How TikTok became the world's biggest marketplace in 2 years
No Bullsh!t, July 9, 2025, 66 min, 235 views. The guest is Sergey Vart, founder of an agency and an official partner of a major social commerce platform in the United States.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 66 min |
| Views on YouTube | 235 |
| Language of the episode | Russian |
| Where to watch and listen | YouTube, Spotify, Telegram |
Date, length and view count according to data from the episode page on YouTube, as of the page update date shown in the footer.
In short
He describes the path from a student startup through work at a social network, a series of financial technology projects and experience in Indonesia, where he noticed the phenomenon of live video shopping on a local marketplace. Then came live commerce pilots, an accelerator, a partnership with a large bank and the sale of the project to it at the end of 2021, two attempts to enter the American market and finally an organic move into the status of an official agency partner. The main part of the conversation is about how social commerce became the fastest growing marketplace in the world, how the recommendation algorithms work, and how creators earn on it.
Key ideas
- In the United States alone the platform did 32 billion dollars of gross merchandise value in 2024, two years after launch, overtaking a major retailer in e-commerce turnover on the platform.
- Its strength in product recommendations rests on the strongest algorithms in the industry: the feed is personalised even without purchase history, based on interests.
- There are three selling formats: product cards in the video feed, purchases inside live streams and a separate catalogue tab, with the average user spending about an hour a day on the platform.
- The creator earnings model is a free product sample plus a share of sales, on average 10 to 30 percent across the market, from every clip for its whole life.
- AI avatars that try to replace a living person one to one are spotted instantly by the audience and rejected, while clearly fantastical AI content performs well.
- The working formula for entering social commerce is not to treat it as a separate sales channel but to use it as a boost for all channels at once.
The full transcript
The episode is recorded in Russian, and the full transcript of the conversation is on the Russian page of this episode. English and Spanish subtitles for the strongest episodes are rolling out on YouTube in waves.
Open the transcript