David Protein's TikTok Shop Playbook
I talk to co-founders Peter Rahal and Zach Ranen about selling over 50,000 products through TikTok Shop.
I have a complicated relationship with TikTok Shop. It goes against most things I know to be true about social media. That these platforms should be used to tell stories and build brand awareness—not hard sell. TikTok Shop (and the livestreams associated with it) are like if QVC downed 10 cans of Celsius. They are loud, bells ringing, discounts galore. They also work. Vitamin brand Goli Nutrition has sold 2.8M products on TikTok Shop. Charger company Anker has sold 529K products. Hair care company Divi has sold 109K products.
When protein bar David launched—with slick branding from agency Day Job—I was a little surprised to see them immediately join TikTok Shop. Between the affiliate content and exclusive discounts, I wondered what it would do to their brand perception so early on in their introduction to consumers. I quickly learned that might not matter when you release a bar with 28g of protein. Today, around nine months after launch, the strategy is still working. They’ve sold over 50K products on TikTok Shop, seen 60M impressions on the platform, and are in high demand at local bodegas.
For today’s newsletter I am speaking with David Protein co-founders Peter Rahal and Zach Ranen about their TikTok Shop playbook. We talk about what kind of customer data you get from TikTok Shop, why they have new employees host livestreams, and how they’ve used the platform to fuel their word-of-mouth momentum. It’s a great conversation and helped me better understand that the value for brands on TikTok Shop goes way beyond sales.
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Rachel Karten: Thanks for chatting with me! How would you describe David's overall social strategy?
Peter Rahal and Zach Ranen : We see social media as a discovery, storytelling, and community-building medium. People hear about us through social media, get to know what we stand for, and what’s behind David (both the people and the rigor that goes into the product). It’s about more than just the product, it’s about our brand. We tailor our content to each platform's audience while maintaining the essence of our brand.
RK: I am particularly interested in hearing about the role TikTok Shop has played in David's growth. Did you know from the beginning that it was a channel you wanted to invest in?
PR + ZR: We had a strong hypothesis that TikTok Shop would be an effective channel for generating awareness for David. Products gain traction on TikTok when they cause people to stop scrolling, watch a video to learn more, and convert into purchases. Because of this, the most important factor to success on TikTok is strong product-market fit. With product-market fit, you can create a flywheel - initial creators gain traction when they post videos featuring David, which leads to more creators wanting to copy that success, so on and so forth.
75% of Americans say that being “in shape” is very important to them. We believe David is the most effective portable protein product onon the market, and we help people achieve that goal better than any other protien bar on the market. Given this, our hypothesis played out, and we saw great initial traction on the TikTok platform. After that, we leaned in fully: we listed products, posted consistently, seeded to affiliates, went Live, opted into TikTok Shop campaigns, and stayed in close contact with the TikTok Shop team. We have increasingly allocated focus and resources towards growing the channel, and we have an employee who spends most of her time trying to grow our TikTok presence.
RK: How often are you going live on TikTok Shop? It feels like every single day.
PR + ZR: We aim to go live twice a week, but we often do it more. TikTok’s algorithm seems to reward creators and brands that supplement traditional video posting with Lives. While live selling is still new to American audiences, and it isn’t the driver of our sales or success on the platform, we believe it magnifies the other work we do TikTok because of the algorithmic reward.
Beyond that, for the folks who do join (we can have up to a few hundred folks watching Lives at any given time), it’s a great way to answer their questions in real time, tell the story behind David, and connect with our community. We now recognize the names of repeat viewers and get to share insights about the product and our company culture. It’s become a real touchpoint. We’ve even embedded TikTok Lives into our new hire onboarding, where every employee goes live in their first week on the job.
RK: Do you work with an agency on that strategy? It looked like MARKET from my research.
PR + ZR: Yes, we worked with Market Live. For a few months, they led our TikTok Lives on our behalf. They were great partners in helping us build a live-selling program that felt authentic and engaging. More recently, we’ve brought Lives in-house. It gives us more flexibility to reflect the brand’s personality and be more hands-on with the experience.
RK: Can you talk about the success you've had on TikTok Shop? On your profile it says you've sold over 50K products through it.
PR + ZR: That’s right - we’ve sold over 50,000 products through TikTok Shop.
Demand on TikTok Shop is unpredictable; it largely depends on the success of affiliate content, which is the main driver of traffic. But when we commit (with consistent seeding, content creation, Lives, and campaigns), the flywheel turns, and we see success directly.
Beyond the actual product sold, we believe most of the value from our TikTok presence is the awareness it generates for David. We have seen a meaningful portion of our website visitors cite TikTok as their mode of discovery for David, and awareness often converts to sales in retail stores where the barrier for trial is smallest.
One insight we’ve discovered: variety packs and smaller-ticket items consistently perform best. TikTok-exclusive bundles and discovery packs do well too. This reinforces how important TikTok is for us as a discovery channel, not just a sales channel.
RK: When launching, were you concerned at all about what TikTok Shop can do to brand perception? Between affiliates and discounts, it does seem like you're handing over the keys to some of the things new brands might want to have more control over.
PR + ZR: This was something we debated internally a lot. Our TikTok presence looks different from our other channels. We have less control: affiliates can post off-brand content, TikTok can discount products without our input, and the overall polish is lower. It’s much more raw and behind-the-scenes.
Ultimately, we felt the upside outweighed the risks and decided to meet the customers where they wanted to find us. We set clear internal guidelines around where we would and wouldn’t flex. We trusted that the product and its quality would shine through.
RK: How has the reach and awareness you brought in through TikTok Shop impacted the success you've seen in bodegas and stores? I loved Emily Sundberg mentioning that David was “the name on every bodega owner's lips”.
PR + ZR: TikTok Shop massively accelerated our word-of-mouth momentum. We constantly hear from store owners who say customers asked for David after seeing it on TikTok. Some even put “As seen on TikTok” signs beside our bars. That kind of organic demand pull is powerful for retail, and TikTok Shop was a big catalyst for creating it. Since our launch, we have seen over 60 million impressions on TikTok.
RK: Have there been any downsides to TikTok Shop? For example, I've heard mixed messages on how much data you get from customers who purchase.
PR + ZR: There are trade-offs. You don’t get the same depth of customer data as you would through your own DTC site. Email addresses are hashed, so it's harder to build direct relationships with contact like follow-up emails checking in on order satisfaction. However, we use other tools, such as Lives, to engage directly. Overall, the scale and reach more than make up for the data limitations, especially because we do not treat TikTok Shop as a substitute for DTC. It’s primarily a complementary channel to spread brand awareness.
RK: You've only posted on Instagram 41 times since launching in August. That's around 4 or 5 posts a month. What role do you see that platform playing for the brand?
PR + ZR: We only started posting actively on Instagram toward the end of November. Since then, we’ve been posting two to three times a week. For us, Instagram is about brand storytelling. Early on, we were mindful not to post just for the sake of posting; we didn’t want to degrade our brand image with low-quality content. We see Instagram as a place for consistency, context, and lifestyle, less about virality and direct selling. It’s where customers go to validate a brand after they hear about it somewhere else. We want what they find to reinforce trust and quality.
RK: Finally, I think as a social marketer, I am particularly fascinated with David because we talk a lot about how social media is for storytelling, not selling. But when I look at David and TikTok Shop Live, it is a lot of hard selling. And it seems to be working! How do you think about balancing those two things?
PR + ZR: While we agree that TikTok Shop is more of a sales platform than other social media platforms, we don’t see storytelling and selling as opposites. Our Lives are not just about "buy now," they’re about getting to know the team behind David, understanding the product, its benefits, our brand, and our culture. Most of the hosts on Live are our employees, so viewers are hearing directly from the people who actually make the product. It’s a hyper-direct and hyper-real form of storytelling. The result of that authenticity is that we sell on the platform.
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Oh fascinating. I’ll definitely be reading.
Gold!! I loved how they explained the downsides that directly affect how they build community with lack of emails & other elements to keep the customer in the funnel.