From Manual to Automated: How Violet Found Their First Enterprise Customers by Solving Real Pain Points

Sometimes your first customer’s pain point is so acute that watching them struggle becomes the catalyst for your entire business model. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Brandon Schulz shares how witnessing the manual processes at Throne helped Violet identify and solve a critical problem in the ecommerce infrastructure space.

The Manual Reality at Throne

Throne’s business model was innovative: allow creators to build wish lists that their followers could purchase from. But their backend operations were anything but modern. As Brandon explains, “The way that they were doing it at the time is they built their own sort of ecommerce concept of where you look at a product, add it to your cart and buy it. And then after it was purchased, it would go to their own system and then get exported into a spreadsheet.”

What happened next was even more labor-intensive: “Someone else would go back on their computer to the website where the product was coming from, select it from that website, add it to their cart, and purchase it with the company card. But put in the address for the influencer.”

This wasn’t a one-off process. As Brandon notes, “They were doing this for every single product and every single order that came in. Right. Like essentially a mechanical Turk approach to handling a version of integrated checkout.”

Identifying the Broader Market Problem

Throne’s challenges pointed to a larger issue in the market. Companies building social commerce platforms faced a common dilemma: they couldn’t just create products in their system like with Stripe. Instead, they needed real-time access to product data from multiple external ecommerce platforms.

As Brandon explains, “If you’re building a social commerce platform or a social media platform, you’re not the one making the candles and you’re not the one who has access to, what’s the name of that product? What’s the SKU iD? How much does it cost? What’s the shipping duration?”

The Solution: Automation Through APIs

Violet’s solution was to create a unified API that could handle all these interactions automatically. Instead of manual data entry and order processing, Throne could simply connect to Violet’s API and get real-time access to all the data they needed.

“They shifted that entire process over,” Brandon shares. “And so it’s essentially going from human manual labor repeating a process to automation and using an API.”

Validation and Growth

The impact was immediate. Not only did Throne eliminate their manual processes, but Violet’s solution proved scalable across different use cases. This led to rapid growth: “We tripled our customer base in the last twelve months or so.”

More tellingly, their sales conversations shifted dramatically. Brandon notes they now spend just “six minutes of quote unquote sales discussion” before moving to implementation details, indicating strong product-market fit.

The Broader Vision

For Violet, Throne’s case represented more than just one customer success story. It validated their vision for the future of commerce infrastructure. As Brandon explains, “We decided that someone should specialize and just do one part so that everyone else can focus on the part they do best.”

This focus has helped them expand beyond creator commerce into various forms of distributed commerce, from live streaming to messaging-based commerce.

For B2B founders, especially those building infrastructure products, Violet’s journey offers valuable lessons. Sometimes the key to finding product-market fit isn’t looking for new problems to solve, but deeply understanding and automating the manual processes your customers are already struggling with.