Automating and Streamlining your store will be key to scaling your business. What we talk about today with my guest Kausambi Manjita, is about how Mason is designed to dramatically save time and make things more accessible across not one but multiple tools you're already using.
Whether it's sales, arranging best sellers, updates, inventory, Mason is designed to provide a no-headache system to handle all this. On a more zoomed out view; we discuss the future of the nocode movement and it's goal to take programming to a new more accessible level.
Kausambi Manjita is the CEO and Founder of Mason, an AI-powered eCommerce content platform.
How Mason Works
Kausambi Manjita: What I'm going to share is our app on the Shopify app store. And Mason's like a whole platform. There's a bunch you can do. The Shopify app store app is simple, and then it'll get started with that. So it's called mode magic when you buy Mason and you install it on your app store, this is something that you would land with. And as I said, like, there are these different components, right?There's the zapier and the canva.
So let's talk about the use case before we go into the zapier and the canva. So when you have a store, one of the most I would say annoying things that you have to do as a store owner, as a brand owner. And as the team grows as an e-commerce manager, et cetera, is there this hundreds of different reasons that I need to call out on my products, like on my different products.
And the simple things are around adventure, which is your it's running low on stock, or it's back in stock or fresh new. These are all things that you do on a very regular basis. As you can see on the left side, these are all your inventory sort of playbooks, right? And you do that on a day to day. Then you have your sale kind of playbooks, which are like, hey, this is on sale. This is on discount. And I want to run my sale only from fifth to seventh and not beyond. Right?
So there's all this sale price kind of call outs and updates to do. And the third interesting set is actually how almost like you can call it customer behavior, how users, other shoppers, in a way, sneakily putting it, I would say social proof, right? What are the best sellers? What are the top trending products on our hot centers, all of that, right? So they're just bunch of like different things that you need to do.
And if you talk to an average e-commerce team, they would say that, hey, all of these are different, you know, scripts or themes. Either an operator or custom automation script that's running in my store trying to do one or more of these, right. And imagine the pain of actually having to manage so many different automation, scripts and manage so many different people to do these different things. And then the more interesting problem over there is how do I keep finding these new use cases?
Because for example, if we can see over here, if a new product, I am uploading a new set of products, I want to mark them as coming soon. But when I inward my inventory, I want to log them as new episode. That's a playbook, right? That's a custom journey. How do I even said that sort of a journey, right?
So these are right now really problematic and painful for teams because these are all. Almost fragmented, different scripts and people that you have to use. With Mason, our goal is that, hey, you don't have to one of course there's automation and all of that. But even before that, this is your almost like your, you know, get hub for all these different plays and a journey is that we need to implement in your store.
And as we keep hearing more interesting use cases in journeys from teams, we keep expanding. So it's almost like your library of like expert advice. Like these are things that you need to in your store, right? And then we went and made it even simpler. So you don't just discover it, but you can literally in one click actually start using that.
So you can say like, hey, any products in the last seven days that first mark that is, you know, it has zero inventory, you know, coming soon, but I also want to call it coming soon in a different way. I'm gonna call it out like this. Right? So it hit that's where, you know, you start, you have enough playbooks, but you know, it's also editable, but it's one click.
You don't need a developer. You don't need an expert. You don't need a design, a designer to come together and tell you what to do or how to make it look, you can choose, you know, Canva, like interface coming over here. You know, you can say that I wanted lacks more, whatever. And then on the other hand of it is if you're like simple interface on the left, which just helps you choose the criteria around which you want to around that automation.
And then you have your entire Zapier sort of automation and our store because all of these products are literally from your store, right? So this actually mason grants your store your inventory, your pricing, and it keeps looking and every time it needs to criteria, it'll just make sure it's always marked as coming soon, a few left or whatever it is that you have. So it's all connected, it's all together. And it's so simple and it's still simple to run your everyday business with something.
Case Study
Kausambi Manjita: A couple of things when you're asking that, two things pop up in my head. The first one is I was really, so I've worked in e-commerce in some way or the address I mentioned for quite a while now. And an app seen how, if you add more visuals to your product details pages, so.
And you'll see that in Amazon right now. It is.
If you notice it's all about all your customer reviews, all of your product details on the USBs is about the product. A hundred percent got on everything, all of that amped up and pulled out into your carousel of images, rather than you, in an Amazon page, you hardly have to go and read everything, right. They've really optimized based on each category.
And when I was working in the Walmart subsidiary before I started doing my own thing. At that point we did notice that, hey, when you kind of amp up all of that, it improves conversions, XYZ basis points and all of those you know, good stuff. But seeing that impact with a store which has found product, like it's a brand, it's an upcoming brand in north America, it's found product market fit. They're doing upwards of 10 million in GMV already. And seeing that improvement on their app to card.
Before and after was such a high, because it's like, you know, you see all these things when you're working in a large MNC and you are doing all the stuff that you're doing, but when you see someone who's at a 10 and it can actually become a 12 or 15 or 30, because of some of the things that you're doing with them. I think that's a different kind of high. So we did see uplift of 25% add to carts, on the product details page to add to cart because of them really using a lot of the guides and the how tos, and also using multiple batches on a single product.
So not just like calling out 10% discount, but saying it's GMO vegan and single origin, I think something that's. So yeah, so all that good sustainable stuff. So it was great. So that's one case study that definitely stands out in my head. And the second was in terms of productivity uplift, and that interesting place where in fact, just two days back as chatting with that team on support and they'd come over the weekend and I love taking up support chats.
It's very important for founders to stay very close to. It's really happening with the teams, with the users who are using it. And we, me and Nicole ponder we'd like make sure every possible support yet given our time constraints. And in fact, he was mentioning, he was like, you know, I was just so worried. The founder was on the other side was mentioning, I was so worried about using so many different custom automation scripts because I use Photoshop and I have some of these designs, but I didn't want to maintain.
You know, ungainly accustom automation scripts to do all of these, before the next, I dunno when I scale my business at one scale with it, right. They won't do anymore and I'll have to redo everything. If my UI changes have to redo everything, there's so much of all of that. And something like this has just taken away that stress away from me because I don't have to worry about it. You guys will worry about it. And I just have to worry about how my brand, the brand story that I wanted to.
I think these are and it's of course it saves up so much of his time and his team, it's an early team, five people, and they definitely don't want to be tagging every product, analyzing data sheets, and then saying these I'm at top products and now tag them and it's it's too much work. So these are two things that come top of my mind.
The No-Code Movement
Kausambi Manjita: One of my mentors once told me and I was complaining that, hey, I don't know how to code. I've never coded, I've worked in the tech industry, but I'm not a, I'm not a techy techy. So I'm more the people side of the big industry, I would say. And which is much needed. We would not have names like headless if I was pointing it, for sure I would call it heartfull.
But and so in the early days I had a mentor who, I'm still in touch with him. He told me once said what you know, is needed is more and more people like you, who can you know, think from the perspective of someone who needs that, not from the perspective of someone who is building that.
And when you think of someone who needs it, it's very different from the person who's building it because the guy who's building it, but thinking technical aspects and functions and specs and specifications and all of the features and all of that. Whereas the guy who needs it will say, this is my theme. This is why I'm stuck. This is why it's hard. Right. And when we use anything, any product, right?
We always have an emotional connotation to it. It makes us like, we love products that make us feel comfortable and happy and make us feel like we achieve something. Right. So emotions are not away from what we do. Any product that we use are not, we can't disconnect emotions away from it. Right. And I think the whole.
At some level, the whole no-code philosophy is a lot about that. It's bringing the ability to create the solutions closer to the person who's feeling the pain rather than keeping it with the builders. So even if I'm feeling, they know you are feeling of being using technologies, time code, we can solve that problem. We don't have to depend on like, communicating that pain, translating it into specifications. Here's a free product requirements, doc, and tickets. We don't have to do that.
So I think that's what no-code is all about. And so it's very, very close to me and I feel like really passionate about it. Like nobody has to push me for it. It is like, yeah, this is so important.
Joseph: It's certainly the passion for it. I can see that that influence resonating through Mason. And I'm one of the things we wanted to make sure that we mentioned too, is just how pivotal this is for growth, especially in the DTC space.
Kausambi Manjita: It is, it is. And because when you're reacting to changes that are, that you need to make a business work and to make your business grow, you can't be dependent on. You know, subject matter experts who can help you with 50 things, you need to be able to run your experiments and run your . Changes on your own to be able to see them back.
And I'm not saying that it's like takeaway code. That's not what I mean. And there is always space for everything, but on a day to day, when I'm running my business, I need to take decisions. And if I have to wait on 48 hour cycle to actually get the decision implemented, maybe my business decision is already about to change, right.
So it just brings so much agility to me, as a business owner to actually run experiments, to grow my business. And it's so, so pivotal.
Future Of Coding
Kausambi Manjita: I think programmers want to do more like with any other, you know, a designer for example, wants to do great design. They don't want to like edit a design to just change the copy everyday. Like that's literally what a bunch of designers unfortunately have to do when they are doing creatives, for example.
So it's the same for developers, all makers. They want to make new things. They don't necessarily want to be operating something that they have made and editing it endlessly day-to-day I see it like, you know, if someone's helping me make like a landing page or something, and then I need to change the copy, I would rather do it myself.
That for developer will hit me. If I thank him a hundred times to just like, change the copy, tweak it and all of that. But, so I think things like. A lot of the great work to be focused on and leaving the operating, which I'm more important for me, for the business guy or for the user. Other than the builder.
So it enables the user and to do the things that they need to do without having to pull in the builder. And I think the second thing is that makes products so much more. I think it just helps create more beautiful products. I think, because if you're closer to the problem and you understand motion, you can create something that will fulfill that emotional need.
I would say, you know, me, and in help you, with your work, it'll help you be more productive. We'll help you grow your business, but it'll also fulfill some sort of that emotional reaction that you have to that pain. And it's gonna create more and more beautiful products. I would say rather than just products which have been built by someone else and a very different kind of user has to like, sort of just use it.
