Co-founder & CEO Brandon Schulz of Violet.io raised $10M by focusing on the pain
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Introducing Brandon Schulz, co-founder and CEO of Violet.io. They raised a $10M Series A and have created a magic middleware for ecommerce.
TL;DR
As an early stage founder, you need to define exactly what traction means for your business
You want to focus on finding product-market fit by clarifying how you solve pain
Map out the pain of your buyers experience in different stages of your space
If the pain is a 10 out of 10 for the user, you immediately have signal you're going in the right direction
If you’re in B2B, get your first users from investor or influencer intros
Brandon shares his thoughts on how companies incorrectly think about and measure traction.
If you’re spinning your wheels trying to get traction for your project, read this.
1. What have you been building?
We’ve been building a distributed commerce API platform for the last 5+ years.
Violet is an infrastructure to connect Merchants and their products to Channels and their audiences in different ways from the last 10 years or more.
We realized the best way to solve this was by building a middleware product that could integrate into any ecommerce platform.
That middleware allows any new or existing media channel to orchestrate their own native checkout experience, with any merchant.
It’s like Instagram checkout for every app, but pre-integrated to any ecommerce platform. And with Violet, channels integrate within a couple weeks worth of work, instead of several years.
2. So, how did you find your early users?
Initially, we got intros from investors. That was how we started.
If you're in B2C, go to a friend or influencer. If you're in B2B, you go to a VC or an angel investor—someone who will know someone that could try your product, and will be open to it.
Just do that and start there. They're trying to show that they're helpful. It serves as a form of diligence in both directions. I think it should happen way more.
The best investors we've worked with did that straightaway. They started introducing us both to companies and to other investors. It was this process that helped us really focus on trying to define and understanding traction specific to our context.
3. What’s the biggest misconception in early stage traction?
In my view, the biggest misconceptions stem from how one defines the word ‘traction’.
This is a matter of ‘definition’. Some people don’t define what traction means for them at all. Others have implicit direction. And some define it explicitly, but incorrectly for their business model…
Someone might say something like, “we finally have traction!” But in reality what does that even mean? Is that a sign up metric, total users, MRR, usage, churn, positive investor feedback? What do you mean when you say the word traction for your business?
Personally, I think most of life is about definitions. In this case, how you define what you’re talking about or thinking about will dictate how you action what you are looking to measure.
4. How do you define traction?
I define traction through the lens of a question:
Does your product solve a particular pain point to the threshold required to make it an easy sale?
Focus on solving the user’s pain.
If I wanted to get traction or if I wanted to define product market fit, I had to start with the pain side of the equation.
Forget revenue, forget all the other stuff. How painful is the current situation for someone? Rank that pain on a scale of 1 to 10.
I get really frustrated when someone's like, “what problem are you solving?” For some people they're not solving a problem, per se.
If you use problem language, what would Superhuman say? “Well, Gmail is just not as efficient as we’d like it to be.”
That's just an inconvenience.
That may be marginally better and you can make a great business, but I prefer to use pain language instead of problem language to say, “how painful is their current situation, and in what ways?”
If the pain is a 10 out of 10, you immediately have signal you're going in the right direction.
Early on at Violet, we found people with this high level of pain, and continue to do so.
The next step is to break down the pain by getting detailed and empathetic.
What you walk away with is a clear understanding of the types of people you’re talking to, the pain that they're experiencing, and then you can start to break down the experiences behind the pain.
This informs everything downstream, including product, and at fruition is the locus of getting to traction.
The biggest challenge in getting traction, in my opinion, is having clarity around the exact pain your buyers are experiencing in different stages of their own maturity curve in a particular product space.
After you rank customer pain, you start getting dots you can place somewhere on a x / y axis. As you do that, you can start to create different stages of the pain journey, informing your roadmap, and allowing you to focus your messaging into stages with the highest pain or the highest purchase intent.
As we talked to customers, we shifted from ranking their pain to ranking the degree to which we solved that pain.
We ranked that on a scale of 1 to 10.
Note: Be brutally honest with yourself about how you score your solution relative to the pain. Then subtract 3 from your initial estimate until you proceed past the section below.
5. Measuring traction
I started to measure traction by how our sales calls went. If the Pain:Solution Ratio was correct, the sales call shouldn’t even really be much of a sales call. It should be like giving someone water in the desert.
What I would do is I would hop on a call and I actually would start timing sections of the discussion. I tried to figure out how much of the call I spent selling them on whether or not they should use the product.
At some point, the conversation would switch from that topic into specific questions on implementation. If they weren’t interested in the product, the implementation wouldn’t matter.
We’d stay in the objection / response phase the whole call. But if we moved to implementation, and further qualifying how our particular product would solve each pain point, it was no longer a sales call, but instead the beginning of an onboarding discussion.
I would then review how much of the call was spent on them asking us how they would implement our product.
The Sale:Implementation Ratio told us whether we were moving in the right direction. When we were spending 90% of a call selling, and the last 10% on implementation, I’d go back to the pain : solution matrix, or clarify the messaging to align closer to your pain : solution understanding.
Once we exceeded < 10% of the call selling, and the rest on implementation, I knew we were there.
Thanks for reading!
Follow Brandon on Twitter @brandon_schulz and check out Violet.io.
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