I raised $1.7M from Amplify (Tapcart/Fanduel/Figma), Vinyl (Klaviyo/Postscript), and AceCap (Pinterest/Algolia/Airbnb) to power the future of e-commerce for DTC brands through Reactive’s on website live shopping experiences. I deeply believe live shopping will emerge as a core sales mechanism of e-commerce. China has led the way, but it'll work differently here in the West with our highly individualized and brand-focused merchants.
I was an early engineer at HQ Trivia, which had viral success. Millions of users tuned in to answer trivia questions to win cash prizes in our wildly engaging game show experience. Players turned out in droves by skipping work or even putting their nights out on pause for a chance to play. Our largest live stream was over 2 million concurrent users, a nontrivial portion of the United States population.
Building an app that could support these heights was incredibly difficult. Doubly so, given the real-time nature of our live events. I came to HQ from GIPHY, and even though GIPHY powered the meme experiences of the largest apps in the world (Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc.), I was floored by the monumental engineering challenge HQ faced to provide a real-time interactive experience for its users. Building for real-time is a wildly different problem set than what most companies and engineers have experience in. It requires an entirely different understanding, tactics, and expertise.
Knowing how complicated it is to build the live experience needed to sell products on a merchant’s website, I know that no brand is equipped to do so on its own. Therefore, the e-commerce market needs self-serve platforms that deliver:
- Low latency and financially feasible live-streamed video.
- Low latency, affordable, and instantly scalable real-time interaction infrastructure.
- A solution to get high ROI out of these resource-expensive marketing efforts.
- Robust analytics and data insights that are easily exportable to power the brand's business.
- Services to connect brands to the right talent to make the content they need.
While it's still early innings, we've already delivered real impact to early customers.
- Zippy Balisong boosted their conversion rate by 7x across four drops.
- M.M. LaFleur drove a 150%+ increase in sales across four collection launches.
- Clare Haggas drove $850,000 to check out and $32k in sales in a single weekend of events.
What’s next for the space? Brands will move from social commerce to focus on live events on their websites. They’ve found out that the promise of free customer acquisition on those platforms is a falsehood. Bringing these events to their site puts things into the correct alignment, driving the brand’s sales and capturing the data they need to operate.
Excited to see this industry grow,
Founder & CEO
Reactive Live Shopping
