Grant LaFontaine, co-founder and CEO of Whatnot, discusses why lower barriers to entry and global reach will drive consumer brands into live shopping.
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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.”
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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 …”
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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.”