What's up, DTC Pod. Today we're joined by Jesse Puji, who is the founder and CEO of Kahani. So, Jesse, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about what you're building with Kahani and then we can kind of jump backwards in time and talk about your past as well.

Yeah, sure. So the best way to think about Kahani is ask the question, if Shopify or Squarespace or any of the big e. Comm website builders were to build today, what would they use? Would they use a website? Our answer is no. We think that what they would use is something that looks a lot more like TikTok and Instagram. And so that's what we're building with Kahani. The vision is, in three or five years, you won't go to a URL where you'll start scrolling and tapping around. You'll land on a video or really a picture that sort of takes over your phone. And from there you'll start to kind of swipe, tap, and use all the mobile features that we're used to using in apps.

You'll use those on an ecom URL. That's kind of the big vision. The first product we launched is really that's like the crazy vision. So we're like, we can't just start telling ecom people to do that. They'll laugh at us. Let's find something that everybody gets and everybody's familiar with. So we launched kind of the Stories functionality. So we have that sort of NAV bar at the top.

You can tap on those circles, and inside of that you'll have video picture exactly like you're on Snapchat or Instagram stories. And we've seen it have a pretty tremendous lift and impact on the websites that were our private beta customers. So that's kind of Kahani in a nutshell.

Yeah, and I think it's really exciting as you just think about form factor and the way people interact with different sites. Right. Mobile isn't, I think, one thing that was really exciting about when Instagram, TikTok, all these platforms popped up, their experience and their user interface for the way people actually want to consume content is so much more engaging than mobile websites. Like you were saying, just have these busted hamburger menus and it's always like an afterthought to the web experience. Whereas the way Instagram and TikTok and these other platforms, they design a truly mobile first experience. So that's kind of what you guys are being able to tap into, coming.

Up with this idea. We've been ideating a lot of different things and so we want to validate that these are good ideas but one of the things we did was have websites even changed in ten years and I kid you not, we went back to the Wayback machine, we started looking at ecom websites and they literally look exactly the same. Maybe the pictures are a little bit bigger, there's certain small things but generally speaking the experience hasn't changed in ten years which sort of blew our mind. Yeah.

And I mean it just gets me thinking, it's like being able to provide that as a service is obviously great for the mobile shopping experience but I'm sure even down the line we don't need to get too ahead of ourselves. It's like being able to provide different sorts of engaging experiences across any device right? Is that something you've thought about as well?

Yeah, I mean one day right? I think I'm one of those I always say entrepreneurship is like a video game, you got to beat the boss on level one before you get to level two. I don't know if you're a big gamer, but as a kid, you'd put the cheat code in, you'd go to Level Five and you'd get crushed. Because even if you could cheat your way to Level Five, you didn't even know what to do at Level five, because you had to have beaten Level three and Level four to figure it out. So I think the same is true for building businesses.