Case Study: Whatnot speeds data development and collaboration with Hex

Whatnot - Customer Case Study

Whatnot, a fast-growing livestream shopping platform, needed a more scalable data workflow to support rapid product expansion, platform safety, business reporting, and machine learning. Its previous AWS-based stack was engineering-heavy and complex, making collaboration across analysts, machine learning engineers, and data engineers difficult and slowing hiring and development. Whatnot turned to Hex and dbt, alongside Snowflake, to create a SQL-first data environment that would be easier for teams to use and scale.

With Hex for exploratory analysis and dbt for modeling and documentation, Whatnot unified its data teams around SQL and reduced the need for custom infrastructure and adapters. Hex’s native integration with dbt let teams move from exploration to production faster, improving reuse of models and cutting time from idea to production by 4–8x. Whatnot also reported a 10x decrease in maintenance costs and new analytics engineering hires becoming productive in just one week, helping Hex deliver measurable gains in speed, collaboration, and scale.

Whatnot

Emmanuel Fuentes

Head of Machine Learning & Data Platforms