Labubu, FOMO, and the live shopping boom

GRANT LAFONTAINE: Huh, live video auctions. It seems surprising no one’s built that. It’s a really fun experience. Huh, no one’s put it on the mobile phone. Let’s build it. And it took off, and we are the largest in the market by a significant quantity. Have I at times worried about competitors? Yeah, absolutely. It’s a very human emotion like, “Oh, here’s this company that has like a gajillion dollars and they’re coming at something that we’ve spent a huge quantity of our life building.”

SAFIAN: That’s Grant LaFontaine, Co-founder and CEO of Whatnot, the fast-growing retail industry disruptor. Whatnot is a pioneer in bringing the live shopping experience to mobile apps, breaking through in the valuable U.S. market in 2025 in a shot across the bow to established players from Amazon to eBay. Whatnot was recently valued at $11.5 billion, double its value from the start of 2025, so I was eager to talk to Grant about how Whatnot has successfully evoked in-person shopping in an online experience, the role of fun, FOMO, and entertainment, and what the buzzy platform’s breakthrough means for other retailers and brands. So, let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

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I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Grant LaFontaine, Co-founder and CEO of live shopping platform, Whatnot. Grant, thanks for being here.

LAFONTAINE: Thanks for having me on.

SAFIAN: Whatnot has seen some real dramatic growth this year in the top 15 among free apps in the App Store, number two in shopping apps. For listeners who haven’t spent time on Whatnot or taken part in live shopping, can you explain a little bit about what the experience is like? People often make the comparison to a digital QVC?

Copy LinkCreating an in-store shopping experience online

LAFONTAINE: Yeah, I started thinking about it a little bit differently. To me, live shopping is the best in-store shopping experience, but online. So, a lot of the people who are on Whatnot have either had their own brick-and-mortar shops or they’re streaming all the time. It’s like welcoming you into their store. So you tap into their live stream, you’ll see a bunch of the inventory they have, you’ll see people in there, you can chat with the person, ask them questions about the product. I sort of view it as the shift of experiential commerce, not just in a brick-and-mortar world, but bring it online.

SAFIAN: Part of the Whatnot experience is, it’s almost like it’s entertainment on your phone too, right? I mean, the best sellers have to be engaging hosts. Do you give them advice? Do you train new sellers about how to be effective in live selling?

LAFONTAINE: You don’t have to be the world’s best entertainer to put on a good show, because what people value can be really different. The shopping experience itself is entertaining. The people that you can talk to are entertaining. It is a format that I think any seller or anyone who has a business can get advantage from. You’ll see a lot of the same people. You can chat with them. You may follow the same seller. It’s like maybe you go to your local bakery or your local pub and you sort of know the people who frequent it, and you know the host and you have a relationship with them. It even carries over to extremes.  There’s a trend on Whatnot called Bless the Chat, and people will buy gifts and giveaways to have people who are just hanging out in the shows win, and it’s completely funded by the audience. And if you go into any of the big shows, it’s actually very, very common.

SAFIAN: There are a lot of collectibles, I know, on Whatnot. There are a lot of small businesses, as you talk about. Other places like TikTok shops prioritize influencers. Your areas are a little less sexy, let’s say. Is that a strategic decision? Is that just where the marketplace emerged?

LAFONTAINE: We try not to overthink these things too much. It is literally like, where can you provide value for both buyers and sellers? And what we see from people using Whatnot is they want to purchase from real people who they think are authentic, who are going to give them good advice. Maybe you’re a record shop owner. And you’ve come on Whatnot, you have a high amount of expertise that are highly trustworthy. That’s going to resonate a lot more with the average person than an influencer who’s maybe not super knowledgeable about the space, trying to get you to buy something.

SAFIAN: Some retail CEOs talk today about this future of tech-driven personalized selling. And so much online is algorithm-driven right now. Whatnot feels less automated, even though obviously it’s an online experience, but the live social interaction between customers and sellers. Is Whatnot committed to this more analog feel?

LAFONTAINE: I think Whatnot’s inherently human. Now, we’re a technology company, so we invest in technology. We have a few hundred engineers working for us. And we have an algorithm and we try and recommend you the best stuff, and we try and build tools that are going to make sellers’ businesses easier to run. So I think Whatnot, if we’re doing it right, is going to be human first, but we’ll use technology to solve people’s actual problems.

SAFIAN: Your team told me that while you use AI in the back-end for efficiency and other things, that you only consider deeper AI in the customer experience if it really solves customer issues. As a CEO today, do you feel, I don’t know, pressure to be using AI maybe more than you need to be? There’s so much talk about it.

Copy LinkWhatnot does not use AI just for AI’s sake

LAFONTAINE: Yeah, I think absolutely. I think one of the most inherent human characteristics is there’s always some pressure by looking at other people and feeling like you need to do what they’re doing. If you’re in tech these days, you probably can’t go more than a one-hour-long period of time without hearing about something in AI. And so I think it makes you constantly question whether you’re doing the right things. Now, the truth with every new technology is it either solves a problem or it doesn’t, and if it doesn’t solve a problem, no one’s going to use it, so it doesn’t matter. So I think despite all of the noise, we try and stay relatively grounded. We’re not doing AI for AI’s sake. It is like, what is the problem? Can this new technology be used in a novel way to solve the problem? And if yes, we’ll test it, see if it works, and if it works, we’ll scale the thing.

SAFIAN: The need that you saw in launching Whatnot, it sounds like it’s about how e-commerce isn’t delivering the experience of physical retail. I’m curious how you see those things fitting together, what you were trying to solve, and whether you have a theory about where physical retail and digital shopping will go in the time ahead.

LAFONTAINE: When we initially started it, we were collectors, and a lot of when you buy things in collectibles, a lot of why you’re doing it is you have a similar shared interest with someone. You like to talk about the things that you’re doing. And when we looked across the set of products that were out there today, they were just very, very transactional. It felt like there was this more human social layer to commerce. And so we started to build Whatnot for collectors, and it felt like there was something around social, because that’s a huge driver for why you collect and a huge part of the fun of any of the hobbies where you collect things. From there, we experimented with a bunch of things and then ended up falling into live. And at that point in time, we had no idea how big it would be or the potential behind it. We just were like, “Huh, live video auctions. It seems surprising no one’s built that. It’s a really fun experience. Huh, no one’s put it on the mobile phone. Let’s build it.” And it took off.

SAFIAN: I’m curious whether there are any trends that you see on the platform about where collectibles are going. Are there any predictions about what might be hot next?

Copy LinkThe growing appeal of collectibles and niche communities

LAFONTAINE: I think people have always viewed collectibles as niche markets, but what we’re seeing is that those markets are getting much bigger. Historically, when you look at collectibles markets and you think about the Beanie Baby that had this meteoric rise and meteoric fall as the quintessential, that’s what happens in collectibles. If you look across our collectibles business, we’re six years old now, I don’t think it’s ever grown under 100% a year. I think in a world where everything’s sort of mass-produced, very digital, I think having unique things and being able to resonate with folks on those things is just providing more value. And so I think these markets are going to be more enduring. The Beanie Baby of the day is, what they call the Labubu. I don’t have one. And my prediction is that market keeps growing for a really long time.

SAFIAN: The Labubu is not going the way of the Beanie Baby?

LAFONTAINE: I think people want more unique experiences today. I think social media amplifies them. And so I think the Labubu is going to stay strong.

SAFIAN: The Labubu is here to stay. Grant is so matter of fact in describing Whatnot’s business, you can almost miss how revolutionary it really is. So how is he responding to deep-pocketed rival players like eBay, and how are big brands and small brands interacting on the platform? We’ll talk about that and more after the break. Stay with us.

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Before the break we heard Whatnot’s Grant LaFontaine explain the rise of live online shopping. Now he talks about fending off rivals like eBay, introducing bigger retail brands to the platform alongside smaller mom-and-pop shops, and how he thinks about fun versus FOMO as a customer engagement tool. Let’s jump back in.

eBay launched a live shopping feature, I don’t know, two or three years ago, right? Did you look at that as like, “Oh, here’s a competitive threat,” or a validation of your model, or maybe a little bit of both?

Copy LinkCompeting with industry giants and staying focused

LAFONTAINE: The way I look at a lot of these things is I try and understand the historical context on incumbents versus startups. As a business, running a business that’s growing very fast, there’s so many different things that you have to worry about in any given point in time. And so if you’re not really clear on what matters, you can get really distracted. And if you look at consumer markets in the U.S. over, I don’t know, 20, 30 years, it is pretty rare the incumbent wins when you have a fast-growing consumer company, as long as you execute really well.

Have I at times worried about competitors? Yeah, absolutely. It’s a very human emotion. Like, “Oh, here’s this company that has a gajillion dollars and they’re coming at something that we’ve spent a huge quantity of our life building.” But ultimately, I tell this to the team now and it’s true, every second I’ve spent worried about a competitor has been a second wasted. And so I think now we just try and stay really, really, really focused on delivering. We are the largest in the market by a significant quantity and we don’t want to get complacent. Sometimes the competition is doing things better than you, and if they are and it’s an area where you are competing for customers, you better deliver better than them. Or at least as good as them, otherwise there’s risks.

SAFIAN: I noticed that bigger brands are starting to discover Whatnot, that it increases the range of the products that are on offer and boosts the credibility of your platform. But I could also see that there are potential risks with that, diluting the smaller players, making it feel a little less intimate. How do you think about that and how as you grow, the feeling or the service delivery adjusts?

LAFONTAINE: On the buyer side, we tend to see that as we get more and more sellers in the platform, it does just make the experience better. There’s more people for them to shop from. It doesn’t erode any of their existing relationships. It’s actually just like, rising tide lifts all ships. On the seller side, as long as they’re a good seller, we see a lot of the same. So one of the things we’ve invested quite a bit in is our recommendations. We’ve made it such that new and small sellers can always break through. We believe that’s an incredibly important part of it. So it’s not as if a brand comes on and they’re going to suck up everything. It’s important part of the experience to be able to ensure that the largest number of people can build businesses.

SAFIAN: Because I could see a bigger brand might have more resources to put toward their live shopping experience. They might be able to make it, I don’t know, feel more active or higher end.

LAFONTAINE: If you look at most new media platforms, you generally see a new set of creators on the platform who become really big, whether it’s YouTubers or TikTokers or Twitchers. And with very few exceptions, it’s almost never a large pre-existing media company, because each new media format works a little bit differently and the people who use it the best, accelerate. And so, do I think there’s room for brands on Whatnot, either by starting their own stores or partnering with our sellers? Yeah, absolutely. But I think at the end of the day, people who are going to be the best, I think are going to be the ones who are native to that platform, deeply invest in it, deeply understand it.

SAFIAN: A term I’ve heard thrown around when talking about the Whatnot experience is FOMO-inducing, fear of missing out. FOMO is something that many business leaders are trying to generate, to engineer. Do you have any advice on what goes into sparking that, making that work?

LAFONTAINE: We’ve never once tried to create FOMO. We have auctions, one of the major formats for how people purchase on Whatnot. The reason we ended up building auctions was because Logan, who’s my co-founder, and I were watching someone hack auctions on another social media site. It was incredibly broken experience, but we started bidding against each other and we’re like, “Wow, this is just really fun. Let’s go and build that because it’s really fun.” And so I think what we mostly do is just try and build an incredibly fun commerce experience. E-commerce over the past 20 or 30 years, very efficient, very transactional. Whatnot, fun. And so we just tried to inject fun everywhere. But our intention was never to create FOMO, our intention was to create an incredibly fun experience.

SAFIAN: Are there things that you’ve learned about today’s consumer that traditional retailers or e-commerce players are missing?

LAFONTAINE: In many ways, Whatnot is like the polar opposite of the e-commerce players of the past 30 years. It’s not an efficient form of purchasing. You’re going to sit around and watch things for hours. I think the fundamental truth is shopping’s always been an activity that people have enjoyed doing. A lot of shopping is experiential. I used to hang out with my friends in the mall. So I think the thing that I would say, is that people are craving an experiential online e-commerce experience. That’s definitely going to be a thing that over the next five or 10 years, every brand, every retailer is going to end up investing in.

SAFIAN: I read that you and the Whatnot team have this feeling of being perennially underestimated. I’m sure some of that is motivating. Is there a downside? Or would the downside be like losing the underdog feeling?

Copy LinkHarnessing motivation from being underestimated

LAFONTAINE: I think we like to be underestimated. The first time we tried to raise money, I have a spreadsheet with all of the investors who I talked to and it got to 100 no’s and I stopped keeping track of it. And I still have the spreadsheet and all of the reasons why. So I’m not going to lie, that’s motivating. At least for me, there’s nothing more motivating than someone saying, “Oh, you can’t do the thing.” I’ll always carry a little bit of chip, and I think a little bit of chip’s helpful because it keeps you going, keeps you motivated. Now, it’s helpful to remain underestimated so we can be not distracted and just build, and then when the thing’s great, it will speak for itself.

SAFIAN: You’re on a good run. You’ve got good momentum going. So what do you feel like is at stake for Whatnot right now?

LAFONTAINE: Whatnot will be a business and a brand that everyone knows as long as we don’t screw it up, which means keep our head down, keep executing, keep delivering for customers. And so that’s how we think about it every day is, we have this incredible opportunity to build something that changes the lives of hundreds of thousands or millions of people who create businesses, and we don’t want to take it for granted. So just try and get up every day and do the most important things.

SAFIAN: Well, Grant, this was great. Thanks so much for doing it.

LAFONTAINE: Thanks for having me, Bob. I really appreciate it.

SAFIAN: I’ll be honest, I’ve never used Whatnot. I never bought anything on it. I’m just not much of a shopper myself. But listening to Grant, I can see the appeal for people who do enjoy the shopping experience, and I absolutely love the way the platform builds community among its users at a time when disconnection has become far too prevalent. Will Whatnot become a household name like Walmart or Amazon? I don’t know. As Grant admits, there’s a lot of work still to make that happen, but it does seem like Whatnot is onto something with live shopping via digital channels. And as digital tools advance, VR headsets and so on, you can see the possibilities expanding. In some ways, it’s a more humanistic version of the metaverse, a place where we can meet and engage in the virtual world as ourselves, as long as we can hold the bots and avatars and AI agents at bay. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.