What's up, DTC Pod? Today we're joined by Dove Kaufman, who is the co founder and CEO of Tolstoy. So, Dove, I'll let you kick us off. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your background and what you're working on with Tolstoy?

Yeah, sounds great. So I'm now, like, an old timer in the industry. I spent eight years running partnerships at Yatpo, joined when company was, like, four employees with my now co founder, Nimrod. We started at Yappo on the same day, just like first jobs, and we left the company eight years later when it was like 800 employees. Along with the growth of Yappa, we saw the whole D to C industry kind of grow from start to finish, the rise of shopify, all that stuff. And then for the past two years, Nimrod and I, we left Yappo to start tolstoy an interactive and shoppable video platform for brands, and brands are leveraging tolstoy to interact with their customers in an authentic way through video.

Got it. And yeah, we're really excited to get into Tolstoy and the Use case you're solving. I think being able to bring video into commerce is such an important development that we're seeing. But why don't we go back to Yachtpo a little bit? I think that's really interesting that like you were saying, you were one of the first employees there from seeing this company go, not only grow massively from over 800 employees over the course of your tenure there, but also being able to observe the explosion of the D to C and Shopify landscape. So would love to know when you were getting started there, what was the product like in the early days? What were you building? What was the problem you were trying to solve? And how are you selling that into?

I mean, early days was the Wild West. I think from very early on, actually, Yatpo was really one of the first to think about social shopping. It started as it was too early for this original product. But originally the idea for Yachtbo was you come onto any website and you connect your social account and you see if any of your friends or your friend's friends left a review because then you'd be able to trust that review. It's all about trust and authenticity through the social graph. It was really like an early pioneer and it was just too early. There were a few kind of issues with that and the company's leadership was kind of like also visionaries then, but really fast movers and realized that at the time the industry was so nascent. Shopify was like a very small platform still and they had no native reviews.

We realized there was an opportunity there and we built a very simple review solution for Shopify. The real kind of game changer happened when we developed the ability to send people emails and ask them for a review via email and allowed them to leave the review in the email itself with like an HTML form that was new. No one had done that before and that completely changed the rules because suddenly people were leaving reviews. Before Yachtbone, no one left reviews anywhere. So that was kind of the early dan from then. It kind of just like rocket ship.

Yeah.

And I think it's always interesting to hear how companies are founded and the direction they are and maybe those little micro pivots and the things that really open up a use case. I know Yachtpo, I think it's a great example, what you just said. Yes, reviews are important, but how do you actually incentivize someone to write a review and when you're able to deliver it to a customer in that same email flow, now you've verified that it's a customer and you've also removed all the friction, so it's super easy for them. So all of a sudden, you probably went from these brands really having scattered reviews everywhere, to all of a sudden being able to quickly acquire hundreds and thousands of reviews, really quickly, use it as social proof, help other buyers out, and you really provide that whole utility for them. So I think that's really cool and I'm sure that was able to help accelerate your sales process a lot. You probably had a lot of customer proof and testimonials on people were using it and were able to grow things. You know, now moving on to Tolstoy and having sold in the ecosystem for a while and having understood all the merchants problems, what gave you insight and what got you excited to start developing and building tolstoy for yourself?

Cool. So I think actually it's also tied to kind of like the experience that we had early on. I think what we saw at Yachtbo was a complete shift in the world, I think especially in the digital world, but just in the world, in consumer behavior. And we tinkered with a product until we were able to kind of enable a new form of interaction. At the time, it was writing a review and just being able to trust to trust online. At Tolstoy, we're trying to do the same thing for again, a new world where communication online and authenticity is achieved through video everywhere, basically, except when you go to a merchant store where storefronts look the same as they did in 2010 when we were started at Yachtbo. The world has completely changed around us and the storefront looks the same. So with that kind of insight gained over the past many years in the industry, we decided to try and basically bring the power of today's communication that's just a lot richer.

It's enabled today by faster bandwidth, people being comfortable recording videos, watching videos that don't have to be highly produced. UGC. I know Ramon is kind of an expert also in this area, but all these trends kind of lead to the fact that store and a consumer, in order to communicate effectively, they need to transition to that experience as well. And that's what we're trying to provide, a platform to allow every merchant to very, very easily and cheaply launch powerful, effective videos to communicate, authentically and tell their story.

So Dove, I've used your product, I'm familiar with it, I know how it works. We're currently having it on our website. But I'm curious, can you walk the listeners through what? Because if you just listen, there's so many video hosting platforms out there. If you just hear video commerce, you think it's just to display the product and buy it. But you just mentioned it goes deep. It's about telling a story. So can you walk us through a specific use case of how a brand uses tolstoy in a way that is different from say, these shopify apps that are out there that just show a video of the product?

Yeah, so no problem. And every like 15 minutes, the light here goes off, so I have to stand up and do a little dance. Yeah, there are a few things. One, today as a merchant.

If you.

Put like 20 videos on a PDP. A, there's no room for them, b, it's going to slow down your site tremendously, and C, you're not going to really know if it has an impact on your business or not. Besides identifying if conversion rates go up or down. With Pulse Toy, you can have an endless amount of video and it won't slow down your website. You'll get full visibility into which videos convert well, which videos are engaging your customers and why, and actually be able to segment your customer base as a result of their swiping through or tapping through the videos. So there are a few things that go into this. One is we have a bunch of different video layouts. So instead of today, I think the standard way to display video is in a little image box, kind of like the same thing that was on Amazon years ago.

In the image box, the last image or the first image is usually a video in some cases, and it's like a brand video. But so many brands today have hundreds or thousands of videos created by their community, uploaded by themselves to TikTok, to Instagram Reels, to YouTube shorts created by their creator or influencer network. There's tons of video content out there. So Tolstoy allows them to leverage this type of video that's more off the cuff, short form and intimate and authentic on their website as stories, carousels, little widgets. So like video bubbles and any possible way you can think of that you're familiar with. Engaging with video anywhere else online is available now on your store. And then we also have different video types. So we have branching videos that allow brands to tell kind of stories that are two way communication.

Most video is one way. So I just press Play and then I watch someone talking at me. With Tulsa, you can actually set up just like a chatbot, you can set up like a logic tree and depending on what a user chooses, you deliver the relevant video to them. So you can actually have a conversation where Tulsa didn't even start as a company for ecom brands specifically, that was like one vertical. But we just saw merchants take over this new form of video, which is like interactive or branching video and and use it to create founder stories. So every time someone new comes to my website, if I'm a mainly founder, led brands see a ton of value from this. If I meet someone, very often I'll talk to founders and they'll tell me that when they have a conversation with a customer in real life and they talk about their products, they are able to sell every single time and with high order value. But online, it's very, very hard to convey that same excitement, vibe, authenticity, and connection.

And the ability to have a branching video that lets a founder get up in front of a user in like a video bubble. User clicks on the video bubble, sees the founder introduce the brand and then ask a question like how can I help you today? And then maybe have three different answers that are basically like the three most common. Usually this is how it's done. It's like the three most common questions that people have about the brand or the products. And then depending on which one I click, I get to see the founder answering that specific question and it starts to feel like an actual real face to face conversation rather than a traditional video. So that's one example. And people are doing crazy stuff with the branching, like really insane flows. So we have branching videos, video feeds and shoppable video, which is just like a TikTok feed or Instagram feed or any kind of video feed that you can swipe through, see more information, or you can actually tag products.

And add to cart directly from video and video quizzes, which are also like traditional quizzes, but especially useful for complex situations where the viewer of the quiz might not know how to answer a particular question. And so you can actually show them what you're talking about and let them communicate. And then all this stuff can work together throughout the lifecycle of a customer. So you can leverage these videos on your website, on every single page, you can have different video content and then you can also share these videos off site as well in email campaigns, SMS campaigns, anywhere.

So you're kind of like the technology layer then for video, right? Like you guys are able to host the video and then you're basically able to come up with all the different containers and wrappers that a brand is going to need on their site, as well as give them the tools to be able to set up flows based on their own logic so they can up their conversion. I think that's really neat because for a brand to build this in themselves, it's obviously going to be really hard to do. But also they don't have the self serve tools to be able to run those flows programmatically. Like you're saying, it's not just about having one video, it's about being able to create flows for getting the right video in front of the right customer at the right time. So you guys are really, that you guys are the platform for basically creating the videos and then launching them and deploying them across your website for whichever scenario that the brand may need them.

Is that accurate?

I can tell you as well from experience, just video hosting formatting, sizing, just all of that alone is a full time task in itself and like you said, like making it load at the right speeds and the right formatting, et cetera.

Yes, exactly. And you don't even have to use the platform to create the video if you already have videos, you can just leverage them and import them. But we're exactly that. We're like the tech layer, the delivery layer, and then the analytics, you get on top of it. Absolutely.

So why don't you tell us a little bit about what it was like starting the company in the early days and how you've since grown it, right? How did you fund it? What was your first MVP of the product and how have you grown it to date to get to where you guys are?

Yeah, we're still definitely early days. We're serving thousands of merchants now and tens of millions of eyeballs on our videos. But this is early day for video. In commerce, it's early day for video. I mean, all this stuff is also changing so quickly. We started the company two years ago right after our time at Yatpo, and we launched just like, honestly, my growth hack was pinging people on my LinkedIn because I'd been around for a while. I had a bunch of good contacts and I just sent them a note on LinkedIn asking if I could chat with them about a new idea that I was working on. And it's shocking how many people are willing to spend a bit of time with you, give you feedback and try your product if they like it.

And so we were helped early on just by friends. It's not even just friends on LinkedIn. There's so many people I had never talked to that I just reached out to because it was early days and they were willing to get on a call. And so I actually made a lot of new friends in this process. But that's how we started and seeded the product. And from day one, we've been working very closely with customers to try to prove value. Actually, in the first year and a half, we didn't even charge for the product. We just wanted to get it in the hands of as many merchants as possible and prove value.

That was the goal to try to see where does this thing deliver the most value. And one of our early customers, AMSam, created this really cool video, like Founder Story, and then that helped us kind of explode because they're like a high profile brand. And the video was awesome and it was just such a perfect fit for the founders. Then we saw other merchants kind of getting the idea and creating their own founder stories, and it kind of just started spreading and spreading and spreading.

So in those specific use cases, I know you guys also have sort of like a viral component to the product where in some certain plans, the hosting say that the video is by Tolstoy. And so I can see that snowball effect happening where people are like, oh, well, this is if I really like it, I'm going to want to check out what Tolstoy is. And then by default, I already had a great example initially. And I know another way of growth is your background in partnerships. So how have you used partnerships specifically to double down on your previous experience, translate that into this business and really grow tolstoy?

So we actually haven't used partnerships per se until today in Tolstoy because I come from partnerships and know it and like it so much, I've been kind of pushing it back as much as possible because I know that from the idea that once we start with partnerships, I'm going to be all in. And so for the first year and a half, we didn't even charge anything, and we ended up working with a lot of agencies just because a lot of top agencies are early adopters of products. A lot of my friends work in the agency ecosystem and in different agencies. And so we worked kind of like off the cuff with agencies and always try to provide as much value as possible to them and their customers. But we didn't have like a dedicated agency program or partner program or anything like that. But two interesting things ended up developing once is once we launched pricing, we decided that it was time to start investing in partnerships. And so we spent months looking for someone to lead that effort, and we finally found an amazing head of partnerships who just recently joined and is just actually ramping up. Now, that's going to be a major, major area of focus.

And then we have agencies, and then there are also we try to help merchants with content generation. And this is, I think, Ramon, how you and I met originally through Trend and just partners who make it easy for our merchants to have content very easily. That's like a major lift for a lot of brands just getting started in video and not even just getting started, but brands that have a need for a lot of video. Once a brand starts using Tolstoy, they need a lot of video and a place like Trend is great for them to get it. And so that's another kind of like, partnership that we see being really valuable.

Yeah, I mean, I see this firsthand, too. Some brands think, okay, they make three videos and then they stop, and then they don't make any new content. Continue testing. But you guys also provide that data that tells you what performs, what doesn't perform for you to keep iterating. And so I'm curious, given how much data you've seen, what is a misconception? What is something that brands get wrong when it comes to making content?

Not favorite is not the right word. But the thing that I put the most emphasis on, that I think that I've seen a lot of brands kind of miss when they first get started is just the video. It's not like there's one perfect video that's going to work for your website forever, right? Video is another medium. Just like you need to keep your text fresh and your images fresh, you need to keep your video content fresh and different videos work differently with every audience. And so what we recommend is that merchants just get started with video and start testing it out. And iterating quickly. Like, just make sure that it's easy and cheap for you to create content that you can get it up as fast as possible and just be able to test and see what's working and what isn't. Just like any other marketing funnel, yeah.

I think that's such an important point about video in terms of it's just one channel, it's one medium, but you have to be able to produce a bunch of the content and then you have to be able to test it out. And not all video is the same, right? Like you're going to have different videos that perform really well on TikTok and Instagram than maybe like the founder story that you're crafting for tolstoy. But if you're getting good signals across social organic, like, oh, this founder story. Is going really well for me. Maybe we use that piece of content and create the remix version of it for Tolstoy. And now we have it purpose that way. And I think that's another thing for brands that sometimes they'll just think of video as like one thing when video is a medium and there's so many different parts of it. Like the video creative that's being used for each individual platform has to be slightly different and tailored to the specific need that they're trying to get out of it 1000%.

Yeah.

Cool.

So what's next on the roadmap for you guys? You guys have clearly done a great job of piloting testing out the Use case, proving that it works. We're on your website and we even see some of our brands that we've had on the Pod Use. You guys, it looks like Suckers is one of your customers as well. What's next on the roadmap? Is it scaling through the ecommerce ecosystem? Are you guys ultimately looking to get beyond the ecommerce ecosystem? What does the roadmap look like? What are the focuses now given that you guys are young but experiencing great growth?

Yeah, so great question. Right now it's skill. The team is growing. We're moving into more areas like partnerships, marketing, customer success, all these kind of pillars of a real company. And we want to make sure that every one of our teams is the absolute best. Not just in the video space or the commerce space, but startup space. We saw what a company that's run excellently looks like from the inside and we want to take that and do it even better. Make sure not to make some mistakes we made.

So learn from our experience, learn from our mistakes, but also learn from the things that went really well and that were really successful just to build a really meaningful and impactful company. I think that original question that we started with of like, okay, we'll give out the product for free. We'll just see where it provides the most value and we'll focus on the value and the customer. I think that we've actually been trying really hard to make sure that as we scale, we keep thinking that it sounds very cheesy now, but I think just making sure to keep that attitude of testing, experimenting, figuring out where the value is and not getting sidetracked by a partnership or a sale or something like that, but actually keeping the eye on value. To merchant like to customer. In our case, it's the merchant. I think that's key.

Yeah. And I think the value here and this is something where one of the things we love doing on the podcast is like learning from SaaS founders, from brand founders. And there's a lot of principles that are interchangeable. And I think one of them that you pointed out early is when you were developing the product and you were in the product development state, you guys were testing with a bunch of people and focusing on value and saying, hey, we want to make sure we get this right. We're providing a bunch of value and then when that's ready, we can worry about partnerships and scaling and doing all these things to really unlock really major growth. And I think that's a lesson that's really applicable even in the D to C space as well for brands.

Right?

Like you want to make sure that your product that you're building, you've tested it out. You have small cohorts of customers that are really starting to love it, engage with it. And then when you've proven that initial product market fit and that people like what you're doing, then you can kind of start leveraging in some scale, some partnerships, some major influencer partnerships, dumping some ad dollars behind it, whatever it may be. But I think that's a lesson from a founder who's seen things work before. And you're like, I'm not rushing into this because I don't want to create an exponential problem. I want to get things at the right pace and pour on gasoline when the time is right.

Totally.

Sweet well, anyway, dovu just want to thank you for coming on D to C Pod, sharing a little bit.

This is awesome.

Yeah. And for our listeners and anyone who might be listening and curious about testing out some different use cases with Tolstoy for their shop or anything like that, where can they find you? Where can they find Tolstoy? How can they give it a shot? Yeah.

So either Shopify, App Store, Tolstoy and we're named Tolstoy because we help brands tell better stories. We try to help brands tell better stories. That's kind of the idea. So Tolstoy and Shopify or Gotolstoy.com, and we have some examples up there and we're happy to talk to anyone. Sweet.

Well, thanks for joining us and we can't wait to keep seeing you guys grow.

Cool.

Thanks, Doug. Thank you.