Hey everyone, we're super excited to announce the launch of our Slack community for D two C pod. This is a space exclusively for D two C founders and operators to connect, share ideas, ask questions and support each other. You'll be able to engage with the best minds and operators and consumer and currently we're on a waitlist and it will open up the community once we reach 150 members. So apply using the link in the description and we hope to see you on slack. So before we kick off today's review recording, ive got one more for you. Keeping up your momentum this year starts with the right selling tools and if youre looking to increase revenue, grow faster, build more pipeline, and close more deals, check out the all new sales hub from HubSpot. Youll be able to manage your whole sales process. Plus my favorite part, the reporting.

Its super intuitive, powerful and customizable. Plus the whole thing is powered by AI, so your teams can spend less time on tedious, time consuming stuff and more time on developing relationships. Also, no one likes a clunky platform that takes months to onboard onto. But getting set up on saleshub is really quick and easy. It's free to get started. The pricing will scale with your business, and with more than 1300 integrations and add ons, you can tune it to your exact needs. Visit HubSpot.com sales to start selling with sales hub what's going on? DTC pod today we're joined by David Hoffman and Samir Rayani of next big shop. So we have been wanting to do this one for a while now.

Basically, these guys built one of the craziest data products that I've seen in e commerce. They basically have data on all the different shops, what they're doing, what products sell, how much volume stores are doing, what's hot, what's not, all of that sort of stuff. And we even teamed up with them in the past on DTcETC, and they help power some of our products and being able to pull and ingest data on that side. Anyway, I've been looking forward to this one for a while, but I'll let you guys kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your backgrounds, kind of how you got started building next big products, and then what led you into the direct to consumer space.

Awesome. Thanks so much, Blaine. We're stoked to be here. Samir, do you want to tell a backstory?

Sure. So David and I have been building data products for the last 15 years. We started in college. We met in an entrepreneurship class and we built a data analytics product for the music industry. It was called next big sound. So you can see that we're not too creative with our naming, but in that business, we tracked millions of artists and songs all over the Internet and sold that data back to record labels and the industry at large, primarily with the goal of trying to understand how does a band become famous? How do you go from playing in your garage to headlining nationwide tours? And that sort of question took us down this really fun, exciting journey for the next ten years, where you fast forward from there. We sold that business to Pandora in 2015, started to work on different projects and ideas. David started a home goods brand with his wife, bringing products from Norway back to the US and selling them.

Started a Shopify store. And I was tinkering on some other random things, and through a sort of circuitous path, found ourselves in the world of data again and found this way to understand how a shop was selling and how their inventory was changing over time. And, you know, sort of brought us back to that original question of not how does a band become famous, but how does a shop go from selling an apartment in Greenpoint to retail nationwide?

Sweet. And then, David. Yeah. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background as well. I know you guys have been working together on this stuff for a while, but, yeah, tell us a little bit about your role and kind of how you. You think about things.

That was a great introduction, by the way, Samir. I say this so many times every day. I'm sick of myself saying it, so it's fun to hear someone else say it. I can fill in a few gaps around how we got there. So, first thing, when Samir and I met, we were the only two kids on campus, this is back in 2009, who were really good at building websites, and we were part of a competition between student government candidates. And that year, they had the sickest websites. We're like, hey, instead of competing, maybe we should team up and build stuff together. I lean more on the design and product side of things.