Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning.
On any given workday, you might find Whatnot employees hawking trading cards, apparel, or other items on the digital live shopping app. They’re not slacking on the job or trying to make rent—they’re actually evaluated on whether they’ve spent time selling and buying on the app.
“We only exist to the extent that we provide our customers a lot of value,” says cofounder and CEO Grant LaFontaine. “If you want to build a customer-centered culture, you have to actually follow through on building one and inject it everywhere you possibly can in the organization.”
At Whatnot, which launched in 2019, focus on the customer starts with the hiring process. “If you interview at Whatnot, somewhere along your interview pathway, someone’s going to ask you, ‘Have you used the app? What do you think about it? What could be improved?’” LaFontaine says. “We want to see that you actually use it, you understand it, and you can think through the lens of a customer.”
An Inc.com Featured Presentation
Try before they buy
Once hired, every one of the company’s more than 1,000 full-time employees is required to answer customer support tickets each quarter, plus sell and buy on the app. The company provides $150 in credits to make purchases and lets employees do their required buying and selling on company time.
Many companies say they engage in “dogfooding,” a term derived from the phrase “eating our own dog food,” or testing one’s own products. Enterprise tech giants such as Microsoft and Cisco have frequently touted the way they used their own tools to drive productivity.
But few companies mandate dogfooding the way Whatnot does. LaFontaine says no employee can “meet expectations” on their performance reviews if they fail to purchase and sell on the app and answer customer queries. LaFontaine has gone live and sold Pokémon cards and toys. Last quarter, he sold some Whatnot swag and donated the proceeds to charity.
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