First Five Launches with Whatnot

Whatnot (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/whatnot/">W20) is a lively platform where collectors can buy, sell, go live, and geek out with other like-minded people across a wide variety of product categories. But, like every startup, the founders of Whatnot began with only an idea. YC’s <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/anuhariharan/">Anu Hariharan</a> sat down with the co-founder and CEO of Whatnot <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://twitter.com/grantlafontaine?lang=en\%22>Grant LaFontaine</a> to discuss their first five launches.The takeaways are below, and the interview can be watched on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKD0IAcwMig\%22>Youtube.

00:40) Launch #1 TakeawayBuild the buyer side of the marketplace – even if you have to hack your way there.To build a great marketplace experience, both sides of the Whatnot marketplace had to be built out. Buyers would come, but only if sellers listed inventory. In the early days, the founders would list products on Whatnot that they didn’t have (i.e. fake listing), and when the item would sell, they’d purchase it on eBay.(<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://youtu.be/OKD0IAcwMig?t=266\%22>04:26) Launch #2 TakeawayIncrease your returning visitor rate through creative marketing campaigns.Whatnot launched with only a website and found it was not engaging enough for consumers to visit frequently. To solve this, they developed an app and a growth channel to push traffic to the app, called <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2488270838055833\%22>Whatnot Drop</a>. Whatnot Drop was a raffle for Funko Grail, and consumers could load up on raffle tickets by sharing referral code and content assets that would draw people back to Whatnot.(<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://youtu.be/OKD0IAcwMig?t=377\%22>06:17) Launch #3 TakeawayWork with trusted influencers in the community.Whatnot worked with a Funko Pop influencer who was trusted by the Funko Pop fanbase. The influencer created a Youtube video talking about their experience on Whatnot, which helped the audience trust Whatnot as a reputable marketplace for collectibles.(<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://youtu.be/OKD0IAcwMig?t=439\%22>07:19) Launch #4 TakeawayBuild the seller side of the marketplace by encouraging high sell-through rates.Whatnot delivered more sales to sellers by building a cross listing tool. Every seller on Whatnot could easily have their inventory cross listed to their eBay account – delivering more sales for sellers. (<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://youtu.be/OKD0IAcwMig?t=626\%22>10:26) Launch #5 TakeawayExperiment with new content formats to drive traffic.Whatnot built and launched a live shop feature – a first in the collections industry. The seller tool was built into the product, so it was simple for sellers to go live on Whatnot and talk about their products to the community.","comment_id":"6335e2416c330f000113fac3","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/09/Screen-Shot-2022-09-29-at-1.06.17-PM.png","featured":true,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-09-29T11:21:53.000-07:00","updated_at":"2022-10-06T08:59:59.000-07:00","published_at":"2022-09-29T13:43:30.000-07:00","custom_excerpt":"Like every startup, the founders of Whatnot began with only an idea. 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At a startup, you’ll jump into real projects and work with founders to solve mission-critical problems. YC startups are actively looking for summer interns across engineering, marketing, and other disciplines. If you’re an undergraduate or graduate student, apply below to join our summer 2022 cohort.When you intern at a YC startup, in addition to hands-on startup experience, you’ll have access to the YC community. You’ll attend closed-door talks with YC founders to hear their lessons learned, and you’ll be part of a strong cohort of fellow students, engineers, and builders at other YC startups. Here’s a sneak preview of a few of the many rapidly growing YC startups that you could join: <ul><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/whatnot/">Whatnot (W20)</a> is a livestream shopping platform and marketplace that is building the future of ecommerce: an interactive community where creators can make a living off their passion. Whatnot is looking for a software engineer to build new features and implement growth strategies.</li><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/volley/">Volley (W18)</a> builds voice-controlled entertainment experiences for Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and smartphones. Volley aims to become the go-to hub for interactive audio entertainment, as Netflix did for television. Their 35-person team is looking for social media & marketing and software engineering interns.</li><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/holy-grail-inc/">Holy Grail (S19)</a> uses electrons to capture CO2 from the atmosphere. Holy Grail, based in Mountain View, CA, has roles available for mechanical engineers, product designers, backend/data engineers and operations to help bring their modular CO2 scrubbers to market.</li><li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/alinea/">Alinea (W21)</a> is an investing app for Gen Zs who want to understand the companies they’re investing in. This women-founded team is looking for NYC-based iOS engineering and software engineering interns. </li></ul>If you’re up for the challenge, apply to join our summer 2022 cohort!<center>\n<a class=\"ycdc-retro-btn ycdc-retro-btn-gold mt-[-10px] ml-[13px]\" href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.workatastartup.com/internships/?utm_source=ycblog\%22 style=\"text-decoration: none;\" title=\"YC Internship Program, Summer 2022 Cohort\" target=\"_blank\">Apply Now</a>\n</center>","comment_id":"622285919235bd0001dc9f77","feature_image":"/blog/content/images/2022/03/yc-internships-2022.png","featured":false,"visibility":"public","email_recipient_filter":"none","created_at":"2022-03-04T13:33:05.000-08:00","updated_at":"2022-03-09T08:59:47.000-08:00","published_at":"2022-03-09T08:59:47.000-08:00","custom_excerpt":"YC startups are actively looking for summer interns across engineering, marketing, and more. 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","reading_time":1,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/content/images/2022/03/yc-internships-2022-2-1.png","twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":"YC startups are actively looking for summer interns. Apply now to join YC's Summer 2022 Internship Cohort! ","meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":null},{"id":"61fe29f1c7139e0001a71ba2","uuid":"a2de7e9b-655c-4b88-af38-1d4df1e6630f","title":"Meet 8 YC startups that are hiring right now","slug":"meet-8-yc-startups-that-are-hiring-right-now","html":"Many YC startups are actively hiring on <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.workatastartup.com/">Work at a Startup</a> across engineering, product, design, marketing and more. We asked founders to shoot a 30-second video describing their businesses and open roles. 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Hiring: Front-end, Mobile, Back-end and Senior Engineers.</li>\n<li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.workatastartup.com/directory/13332/">PostEra provides chemistry-as-a-service to design and synthesize molecules faster and at a lower cost. Hiring: Software and ML Engineer.</li>\n<li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.workatastartup.com/directory/12660/">Rosebud AI</a> creates software generated photos for advertising and marketing. Hiring: Deep-learning Engineer.</li>\n<li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.workatastartup.com/directory/12609/">Soteris creates ML software to route and price insurance risk. Hiring: ML and Back-end Engineer. </li>\n<li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.workatastartup.com/directory/989/">Tovala makes home-cooked meals effortless. Hiring: Software Engineer, Marketing, and Social Media Manager. </li>\n<li><a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://www.workatastartup.com/directory/13146/">Eternal is a rewards program for gamers. 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Choi","slug":"rchoi","profile_image":"//www.gravatar.com/avatar/36ba914c5f191f813e96db0296154469?s=250&d=mm&r=x","cover_image":null,"bio":"Ryan works with YC companies to find great engineers — from 2-person startups to larger ones like Airbnb, Stripe and Instacart.","website":null,"location":null,"facebook":null,"twitter":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/author/rchoi/"},"primary_tag":{"id":"61fe29efc7139e0001a71170","name":"Startups","slug":"startups","description":null,"feature_image":null,"visibility":"public","og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"codeinjection_head":null,"codeinjection_foot":null,"canonical_url":null,"accent_color":null,"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/tag/startups/"},"url":"https://ghost.prod.ycinside.com/meet-8-yc-startups-that-are-hiring-right-now/","excerpt":"Many YC startups are actively hiring on Work at a Startup across engineering, product, design, marketing and more. We asked founders to shoot a 30-second video describing their businesses and open roles. Meet them below:","reading_time":1,"access":true,"og_image":null,"og_title":null,"og_description":null,"twitter_image":null,"twitter_title":null,"twitter_description":null,"meta_title":null,"meta_description":null,"email_subject":null,"frontmatter":null,"feature_image_alt":null,"feature_image_caption":"Photo by <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://unsplash.com/@campaign_creators?utm_source=ghost&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=api-credit\%22>Campaign Creators</a> / <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://unsplash.com/?utm_source=ghost&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=api-credit\%22>Unsplash%22},{%22id%22:%2261fe29f1c7139e0001a7199e%22,%22uuid%22:%221b1c1b40-92d1-4b23-88e4-584b035f311b%22,%22title%22:%22Scaling Growth | Gustaf Alstromer (YC Partner + Airbnb) & Ed Baker (Uber)","slug":"scaling-growth-panel","html":"Gustaf Alstromer, <a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://ycombinator.wpengine.com/welcome-eric-gustaf-and-jocelyn//">YC’s newest Partner</a> (formerly product lead for Growth at Airbnb) joined a panel with Ed Baker, (former Head of Growth at Uber), to share tips on growth experiments and team dynamics at a scaling company.\nTopics discussed:\nWhat is a north star metric for growth? If you talk to anyone on the growth team, and ask them, “what number are we trying to grow.” They’d be able to say that number. And if they aren’t working on something that could grow that number, they’re probably working on the wrong thing. At the time Ed was at Facebook, retention and user engagement contributed even more to the north star metric (MAUs) than new user acquisition.\nPaid acquisition can further accelerate growth: Growth isn’t only about organic growth — especially for companies who charge for their products. In a competitive market, it can make sense to pay to acquire up to the potential value of a customer if it’s important to grow quickly (this was true for Uber, who had to beat competition to market).\nIs there a channel with particular upside right now? Nothing beats building a great product. Beyond that, most great companies get really good at one specific channel — so figure out what your product is best suited for and double down on it (make sure it’s a channel that can scale — meaning that channel potentially has 100s of millions of people coming through it).\nYou should be seeing things that are counterintuitive in your data: If you aren’t, you probably aren’t experimenting enough.\nA little wording change can matter: As an example, Facebook saw low growth in Japan, and went and talked to people in the local market and found that people felt it was rude to “invite” friends to Facebook. They found through a growth experiment that changing the wording to “announce to your friends you’re on Facebook” (instead of “invite”), they immediately began to see growth there.\nMake it easy for users: The simplest thing you could do today to help strengthen user data is to not log people out. This practice is bad for growth, and Amazon is a great example of doing it right.\nEventually, the whole company is a growth team: At Airbnb today, every big team uses data to fuel decisions. That’s the goal. The growth team should not only be collaborating across the business, but you should start to see most areas join in on a cadence of experimentation.\nThis panel was recorded at The Scaleup Offsite, an event for growth-stage CEOs hosted by Y Combinator Continuity and Greylock Partners. Josh Elman from Greylock Partners moderated this panel.\n<hr />\n<div id=\"backtracks-player\" data-bt-embed=\"https://player.backtracks.fm/ycombinator/ycombinator/m/13-scaling-growth-gustaf-alstromer-ed-baker-and-josh-elman\" data-bt-theme=\"orange\" data-bt-show-art-cover=\"true\" data-bt-show-comments=\"true\">\n</div>\n<script>(function(p,l,a,y,e,r,s){if(p[y]) return;if(p[e]) return p[e]();s=l.createElement(a);l.head.appendChild((s.async=p[y]=true,s.src=r,s))}(window,document,\"script\",\"__btL\",\"__btR\",\"https://player.backtracks.fm/embedder.js\"))</script>\n<script>\n(function(p,l,a,y,e,r,s){if(p[y]) return;\nif(p[e]) return p[e]();s=l.createElement(a);\nl.head.appendChild((s.async=p[y]=true,s.src=r,s))\n}(window,document,'script','__btL','__btR',\n'https://player.backtracks.fm/embedder.js'))\n</script>\n<script>\n!function(n,i,s,c){n[s]||(n[s]=function(i){n[s].q.push(i)}),n[s].q||(n[s].q=[]),\nc=i.createElement(\"script\"),\nc.async=1,\nc.src=\"https://c.bktrks.com/utils-1.0.0.all.min.js\",\ni.head.appendChild(c)}(window,document,\"BTUtils\");\nBTUtils(function(use) {\n var options = {\n autoplayLinks: false\n };\n use('backtracks-autolink', options).init();\n});\n</script>\n<hr />\n<h1>Subscribe</h1>\n<a href=https://www.ycombinator.com/"https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/y-combinator/id1236907421/">iTunes
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