Case Study: Whatnot accelerates data-to-production speed with dbt Labs

Whatnot leverages data to pioneer social commerce

Whatnot, the live stream social commerce platform, needed a faster, more collaborative data workflow to keep up with 20x revenue growth, rapid category expansion, and a complex engineering-heavy stack that made hiring and cross-team work difficult. To address this, Whatnot turned to dbt Labs and its dbt Cloud product alongside a modern data stack centered on SQL.

dbt Labs helped Whatnot standardize on SQL-first workflows with dbt for modeling and documentation, enabling analysts, data engineers, and machine learning teams to reuse common models across Hex, Sigma, and Snowflake. The results included a 4–8x faster path from idea to production, a one-week onboarding time for new analytics engineers, and a 10x reduction in maintenance costs, while also improving data quality, accessibility, and collaboration.

Whatnot

Emmanuel Fuentes

Head of Machine Learning & Data Platforms