The team behind Hidden Studios, the in-game advertising platform reaching tens of millions of players per month, has joined Whop.
The first time Nicholas Motamedi used Whop, he was 16 years old and renting out sneaker bots.
Now, his business has been acquired by Whop to lead the new ads division.
From one of Whop's earliest sellers to part of the team, this is Nicholas' story.
Where it all began
It was 2020: peak sneaker bot era. Nicholas had started reselling shoes at 15 to buy a car his dad wouldn't fund, and quickly realized that camping out at releases wasn't going to cut it.
So he taught himself to bot, purchasing thousands of units at once, and documented the whole process on YouTube. But moving physical inventory got old fast. He pivoted to flipping the bots themselves.
Before long he was moving $20,000 to $30,000 a day in bot trades, running everything through crypto because his bank account had a $1,000 daily limit (remember, he was 16 years old). Crypto pulled him further in: he started competing for allocations in new Web3 releases, building tools to give himself an edge, and posting the results online. That audience became CryptoClub: a paid community teaching the strategies he'd developed for trading and botting.
If that story sounds familiar, it should. Whop's cofounders, Steven Schwartz and Cameron Zoub, got their start in the same sneaker bot world. The platform had been built, in part, for communities exactly like the one Nicholas created. At its peak, it was generating around $150,000 a month.
But by 2023, the bear market had hit, and he lost it all. But he didn't stop creating.
What came next was Hidden Studios.
The making of Hidden Studios
Nicholas turned his attention to Fortnite minigames: a market that, at the time, most people were not taking seriously. He ground through a year with no revenue, then another, before the business began to gain real traction.
Two and a half years later, Hidden Studios was one of the largest studios on the platform – a portfolio of games with 15–20 million monthly active users and close to $20 million in annual revenue. They operated with the discipline of a private equity firm, building partnerships with Paramount, Mark Pincus, Snoop Dogg, and CaseOh as they scaled.
The question Hidden Studios kept returning to was: how do you get more value from your player base than anyone else can?
The answer was advertising infrastructure. Hidden Studios built proprietary ad technology to monetize their own games, and when they demonstrated it to the Whop team, the conversation quickly turned into something bigger.
After six months of working closely with the Whop team, it became clear that the infrastructure Hidden Studios had built – the audience reach, the ad technology, the distribution – could be applied to something far more meaningful than gaming alone.
Whop acquires Hidden Studios
On October 22nd, 2025, Whop acquired Hidden Studios to lead the new ads product. On the acquisition, Nicholas Motamedi says:
"After meeting the Whop team, it was clear that our team's foundation combined with Whop's infrastructure would change the way entrepreneurs around the world grow their businesses. We're excited to bring what we built for gaming to a platform where the stakes are magnitudes greater."
The seller who used Whop as a teenager is now building the growth engine for the next generation doing the same.
Hidden Studios closed a previously unannounced $10.5M round from Cory Levy, Justin Mateen, Pareto Holdings, and others.
