‘I refuse to act like it was easy’: Tori Dunlap’s Her First $100K becomes one of America’s fastest-growing businesses by helping women build wealth

“I refuse to act like it was easy,” she wrote in an Instagram post about her journey so far. “We built a company teaching women the things the entire financial industry has made them feel like they’re too stupid to understand. Turns out when you make financial education bigger than just literacy, people don’t just show up. They stay, they tell their friends, and the whole thing becomes your life’s work.”

From community blog to big business

Dunlap, who had worked in digital marketing after graduating, initially created Her First $100K as a blog and online community. But her goal wasn’t simply to teach women how to cut expenses. Rather, she positioned money as a tool for establishing independence, encouraging women to negotiate their salaries, pay down their debts, build their savings, invest their money and create enough financial security to create more choice in their lives.

“Money gave me the ability to grow a company from $40 and a blog no one read to a global, multi-million dollar movement that changed women’s lives every day,” she writes on Her First $100K, acknowledging the power money has to change lives, including her own.

To date, Dunlap has helped over five million women “make more, spend less, and feel financially confident,” she writes. Her First $100K has scaled so quickly, in fact, it claimed the 3,046th spot on this year’s Inc. 5000 list.

The companies on the list generated a cumulative $385 billion in revenue in 2025.

To qualify, they must be privately held, for-profit, based in the U.S., and independent — not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies. They also must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2022 with a minimum revenue requirement of $100,000 for 2022 and $2 million for 2025.

A different approach to financial wellness

Dunlap’s work challenges traditional personal-finance advice that often focuses heavily on individual spending habits — the so-called “latte factor” — while overlooking major systemic issues such as the gender pay gap, the gender wealth gap and other gender-based barriers that affect women’s ability to build wealth — including the investing gap.

“We talk about the pay gap a lot … But what we’re not talking about is the investing gap,” she told GeekWire in 2020. “We know that the number one reason women don’t invest is fear — fear of doing it wrong. Women either wait longer than men to invest, or do not invest at all. They are told investing is scary, or risky or just not for them. And then, women live seven years longer on average than men do. So we’re taking less money that grows at a slower rate, and then we’re expected to live longer on that money.”