This week on the podcast, entrepreneur Rachel Tipograph describes her startup MikMak and her vision for a future where every media format is commerce-enabled.
The company provides universal product detail pages that brands can embed in any content environment and that integrate with pretty much every retailer out there. A person can swipe or tap one of its pages, then instantly transact on Amazon, Walmart, Target, Glossier and beyond. “Our goal is to shorten the path to purchase between the content you’re consuming online and your main retailers,” Tipograph says.
Originally positioned as a transactional platform for Instagram and other social environments, MikMak now integrates with programmatic, email, search, messaging and other platforms. It’s something of a hedge against rising prices in social.
“There’s two key drivers of ecommerce today: It’s search and it’s social. If you think about your own behaviors doing product discovery and recall, it happens within those two environments,” she says. “If you look at some of these darling direct-to-consumer brands that we all talk about – whether it’s Kylie Jenner’s beauty line or Warby Parker or Casper or Away or Glossier – all of these companies have been built on the backbone of social ads.”
Today, she said, “the majority of our experiences live within social but the reality is our partners are tracking in content everywhere.”
Also in this episode: Tipograph talks about meeting her primary investor Gary Vaynerchuck, balancing software and services revenue, and how she guards against disintermediation.
