Connily started with a simple problem.

In 2018, I built my first e-commerce brand. Growth quickly led us beyond marketplaces and into owned channels - and social media became the most important driver of awareness, community, and sales. But running social media properly wasn't just a creative challenge. It was a commercial one. Every post had to earn its place.

I began helping other brands in my network do the same. That work became Connily Studio, where we've now supported hundreds of consumer brands in growing their presence on social media.

Over time, a clear problem emerged - and none of the available solutions actually solved it.

Agencies like ours could deliver quality, but only if brands had the financial runway to commit a significant budget for months before results were clear enough to justify the spend. Most early-stage brands don't have that luxury. Hiring internally meant salary, management overhead, and the inflexibility of a fixed role in a business where priorities shift weekly. So founders were left doing it themselves - trying to draft something in Canva when design isn't their expertise, farming out work to unreliable freelancers found online, posting only when they had the time or budget to.

The result was always the same. Social media became a necessary evil - something brands knew they had to maintain, but never truly utilised. Feeds were sporadic. Content was reactive. And the platforms that should have been driving meaningful growth were treated as a checkbox.

Over the last couple of years, AI has had a significant impact on the cost of content creation. It hasn't solved the problem.

Generative AI made it faster to produce a caption or an image. But brands still have to decide what to post, brief every piece of content, manage quality, maintain consistency, track performance, and connect results back to revenue. The tools got cheaper. The workload didn't.

And even when brands tried to be more strategic - looking at their analytics, reviewing what performed - there's only so much a human can do manually, and it's not something that can be done on a daily basis. Social media has never been properly tied into store data. There's been no effective way for e-commerce brands to connect post performance to actual sales, or understand which content drives revenue versus just engagement. The data existed in two separate worlds, and nobody had bridged them.

What the market actually needs isn't another content tool. It's a system that owns the entire process - one that understands what you sell, knows what's working, and acts on it without being told.

So we built Connily.

Connily is an end-to-end system that replaces fragmented tools, manual workflows, and agency dependency with an always-on AI agent - one that connects directly to your Shopify store, reads your product data and sales in real time, plans your content strategy, creates and publishes your posts, and improves over time.

For the first time, a Shopify brand can run social media that's genuinely informed by their store - not as a manual exercise, but automatically and at scale.

Not a tool you operate. Not a content generator you must hand-hold. An agent that runs the process - built from the experience of doing this work for hundreds of brands, and designed specifically for e-commerce.

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Robert Thorp, Founder Connily.com