Money expert Tori Dunlap's Her First $100K has been named among Inc. 5000's fastest-growing companies in America, completing a journey that began with a personal savings goal and grew into a multi-million-dollar financial education business. The company claimed the 3,046th spot on this year's list.

Dunlap started Her First $100K with a goal of her own: save $100,000 by the time she turned 25. She reached that milestone in 2019, at 25 years and three months old, after saving and investing a portion of her income while growing Her First $100K as a side hustle. The achievement eventually became the foundation for a much bigger business — a personal-finance empire built around helping women take control of their money.

"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 worked in digital marketing after graduating, initially created Her First $100K as a blog and online community. Her aim was not simply to teach women how to cut expenses. Instead, 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 open up 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," Dunlap writes on Her First $100K, acknowledging the power money has to change lives, including her own.

That blog-to-brand trajectory is a well-established path in personal finance media — NerdWallet and The Points Guy, for instance, both began as independent websites before growing into major consumer businesses.

To date, she has helped more than five million women "make more, spend less, and feel financially confident," she writes. That pace of growth carried Her First $100K onto this year's Inc. 5000. 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 must also 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. Inc. ranks companies on the list by their percentage revenue growth across that three-year span.

A different approach to financial wellness

Dunlap's work challenges traditional personal-finance advice that 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.

The backdrop is well documented: Pew Research Center estimates put U.S. women's earnings at roughly 82 cents for every dollar earned by men.

"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."

Her goal is to help followers get the funds they need to live the life they want — and "slay the patriarchy at the same time," she said. To do that, she is pulling back the curtains on key investing insights and removing the stigmas surrounding money talk.

"Finance bros [are] playing gatekeepers, and in a much broader sense, the patriarchy as a whole prioritizes the voices of old, white men over almost anyone else," she told Moneywise in 2023.

Her platform offers women — more than half of whom, studies say, prefer to learn about money from other women — a fresh perspective.

Her First $100K has since evolved from a personal-finance blog into a broader financial education and media company, with courses and educational resources, social media content, a podcast, speaking engagements, and Dunlap's New York Times bestselling book, "Financial Feminist."

Now part of Inc. 5000's list of fastest-growing companies in America, Dunlap says: "I'm proud. I'm emotional. And I am nowhere close to done."

This article originally appeared on Moneywise.