Prediction Not checkable as stated
LaFontaine: Consumer Goods Businesses Will Eventually Adopt Live Commerce
“And so I think that, that value prop means if you're a business you know, selling consumer goods I think you're eventually gonna get into live commerce. I don't think you're gonna be able to ignore it.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
LaFontaine: Over 80% of Whatnot's Daily Users Do Not Transact
“Most people don't, like, you know, greater than 80% of people don't purchase on a given day. They're just there watching, having fun.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
LaFontaine: Top Whatnot Sellers Do $100M+ in Revenue With Strong EBITDA
“The biggest businesses on whatnot are probably doing upwards of a hundred million dollars in, in revenue, and, you know, with, like, very strong EBITDA margins, 2030, 40, Plus percent.”
Insight
LaFontaine: AI Avatars Will Fail as Live Shopping Hosts
“If someone goes over top on, I don't know, building an AI avatar, people aren't gonna come back to them. Right. Yeah. It's not good business. Because the core of whatnot is you visit a shop, you know the shop owner, and then you know the people who frequent th…”
Insight
LaFontaine: Obsessing Over Market Size Distracts From Building Great UX
“Users don't give a shit about the market. They don't care about the market at all. They care about whether they're gonna enjoy the thing. It provides value. And so there, there's this counterintuitive thing, which is if you build, try and build a market, it of…”
Insight
LaFontaine: Traditional E-Commerce Gained Efficiency by Obscuring Sellers
“If you look at a lot of what's happened, again, in e-commerce over the past 20 or 30 years, is it got so efficient, and one of the ways to make it so efficient is to obscure who you're buying from, and obscure the ability for people to, like, build brands and …”
Assertion Supported
LaFontaine: Whatnot surpassed $1B in sales last year and YTD
“If you looked at what not last year, we did, you know, over a billion in sales, and so far this year, we've done over a billion in sales, and we don't, we take a small fraction of that.”
Insight
LaFontaine: Any Retail Shop Category Can Work on Whatnot
“I think anything that someone would build a retail shop around would work on whatnot.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
LaFontaine: Women's fashion is now Whatnot's largest category
“I mean, women's fashions, women is now our biggest category.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
LaFontaine: Trust and Safety Is About 40% of Whatnot's Headcount
“Trust and safety in particular on whatnot is about 40% of employees.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
LaFontaine: Whatnot Acquired Its Domain for 0.5 Bitcoin
“Logan got ahold of the guy who had whatnot. And he, the guy goes, I'll sell it to you for a Bitcoin. So, I was an early Bitcoin investor, so I had Bitcoin. And Bitcoin back then was worth 10,000 dollars, so not like what it's worth now. And Logan haggled him d…”
Assertion Supported
LaFontaine: Live Shopping in Asia Is a $1 Trillion Market
“It's a monster market, you know, it's like a trillion-dollar-plus market today.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
LaFontaine: Golf Sales on Whatnot Are Growing Hundreds of Percent YoY
“And so golf on whatnot is having a huge surge, you know, that's growing hundreds of percent year over year, and we have all these golf shops selling, and so that's, you know, another, another fun category that
I've been buying it, and the team's been investin…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
LaFontaine: Tens of Millions of People Use Whatnot Annually
“Tens of millions of people use whatnot every year.”
Disclosure
LaFontaine: Whatnot Plans to Expand Into Cars and Alcohol
“Now, maybe we'll launch in some more countries. We'll do some cool stuff like cars. You know, eventually we'd like to get into liquor, beer, and wine.”
