Bora Mutluoğlu - Founder at Reacher

Welcome to another YC Wisdom pod. We have Bora Mutluoglu. I'm trying to pronounce that right, maybe I fucked up, who knows. Uh, this guy's the co-founder at Reachr, uh, it's YC S25, uh, he's building AI agents to scale TikTok shop efficiently. He's a co-host also of a social commerce and business podcast, Zero Sum Game. Bora, I'm glad to have you on. You have a hell of a— have some traction. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what you're up to.

Yeah, my name is Bora. Thanks for the introduction, by the way. My name is Bora, co-founder of Reacher. We are one of the top TikTok Shop AI solutions for scaling your brand on the TikTok Shop platform. We actually just won an award from TikTok directly 2 days ago. We got like a gold star award. It was one of 2 partners. Pretty sick. Never really got an award from them, so it was good to hear that they actually appreciate us and then recognize us. So that was good. And yeah, just like you said, we're focused on working with brands and agencies that are selling products in the space, helping them make their processes more efficient in terms of finding the right creators, reaching out to them, working with them, processing payments, holding campaigns, all of that, and using AI to abstract the humans out of those processes since it's a lot of manual work. And that's summing it up.

And what's your life story? Is it like from barista to software engineer to founder to YC? Is that a good summary?

You must be looking at my LinkedIn. Yeah, you know, I mean, there's a lot more than that, but I mean, yeah, like, that's a pretty good summary.

Like, who are you? How did your brain shape itself to, uh, who you are today?

Ah, that's— I could answer that in a lot of different ways. I would say, um, I was raised in Cupertino, California, which is like, you know, Apple's from there. I used to— my dad used to work at Apple. I've met Steve Jobs many times before he died. I've like seen him. I apparently— I played with him when I was like a kid, and he played with me in the halls of Apple.

Um, so you got the, the blessing.

Yeah, I guess so. I got the Jobs touch, right? So yeah, I mean, I kind of grew up around a bunch of like rich people, but I wouldn't say I'm rich. My family's not rich. So, you know, I just like experienced that kind of life and was around greatness, but never really achieved it myself. And I was like, you know, I need to figure out a way to make it big and make a change in the world. And I got into, you know, computer science. I was a big gamer when I was young and I just started like hacking computers and stuff.

And like, what did you play?

Man, I played a lot of like really nerdy games like World of Warcraft, RuneScape, Minecraft.

Like, that's the best. I, I was the best level, uh, 70 Hunter Beast Mastery. Wow. 2010, I would say, in the arena PvP. I would just wreck the shit out of it, like wreck everybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's crazy. I played private server because I couldn't afford the actual game, so I had to play these stupid private servers. Um, yeah, I was, I was like a freaking, uh, undead mage, you know, like stupid crap like that. But yeah, I played these play a lot of games, my dad would ban me from the computer, so I'd have to find a way to hack into the— oh yeah, you know, all that stuff, right? So anyhow, that's how it started and then came into TikTok Shop somehow.

Yeah, but you, you studied like neural, neural computing and cognition and all of that. How does that lead to TikTok? And if a smart guy like you starts playing that field, like, shouldn't the world be worried, like, where their attention is going?

Mm, yeah, yeah. So I mean, I got super interested in, um, machine learning and AI from, again, a young age because I used to play a lot of this game called RuneScape, and there were these bots. People would like make these game characters and they would like bot them basically, um, and they would like program them algorithmically to just like wreck me at PvP. So I'd go into the wilderness and I like fight these like other fictional characters and they just destroy me. And they were all bots and they were just better than me, right? I'm like, dude, how, how are these like computers destroying me? So I got into AI and like machine learning from that. So I started studying that in college. But the whole time I was also kind of like creating content on the side. Like I always like tried to dabble in creating content like YouTube and Instagram and crap like that. So I was in the social commerce space. And then as I, you know, got a job in cybersecurity with my like engineering capabilities, I started getting bored of cybersecurity. I was like, I don't really care about cybersecurity at all, but I always had a passion for creating content and social commerce. And I figured out really quickly that all these like e-commerce brands and these e-commerce agencies, they all scale with human labor. And nobody in that industry was really thinking about like, how do I apply AI or machine learning, which was very niche at the time, I guess, you know, in SF, in the Bay Area. And all these e-commerce brands are operating out of Bali or Saudi Arabia or whatever, right? And they're hiring people from the Philippines and Pakistan. They're all kind of just building products and then, or not building, selling products and making money, but they weren't thinking about tech. So that's why I figured out we could apply technology to disrupt the market essentially with TikTok Shop.

And you've probably deconstructed the genius of TikTok and the guy behind TikTok, ByteDance. Um, they were the, the first real company to really crack the code when it came to the feed, right? Because Facebook was addictive back then, but TikTok was the first one. You would scroll, the video would start, and it would very much be personalized to your own taste, right? So can you deconstruct, uh, ByteDance and how that happened, and where do you see it going also?

Um, I don't know if I can deconstruct the algorithm. Those guys are like PhD geniuses, but Definitely, like, we do a lot of analysis of the videos and why TikTok is so addictive, and we actually create content briefs. So we use AI to break down all the videos, the best performing videos, and we generate creative briefs using our AI models, and we actually recommend different kinds of ways to get people to engage with your content and eventually purchase the content psychologically. So that's like, there's certain hooks There's certain things people do in the videos to draw emotion out of you. For example, if somebody says something that's blatantly wrong, people will get pissed off and they'll go and they'll comment, right? And they'll engage them into the video, right? And they'll see more content like that because they're engaging. So there's these little things that TikTok has engineered into their videos and their algorithm that work really well. And we're slowly deciphering bits and pieces of it. But I think those guys will always be ahead of us, to be honest.

Isn't that sad, though, that they take advantage of human nature and us getting angry? And like in downward spiral, isn't that like bad news for humanity?

Uh, bad news for humanity. Um, we're getting very philosophical here. I would say it depends on who is in control. Like, if, uh, like if you think about like, um, dictatorships, right? I'm not, I'm not a very political person, but I'm just like looking at history. Like, most dictatorships fail because I think the dictator at the front that's leading all the people is like inherently corrupt, but there's also like very few dictatorships that did very well. If we compare TikTok to a dictatorship, like the, uh, Singapore actually is famously a dictatorship, or like, you know, the one guy rules everything, that is performing really well, right? And they kind of control everything and they control their population. But I was— I'm not saying I agree with that, I'm just saying like, you know, all companies are dictatorships.

Steve Jobs ran the greatest dictatorship of all time. Um, pivoting on that, right, because it's not a political podcast, although politics are pretty fun if you ask me because they're very intellectually stimulating, but fundamental problem with politics is that you're serving a broad population of people and it's hard to understand and control everyone, right? Yeah, 100%. Um, TikTok Shop. We were on the history of TikTok. Uh, when did TikTok Shop happen? My wife buys shit all the time on TikTok. Uh, tell me about his— the history of that and the genius of, uh, TikTok Shop.

Well, first of all, tell your wife I say thank you for supporting the business. Um, but the history of TikTok Shop, yeah, so social commerce has kind of been around for a little bit with like YouTube. Um, like you could shop stuff on YouTube, you could shop stuff on Instagram, but TikTok Shop is the first platform that's actually all native, like social commerce is native within TikTok. So like, for example, if you went to Instagram and you want to purchase a product from an ad, it takes you to Shopify or takes you to Amazon. Right, but TikTok Shop is like, you go to purchase the product, it's still in TikTok, you don't ever leave the platform.

And it's one click, right? One click checkout.

It can't— yeah, yeah, it can be. So it depends. Sometimes you have your like card information uploaded, you ask like one-click checkout, or you go and like you enter in your card information.

But it must be one-click checkout with the rates of TikTok products that are showing up to my door.

Yeah, yeah, it probably is for your wife.

One-click checkout, they definitely cracked her algorithm. Like, they definitely understand what she wants.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So they know what they're doing and they know, like, I think they're smart because they figured out that TikTok is addictive, right? And I think they figured out like it's a really good place to sell things to people because they're just always on the platform. So they rolled it out late 2023 and we actually started our company right super early 2024, right after they rolled it out because we noticed the issues that people were having. So that's— yeah, we've been following it for a while.

And it's influencers, right? So if there's an influencer that makes a video, the product is going to show and I can just click on it and buy it.

Yeah, so I do want to make a distinction here. So, um, there's a difference between the, the term in TikTok terms like influencer and affiliate creator. So they consider all the people on TikTok affiliate creators because they could have like 1,000 followers or they could have a million followers, but they could still— like, the 1,000 follower person could sell way better than the million follower person, right? Got it. That with the algorithm, to your point, it doesn't matter how many followers you have. If you make content that's addicting and engaging, it'll be shown to a lot of people and they might— a lot more people might purchase from the product, right?

Okay. And these ladies or whoever makes these videos, they make a percentage of the product they promote, and that's native to the platform, correct? They make like 15% of the total sell of the product.

Yeah, exactly. So if I, if I purchased from someone's video, they would get like a 20% commission if I purchased from that video directly.

Exactly. And I can sell my own shit on TikTok, so I can have my own channel and sell my own products, correct? Or do I have to sell products that are approved by TikTok?

You have to— they have to be approved. So you can't sell alcohol right now. You can't sell any hemp products or marijuana or anything like that. I think there's certain dangerous products you can't sell, like knives and things like that either. But yeah, you can sell a lot of your own stuff. You can even sell virtual goods. So actually TikTok is trying to onboard us to their platform to sell our own software on their platform, which is a very interesting concept. But now you're able to sell virtual goods as well.

I love it. And your software, I can see the pricing on the website here. It starts at $200 a month. What do I get for that? And what's the difference between this and Pro and Enterprise?

Yeah, so for like the $199 plan, um, is really just like basic automations. It's like, you know, like imagine like a Python script that's running like a, an infinite loop or like a for loop to send messages over and over and over again, right? It's like some pretty basic stuff. Um, the Pro plan is where you start to get really interesting with the AI features. Like we have AI creator search, we have a smart AI responder that goes in response to the thousands of creators that are sending you messages by analyzing like sentiment analysis. Yeah. Um, and then we have a— we're constantly analyzing a lot of the content, also sentiment analysis, um, on top of the video and audio analysis. And we're letting people know, like, what is the hook in the video, what is, like, the, the active selling point, that kind of stuff. Um, when you get to the Enterprise plan, that's where we are actually trying to just do all the work for the brand, right? So on the $199 and $599 plan that's still a UI that you go and log into. Sure, we have an MCP with Claude and Codex that you can also use if you don't want to go into our UI, but a large majority of these e-commerce brands are still not there yet and they're going to the UI and clicking around. But when you get to the enterprise plan, that's when it's done for you and we use our own software and our own API connections to basically do all the work for the brand as well.

And this one's like $5K, $10K a month or?

Yeah, you hit it about $5K. Yeah, around. It depends on the work and scope that's required.

Nice. And how's it growing so far?

So surprisingly, um, the software growth— like, I'm gonna say software and then like the enterprise growth— have been— the software has been growing continuously. Um, we just started focusing on the enterprise, like, kind of more managed service offering recently, like in the past 3 months. Um, and that one obviously is like a bigger ticket, um, higher ticket sell price, so It's been growing slowly, but as we focus more on it, I think there's a huge demand in the market for that kind of a service. Because right now, again, traditionally everybody's doing it with like a bunch of humans. They're hiring them from like overseas and it's just not efficient. And they're like, hiring people is not easy, man. I mean, yeah, like hiring, that's why there's so many different recruitment agencies and there's so much money being made in that industry because it's so hard to hire good people. So people that I talk to are kind of getting tired of it and they're like, hey, I can't find anybody good. Can I just have my agents do everything for me? And that's kind of where we're going with this whole thing.

And your agents, they would find influencers to sell my product? They would grow my follower base as well? What would they do for me?

Man, there's a lot. I mean, TikTok Shop is such a complicated platform, but I'll break it down to a few, I guess, key facets. It's really like setting up your campaigns and your strategy, your product strategy on TikTok so that you are profitable., or at least breaking even, because TikTok is a really good marketing channel. So that whole thing requires like calculating your P&L, your, your commission rates, your like fees, that kind of stuff. The other thing is going to be like, based off my product and based off the creators I have access to, which creators are the right fit for my product? And that whole process of finding them, reaching out to them, giving them a good deal, getting them to respond, managing that relationship.

That's painful. That's a lot. Dealing with influencers most of the time is painful. They're pretty disorganized there. They have like so much requests coming in, right? So it's hard to get them interested in my product. Plus there needs to be an overlap, is pretty much rocket science. You have so many features. What's the number one feature your, uh, customers want from you?

The number one feature they still use us for is reaching out to creators. It's like sending them messages. It's like basic stuff. But, um, as we grow, it's going to be a lot more like ads management. It's going to be a lot of like just doing the whole TikTok shop for them, essentially.

Would you take a percentage of their percentage eventually? Would that be a great business model?

Which, uh, the creator's percentage?

Yeah. Or the brands? Yes.

Vice versa. Both actually. Both. Yeah. Both. Exactly. And, and that's better because you actually, you align your incentives with the brand and the creator, right? So if you grow together, um, is you're more, you're more, um, inclined to help them grow because you're making money as they grow, right? So that is actually a model that we're exploring right now.

Right. Um, you've been to YC. How game-changing, uh, was, was it for you and your co-founder?

YC was extremely difficult. Um, my co-founder and I, I think our backgrounds are not traditional, like, YC founder backgrounds. I think we came from, like, a different route in life, to be honest. Um, so we were very— we were surrounded by a lot of, like, really smart genius individuals who, like, obviously from a very young age are just, like, coding and super deep into tech. Like, I saw a Twitter post yesterday about someone posting about a freaking 12-year-old founder, dude. Like, 12. Not in YC. They're not in YC, but they're— no, literally, like, I'll share, I'll share the link with you afterwards. But I was like, what the hell is this, man? Like, a 12-year-old.

I've seen this before. I had like a 15-year-old kid on my podcast, and I was trying to be nice and ask him questions, but it's like, dude, your dad— what did your dad do? And but it's not like if I'm like fully opposed, uh, to this, right? Like, I believe kids should start businesses way earlier in life, right? Like, instead of wasting their time partying and doing like stuff that doesn't scale. Uh, I wish I was that, um, actually. So I'm not like fully opposed to it, but yeah, it feels a bit odd. Like, when you're around these genius— imagine being around Bill Gates, right? Like, Bill Gates at like 16, man, he was— yeah. Already making hundreds of thousands per year and just being like at another level, it's intimidating, right?

Yeah, well, that's the thing. I'm not talking bad on them. I'm saying that wasn't me. I wish that was me, but it wasn't me. I was freaking, I was the guy going and like partying and like playing video games and stuff like all day long, right? And then I figured it out, figured it out later. But anyhow, like YC was life-changing in that aspect where I like went to YC with my co-founder, like, holy shit, there was so many really smart people here that are like geniuses. Like, I talked to them, I'm like, wow, there's so much alpha to be gained. Um, but then, then I was surprised because they also want to talk to us because like what we're good at is like scrappy ways of growing and scrappy ways of like winning and doing things right. Like the street smarts that, you know, they don't have, and we don't have like those book smarts, I guess. Um, so it was very interesting in that regard. But what YC really taught me is how to sell yourself and how to work your fucking ass off.

Like, Yeah, level up your game, right? When you're around greatness, you naturally level your expectation. That's good, and that discomfort is great. And all these nerds don't know how to sell, right? Like, YC founders are most of my clients, and they don't know how to fucking sell. So, but, and another cool thing about smart people is that they love asking questions to others. Like, that's always— and that's why I like YC so much. Where did you meet Jerry and how are both of you guys complementary?

I met Jerry in college. We both went to UC San Diego together, undergraduate. Yeah, met in college. We didn't really do any projects together for the first like 3 years of being friends. And then the 4th year it was COVID. During COVID we got extremely bored and we're just like, let's start to think of like some, something to do, like not waste away with our lives, you know? So that's when we started actually, you know, working on some projects together. Um, how we're complementary— I, I would say we're both good socially, but, um, and we both are from technical backgrounds. I don't know why I froze, but, um, we both used to have technical jobs. Like, I used to be a cybersecurity software demo engineer, and then he used to work at Meta as a software engineer— or a data scientist, sorry. Um, but I would say he's a little bit more product-minded and definitely more interested in engineering and, and actually getting down to the nitty-gritty. Than I am, and I'm more like, I can do it. I built our infrastructure initially on Microsoft Azure for this, um, but I'm more interested in like selling and, you know, talking to people, building relationships, partnerships, that kind of stuff. Um, so that's kind of our focus is like he's more product engineering, randomly finance even though he hates that, and I do every— all the go-to-market stuff basically, and a little bit of product.

But isn't it like the contrary one would expect from a cybersecurity guy like you, like to be socially apt, you know, like most guys in your in your category are very much on the spectrum and would rather talk to, uh, an AI girlfriend than, uh, real humans, right?

Yeah, yeah, go into the server room and with the server racks and go and like put the plugs into each one and analyze what's going on in the machines, right? Um, you would think that, right? But my, again, my background is not traditional. Again, I'm, I'm an immigrant, parents, and they are from Cupertino. I was forced to do engineering. It was either being a doctor or being an engineer, so I, I did engineering, but I never truthfully actually really enjoyed the deep down nitty-gritty of engineering. Um, so I was able to do it, but that wasn't, you know, my calling, essentially.

This is a Steve Jobs touch, definitely. That, that touched everything for you. Um, what's next for you guys? Are you fundraising? Uh, tell me a bit more about that.

Oh, that's always a good question for fundraising. We really wanted to follow after the Zapier, like the founder of Zapier came into Y Combinator during our batch and gave a, yeah, gave a presentation and he's like, we seed-strapped and all that, right? And it's like, we raised our seed round, we closed our seed round and we want to also seed-strap if possible. But the problem is talent is so expensive these days and it's such a competitive market. I feel like you need money to be able to go and execute and then do these big things, right? And move fast. Like, this is the main things we want to move as fast as possible, especially with AI and this market and everybody's being able to code and now everybody's— everybody and their mom's an engineer. Like, we need to move fast and move as ahead of the pack as possible. So long TL;DR, I— we're considering it. We haven't made up our minds yet, but we're considering either like a seed extension or maybe a Series A potentially. Um, we'll have to see. I'm not sure yet.

Nice, dude. Well, thanks for coming on today. Uh, where can people find out more about you?

I mean, I post a lot on LinkedIn. I'm always posting on LinkedIn. It's just Boram Luola. Should be— there's not many people with my, my long-ass name. Um, and then X is also Boram Luola, is the same thing. So you can probably find me there.

Hey, one last question before I let you go. What does a day in your life look like? I'm pretty sure you have like weird habits and quirks that, uh, make you like the high-performance being you are?

Uh, weird habits and quirks. I wake up every day at 6:03 AM, um, and then I'm out of the door by 6:10 AM. Go for like an hour walk, and on that walk I start my calls at 6:30 AM, um, and I'm on calls until like noon. At noon I— sorry, I drink coffee around like 8 AM while I'm working. I have my one cup of coffee Then at noon I eat my lunch and I like usually do that while I'm working. And then I work until like 3:30 or 4:00 PM. I hit the gym for a couple hours and then I go back home and eat dinner and work until like 10:00 PM. And then I wake up and do that every single day except for Saturday.

What do you do Saturday? You chill?

Saturday I go crazy party. No, I'm kidding. Yeah, I usually, I usually chill Saturdays. I spend time with my fiancée, um, you know, Friday nights as well. Maybe sometimes a little bit with my fiancée if I'm not, you know, having to work a lot. So Saturdays I try to go out. Try to see the sun, interact with other normal human beings, go hiking, things like that, you know. There you go.

And if you'd have to picture you and the company 5, 10 years from now, where, where would you see it? Was a big vision, was a master plan.

5 to 10 years from now, um, I would want our company to be super like, okay, for, for what we do right now, I would want all of it to be agentic. I want our UI to probably just be like a chat box and like everything can be done for you. Um, in terms of the product. In terms of like how big the company is, I think we can operate in every single region that has TikTok Shop. That's US, UK, Europe, South America, Japan, all these regions. Um, and I see us really being like— I see us getting to unicorn status for sure. Like the market is quite large when you extrapolate it beyond just TikTok Shop, especially as TikTok Shop grows into each market. But that's the dream of every founder, right? That's the goal of every founder.

So it's probably nothing like new, to be honest. Yeah. I'm pretty sure you'll achieve it. You've got the Steve Jobs touch. You even take your meetings while walking. That's very Steve Jobsy. I love Steve Jobs and studied various of his biographies. Founders, David Senra covers him a lot if you want to listen to that one, that podcast.

I listened to that, yeah.

Oh yeah, I'm sure you did. That was Bora and Charles Cormier.