Stories: Into the Story-verse

What is Whatnot?

Whatnot is a Live Shopping App. People can start a livestream from their phone and start selling inventory through BIN and auctions.

New Sellers have had explosive breakouts on Whatnot; growing from just a few followers to 5-digits, creating a strong community on the platform who come back regularly to see them. They are looking to scale beyond their current growth and need another way to engage with their community outside of the Live shopping experience and Live shows.

For a Seller to build up a community, they may spend hours preparing for a livestream event and wait for potential buyers to show up. When the Livestream is over, there’s a dead-end where Buyers/Sellers have difficulty engaging with each other on-platform so a Seller needs to go to live really frequently to maintain momentum with their community. This whole process can take many hours.

How can we help Sellers grow?

Sellers need a shorter feedback loop to maintain their audience and sell items if they don’t have time to run a long show and wait for people to show up. If their audience isn’t around on the exact time they are Livestreaming, then those people miss out.

We identified 3 key themes for driving value:

Seller Utility: How to give Sellers on Whatnot simple tools to engage sell their items and engage with their followers

Buyer Utility: How to give Buyers on Whatnot a fast viewing experience with obvious calls-to-action for engaging/purchasing.

Discovery: How to make the Seller’s content discoverable and available?

By focusing on these three areas, and making the content discoverable, then the Sellers will have a new channel they can engage in without having to time their content for a specific day/hour.

How do we scope down the feature set to first prove the core value?

Because Whatnot is a native live video social experience and async consumption of shows, trailers, clips, etc… Stories are a natural extension of this and if we build it the right way, it can solve all the problems above.

Seller Utility

• Simple video record/upload flow to show content
• Easy Listing creation flow to sell an item

Buyer Utility

• Embedded purchasing/offers flow to directly purchase the item
• Reply messaging to ask more about the item or seller
• Sharing to bring off-platform users directly to their on-platform listing and store

Discovery

• Lock the Stories directly in the top of Homefeed, so there’s a consistent place for Buyers to discover
• Limit the feature initially to followers-only so it does not cannibalize real estate of Livestreams for new users

Growth 📈

We invested in telemetry early on and actively talking to Sellers. We observed a new use case beyond the selling utility and community engagement: promoting their Livestream shows and their Profile. While this was not part of the initial goal, it’s a more common use-case that we’re folding into follow-up features and the utility such as: showing if they’re actively Livestream, adding stickers/overlays to help sellers communicate with their audience, and much more.

Fun fact: over 80,000 Stories have been posted since launched in May!

Acknowledgements

Huge shout out to all the folks who worked to bring this feature to life: Larry Tran, Alex Chase, Hyunwoo Park, Natalie Muenster, Shreyas Hirday, Kyle McDowell, Rami Khalaf, and Seth Sandler.

If you want to build cool stuff with us, check out our careers site and the rest of our engineering blogs.