Summary. Content Academy is a $97-a-month content-growth community run by Mino Lee, a 21-year-old college dropout in New York City. Whop’s write-up reports $20,000+ in monthly recurring revenue, $160,000+ in 12 months, and churn cut from a 40% peak to about 20%, all on a Whop subscription with a Discord community, courses and group coaching calls. If you sell coaching, the churn number is the one to study.
What Content Academy was doing before Whop
At 19 Mino sold high-ticket TikTok coaching and, by his account in the write-up, found it miserable. Before that he tried dropshipping Nerf guns. It failed.
Both models share a flaw. High-ticket coaching sells one client at a time and restarts at zero every month. Dropshipping sells someone else’s product to an audience you do not own.
What changed on Whop
Content Academy is a subscription at $97 a month, sold through Whop. The membership delivers three things: a Discord community, a set of courses, and group coaching calls. Members pay monthly and stay as long as those three things are worth $97 to them.
The sales method is the content itself. Mino describes it: “The interesting thing I’ve stumbled upon is that when you’re just building in public, but you just happen to have the business, it’s like this kind of soft selling thing.” He posts about growing an audience, and the people who want the same result join.
The write-up reports churn dropped from a 40% peak to about 20%. It does not break down which change drove that, so I will not assign the credit to any one feature. What it documents is that the drop happened while the offer was a community plus courses plus calls, not a course alone.
The numbers
From Whop’s write-up: $20,000+ MRR; $160,000+ earned in 12 months; churn reduced from a 40% peak to about 20%; 1.4 million followers; a 4.98-star rating across 40+ reviews; and a claimed 2-hour work week. Take the work week as the founder’s description of his own time, not a promise about yours. Financing is not mentioned in the story.
What I would tell a coaching or consulting owner to copy
Measure churn by cohort, not just sign-ups. $97 times members minus cancellations is the business. Most coaches count new members and never look at who left in month two. Put Google Analytics 4, Tag Manager and Search Console on the sales page, with the checkout firing as a conversion, so you know which post produced which member.
Get proof with names. A 4.98 rating with 40+ reviews is proof. A member like David Pham is proof: “Mino is a master at what he does. I joined the community after hitting 10K followers on Instagram and seeing my growth slow down.” Collect that on purpose, with permission, and put it on the page where people decide.
Build one definitive page on the result you sell. For Mino that is content growth. One page, with the method and the named results, that every post links back to.
Keep the price low enough that the decision is small and the community strong enough that leaving costs something. Churn from 40% to 20% doubles the average member’s lifetime at the same price.
Then put a dollar a day behind the build-in-public post that already got comments. Do not boost the offer. Boost the post that worked.
Who this is not for
Whop is a checkout, financing, affiliate and storefront layer with community and course delivery attached. It is not a CRM, a video host or an accounting app, and it will not make your content. The base rate is 2.7% + 30¢, 20 basis points under Stripe’s 2.9% + 30¢, and the optional layers (managed tax at 2%, orchestration at 0.8%, billing at 0.5%) can push the stack above Stripe. You feel that at $97 a month. Financing requires $30,000 processed from 10 or more customers in 90 days and a dispute rate under 2%. A low-ticket subscription rarely needs it. Financing is unavailable to gambling, sports betting, trading signals, credit offers and adult categories.
If you were going to use Whop anyway
If you were going to sign up for Whop anyway, sign up through my link, dennisyu.com/go/whop, or send me your business name and email and I will submit the referral. Whop pays me a share of its profit on your account; your rate is the same 2.7% + 30¢ either way. In return my team at Local Service Spotlight sets up the AI agents that audit your public reputation, fix what they find, and keep it maintained: a personal brand analysis, Google Analytics 4, Tag Manager and Search Console with conversion events that actually fire, a Content Factory that turns one recording into a definitive article, clips and posts, and a weekly Metrics, Analysis, Action report. That is the work we normally charge coaching and consulting businesses for.
Source and disclosure
This story is retold from Whop’s own write-up, Meet Mino Lee: He dropped out of college and made over $160k in 12 months (2025-05-26, modified 2026-07-06), which you should read in full. I am a Whop partner and earn a share of Whop’s profit from businesses that sign up through my link. Whop did not pay for or review this article. See Whop for coaches and consultants for the other coaching and consulting stories and my full notes on what Whop costs, and my main Whop page for the partner program.