The following interview is a conversation we had with Brandon Schulz, CEO and Co-Founder of Violet, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $14 Million Raised to Power the Future of E-commerce
Brandon Schulz
It’s great to be here.
Brett
So to kick things off, could we just start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Brandon Schulz
Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I live in Seattle. I’ve kind of spent most of my career focused on social commerce and then eventually varying emerging formats for ecommerce. And then through that process, kind of found my way in my real love and passion for entrepreneurship, creating products. I’m lucky enough to say that my day job is also my hobby. So, yeah, that’s what I spend a lot of my time on. Outside of that, I compete for triathlons and like to spend time with my golden retriever. Nice.
Brett
Have you done an Iron man before?
Brandon Schulz
Not yet. That’s a big commitment. I have a hard time doing things not at a really high level. So I want to do it, but I feel like if I were to do it, I wouldn’t be able to train enough and I would just be frustrated at my outcome.
Brett
Yeah, I’ve looked into doing it, and the training required is so gnarly. It’s like 15 or 20 hours per week. Something crazy like that.
Brandon Schulz
It’s crazy. I do see some founders that do it, and I don’t get it. I have no clue how they do that.
Brett
Now, a few other questions that we like to ask, and the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick. So first one is, what CEO and founder do you admire the most, and what do you admire about them?
Brandon Schulz
I really admire Patrick Collison over at Stripe. He’s maybe not as much of a central sort know pr and public figure per se, but I think his ability to be so clear in his language and his strategy and what they’re doing as a company, it’s just on a different level. It’s hard to explain, I suppose, and even to some degree, I think I consume his content or his influence by interacting with some of his executives. I’ve had a chance to work closely with and or receive funding from several folks that were very early, like in the first 30 to 50 employees at Stripe, and each of them are also incredibly lucid, wonderful people to work with, and I think that’s just a testament to how he conducts himself, the way he leads his teams. So, yeah, I think he’s fantastic.
Brett
How would you describe Stripe’s internal culture from your interactions with early stripe team members?
Brandon Schulz
It is ruthlessly efficient. There’s a kind of common pattern I’ve seen for many of them where they don’t often send emails that are longer than three sentences long, which is fantastic if you take that as a challenge. Generally, I’ll do that sometimes and say, I wonder if I can pull that off and I just can’t do it. But it’s a really beautiful way to say, what am I trying to get to? And I always find that the smartest people are able to communicate something equally as complex, but at a small fraction of the amount of words required. And that’s just kind of what I’ve come to notice.
Brandon Schulz
And so that requires a deep level of knowledge around every topic, an intense amount of curiosity around how something works, why it works that way, and then a bunch of clarity from first principles thinking all the way down into how something can or should be implemented. It’s very rare that in those conversations, something either isn’t considered or there’s some sort of strange ego or weird external input that is getting in the way of the decision making. So I don’t know if that is necessarily true for all thousands of the employees at stripe, but some of the folks I’ve got to interact with have been really fantastic. And this is like the locky grooms of the world and some early general counsel and legal folks there, but they’re fantastic.
Brett
Super interesting. What about books? And the way we like to frame this is we call it a quickbook, which we stole from Ryan Holiday, but he defines a quickbook as a book that rocks you to your core and really changes how you think about the world. Do any quake books come to mind?
Brandon Schulz
Yeah, my quake book, I guess, is the righteous mind by Jonathan hate that book, I think, changed the way my brain operated a little bit, I guess. The subtitle to the book is why good people are divided by politics and religion. And that sounds not super enjoyable, but it’s really sort of a book about moral philosophy and the concepts of morality and ultimately morals impact our decisions, right? There are these things that are non required edicts, essentially, that govern action. And so it’s a form of sort of passive decision making, right? We say x is the right thing to do or y is the wrong thing to do. And in doing so, hate kind of walks through the way in which those things are actually constructed versus being inherent potentially to certain parts of the human condition, et cetera.
Brandon Schulz
And so kind of seeing someone take a concept as complex as that, parse it, apply science to it, and then actually give me an entirely new lens to the world. Both was a very interesting lens to stare through, but also on a meta layer to challenge myself to say, what are other parts of my life or my business or relationships or whatever, in which I just kind of assume them, or essentially haven’t turned the rock over to see what’s on the other side? How can I attempt to do something similar? And that book was definitely that book for me.
Brett
I haven’t heard of that book, but I’ll add it to Amazon cart now.
Brandon Schulz
Great.
Brett
Now let’s switch gears and let’s dive deeper into the company. So can you just give us a high level overview of what you do?
Brandon Schulz
Yeah. So Violet takes all of the e commerce platforms out there and the data coming from their APIs and unifies that into a single pipe and format. So any company today, they’re needing a lot more e commerce data. It’s more powerful and open, really, than it ever has been, but that data is pretty inaccessible and pretty complex to get to for infrastructure reasons. So we are essentially that infrastructure layer that enables companies trying to build their own connected checkout or trying to get real time updates on all orders because they’re a fulfillment company and need to be able to track when certain events are happening. Instead of having to go and integrate with a number of platforms like Shopify, Magento, Salesforce, Commerce, cloud, et cetera, they just get it all through one API and one integration and don’t have to worry about it.
Brandon Schulz
So that’s kind of where we fit in the e commerce enablement infrastructure space, but with a very unique flavor. Know API products, middleware to some degree. Obviously, you can probably notice the appreciation for stripe and what they do. But yeah, that’s kind of where we play today, and that’s generally how we serve folks.
Brett
And for those listening who don’t come from ecommerce, on the header it says, don’t allow ecommerce integrations to slow you down. Can you talk us through how ecommerce integrations slow people down.
Brandon Schulz
Absolutely. Yeah. So the kind of canonical answer here is companies and teams often are building some sort of product. And let’s say you’re building a new social media app or you’re building something that has primarily a media experience to it, and you decide one day that it’s really important for your monetization strategy to add ecommerce and to add checkout, right? You’ve seen this with creator commerce right across the board. People are trying to figure out how to stand up their own stores, their own versions of marketplaces. We have live streaming, we have messaging, commerce popping up, all kinds of stuff happening. And those teams assume that they can just go and grab some API or SDK off the shelf and spin up their own little checkout flow, kind of like they do with stripe.
Brandon Schulz
And the difference there is if you go do this with stripe lets you create your own products, right? Like if I’m going to go do this, I can say I’m going to make candles in the back room here at my house. I’m going to turn one candle into a single SKU and I’m going to charge $10 for that. And then I can just input that and say, go to my website, pay me $10 through stripe, and I’ll ship something out that’s totally doable. But 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?
Brandon Schulz
And the people doing that have their own business that they’re running on any number of these different ecommerce platforms. So the social commerce teams are having to go figure out and say, okay, well, in order for this to work, not only do we have to build our own ecommerce functionality, but that has to be seamlessly integrated and synced basically in real time with every one of the individual companies selling products through our application. And that requires all kinds of data going back and forth around. Like I kind of mentioned, catalog updates, inventory levels, shipping rates, tax rates, handling orders, multi merchant carts, all of that work. That’s kind of actually why I started the company. I had to build this in the first company I built and just failed miserably and realized that you can’t do both.
Brandon Schulz
You can’t build a threads competitor and also try to build a world class ecommerce infrastructure. It’s just not possible. And we decided that someone should specialize and just do one part so that everyone else can focus on the part they do best. And so that’s the part that we solve for because it is so painful and takes so much time and nuance, and often these APIs aren’t even documented. It’s just a disaster. So, yeah, we go in there and allow those teams to not have to worry about it at all. They get a real kind of clean and simple API and just say, hey, I need to make sure that I get the following data at this interval. And the rest kind of stayed automated.
Brett
Just to visualize that a bit more, can you maybe talk us through the throne case study?
Brandon Schulz
Yeah, absolutely. It’s a great example. So Throne came to us. They’re a great company. They are kind of in this space in the sense that their main customer is creators. And this has been a really strange realization for us. Throne, as a business model, provides a tool for creators that want to build their own wish list, right? So it took me some time to figure out what their business actually was, and it’s incredibly interesting. In fact, it could apply to you. But what they do is they say to creators, you go and create an account on throw, we got a bunch of products in our gifting environment, and build your wish list, right? You got a birthday coming up, maybe it’s an Valentine’s Day coming up, or some sort of gaming event or whatever.
Brandon Schulz
Build that wish list and then add that link to your profile or to a video or whatever, almost like link in bio. But once it’s there, your followers can click that, go to that location, and purchase something on your behalf. And that part is actually difficult because you can’t give the purchaser the address of the influencer or the celebrity. Right. So there’s some element of sort of privacy and how that’s all handled. And so 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.
Brandon Schulz
And then after it was purchased, it would go to their own system and then get exported into a spreadsheet, and then 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. And 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, quote, unquote, checkout right. And they do so through some initial technology around scraping data. But the difference is they were not connected from their backend to the backend that the merchant was using. Right. Direct connections to Shopify’s API or a direct connection to Salesforce commerce cloud’s API.
Brandon Schulz
And so instead they come to us and know, can you guys replace that whole piece? Can we still keep the checkout flow that we have and just connect that to Violet? And then that way we’ll get all the data that we need and then when an order happens, can we just send you an API request and you guys will route it and process it and notify us of success and tell us when it’s shipped and all the rest. And that way we don’t have to have a bunch of people out there doing some manual action that has a dual transaction fee and all these really inefficient things. And he said, yeah, absolutely. And so they shifted that entire process over. And so it’s essentially going from human manual labor repeating a process to automation and using an API. Right.
Brandon Schulz
I think in that story it becomes clear, well, of course that’s how it should work. But that didn’t exist as a tool until Violet came along.
Brett
Yeah, it’s such a compelling narrative. What’s holding you back? Did you say from having another hundred x customers? What’s in the way? Because it seems like a no brainer for a brand to embrace this.
Brandon Schulz
Yeah, a lot of it has to do with how people feel about taking on the risk of building this appropriately, or building it correctly, I guess you could say. So there are a lot of companies that still kind of want to stick with the old affiliate model, right? Where you have links and you click out and you go to some other website. And to some degree I respect those decisions. Right. Generally, humans are afraid of change. We deal with inertia. Those are common elements of physics. So I get it. But that will continue to change and that model will evolve, I think pretty dramatically. So once that happens, that I think will be a big shift for the broader market.
Brandon Schulz
And then beyond that, I think there’s also an element of a couple of canonical case studies in the US market that still don’t yet exist. If you look at live streaming commerce in China, for example, a couple of influencers sold, I think it was like billions of dollars worth of GMV in a single day. That has not yet happened in the US. And even the fact that happened in China was a massive earthquake in the US market. And everyone realized, oh, this is a really important thing. The way people are buying products is fundamentally changing, and it’s already happening, and it’s on its way. How do we figure this out and get it right? And so we’re just at that early stage of the definition of that, how it’s going to work.
Brandon Schulz
And I think it’s just a matter of time before one or two companies get it right, and then everyone else will see that playbook and be able to roll it out, and we’ll kind of be standing there with the kit of tools they need to go build it.
Brett
And can you talk to us about growth?
Brandon Schulz
Our audience loves to hear metrics.
Brett
So any numbers that you can share that highlight some of the growth you’re seeing today would be.
Brandon Schulz
Yeah, yeah, totally. Fair question. So for us, we’ve had a couple of cool factors in a few of the areas that we measure. First, one is what does growth look like for us between Q three and Q four? Obviously, for our business model, holiday is really important. And the amount of transactions, the average order value, all of those things are really important. And as a business, we’re constantly thinking through how can we make our customers successful? And our pricing model is oriented that way. Obviously, the things we work on are oriented that way. So we have a vested interest in them making money, which we like. It’s a good thing. It’s a good incentive.
Brandon Schulz
And so last year, were at a place where Q three was very healthy, and then we actually doubled by 100% from Q three to Q four, which was well above kind of the industry standard for what happens in the holiday season. And it was kind of a surprise for us. It was cool. There were several factors to that, and I think it informed a lot about what our customer mix looks like, and a lot of things you can kind of parse through as you look at ACV and all the rest. And then we sort of set a goal for ourselves to be able to hit that high growth rate in Q four, but to really do our best to try to maintain that going back into the next year.
Brandon Schulz
And so our Q four total transaction volume was the same in Q one the following year as well. So there was no drop off. And that was a big deal for us. So that’s one of the things that we look at, and obviously is us sort of setting goals relative to our particular business model. Some folks would say, like, well, you didn’t grow from Q four to Q one. Actually, we grew by a lot. If you were to look at the rolling basis from Q three to Q four to Q one, that’s a notable increase. But because of the seasonality of the market, that was kind of a goal that we set for ourselves. And it’s obviously something we hope to try to repeat. It’s very rare, but we’ll hope to continue to try doing that.
Brandon Schulz
The other thing that we’ve done thus far is we tripled our customer base in the last twelve months or so. And that comes with a lot of learnings around sdks and how to handle the onboarding of a product like ours, also focusing on the right customers. We’re obviously not a consumer product, so it’s very different being in B2B SaaS. But that was, I think, a really notable thing for us and being lucky to be at the place where most of our sales calls today, it’s a bit more of a soft metric, but most of our sales calls today, we try to track how much time are we spending on the sales call trying to sell the product versus trying to explain how they use it. And for us, that’s the biggest indicator of our sort of fit in the conversation.
Brandon Schulz
And I think last I checked, were at like six minutes of quote unquote sales discussion and then it turned into like, okay, so hang on. So what does my developer have to do? He goes and creates an account. He goes here, and at that point it’s like almost beginning onboarding and it’s just a matter of getting it to fit and make sense. So that’s something we can obviously continue to track. Sure those numbers will change. All of the numbers I listed, I’m sure will change as we continue to add scale. But that’s kind of some of the early data points that we’re seeing.
Brett
And what do you think you’ve gotten right? Obviously, there’s been a lot of money that’s gone into ecommerce technology. I’m sure these brands are bombarded with vendors trying to sell them stuff. How have you managed to rise above that noise and really engage customers like that?
Brandon Schulz
Yeah, it’s a good question. I think we’ve been able to take our past experience and use that to inform our product and how we wanted to build things. I don’t think it’s a mistake that some of the best and biggest companies today are making decisions around how do they build things that allow for the requisite amount of customization and scalability. I think that’s the thing that we really get right. Core to the problem that we’re solving is an architectured question. What should the architecture of this next phase of ecommerce look like. And in a world where there are now millions of stores on the Internet, millions, and they sit across some 200 to 250 different ecommerce platforms.
Brandon Schulz
And if you’re going to be building any sort of a business in that space, you can either do a very old school kind of manual process, like the Amazons of the world, in which most of that was built in probably like the early 2000s, or adopt sort of a net new model where the fidelity and the experience is just categorically different. And to do that, the system needs to be API first, needs to be headless, and needs to have sufficient flexibility at each step in the process that someone can essentially customize whatever they want, their marketplace or social app or commerce experience to be and or look like. And I think that’s the part that really sets us apart, is that modular, flexible nature of the product we built.
Brandon Schulz
We obviously are big fans of the mock alliance for those that are familiar, and I think that’s the piece that’s really allowed us to do what we do. And I think it’s probably why Stripe has had such a unique competitive advantage in the early days. Similar thing for Twilio, Plaid, et cetera. I think it’s our particular go to market approach and the distribution model associated with KPI products generally.
Brett
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Brandon Schulz
It’s a really good question. My first answer is, there is no category name for it yet. And I say that because everyone talks about category creation, and that’s a great idea, a great concept. And I struggle because I remember I had a call with the e commerce guy, I think, at Gartner, and we talked through this for a while, and I kind of, you know, we’re having a really tough time defining what it is that we do or even what category we fit in, because I am maybe a little bit less into trying to claim some big category, especially for ours, in the way that it’s. I’d say poorly defined, and there’s a lot of overlap and can feel a little bit messy in a way.
Brandon Schulz
And he just paused and said, well, I can see what you’re doing is definitely novel, but I don’t have a name for this yet. And that’s kind of where we sit today. People are generally looking for some way by which they are merging several important factors or several important forces. So one, they are trying to get commerce data directly from ecommerce platforms. That’s the first thing. So generally it sits in the ecommerce integration bucket. Ecommerce integrations can mean so many different things. I can build a really basic ecommerce integration that sends a text message to my mom every time someone orders one of my candles. That’s an ecommerce integration that has absolutely nothing to do with what would be required to orchestrate and facilitate every step of checkout for some other external application. Those are just categorically different things.
Brandon Schulz
And it’s hard to just say, well, if the categories e commerce integrations, that’s difficult, but that’s one approach. Second is this, like, middleware layer around unified APIs, and that one’s growing more. I’d say today we probably are the closest to that category and would then probably differentiate within unified APIs. But you have the merges of the world. Probably kodap fits in that bucket rudder sort of in the finance plus commerce flavor and others. And I think we fall in there also those in sort of hr that probably are in that equation as well with Finch and others. But I think that’s probably the closest direct correlation.
Brandon Schulz
And then the third piece there is you sort of attach this marketplace component where if you were to combine the ecommerce specific integration category with a unified API, and then to do so for people that are trying to build their own native checkout, those three things together is kind of the category that we sit in, and I don’t have a great name for it today, but people are often searching for one of those three things. E commerce integrations, something, or unified API for e commerce or native checkout or marketplace enabler, something in those spaces. And those are the three kind of big buckets.
Brett
And is that something you’re urgently trying to solve? Like, do you want to have a category name and a term? Do you view that as a top priority, or does that not really matter right now which category you fall into?
Brandon Schulz
Oh, man. I think the main focus or the main driver behind this is just clarity, right? That’s the real goal. I think sometimes categories are defined for hype or marketing purposes, which can also be helpful. But today, a lot of that market positioning and hype has been counterproductive. A lot of companies over promising, miss promising, and that’s been detrimental across the board, and it’s had very material impacts on people’s businesses. And the point in which some of those companies come our way, it’s been a very painful and frustrating experience for them. So our main objective is we just want to be able to call the thing what it is. Right. Maybe it’s a little bit of a limitation of the english language.
Brandon Schulz
I know other languages, like Japanese and German, do a lot better of assigning a word for each discrete, individual thing, and I really wish we could do that. I wish I had a word I could just put on it. We haven’t done that yet. So, yeah, I think it’s a very big priority, and it’s also quite challenging, and we want to get it right. We don’t want to be premature. We don’t pick some random word and end up having to change it or whatever. So, yeah, it’s tough. It’s a difficult process, and we’re in the middle of it.
Brett
You mentioned clarity there. So I want to ask about the website. So when I was preparing for the interview, going through the website, I was really impressed with how clear and crisp the messaging is. I walked away not scratching my head like I do most times I visit the website. What was that like to really nail your messaging and get all of that copied? Right.
Brandon Schulz
Well, thank you. I still don’t think it’s that clear, so that’s a really great vote of confidence. Thank you. The process so far, I think, has been trying as hard as we can to listen to the language other people are using around our product and try to pull that through different frameworks and different approaches. One of the things that was probably most useful or unlocked for us was being willing to say that were okay with more image driven or like illustration centric communication around our product. And that was kind of an investment or a risk that we took. And I just said, you know, it’s really hard to explain all of this with a couple sentences or like a screenshot of a mobile app or someone at a computer working on something. It just doesn’t capture the product.
Brandon Schulz
And so we actually started with the images first, and I said, how do we land what it is that we do in two or three screens? What would that look like? And then challenged ourselves to do that again. And you’ll kind of see that on the bottom half of the site. That obviously wasn’t three screens, but it is a little bit of this concept we had, which was an x ray view that we thought was crucial for our particular product. And so that really is what drove what you see today. And I think the images do most of the heavy lifting. And then from there, were able to just wrap in the language, which I think still needs improvement, for what it’s worth. But that was kind of our unique strategy there.
Brandon Schulz
On if I were to visualize our product as a metaphor, what is that metaphor, and how can I construct that metaphor in a way that someone viewing this can see themselves in this and understand, really like, what’s happening here conceptually, to then filter through and understand the rest of the way the product functions.
Brett
Love that approach. Now, getting into our final questions here, we’re getting close to being up on time. So as I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised 14 million so far. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Brandon Schulz
Fundraising is really tough until it’s not. It’s one of the most asymmetrical things I’ve ever done. So our story is probably not unique. It’s a very common situation. But my co founder and I ren, we didn’t have much of a past in fundraising and even don’t have much of a super compelling resume on paper. But we knew we had a great product and we knew we could build great product. And so we said, okay, let’s do this, let’s go for it, and spent four years getting very little interest. We met with investors, they showed interest. We got through processes, but just couldn’t raise a proper seed round. I just couldn’t get it done. And it became a distraction, and it was difficult and took away from accomplishing some of the things we needed to accomplish.
Brandon Schulz
And as we worked our way through, there was a unique moment in time for us in which we kind of found our product market fit in terms of how we priced the product and who were selling it to. It’s like an overlap there between the go to market fit and product market fit. And once that clicked, the investment conversations changed dramatically. And I remember were early 2021. We were getting close to the end of our Runway. And I had spent at that .4 years just hustling and trying to talk to everyone I could and begging for intros. And when you’re on the outside, you know you’re on the outside like you just are. And then it clicked. The right person had the right priors, understood it, and from there, everything else just worked.
Brandon Schulz
And I remember that moment in time where four years of intense, brutal output and then over the space of two weeks, I was pitching sequoia a 16 z greylock, like firms that I would idolize five years before this, in my mid to late twenty s, and there I was in the room and it took all of an email or two and it didn’t compute. It didn’t make any sense to me. And it was even a little bit frustrated because that only took two weeks. And then we ended up closing a seed round 60 days later. And then we raised a series a 90 days after that. And I just sort of looked at it all. It’s like, what the hell? I put in all this time? And it actually wasn’t a one to one equation.
Brandon Schulz
It wasn’t like for every additional hour of hard work I put in, I received back in yield an hour of output, not how it works. And instead it was about the way that the pieces all fit together. And then when it clicked, then all the other things that I had been reading and prepping for and doing well started to work. And it’s just a hard lesson to take. I’m really glad it happened, but it was incredibly disorienting for me. And that was kind of my biggest takeaway, that I got to get all the cogs and all the gears in the right place. And once that happens, things are going to work, things are going to flow. But it is a tough uphill battle until then.
Brett
And four years is a long time. Yeah, that’s a long grind. How’d you stay motivated during that four year period?
Brandon Schulz
Great question. This isn’t our first rodeo, which helps. I also think it does help, actually, that red and I come from kind of nonstandard backgrounds, our early socioeconomic status, and kind of being maybe not the kind of founder that most people would think could do something like this. Gave us a bit of a chip on our shoulder. And we love to work hard. We’re sled dogs at the end of the day. And I think the toughest part was actually not the hard work or even potentially the duration, but it was the amount of rejection. You walk away from a conversation with an investor, and they are basically telling you that you’re wrong. Right. If they believed you and thought that you were right, they would absolutely give you money.
Brandon Schulz
And so by saying, well, this either doesn’t fit our thesis or whatever it is, what they’re actually saying is, yeah, sorry, we don’t agree with the way that you’re connecting those dots. And the absolute worst sentence in every email from investors is, we hope you prove us wrong. It’s like the last thing you want to hear in that situation. And so that was actually the hardest part. And there were times, and I was like, am I wrong? Ren, do we have this right? And being crystal clear about what our vision is, what we think the market’s doing, finding ways to test that, and sticking through that. And I think were lucky enough to have a product that had a strong enough vision, was unique enough.
Brandon Schulz
And maybe it is the fact that were sort of in a not yet defined category that allowed us to keep the faith. Maybe I owe it a little bit to this category definition thing for that. But we just had to continue to believe and continue to build. And one of the big shifts was signing our first big customer. At the end of year three, we signed a contract with Instagram, actually, to have to work on some of the early iterations of Instagram checkout. And I think had that not happened, it would have been also much tougher. But that was a huge form of signal and a big part of our learning and our growth and kind of our next step.
Brandon Schulz
But, yeah, it was that it was support from family, having a really great founder relationship, and, yeah, you just kind of keep rolling and either got it in you or you don’t, and you just kind of have the grit and keep moving along if you believe in what you’re doing stuff.
Brett
And you have a dog, too, you said, right? The dog has to.
Brandon Schulz
Yeah, dog helps. I didn’t have the dog at the time. He’s just over a year old. So it’s a more recent development. But, man, I sure wish I did. It would have been very helpful.
Brett
That’s always my advice to other founders. Just get a dog. No matter what you say of why you can’t, it’ll help make your life a lot better.
Brandon Schulz
Absolutely. It’s the right choice.
Brett
Now, last couple of questions here. So let’s just imagine you were starting the company again today from scratch. And based on everything that you’ve learned so far, what would be the number one piece of advice you’d give yourself?
Brandon Schulz
Can I ask for one clarifying question? Yes, of course. If I’m starting it today, do I get to take with me my current experience and my current relationships? Access? Yes, I do. Okay, great. First thing I would say is, do not spend any time trying to raise money. That was one of my biggest early mistakes. Our time spent on investment was driven by investor interest as opposed to a rigorous approach. To how and when we will raise money. And it’s tough. It’s a common error, because at the time, you’re so worried about Runway and looking for validation of the product, getting to the next phase, there’s so much work, you don’t know what to do or who to turn to. And all you want is more people. And you know you need the new people.
Brandon Schulz
And for every founder of the call, you’ve done this equation and stared at your p l and product roadmap and tried to square those two. And as a know I’m in the Seattle market, we got to know some great folks here in the Seattle area, many of whom took us all the way through the process, and we got very close, and then it never worked out. And so that was a little bit of like the tail wagging the dog to some figurines. I would go the complete opposite direction and really focus on what we’re building. And this is what I say to founders now when they have questions, but to really focus on getting to some notable point and being very specific and okay with the reality of, well, here’s what we did, here’s what we learned.
Brandon Schulz
We hit our goals, or we didn’t hit our goals, but here’s the next phase. And I think having gone through the things I’ve gone through now, it’s a lot easier to do that. I don’t think I could say that to myself in the early stage of my career just because I didn’t have the track record right. It’s a lot easier to raise money when you’ve done it and you know people in the space, but when you are doing it. Net new for the first time, almost impossible to get over the trust factor required for someone to make an investment. So, yeah, it’s the advice I would give myself. But there were times when I would hear things like that on a podcast and say, yeah, it’s fair for you to say, but I don’t have that same experience and track record.
Brandon Schulz
So that’s probably what I’d say with the caveat sort of reflecting on where I’m at the moment.
Brett
Now, final question, let’s zoom out three to five years from today. Can you just paint a picture of that vision that you’re building?
Brandon Schulz
Yeah, I think the world five years from now will have a lot more choice and a lot more touch points for ecommerce. I don’t think we will be so distributed of having to go to millions of different ecommerce stores, having individual accounts for every single one of them. And I also don’t know. We will really just use like four to five apps. You’re already seeing some of that fragmenting from Twitter out into threads into a whole bunch of other tools. And so I think that is going to really accelerate. And to the degree that accelerates, Violet is there to open up and enable that next phase of innovation. And so we imagine a world in which there are thousands of applications and experiences and websites in all different ways where communities are able to specialize and focus and find the products that they want.
Brandon Schulz
And doing so is no longer capital intensive, really difficult, and it doesn’t take a long time anymore. That’s kind of that future vision. And so that’s what we hope for. Obviously, we expect the business to grow a lot. We have projections, no idea if we’re going to be right or not, but that’s kind of the world that we see, and it’s fun to see that already. I think for those on the call or on the podcast listening in, I think we’re incredibly bullish and interested to see what happens in the world of generative AI and what that means for messaging and product recommendations. I think there’s really interesting stuff people build on that space. We’re seeing some really cool things in shoppable tv.
Brandon Schulz
So what it looks like to turn sort of the television and all of that content into a shoppable experience, or a mall, if you will, and then augmented reality has been the one that we’ve been waiting for a really long time. And with Apple’s recent announcements, I think we’re definitely on kind of the beginning of that curve as well. So five years from now, expect that to be a whole nother layer with a whole new ecosystem of innovators and apps and experiences, et cetera. So very excited. Lots of new opportunity, lots of new sort of touch points and interfaces and hoping to continuing to just expand and redistribute the way e commerce works out into a whole new generation and phase of innovators to make shopping easier and better for everyone. Amazing. I love the vision.
Brett
All right, Brandon, we’ll have to wrap here. Before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey as you build and execute on this vision, where should they go?
Brandon Schulz
Twitter is probably best. Twitter and LinkedIn. Twitter is brandon underscore Schultz Schulz. And yeah, I post on LinkedIn probably a little bit more company updates there. You might see an occasional photo of a golden retriever of runways or if you happen to go that route, amazing.
Brett
Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join, talk about what you’re building and share some valuable lessons that you’ve learned along the way. I really enjoyed the conversation, and I know the founders listening in are going to as well. So thanks so much for taking the time.
Brandon Schulz
Sure. Thanks, Brad. All right, keep in touch.
Brett
This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast list, visit Frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for category visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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