DTC POD - #246 - Dov Kaufmann, Tolstoy: Building the Video Layer for Commerce

DTC POD #246 - Dov Kaufmann, Tolstoy: Building the Video Layer for Commerce

Blaine Bolus 00:00:06 - 00:00:42

Welcome to Dtcpod, where we take you behind the wheel with the best founders and operators of consumer brands. You'll learn the ins and outs of business from setting up shop, hitting your first million, scaling past eight figures, and even navigating an exit. As founders ourselves, our goal is to help you learn from the best as you build. Visit us@dtcpod.com to sign up for our weekly newsletter. Join our founder community and find additional resources from every episode. Dtcpod is brought to you by Trend, the creative solution for your brand. Go to trend. IO to access thousands of creators for content needs such as product photography, unboxing videos, or even TikTok and Igorganic Creative.

Blaine Bolus 00:00:42 - 00:00:58

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Ramon Berrios 00:01:02 - 00:01:33

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Blaine Bolus 00:01:36 - 00:02:06

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Blaine Bolus 00:02:10 - 00:02:20

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?

Dov Kaufmann 00:02:20 - 00:03:21

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.

Blaine Bolus 00:03:21 - 00:04:03

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?