u/StaxHouse

Whatnot has a massive moat because live selling psychology is incredibly powerful... nothing beats the high contrast, high energy adrenaline of a live "hit" culture stream. But right now, the platform is treating itself like a short-term acquisition play rather than a premium, scalable marketplace.

They are dumping ungodly amounts of cash into advertising and onboarding massive influxes of new users (Example - David Dobrik is being paid to run whatnot ads) while completely starving the infrastructure that keeps veterans and dedicated communities alive.

Look at what they are completely ignoring to fund those ads -

Community Hubs - Why do I have to send my community to a separate app to build an identity, share inside jokes, and build anticipation for future drops? We need an in-app feed, a collectible showcase profile, or a way to keep the culture alive when the camera is off.

Professional Seller Dashboards - If you want premium sellers to treat this like a real business, stop giving us elementary-school tier financial data. Give us granular, actionable performance metrics directly in the dashboard.

HUMAN Support for High Value Ecosystems - Copy & paste macros don't cut it when thousands of dollars in high end collectibles are on the line...

They have the money to fix this. They are just choosing to spend it on ad impressions instead of product engineering. It's a massive missed opportunity for a platform that could easily dominate the future of ecommerce if they actually listened to the people keeping the lights on.

Again, I say this all with love for Whatnot. I WANT to see these things happen and see the app thrive because it sucks seeing big names moving to more generalized live selling on places like ebay. Im unsure which platform it was so here a "trust me bro" statement, I've already seen users on other live selling platforms receive things like a trophy or plaque for reaching the 10k follows milestone or 1k sales etc.

Hello hey hi friends of whatnot! Im a software developer & also a seller on whatnot (Pokemon mainly). Recently, it seems sellers especially are getting fed up with some of the platforms missing features.

Those things consist of - A dedicated area on the platform where sellers can post a message to ALL of their followers to update them on multiple things. Postponing a stream, announcing youll be away for a few days, let your followers know if you have ran into shipping issues etc.

(Not self promo)

So recently, I made a personal app that consists of features like chat lounges for my mods, another area for the mods to choose a gift just for being good mods. They can be paid but they seem to like the gift idea, I send out "Mod Mail" once a week. a lounge just for viewers who have become pals from my chat lol. There's an area on the app for card requests to see on stream, it asks you the name of the card youre looking for or cards, asks your budget for what they'd pay for the requested card(s). Front page is just big announcements for upcoming streams and much MUCH more...

The reason I don't do these things with discord or instagram & asking my followers to go find my socials is because a lot of my viewers are not on social media at all. We also need much MUCH better analytics and tracking of finances. You get the idea, there's plenty of other things i personally believe is missing but... I want to create a demo app specifically made for whatnot & pitch it to them. Ive shown my personal app to some very large streamers who keep telling me I need to pitch the idea and id do it for free.

Should i propose to whatnot that I want to make them something a lot of sellers have been asking for? or do I build out the app first and THEN pitch it to WN?