competitions, coursework, and startup weekends.
Students identify a problem they care about and choose a business model: service, digital product, community, or software.
Students use AI tools to build their product, create a storefront on Whop, and develop a go-to-market strategy. No capital or technical experience needed.
Students leave with a live online business they own. They can keep growing it during college, after graduation, or bring an existing business onto the platform.
Student Success
Students across the country are using Whop to build businesses while still in school.
$16K
Weekend revenue
13
Participants
1 weekend
Duration
13 builders from Columbia, Harvard, and Queens College competed on Whop. They launched storefronts, processed payments, and delivered to real customers in real time.
"Whop made it possible to go from idea to paid customer in hours, not months."
7,000+
Students served
15-20 pt
MCAT increase
$27/mo
Starting price
Built on Whop to offer affordable MCAT tutoring with live sessions and a peer community. 7,000+ students served. Top MCAT tutoring company 2026.
"Whop gave us the infrastructure to build something affordable and high quality from day one."
Everything Included
You get everything needed to run a successful event. We handle the curriculum so your faculty can focus on facilitating.
What is Whop
Every business needs a store page, a way to accept payments, tools to build a product, and a way to communicate with customers. Whop gives students all of that for free.
Case Studies
Washington University in St. Louis
Skandalaris Center Whopathon
Students built products with AI, designed storefronts, and launched real businesses. Several teams selected for follow-on funding from the Skandalaris Center.
Businesses launched
Michigan State University
350+ Students Launch Businesses
Instructor Ken Szymusiak integrated Whop into his course. 350+ students launched real businesses, proving the model works at massive scale inside existing coursework.
Businesses launched
University at Buffalo
100 Students. 100 Businesses.
The event that started it all. 100 students showed up, explored Whop, and every single one launched a business by the end. UB's format became the blueprint for the Whopathon.
100 businesses launched including
Your University Here
Join 122 universities already running Whopathons. Book a call and bring this to your campus.
Book a Call →What Faculty Are Saying
"What has become very clear over the past two years is that my students now have the ability to build at superhuman speed. What used to take weeks now takes hours. This has profoundly changed how entrepreneurship education is taught. It has to be about experimenting, not case studies of the past."
Ken Szymusiak
Managing Director, Burgess Institute, Michigan State University
"Whop takes an already fun, experiential class and adds a little extra juice due to the ease of getting student ideas launched and the fact that real dollars are immediately available."
Joel Wooten
Associate Professor & Academic Director, MSBA, University of South Carolina
"Now, more than ever, students are interested in creative entrepreneurship. Their challenge is community building and sales strategy to monetize their creative output, whether as a side hustle or full-time gig. That's the big opportunity this next generation is chasing, and it's changing the way we think about entrepreneurship."
Linda Dickerson Hartsock
Founder, Blackstone LaunchPad, Syracuse University
FAQ
A 3-hour event where students identify a problem, choose a business model, build their product with AI, launch a storefront on Whop, and walk out with a live, revenue-ready business.
No. We give you a complete playbook with step-by-step instructions plus guided video modules for students. It runs smoothly even if the host has zero online business experience.
20 to 200+. The guided format and video modules scale naturally. Every student gets the same high-quality experience.
Whop is completely free for students. There are no contracts, no fees to participate, and no cost to host. We provide all the materials at no charge. Book a call and we'll walk you through how it works.
Services, digital products, communities, software tools. Anything they can sell online. Past examples: tech consulting, wellness brands, recruiting platforms, peer marketplaces.
Yes. Students can start something new or bring an existing business onto the Whop platform during the event.
No. Whopathons complement what you already do. Think of it as a new category alongside pitch competitions and coursework: experiential business creation.
It's free, there are no contracts, and we handle the curriculum. You just bring the students.
