The problem
Commerce has always been social. Online, it became a product page: practical, but cold. Sellers wanted to show their products live and answer questions on the spot; buyers wanted to trust who they were buying from.
The MVP proved that live auctions worked for collectibles in Brazil. But it ran on a Telegram group, payment links and forms. Every auction depended on manual work, buyers left the live to pay, and the data lived in forms. To grow, it had to become a product.
What I decided
Keep the auction at the center. The auction was what made the MVP entertaining and kept people watching. Live video, real-time chat and bidding became one experience, closer to a multiplayer game than to a store.
Make video, chat and checkout a single flow. Buyers pay without leaving the live. Benchmarking Whatnot showed what to copy and what to adapt to Brazil, and the clearest adaptation was Pix as a payment method.
Build tools for sellers, from what sellers said. Sellers schedule lives, link products, track orders and see each live’s numbers. The requests came from an individual WhatsApp group with each seller, a VIP group of 160 buyers and a Telegram community of 2,000 members.
Design directly in code and iterate after every live. I designed in code, and after each live show I talked to part of the audience about what to improve. The seller tools were built together with front-end engineer Samuel Colares.
Measure everything before deciding. I built the event tracking and the dashboards behind every product decision, and we kept testing hypotheses about who the platform served best instead of assuming it.
The result
- 17% conversion, against the 1.5% to 3% typical of e-commerce.
- 40% retention and 50-minute average sessions.
- More than 20,000 products sold, more than R$1M in sales and more than 1,000 customers.
- In 2024: sales volume grew sixfold, revenue fivefold, users 24 times and buyers almost sixfold.
What I took from it
An audience does not need to be big, but it needs a minimum. A minimum of about 15 participants per live was what kept sales strong.
Sellers who bring their own audience win. Sellers who promoted their lives to their own followers outperformed those who waited for the platform to bring buyers.
Engagement turns into sales. The conversion rate came from the format: when buying is also entertainment, people stay, and people who stay buy.