The future of Social Commerce with Sam Jacobs, Co-Founder @ Go Places

0:00Hello and welcome to another episode of Rider Unicorns. Today we are joined by Sam Jacobs. Sam is the co-founder of Go Places which is a super cool company that helps brands on TikTok. Sam. Sam, it's great to have you on. Thanks for joining me. Maybe you could do a quick intro on GoPlaces and then I'd love to dive into sort of your journey as an entrepreneur. Of course. Thanks for having me, James. So GoPaces was born a year and a half ago now in April 2024. Really simple insight. Help brands unlock the power of social commerce in the West. Social commerce, I think, has been a very, very well-known and now a well-shocking path in Asia in particular.

0:41And we saw that there was a unique opportunity to help brands enable social commerce activity and execution by providing them all the tools they need, both from an execution perspective, but also from a tech perspective to truly understand the value that this channel can bring to their businesses. So we set about the journey in April last year. And since then, we've been designing what we like to call the social commerce operating system, the TikTok shop operating system, to be specific here in the UK, with a suite of in-house executional tools, but also the technology that supports brands, understand the channel and the value of the channel as well.

1:17Awesome. And maybe just to bring it to life a little bit, can you share some of the brands that you work with? Of course. When we started, I think my background is a very large consumer brand. I worked at North Dakota for many years, ended up heading up e-commerce there, moved over to venture capital and venture studio-style work at AB InBev at a business called ZX Ventures. And Jack, my co-founder, was at Amazon for seven years. And when we started, we realized that shop in the UK and in the West in general had previously been a bit of a playground for not well-known, well-distributed brands.

1:52Social native, social first brands had really taken the need in what is a bit of a wild west land grab when it comes to dominating categories. And we specifically built our solution based on our experience to help high growth challenger brands and enterprise level clients understand the channel and unlock the channel for them in the right way. So we work with a number of brands that I'm sure many people have heard of, brands like Trip, Huel, Lovecorn. We're working with enterprise plants such as Mars, McCormick, a big flavor and spice business, The Body Shop, and many others. We're quite category focused.

2:25We really focus in on consumer electronics. We work with Samsung. We work with FMCG, with some of the clients I've named, and also beauty and personal care. So we're really focused on those three areas and that style of client and customer, because they understand the value proposition that we bring via our product and services whereas others who may have lived and breathed TikTok shop in its infancy and its start they've built a lot of capabilities in-house and they don't need to worry about the effect of the channel on their Tesco listings or their Amazon listings and their wider distribution and brand strategy so they're things we really deeply care about and that sort of informs the sorts of clients we work with as well.

3:05Awesome and you've done amazingly to get such incredible sort of big brands and challenger brands as clients already so you obviously had interesting context and insight into the space already from your time at coca-cola etc and obviously jack was at amazon so you guys kind of understood the space but what was the trip to china about and what did that really unlock for you guys yeah i mean probably worth going back a little bit just before we went to china at the end of last year when jack and i started the business the company i was working at just before starting go places was a business called pattern which has been a wildly successful and now very recently ipo marketplace accelerator and enablement business with majority of its business existing on amazon helping brands are not the power of amazon so there i was working at the world's largest amazon seller and their jack was working at amazon and we thought we've got great context as the marketplace ecosystem done for brands let's start a marketplace accelerator and enablement business for brands and develop the technology that allows them to list and launch across multiple marketplaces not just amazon or tiktok shop or sephora or tesco's new marketplace and that was the original idea that's what we uh we went and raised money for and i'm sure we'll get into that journey a little bit but obviously at that point it's very founder market fit and we had good founder market fit and we quickly realized after the launch that actually TikTok shop is not just an addendum to a list of marketplaces it is its whole world and ecosystem social commerce is wildly different in both the way to operate the way to transact the way to deliver performance the way to try and understand performance and results than everything else that's out there so we did a an Amazon-style memo session with an advisory board where we listed out our business and the vision and all the different areas we've been operating from a marketplace perspective.

5:01What became very clear in a very long session was there is a unique opportunity within social commerce. It is going nowhere. What is TikTok shop today? The ways of selling on TikTok shop today, of which, again, we can talk through a little bit, are going to become ubiquitous across e-commerce and commerce in general, from live shopping, infopiliates and influencers, content-driven sales. And we went all in on the space. And to go all in on the space, like social commerce, there's only really one place to go to truly understand it, which is China. I'd lived in Hong Kong for a bit when I was at university, and I'd seen a little bit about the different ways culturally that people shop and interact with retail and online experiences.

5:42But going there really blew our minds. It changed everything. to see how ingrained social commerce, and in particular live shopping is, into the everyday shopping experience within the Chinese retail market ecosystem was incredible. Sitting on trains between cities and everybody is watching a live shopping event and spending not 10, 20, 30 pounds, but hundreds or thousands of pounds across every major fashion house and beauty brand. How it's just completely always on. we visited a super like a big westfield sized shopping mall with about 550 stores in it and every single store you could go in you could buy your nike shoes and there was a large stream going on at the same time so you could see someone live shopping thousands of people watching and it's like 365 days a year so that was like okay wow this is unbelievable and it's completely different to what we see as social commerce in the uk considering the types of brands that are transacting on it and the level and depth of which the content is going out there and how incredible it all looks as well.

6:49And we took that back and said, actually, nothing Chinese is driving live shopping. It is not a cultural phenomenon in China. They are just ahead of the game. And we've really taken that insight and it propels a lot of the work and effort that we go into it. Because what we believe is that live shopping is one of the many areas that you sell, will be ingrained into every area of e-commerce. You go onto a brands direct to consumer website and the first thing you will see is a live shopping event. Amazon, every other major retailer will all be tapping into what is a very unique retail and shopping experience.

7:22And that already stemmed from that trip to China where we started to understand the landscape a lot more. Awesome. That's amazing. And so it's obviously a very fast moving space. So it must have even changed a little bit, even in the time that you've been operating in it. So what has changed? What should people be aware of? what are the kind of trends of social commerce in q4 2025 yeah it's it's amazing i mean we sold our first unit on behalf of the client in august last year and the landscape is completely different in october 2025 than it was back then and back then it's not very long ago so it's uh i think the first thing is it's on everyone's mind there is no need to convince people on this channel anymore.

8:08They understand the power of it. They've heard the stories about it. It is moving from, you've heard our client list from amazing challenger brands. I think what will always be the core of social commerce will always be the brands that succeed from a revenue perspective, even more so than enterprise level brands, which is a really interesting phenomenon and obviously very different to retail where big brands would always pay for space and the distribution required and the promotional leaders that they can pull. Whereas here, community driven brands, we've got amazing stories and founders and creators of them behind them, they will often be the most successful brands.

8:42But now enterprise level clients are starting to understand this is where I need to be to access new consumers, to deliver unique both commerce, but also in marketing experiences via live shopping and content driven sales. And that has led to a whole world of new entrants and players that are super exciting because of that very big names, but also the level and quality of the content being produced is going through the roof. And I remember our side-stop shopping event, if I watch that back in our first ever studio to where we are today, it's completely different. And that's the expectation of the channel is that it will continue to accelerate rapidly at the quality of the content that's being reduced and the quality of the clients and the brands that are starting to transact on there because they start to deeply understand what it can offer them, but also they know that this is the future both of e-commerce, but also of marketing as well.

9:34Yeah, awesome. Yeah, definitely an exciting space. And so I know that you guys have, you've built a lot of tech as well as being able to sort of advise and give knowledge to your clients. But presumably TikTok are sort of building new tech as well. So how do you balance what you innovate on versus what they kind of build out and get that balance right so that you're being as efficient as possible with the value you create through software? Yeah, we look at software in quite an interesting way for our business, where the software powers what we do that is not our total product. It is often what makes us different and what makes us unique.

10:12It drives outsized performance for the brands that we work with, but it powers our operations and decision making within our business. So whilst TikTok have got incredible technology that spans their entire ecosystem, like through AI content to insights and analytics, what they don't do is have very bespoke personalized tools for clients to truly understand the value of the channel. And one of the reasons for that is that the value of TikTok shop goes far beyond a sale on the platform. It is customer acquisition. It is awareness. It is driving brand positive conversations. It is driving community building.

10:46and therefore is also driving a huge halo effect of sales into other areas of distribution, whether that's Amazon, DTC or retail. So bringing that all together under an analytics platform, which is what we have done, so brands can truly understand the power of the work that we are doing, is not just in top-line revenue, but is it all these other areas. That is unique and provides brands a lot of context for how we want them to see the channel and how we feel they should see the channel. Because it is not just somewhere to transact. and that is why social commerce is different to e-commerce and needs to be treated as such.

11:20So we work within the frameworks of TikTok and ByteDance's incredible algorithm and product building and we work very closely with them to identify areas that allow us to support our clients but also support our business. So to give some examples, our first product is a tool called OnePlace. It is self-serve reporting analytics and AI tooling that gives brands the ability to query their data, understand on a more deep level what's happening on the channel, but what's also happening elsewhere because of the channel and all the social metrics that come with that. And that is often a lot of data that is taken from the TikTok ecosystem, but also ingesting data from ourselves and our spend and our return on investment, but also brands to understand uplift and other channels as well.

12:04So really giving that holistic view of the channel. And that's sort of the first thing we've built and it's been incredibly impactful to the brands we've worked with and we have a series of new products coming out again which are designed to help us as a business perform better so a piece of live shopping technology which would allow us to manage our our new studio setup coming next year which will be 25 new live shopping studios hundreds of live shopping presenters and producers informing them what they should be focusing on giving them real-time feedback on their performance and how they can improve booking management payment the in total live shopping infrastructure all living within one product and tool which again TikTok will deliver this is what your life has done this goes far beyond that.

12:48Nice and obviously there were some things that were possible pre-AI and there were some things that weren't really possible pre-AI and so how are you guys using AI within your business? Yeah it's it's interesting So we're using AI in a couple of very interesting, I think probably different ways. The most obvious is to more deeply understand our data and drive actionable insights from that data. So running performance and pricing elasticity studies, using AI across our portfolio of brands to try and drive better results, looking at live shopping events at very intricate detail and understanding which promo mechanisms work or which presenters work best at different times and different studio setups.

13:32There are so many data points across pieces of content, some tangible, some also intangible, that AI can help us recognize and then also drive better performance off the back of it. So I think that's the first. And we've built our own servers that integrate with MCP servers that integrate with existing NLMs such as Claude that helps us do a lot of that work. So for us, the first stage within AI for us has been having an unbelievable data set and building a really, really clear data warehouse that is usable and actionable. and then from an operational perspective there's a huge amount we have in-house content creators who can use ai to create significantly more content than we previously could have in the past there's lots of sort of regulations that we need to be aware of to make sure that it is still authentic it is still driving the right brand presence and brand messaging but in terms of the quantity and quality of content across all of the things we can do we're now starting to use AI in a really interesting way as well.

14:31That's awesome and so obviously you took a high conviction bet in a big market and you've landed all these clients built amazing tech using AI so it sounds like a dream journey but obviously with any entrepreneurial journey there's an element of it being a bit of a roller coaster. Can you tell us about some of the challenges? Yeah it's definitely been a roller coaster. It's both mine and Jack's first foray into entrepreneurship, which I think comes with positives because we have some blindness to the things we do and convictions without scars, but also challenges to dealing with the many pressures and there are intense elements of what we do on a daily basis.

15:17But I would say our biggest challenges have been scaling and building the right culture and team alongside what we do. We started this business in April last year. The end of last year, we were six people. By the end of this year, we'll be close to 35 people. Now, from a headcount perspective, I'm getting sure we get the right people who are really bought into what we do and are proud to work for Go Places and believe in the vision. That hiring challenge is definitely something that has been very, very new to us to do at speed whilst guaranteeing that we get unbelievable people through the door.

15:53And of course, you take loads of learnings from that journey, even in a short space of time. But I think building the right team, the network around you has been, for us, has been absolutely essential. I would add, probably even more so than perhaps other sectors, is their own social commerce experts in the UK. There are not 20-year live shopping experts that exist in the UK and the US and across Europe. Now there may be some five, 10 year in China, but that means that what you're hiring on is unique talent, drive, and truly people that care about what we're trying to do from a vision perspective, which is sometimes hard to digest as part of an interviewing process and definitely something that we feel like we're getting a lot better at with time.

16:38But that growth journey and ensuring that we can support our client demands with ongoing new people coming through has been a real challenge. yeah i can imagine maybe quite refreshing in some ways that you sort of get people in with fresh eyes that don't sort of assume they know it all and as long as they have the right attitude which obviously is an important criteria for you um maybe that you know you know maybe it gives people a fresh start a fresh yeah it is and like what we're learning are the translatable skills into this space, the sorts of different profiles and talents that work well.

17:16But I think our biggest learning from a hiring perspective is people that care because any startup is an incredibly intense place to work. You have to be incredibly adaptable, flexible, willing to do lots of different things, except the fact that there is not a 90-day training manual before you do your first piece of work. And that's right for some people and it's not right for others. and trying to identify that as early as possible and give them real clarity over what this means by joining a business like ours is really important. And I do think it is refreshing because it gives us a bit of freedom to look outside the box for different types of personalities and profiles.

17:53And it will be fortunate enough to get some, not just some, but an incredible team here that now I would say are social commerce experts, even if they've only been here for six months, which is not what you would find in other industries of verticals. Yeah, 100%. Does it get a little bit harder as you get bigger that you sort of maybe have more presence, more clout? And so does that, do you sometimes attract the wrong type of candidates as well? Yeah. Yeah. Has that been a challenge? You do. I think there are people that may look at the size of the business and from a headcount revenue and the sorts of brands that we work with and operate with and think they would be coming into a very large organization in terms of structure.

18:37and operational architecture and processes. And these are all things that were working really hard to accelerate as fast as the company has grown, but we are not that business. And so you do definitely get people, I think, think we may be further down the line with some of those internal elements than we are. And we've definitely done a huge amount. I mean, our first ever hire was a BCG consultant, which was probably a very odd thing for a social commerce business to do. But we realized immediately how complicated this business is. We have content creators, affiliate and influencer management teams, live shopping teams, ads teams.

19:12That's just on the execution side. And you combine that with the engineering and operations team. And there's a huge amount of work and collaboration and coordination that goes in across our teams. So from the very beginning, we've tried. And I would say this is for any business, really thinking about the operational architecture of your business, thinking of how to design processes as early as possible without slowing you down is absolutely imperative because otherwise you can get caught up very, very quickly. And that was a big learning. The processes we had a year and a half ago are very different to the ones we've had today because of the size and scale of the operation that we're running.

19:45But we still had one. And we still managed to operate really, really well and deliver results for the brands and clients that we worked with. So we're quite proud of the fact that I think we had an element of foresight into the complexity of entrepreneurship without having done it before and try to fire a focus ahead of the curve on some of those things. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And obviously there'll be some people listening who maybe work at brands who could be potential customers. And I'm sure that there is a pricking up at sort of everything you're saying. But there's also will be a lot of people who aren't necessarily in the space, but are a user of TikTok.

20:19And a lot of people who are users have bought something and sometimes it's a good experience. Sometimes it's not as good experience. From your sort of expert position, what are the things people should look out for when buying on social commerce platforms? Yeah, I think from a brand perspective, I would start by saying you will all be doing elements of what we do today on your brand in the next five years. I would prepare to take a relatively strong bet that almost every brand in major categories across fashion, beauty and personal care, FMCG, consumer electronics, will all be running some form of live shopping event in the next five years.

21:00Will it just be on TikTok? Probably not. It will be in lots of other places and, you know, whatnot, tilt, and whether it's DTC and Amazon. The ways of selling on social commerce are here and they are not going anywhere. In same sats, I mean, TikTok launched from a shop perspective in the UK in 2023. It's the third largest beauty retailer. It's attention to be the number one beauty retailer by next year. There are already 6 ,000 live shopping events every single day, generating from a revenue perspective. And this is just a strange little anecdote. It's the number one toilet paper retailer in the country, is TikTok Shull.

21:37So people are starting to look for everyday items. And some of that is because of great value and there's elements of jupes and knockoffs that have historically been quite present on the platform. But that is now moving away. And what I would say is that for people and consumers who may have some distrust of the channel, buy from brands, buy from people you know, and look at the quality of the content and the work that's going into this. And once you have that experience, it's an incredibly sticky proposition social promise. People don't just buy once, they buy on average seven times. And that is something that is unique, but it is also a gateway to new customers.

22:15And from a brand perspective, it doesn't need to just be about driving revenue. It'd be reintroducing your brands to new consumers. we've had that challenge with with some of our businesses like the body shop who have said of course we want to drive amazing revenue want to drive incredible top client gmv but more than anything we want to remind people who the body shop are we are not something that is not a business that has gone away we are a world-class beauty brand and skincare brand and the tiktok shop is a gateway to driving new consideration from from consumers so there's lots of different ways to view the channel from a brand perspective but from a consumer perspective i would just say try and engage with the content learn about it watch your live shopping event ask questions and my opinion is it's uniquely engaging because it will mean that you're having an in-store experience but you're probably watching tv at home yeah awesome and we've already touched on some of your tech and uh you know team hiring and things like that but you the the sort of other element is these live shows have presenters and you have to manage lots of presenters what's that been like that must be operationally challenging yeah hugely i mean it's funny again in china live shopping presenters are celebrities new people who were previously news anchors have quit their jobs just to do one live shopping event every few weeks and they make 10 times the amount of money they don't want they don't get paid hourly fees they get paid only commission and they're incredibly successful individuals now they're coming back to this market this is a new space this is a new profession for people so finding great talent is uh is tough training them retaining them and making sure that they are well compensated for what they do because it is a ridiculously incredible job it is definitely operationally challenging and i mean our live shopping operations is to put some context on it today we have nine live shopping studios just up here in north london and we have about 60 percenters um and a team of about 12 producers and they are here every day all studios will be running every day and that's throughout the week and just to manage that is you know training sessions every single week brand immersions we're having to build our own technology to support it with booking tools and providing them the right information on what products to focus on and also trying to look at marketing to try and source new presenters as well so that's where we are today and it's definitely one of our operationally biggest challenges but at the beginning of next year we're going to have 25 live shopping studios and the program's going to be two and a half times so we're trying to get ahead of that now and looking at new ways to bring in great talent because again my belief is that more and more people are going to see this as a really valued fantastic career choice because it requires quite a specialized skill set and it's giving them an opportunity to be in the media which is lots of people's dream yeah and what makes a good presenter yeah i think energy people energy authenticity which is kind of the key word for the entire social commerce ecosystem when it comes to content this isn't glossy it's you know front of camera explanation truth answering questions in a really authentic manner giving people great recommendations and product feedback but energy is number one our minimum live shopping hours are three hours that's the a minimum live shopping event.

25:35We've run 14 hours nonstop, multiple presenters. The energy is absolutely critical. And kind and attention. You have to have a passion for the categories and the products you're working on or it shows up. Similarly to if you go into a store and a retail assistant is looking bored and disinterested, you wouldn't probably buy from them. That's got to be complete opposite where there's thousands of people in your store at one time and you're presenting this brand to them. You become the face of the brand. yeah i remember one of my early jobs in sort of summers in between school and stuff was uh was kids parties and i just wasn't really cut out for it i wasn't really cut out for it there's a company called sharky and george some people will have heard of it it's big in london um i wasn't really cut out for it but i worked with some incredible people who i'm sure have gone on to be like radio presenters and stuff because they were so engaging and incredible um it is so yeah unbelievable sales people yeah and that's i remember my first ever job was field sales at coca-cola convenience stores in acton and chiswick in west london and like you learn how to sell and get challenged like seriously even when you're selling such a popular product and serious collection of brands but you know some of the sales people i worked with on that journey i think now is like they could just talk and they can convince anyone to buy anything and what an immaculate skill to have and being able to translate that to doing it in front of thousands people at once is uh it's fantastic yeah 100 and just talking a bit about sort of the types of companies you've obviously mentioned consumer electronics big brands challenger brands fmcg what's the sort of luxury component and are more and more luxury brands in social commerce as well so in china every luxury brand um is is there when we one of the businesses that we spent some time sandwich, Hermes, Louis Vuitton, everything from there to Tumi suitcases.

27:28Obviously, they are a much more advanced market and there is much higher consumer understanding and acceptance of the channels and multiple platforms that can run social commerce in China as well. Here has been a slower burn. It's partly due to the way TikTok in particular launched in the UK in 2023 was a very large selection of Chinese products, which was fantastic in terms of we had so much and it was great value, but that therefore gives consumers, some consumers the perception that this is maybe a low value proposition or something that can't be trusted. Now what we're seeing over time is that bigger brands are starting to invest in the platform and deliver social commerce experiences.

28:10It's a very different place. We are now getting to the place where more luxury brands and high value brands are starting to launch and execute on the platform. And we're in conversations with some very large beauty conglomerates and then looking at a very top end of their products all the way through to the bottom. What changes is the expectations because until the platform continues to mature, then perhaps they're not going to be the number one product within beauty is going to be a luxury beauty brand, but they still want to be there executing, learning about the platform, how to run live shopping events, build communities, work with affiliates, because I think that's very, very different to how brands have previously worked in the past with influencers, where you pay a significant sum of money, you have complete control over the content.

28:54Now you're sending samples out to hundreds or maybe thousands of people, and you lose some of that control or ability to dictate every bit of conversation around your brand. So they are starting to access the channel. They have different expectations today, but they understand more and more that they will have to be here and play here yeah it feels like a matter of time rather than it never happening um and so sam let's just zoom out slightly if i could say you know what's your north star where do you want you know go places to be in in five years let's just go for yeah we want to be ubiquitous with the being the social commerce experts we want to be the greatest a social commerce platform in the world by providing brands and clients the tools to execute on the channel at any stage of their journey.

29:41So whether that's using our influencer affiliate capabilities, our content creation capabilities, our live shopping capabilities, or our technology, we are here to support brands at any stage of their journey within social commerce. And whilst today we have a particular set of brands we work with, we believe that we will expand out to significantly more brands of all different sizes and different categories and verticals to enable them to truly unlock the power of social commerce. We are very, very focused on that. And we're very focused on delivering this across the UK, US and Europe over the next five years.

30:14Awesome. Very exciting. So Sam, if it's okay with you, I'm going to do some kind of quickfire questions, if that's okay. Cool. So what's your favorite trend on TikTok right now? Oh, it's a good question. My favorite trend on TikTok right now, there's some song ones and dancing ones but i'm not going to sing on a podcast um so i i would say my favorite trend on tiktok in the last little like i'd say it's a bit longer than right now has been the jet 2 advert that has been just i find some of that content unbelievable the repetition of the jet 2 advert some of the content that's been created in hilarious places and how brands have actually utilized it as well providing they're not doing it today they're doing actually when it was relevant yeah i've loved that stuff awesome most underrated skill for an entrepreneur underrated um a lot of rated ones underrated i would say to be able to sell to be able to sell is i think the most underrated skill in any business you are always selling externally internally investors fundraising you are selling you're selling your vision you're selling you you're selling your company and if you don't know how to sell i think it is always going to be it's going to be tough because distribution in whichever format your company operates in is the way to gain scale and traction and selling is the most important part of that.

31:36Apart from your amazing clients you already have, who would be your dream client for GoPlaces? Oh yeah, we talk about this a lot. I think the one and it's a number of businesses within it, I'd love to work with Estate Order. I think the Estate Order company has got such high potential across social commerce in the uk and us and in europe unbelievable brands between luxury and heritage and new beauty and skincare products i think there is such value to be unlocked for them to be doing it in the right way and i know that amazon was something that took them a really long time to get their head around which is broad grief for a business of that size and they're the ones who i feel like they have an opportunity here to not be late for what is the next great e-commerce trend.

32:20Yeah, presumably they are live in China with social commerce. Live in China and a couple of their brands in different markets are here. But as a group, having a coordinated strategy and clear playbooks and understanding of what partners can offer them, I think it's critical. And they're the sorts of business, again, where our technology and insights that we can provide them. I think that's what they need. They need to understand the value of social commerce beyond sales because their sales can be amazing but the estate order group needs truly be bought in that this is delivering a huge wide range of impact across marketing retail other marketplaces and within social commerce as well yeah awesome okay so we're going to just um move on to our two final questions which we we ask on every episode um so the first one is a future unicorn prediction so have you seen another company could be related to your space or not at all but another company that's relatively early that you think has a lot of potential?