How this woman entrepreneur helps small retailers run online stores
Helping tie various elements of a growing e-commerce business together, Mason is a no-code Software as a Service (SaaS) platform that businesses need to ensure the customer-facing storefront always stays shipshape. Driving Mason to new heights with her undying passion for making a difference, its co-founder and CEO Kausambi Manjita shared her thoughts with NewsBytes about India's e-commerce landscape and her experiences running Mason.
Kausambi is an entrepreneur who worked for Paytm, IBM
Kausambi grew up in small towns across India and holds an MBA from ISB, Hyderabad. She has worked with companies, including IBM Research Labs, Paytm, and Myntra. Her mother had an artistic temperament and worked with All India Radio while her older sister is a professional who has worked with start-ups. Kausambi gleefully mentioned that both these women have been instrumental in her journey.
Kausambi started out with a podcasting platform called Storeo
Kausambi soon transitioned from making products for companies to making products for people. Her first start-up was called Storeo, a community-first podcasting platform for South Asia started in 2017. Although the idea was shelved eight months later because the idea was "ahead of its time," it had already accrued 400+ creators by then. Around this time, Kausambi conceptualized her next venture, Kubric.
She observed lack of democratization of technology in e-commerce space
Kubric commenced operations in April 2018 as an enterprise SaaS business that enabled video automation at scale for content creation in teams. The venture was another runaway success that continued until early-2020. Around that time, Kausambi realized that B2C e-commerce brands were coping with the lack of democratic access to the technology required to succeed. With this idea, Mason was started in May 2020.
Mason ties ends of product funnel together with zero coding
Kausambi explained that Mason is designed around the needs of a well-established, medium-sized presumer (pre-consumer) business that has found its product-market fit. Mason's automation tools help integrate various subsystems of an e-commerce business, including inventory, pricing, customer engagement, marketing, and visual design so product availability is never miscommunicated to the customer. What's more, the whole process is coding-free and completely automated once set up.
It is available as a Shopify store plugin
Kausambi said businesses can start using Mason by installing it as a plugin for their Shopify or Dukaan storefront and start using it for free. The freemium business model lets low-volume businesses avail premium services for as low as $9 (roughly Rs. 650) per month. Kausambi claimed that Mason has already helped over 30,000 brands automate their business funnel since its inception.
Mason is focused on growth in short term, long-term versatility
Mason is backed by renowned VC firms such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel, and Venture Highway. Kausambi added that the company plans to raise capital sometime next year if it continues to scale at the current run rate. In 2022, Mason aims to reach 100,000 businesses and in the long term, it wants to open its doors to small-scale e-commerce businesses, too.
Kausambi advises budding entrepreneurs to chart their unique success roadmap
Summarizing her learnings in a nutshell for e-commerce entrepreneurs and the SaaS businesses beginning to cater to them, Kausambi said product building is not a path set in stone and is an iterative process. Kausambi said most importantly, entrepreneurs must be conscious of the problem statement they set out to solve and this is more relevant as operations are now transitioning to remote work.
