On a Wednesday night in early June, Rene Nezhoda leaned back in a Secretlab gaming chair, fiddled with a computer keyboard, and stared into a camera while looking very much at home. Clad in his company’s black “Bargain Hunters Breaks” T-shirt, Nezhoda carried what could be viewed as an imposing thick-built frame, until he opened his mouth and revealed a self-deprecating charm coated by a soft German accent that would be familiar to fans of A&E’s reality TV franchise Storage Wars – where he and his wife Casey have appeared as central characters for the past decade.
With a box-cutter in hand, Nezhoda sliced open the plastic film covering the back of an ultra premium box of baseball trading cards, the contents of which would soon leave some viewers on the other end of his screen ecstatic, and others likely devastated.
“We got a situation! We got a situation!” he bellowed as he slowly revealed what would turn out to be not just a typical trading card, but instead a small booklet featuring images of two San Diego Padre star teammates – along with tiny pieces of their game-used bats – known as “relics” in the sports card world. A collector’s dream.
“Get some fire,” Nezhoda urged his audience. “Get some fire!”
Fire emojis soon lit up the comments thread at the bottom of the screen, and cartoony flames began bordering the video frame.
A night later, Nezhoda would livestream another high-end card show for his 47,000 followers, with one lucky bidder walking away with a card autographed by New York Yankee star Aaron Judge that also included a swatch from one of his game-worn jerseys embedded within. It was a one-of-one, meaning the only one ever printed – a true “monster hit” in industry speak.
The biggest business you’ve never heard of
Nezhoda’s hundreds of viewers were tuning in to this drama not on traditional TV – but through their smartphone screens and more specifically, a five-year-old shopping app called Whatnot. Over the past couple of years, Whatnot has quietly climbed App Store charts – as one of the leaders of the growing trend of live-streamed commerce in the U.S. – while also capitalizing on reinvigorated collectibles markets. The result? Whatnot currently ranks inside the Top 15 most popular free iPhone apps in the U.S., sandwiched between household names Instagram and Netflix, and No. 1 in the shopping category overall.
While hawking merchandise via live video streams has become lucrative and mainstream for businesses big and small in Asia over the past decade, Whatnot and TikTok are two of a much smaller subset of live-streaming services in the West that have found meaningful success in this area of e-commerce. This sales method, which offers a new spin on the QVC and HSN cable TV shopping channels of yesteryear, marries some of the auction model and enthusiast appeal of eBay with the camaraderie and communal viewing euphoria of Twitch. Merchants on Whatnot sold a combined $3 billion in goods in 2024, mainly in collectible categories like trading cards and sports cards, but also in fast-growing verticals like women’s fashion and sneakers, too. The startup, while unprofitable, is forecasting more than $6 billion in gross merchandise volume, or GMV, in 2025, or about double its 2024 numbers. (EBay’s GMV is about 12 times Whatnot’s but its growth is largely stagnant.) Whatnot would not disclose its revenue, but some back of the envelope math suggests that 2025 revenue could range from perhaps $700 million to around $1 billion based on its average seller commission of around 11% plus a fast-growing advertising initiative.
“We’re the biggest business you’ve never heard of,” Grant LaFontaine, the startup’s co-founder and CEO, told Fortune recently.
While e-commerce incumbents and other would-be acquirers have shown Whatnot “surprisingly little” attention according to LaFontaine (“I am surprised,” the CEO admitted, chalking it up to possibly being “underestimated”) his company has attracted significant interest from venture capitalists, who have poured more more than $700 million into his startup since its 2019 founding, with some recently valuing the company at a nearly $5 billion valuation during a $265 million round announced in early 2025. The Los Angeles-based company now employs around 750 people, and operates in nine countries in North America and Europe, plus Australia.
LaFontaine, the 37-year-old co-founder and CEO, said that while the entertainment and deal-hunting characteristics of the app play roles in its success, he likes to think it’s mostly about community.
“The most salient characteristic of what really makes Whatnot work is just about people,” he said. “You come back to a shop because you know that human being, or know the human beings who frequent it.”
But big questions remain: Can Whatnot (the name is a riff on the idea that all sorts of goods can be sold on the platform) build a big enough profitable business to justify its lofty valuation while built in part on live auctions, impulse buys, and trend-boosted niches? As Whatnot attracts more sellers, will the company be able to attract enough who are as interested in building long-term customer relationships – and real businesses – as they are making a quick buck? And at a macro level, how well will the startup survive a potential economic slowdown that could weaken crucial merchandise categories most reliant on discretionary spending?
At least for the last question, LaFontaine believes his company has at least several years of new-customer runway before they’d have to seriously consider the impact of such a reality.
“We’re still so relatively under-penetrated in every market that we’re in–both from a buyer and seller perspective–that the macro doesn’t deeply affect the business,” he said, “because our experience is so new, and so many new [buyers and sellers] are coming on, that overall growth is still so high.”
Time will determine whether that assessment was realistic or naive.
From Funkos to the Wild, Wild, West
Whatnot was founded in 2019 by two product managers: LaFontaine, who had worked at Facebook and Google and had dabbled in selling collectibles and sneakers online from childhood into his 20s; and Logan Head, a one-time medical marijuana dispensary owner who immediately before Whatnot was a senior product manager at GOAT, the sneaker and apparel resale app. Initially, Whatnot was designed more as a high-end version of Craigslist but the founders quickly pivoted it toward a focus on collectibles, starting with Funko Pop! Figures exclusively for the first year. In 2020, the startup also began experimenting with the livestreaming feature that would become so crucial to its success.
While Whatnot merchants can list products for sale on the app in a more traditional online storefront format, the vast majority of sales on the platform occur via livestreams, in which the seller, or a streamer they pay to host, engages with, and answers product questions from, viewers who can comment in an onscreen thread.
Whatnot’s strength is in collectibles, whether Pokemon cards, sports cards or rare coins. Seth Chandler, owner of the 65-year-old Witter Coin shop in San Francisco has sold millions to coin enthusiasts on Whatnot over the past few years.
But the app’s appeal to buyers and sellers in other categories has broadened over time to include luxury bags, electronics and its fastest-growing segment, women’s fashion.
Ryan Maresch and Jose Lim-Valle are lifelong friends and two of the business owners that have turned Whatnot’s entry into women’s apparel into a multi-million-dollar business. The duo previously ran an apparel liquidation storefront out of a Southern California warehouse before starting to experiment with live streaming on Whatnot in 2023 when they couldn’t sell enough of the clothing that they bought as part of a bulk liquidation purchase of excess Sam’s Club merchandise. Now their business Circle City OC has become the first women’s fashion seller to cross $1 million in monthly Whatnot sales across its three streaming channels targeting three types of customers.
“We realized the reach of customers is endless,” Lim-Valle said, “There’s a morning crowd, the afternoon crowd, the night crowd. East coast and West coast. We started realizing that as long as we keep streaming, we can keep moving product. It lit a fire underneath us knowing that it’s up to us on our success and how far we want to push it. It’s a free-for-all. It’s like the Wild Wild West.”
Other merchandise categories include electronics, beauty products, golf gear, and even live plants. Often with enthusiasts in the audience bonding over time with the fellow enthusiasts who are hosts. Consumer brands like Dolls Kill have also been experimenting with liquidating excess inventory directly on Whatnot.
“What’s really exciting about Whatnot is that they are combining the best of entertainment, shopping, and community to reimagine what a commerce experience is like for sellers and buyers,” said Marcie Vu, a well-regarded investment banker-turned-VC who’s now a partner at venture capital firm Greycroft, which co-led the latest Whatnot investment. Vu took a board observer role with Whatnot alongside her firm’s investment. DST Global and Avra also co-led the round, while Andreessen Horowitz, CapitalG, BOND, and Y Combinator have backed the company as well.
Basketball card roulette
Sellers on Whatnot can choose to sell merchandise either at set prices, including in time-limited “flash sales,” or in live auctions – which themselves can come in various forms. Whatnot’s design makes bidding dead-simple through an almost-too-easy swipe to the right. An auction countdown clock creates urgency. And when your bid wins, a digital confetti explosion greets you in celebration.
Some have criticized these design elements as creating fertile ground for regrettable impulse buys, or worse, addiction. But LaFontaine insists that the only way Whatnot will become a long-term durable business is if buyers come back again and again, and feel good about it. He believes buyers who feel burned, or have buyer’s remorse, won’t return.
“If people go in over their skis or they pay too much money through an impulse purchase, those aren’t people who are going to come back; they’re going to feel burned,” he said. “Let’s say we saw a deep problem where people were having all these impulse purchases, they felt really terrible about those purchases, and that was making people talk incredibly negatively and never come back to Whatnot, we would look very deeply into it. We don’t see a ton of that today.”
The CEO added that fun digital design elements are “the cherry on top” and not what keeps viewers returning. Rather, it’s a connection with people, either the hosts of their favorite streams or the fellow viewers who frequent a certain show. Whatnot users spend 80 minutes on average on the app each day.
For Nezhoda, of Storage Wars fame, he told Fortune he makes a point of being as transparent as possible with his viewers about the potential risks of the sales events he hosts. On a recent June night, this reporter tuned into one of his nightly shows unannounced while waiting in a car outside a youth soccer practice. What viewers were witnessing was Nezhoda’s latest “break”—a type of group-buying event that has gained popularity among trading card enthusiasts, collectors, and opportunists in recent years—where buyers either bid on, or buy, the right to receive certain cards from a pack or case of cards that the host “breaks” or sells portions of to different buyers.
In this break, Nezhoda was selling 30 “slots,” each representing one of the 30 Major League Baseball teams. By purchasing a slot (the New York Yankees slot sold for $710, for example), the buyer is essentially claiming the right to the card that corresponds to that particular team—if that team happens to be one of the eight random cards that comprise the set that Nezhoda opens.
For the lucky eight people whose teams turn out to be in the case, the payoff is great. Nezhoda was pulling from a case of 2025 Topps Sterling line of ultra-premium autographed cards, each card essentially a collector’s item. But for the folks who spent hundreds of dollars apiece to snag one of the 22 other team slots, the break is a bust: they’ll walk away with just a $5 pack of basic cards, “skunked” in industry speak. High risk indeed.
Nezhoda sold $8,000 in total slots across all 30 teams. Before the break began, he offered a verbal disclaimer and cautioned that if you didn’t understand the mechanics of what was about to transpire, you’d be better off leaving the virtual room altogether. Whatnot livestreams and their various sale formats and auction types can be confusing to first-timers or novices.
“Please understand the risk of this break,” Nezhoda told his viewers. “This is like roulette.”
“Eighty percent of you will most likely skunk,” he added.
For Nezhoda, that candor – coupled with his celebrity and strong relationships with trading card maker Topps, owned by Fanatics – have been crucial to a lucrative pivot away from his old business of reselling hauls from storage unit auctions, which was his and his wife Casey’s previous claim to fame. The move to selling sports cards – and specifically through live streamed events – has been so successful, he said, that Bargain Hunters Breaks should generate $15 million to $18 million in sales on Whatnot in 2025 alone. (Watching him in action on Whatnot, I quickly understood why. I haven’t purchased a pack of baseball cards since the 1990s but Nezhoda’s show still left me with a tantalizing urge to buy in.)
Nezhoda puts in long hours in this new sector, but it’s not the same grind as scouring storage unit auctions all over the country.
“The big battle was always sourcing product,” he said of his past business.
Given the current frothiness in the sports card market – where card makers release new sets frequently – and Nezhoda’s deep relationship with some card companies, his sourcing work has become much easier.
“I don’t have to hunt for product,” he said.
The next great e-commerce war
While Nezhoda has built a real big business and presence on Whatnot, he does host and sell elsewhere. His other main sales channel is Fanatics Live, a livestream commerce experience but one mainly focused on trading cards – at least for now. Nezhoda said that while Whatnot allows a broad range of sellers – from big companies like his to “somebody that breaks on their living room desk…and has a 9 to 5 [job] – “Fanatics Live is a lot more regulated.”
On the other hand, “Whatnot has the benefit of a lot of different categories,” he said, which attract different kinds of consumers who might not otherwise have come across his digital shop.
“You can pick up new customers – maybe a coin [collector] will see it, or a sneaker guy, and they’ll come over to trading cards.”
Then there’s the 30-year-old online collectible marketplace giant eBay. The company debuted its eBay Live streaming section in 2022, but has started pushing it aggressively over the past year. Nezhoda sees the onetime sleeping industry giant as a real, potential threat.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if eBay Live might become the market leader because they just have such a big user database,” he said. “But I actually think it’s great that we have different companies, different competitors, because it’s good for the ecosystem.”
The charm of the barroom
Spend some time on the app, and you’ll find shows that vary widely in production value and style. Some sellers like to present themselves to the audience face first, whether in card breaking or to show off and describe a collection of women’s clothes. Others keep the camera’s focus on the cards, with pounding hip hop setting the vibe, and an on-screen Google spreadsheet in view that’s keeping track of which viewer purchased which team or slot in the upcoming card break. And then there’s those who aren’t afraid to reveal their business anxieties – whether real or manufactured – and apply pressure to their viewers with the zealous schtick of an old-time ticket scalper. “Bid me up, chat!” is a refrain you might encounter.
On a recent afternoon, a sneaker seller auctioning off merchandise broke from his jovial demeanor to lay a demand on his audience.
“Do not buy that!” he barked after a collection of Patrick Ewing basketball sneakers was about to sell in his auction too quickly or perhaps well under the price he was looking for. A few beats later, looking dejected, it seemed like he was coming to grips that he had acted too late.
“We just got absolutely killed on those,” he lamented. “Gosh dang it! Fuck!”
It was unclear if the host was legitimately distraught, or rather a talented salesman wanting his audience to believe the sale in question was an amazing steal. Perhaps that’s part of the appeal.
On another day, A 20-something woman hawking luxury bags and other accessories struggled to suppress her laughter after mistakenly referring to high-end tree ornaments as “brown balls.” A few minutes later, she sold a $3,400 saddle purse like nothing.
Whatnot’s CEO said his company aggressively monitors customer feedback for complaints and refund requests, and will remove sellers who breach company thresholds. But he also contends that what might not seem like a quality and entertaining seller experience or setup to some viewers, may hold a different appeal for others. He likened it to how a dive bar may attract loyal customers who frequently visit because of a specific bartender or a connection with fellow patrons – factors that are more important to some than the grime that may cover the barroom floor.
“We want Whatnot to be open to all flavors and tastes,” he said.
Bid me up, chat!
Are you a current or former Whatnot employee, seller, or customer with thoughts on this topic or a tip to share? Contact Jason Del Rey at jason.delrey@fortune.com, jasondelrey@protonmail.com, or through messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp at 917-655-4267. You can also contact him on LinkedIn or at @delrey on X, @jdelrey on Threads, and on Bluesky.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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