E104: Kausambi Manjita

Richard Hill:
Hi, and welcome to another episode of eCom@One. Today's guest, Kaus Manjita, co-founder of Mason. How you doing, Kaus?

Kaus Manjita:
All good and really excited to be here today.

Richard Hill:
Now, Kaus was telling me that she's in Singapore right now, which is very exciting. And we've actually had two guests this week from Singapore, which is quite rare, one of my favorite places. I spent many months there many years ago in my student days. Beautiful place. I'm looking forward to going back. We're actually planning on going back this April with my family, actually, but we've decided to pause it at the moment, but we'll be going back there next year, hopefully. So how did you get into the world of e-commerce?

Kaus Manjita:
Well, I think first of all, as a shopper, as older millennial now, but a millennial, I think we just grew up in a world where everything was online or starting to get online at least. And so it was very natural to be excited by what's happening in e-commerce. I was back in the states working at IBM Commerce, coincidentally, right after I graduated. So that definitely helped, working on the supply chain side, building products for order management and inventory management and all of that, I would say, now boring stuff. And about the time, I started noticing that back home in India... That's where I'm from... my family, everybody's getting online, and they're literally starting to shop from their phones. And that was very interesting because that's not what was happening back in the states.

Kaus Manjita:
We were still using desktops and web stores, et cetera, and here in India, it was all chat and social commerce and people literally getting online for the first time through their phones and never having shopped before, just getting out from colleges and directly jumping on into the e-commerce bandwagon. So it was very exciting. I moved back and did a bunch of work on the experience side of e-commerce. That's how do you ensure that the store is really awesome and it converts awesome. And on one side, it looks great, but ensures that you get great AOVs and revenues and stuff like that. So yeah, that's how it all meandered in.

Richard Hill:
Wow. So then, you moved into and set up Mason?

Kaus Manjita:
Kind of.

Richard Hill:
Not obviously straight away, but it's always interesting, isn't it? I think most people... I love to hear those stories of how people got into things and quite often, obviously, different generations and things like that, but working in maybe a corporatey-type environment and seeing what opportunities are out there and things that, obviously, you get a feel for different parts of a business, but maybe it's quite narrow focus quite often when you're in a business, but then it's like, obviously, you're using the internet and buying a lot of things and looking at what's working. Actually, there's maybe an opportunity there. And obviously, I think it's quite interesting... How did you get Mason off the ground? I think I'm quite interested in that because I think there's a lot of people that would obviously be interested in what you do there, but also going from possibly a little smidgen of an idea to what it is today, obviously, is quite a stretch, isn't it, so quite a journey. So how did you get that off the ground? What was maybe that first year like?

Kaus Manjita:
It's been such a... I tend to use the word journey, and my co-founder has a good laugh about it, but it literally feels like the last few years feel like a decade, to be honest, in terms of the amount of changes that has happened overall in your life and in the work and in the product itself. But when I moved back to India, I started working initially at Alibaba company and then moved on to Flipkart, now Walmart in India. And, as I said, my focus was how do like productize experience and make it really scalable and stuff like that. And it was interesting because you're with the top 1% marketplaces of the world and you have 200 people, 300 people in your storefront team.

Kaus Manjita:
I was the product lead there, building out technologies, not just for how the store runs but also powering the revenue teams and the business teams to actually run their experiments, do their campaigns, essentially help customers convert. And in that whole 300-sized team of working towards this goal on making the storefront convert really sharply, at the same time, ensuring that the experience is really kick ass and engaging for young folks to really have fun with too. My family moved to Toronto, so I used to 2019, go back and forth in Toronto quite a bit, and also ended up meeting the other end of the spectrum, the rest of the 99%, a bunch of Shopify store owners. And pretty much in the ballpark of the teams that you were talking about, which is they found product market fit, they're setting up their teams, they're trying to scale, grow into bigger businesses.

Kaus Manjita:
And interestingly, they kept saying it's the same problem. It's literally the same problem. It's "How do I ensure that I give the best experience in my store? I'm spending a bunch of money to get customers to my store. How do I make sure the experience in my store is kick ass any time of the day to engage my customers, to retain them, to sell to them, and so on and so forth?" And it was so, so interesting for me. And when I came back to India and I was speaking to my co-founder that, "Hey, it's the same problem." So whether you are at scale or you're the rest of the 99%, your goal is you want a store that people engage, love, and come back to. And it's how do we, as two folks who love product, who love technology, what can we do to democratize it, bring it to others?

Kaus Manjita:
And that was the starting point, to be honest, Richard, but yeah, as you said, that was just a starting point. After that, it was all about how can we narrow it down even further? What is the first use case to solve? How do you go to market, which is so important? And as those things started happening, how do you scale? How do you set up your own team? How do you set engines for your own team to scale and so on? Yeah, so, as I said, it's a journey, but initial spark was literally that we are building all these technologies for the top 1%, but the rest of the 99% need this too. And can we make it simple? Can we bring it to people?

Richard Hill:
Yeah, so this came from an idea for maybe the bigger firms. You obviously touched on your IBM, but obviously, Alibaba and another one there. Obviously, the reality is they are in a different league to most day to day Shopify, Magento, whatever store owners that are doing their £10 million a year. It's very different to these people, but ultimately similar problems, but very, very, very different budgets is the reality. So I think that's great that you've seen that issue, the challenges, and problems that you're solving for these big companies, but then started talking to store owners that are a bit more relatable probably in reality. And actually, yeah, it's a similar thing, a different scale, but it's the same thing, similar challenges. And then, obviously, devising a product and getting a product off the ground. And it's probably a whole episode there. We'll just part that for a minute. I mean, I think, looking at what you're doing at Mason, I'm really intrigued about the no-code tech. It's not something I'm that familiar with, so I'm genuinely interested myself. So you talk about no-code tech technology. So what is it? How does it work?

Kaus Manjita:
Yeah. I think the push to be no-code actually started with the same spark, I would say, as how to democratize technology. And then I don't code. I'm a product manager. I've been a product manager. I've been in product. I've been in business, but I don't code. And so it was always the question about, if you are talking about democratizing technology, you got to think about a way in which you make it super simple for business owners, store owners, merchants themselves to be able to operate stuff. Because, of course, back at the Walmart subsidiary that I was working at, it was a 300-member team, and that's for that scale, right?

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Kaus Manjita:
But when you zoom into like your £10 million a year business, you are most likely trying to keep a lean team, keep all those project management collaboration things at the bare minimum and because you want really fast speed. You don't want to be bogged down by a lot of these having to bring together a set of different people. First of all, it's expensive. Second, it just eats up a lot of time. And specifically, I would say 2020/2021 with the whole pandemic, it became even more difficult for people to align together and focus towards one goal together. And so the goal was always... 2020 we launched on the Shopify app store first. And I think very early on, we realized right after launching a couple of weeks, is that, "Hey, we got to keep it really simple." And apparently, that's called no-code. We chanced upon that as the terminology to use, to be honest.

Kaus Manjita:
But the whole goal was that make it simple, give open, out-of-the-box playbooks that you can literally... How do we make it out-of-the-box playbooks, which is no-code essentially, but how do we also keep it connected? So can it connect so easily to your Shopify store, Magento, whatever you are on without having to, again, pull in engineering bandwidth or technology bandwidth and all of that stuff?

Kaus Manjita:
And the third part of it was apart from making it connected and keeping it simple in terms of having no out-of-the-box playbooks for e-commerce strategies was also ensuring that it works on the goal. So is it on cloud? So can you literally just take out your phone and literally do some of the updates that you got to do in your store? So that was very important too. And then you start realizing that, "Hey, the whole concept of no-code, essentially, is that how can I do all of these without having to really collaborate, learn how to code, first of all, collaborate with a bunch of different people, align them." Going through sprint cycles... Anything that goes into code has to go through sprint cycles. And more importantly, it's less expensive because what you can do is you can go super fast. You can see if your idea or your strategy is working or not. And then you can definitely invest in more things to make it scale across channels, et cetera. But how do you go fast, how do you do it with the least amount of friction, and how do you ensure that you don't have to collaborate with different skill sets to make it work out?

Richard Hill:
Yeah, I mean, simplifying is the word I hammer home at work in everything that we're doing. In our businesses that I'm involved with, simplify. I think people over complicate and then maybe abandon, but I think it'd be good for you to say... Okay, so we've got a Shopify, Magento e-commerce store listening right now, but I know Shopify maybe specifically. What exactly does your toolkit and the no-code toolkit help with? Give me a user case. I'm sat here with my 10, £20 million Shopify store. What sort of things are we talking about exactly? What's very relatable to our listeners?

Kaus Manjita:
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I'll start with a typical product talk, I would say, is your store is literally like the set of blocks. It has all the bestseller block and then you have a new arrivals and you have these offer blocks and stuff like that. And all of these blocks are essentially things you got to keep fresh, relevant, engaging for your customers to come shop with you, convert down the funnel, and keep coming back for more. We make each of these blocks real time, which basically means that if you're running as a block in your homepage or in your list pages, et cetera, when you install Mason on your, let's say, Magento store or Shopify store, all you have to do is select like, "Hey, these are my categories" from a dropdown and then say, "I want to ensure that everything that sells more than 50 times in the last 30 days is a bestseller," right?

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Kaus Manjita:
So just click, make that choice, and you turn on that playbook. So what it essentially does is that every time you have updates to your bestsellers, new products become bestsellers, some of the bestsellers are no longer bestsellers, all that keeping your store fresh, relevant specifically, for example, for this use case, you don't have to really operate it anymore. You set up the system, it runs, it makes sure that your entire storefront from your homepage to list to PDP is updated with the right information.

Kaus Manjita:
So that's one-

Richard Hill:
Sorry, go on.

Kaus Manjita:
No, just is one example, but think of it like new arrivals, trending products, my sales, my discounts, coupons that I run, all of that. So make all of these blocks real.

Richard Hill:
Auto. Yeah. So maybe what will be the next level from that? What's something maybe a bit more complicated, a bit more "Oh, wow"? Because when I think about auto-populating bestsellers and things like that, there's a lot of tech that does that, I think. So what would be another level when we're thinking about it in the toolkit and that's sort of right. We've gone in there. We've set up and dynamically automated those... I think we talked about there bestsellers, upsell, cross-sell maybe, those sort of things. What's some maybe more medium-advanced things that we can do?

Kaus Manjita:
Yeah. That's a great question. And when we started out, that was a question for us, too. We were uncovering e-commerce strategies and great thing is that I think the e-commerce industry, the merchants themselves are so collaborative and community focused. They come back with a great set of examples. So inventory liquidation is a big thing in fashion apparel, beauty, and so clearance sales, running inventory liquidation sales, it's like this whole gamut of things that has to come together. And then we started realizing that for food and beverages, it's an even faster cycle because you got to do it literally often. In fact, for salads and greens, it's something that you do every single day. You got to make sure that you take a stock of all your products or product lines, which of them are not selling out well. You got to ensure that they're at a certain discount, making sure that your COGS is taken care of. And then you have to package them into certain collections, have some banner around it, put it back into your store, keep doing that monitoring process. So you can literally automate your entire liquidation that's clear on sale or end of season sale and stuff like that with-

Richard Hill:
Yeah, that's a great one. That is a great one, isn't it, cause I think that's a topic that it's almost like a lot of facts, absolute fact that I think a lot of merchants... And I think, yeah, we're talking to you people that are listening right now, how much stock do you have sat in that warehouse that may be sitting on your balance sheet as maybe the wrong value and maybe it's... And the reality is that is a real dent. It can be a real dent in a lot of store owners' profits. Balance sheet is maybe not quite as it should be. So if you've got something automating that end of life or those lines that need to be moved quicker, because pricing is volatile from your manufacturer or obviously all sorts of reasons, those returns...

Richard Hill:
I remember in my old business... I mean this is going back some... we were probably doing about 2 million a month in US dollars, roughly, but we would have sort of circa £100,000 in our returns department in roughly all the time. And that was a big challenge because that's basically 100 grands worth of stock, but we can't sell, but we need to turn around to then try and sell. So we've got to... There's even a piece before that where we've got to sort out those returns. Are we reselling them? Are we sending them back? Are we giving them... Are they just not of value because they've been used or whatever or... So there was maybe £40,000 pounds in that returns department could be resold, but it's literally, if it's not turned around quick... So we had a real focus on that in the latter years of that business to obviously tighten that up. And obviously, the guys that are listing in, that could be 100 grand, 200 grand, 300 grand sitting in dead stock or whatever your number is. But the margins that a lot of retailers are working on, that can be the difference between profit and losses in a year maybe. So I think turning those areas around that are maybe not as shiny and front-endy, so that's great.

Richard Hill:
Okay, so obviously, a lot of changes in the last couple of years. I mean, literally, you've started during a pandemic pretty much and seen that huge growth in your business and I assume huge growth in a lot of your clients' businesses. But how do you stay up to date with the change in landscape, and what sort of advice would you give to listeners last two years in e-com? We represent hundreds of brands at our agency and just some of the things we're seeing, it's just so fast-paced, isn't it? What advice would you give to the guys about keeping up with trends and how to spot the new things that are coming through, whether that's one-click checkout on social or whether there's different revenue streams coming through that our listeners need to be thinking about? What would you say?

Kaus Manjita:
Yeah, I think the fundamental trends are very similar across industries. And the biggest fundamental, I would say, trend across the globe today is that, yeah, we are all online all the time. And so what happens is that it is getting much easier, thanks to great e-commerce platforms like Shopify and Magento, it is getting easier and easier to come online. And it's not just in e-commerce. In any industry, like for SaaS products, it's getting easier for people to create software and start selling it from anywhere across the world to anyone across the world. So it's definitely getting so much easier to set up your own business. What's getting harder is differentiating and standing out from the crowd. And so you spend a lot, you have your literally shooting off the roof to drive customers into your store.

Kaus Manjita:
So how do you really optimize your customer lifetime value is essentially the fundamental, I would say of any business, today and specifically true in e-commerce, because even if you have an Amazon strategy or any other regional marketplaces, you're just one of the products of many. And that most of the time doesn't form that one-on-one connect, and without that one-on-one connect, without you having a personal relationship with your customer, with the consumer, they will not necessarily come back to you when they need something. And so that fundamental trend doesn't shift. So I think keeping that lens on how do you ensure that you are having that one on one relationship, you're optimizing your customer lifetime value consistently, that is a great lens to put on while evaluating any trend, because trends come and go. But the fundamental how the world and economies are shifting, that remains.

Kaus Manjita:
So I think, for me, that's the number one thing that I would like to tell everybody, because we've seen that, as a software business too, is that it's crowded. It's the same. We are facing very similar changes in the economy. And the way to differentiate yourself is, how do you ensure that you have that one-on-one connect, right?

Richard Hill:
Right.

Kaus Manjita:
And a lot of times, technology definitely helps you because it, of course, gives you ability and access to things that you can't do as an individual or as a set of small unit of people working together. Technology also gives you access to... What we have seen is that some amounts of playbooks and actionable playbooks and templates... And people think of templates as more like design templates, but even your e-commerce strategies are templates. This clearance sale, it's literally an e-commerce strategy and that's a template. So if you're able to implement and experiment with these templates fast using templates and experiment with these strategies fast, that's another thing to constantly do, which is experiment, A/B test, with any trend, like from VR to whatever, Meta, it doesn't matter, to metaverse. So I think one is that keeping that lens on how do I ensure that I have a one-on-one relationship with my consumer and I'm trying to optimize my CLV? The second is that, how do I quickly experiment with trends, A/B test? And use technology and data to take the decisions on where to move ahead.

Richard Hill:
That's brilliant. Kaus, that is brilliant. I think people are just so wrapped up in getting that order just for any and hang on the customer lifetime value. We did a whole episode on that about two months ago, episode with fantastic episode. And I think something in our own business for our clients, for them, obviously, and for us as well, it's something we are very much focused on right now. We're investing in new tool sets for our clients. So, ultimately, the cost of paid media is going up. It's obviously return on ad spend and things like that is getting harder, and that's the fact. It doesn't mean we abandon that side. We just need to get... We need to get better at it. While everyone else abandons and we focus even harder and do better, then our clients do better. But obviously, that customer lifetime value is just... It usually doesn't even get looked at is the reality of life. They might have the old abandoned cart here and the odd newsletter going out ad hocly, but in reality, it's a whole department or a whole service right there that can transform, whether that's your paid media, your PR, whatever it may be, that customer lifetime piece, I think, quite often... Yeah, I totally agree with you on that one. Brilliant.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, so obviously, last couple of years, we've said, obviously, some serious change going on and some serious pace in the industry, but what would you say if asked to say what brands you think have done really well in the last couple of years moving really quick, transforming from maybe what they were to what they are now? Is there any brands that stand out for you that our listeners could have a look at?

Kaus Manjita:
Yeah, I usually don't like this question because it means I got to pick on a certain set of brands, but I do think that a lot of brands in, essentially, sustainability brands, which are about clean food and single-origin food are really doing such amazing work in their stores. And that's across the board. I mean, you just need to open up the fascination.com and go to like food. And then the list of young brands that are coming out, which are around clean food, ensuring that you got the right ingredients, even in the paper that you use, non-toxic, sustainable, and yet keeping that in mind, because a lot of Gen Zs and, of course, most of us today really, really care about... Specifically, after the pandemic, we really care about what happens in the world. We know that it impacts us no matter where we are.

Kaus Manjita:
So I think, for me, more than a brand, I think in the segment of food, F&B, and skincare and beauty, brands which have adopted a sustainable, clean, transparent sourcing model. And the interesting thing is how are they showcasing it? These are the boring things to discuss. And then you don't expect that when you get into a site, you don't necessarily want to be bogged down with miles of information around where it's sourced from, but a bunch of these young brands use this very interesting how-to cards. And they use iconography to showcase where the products have come from. For example, this salad company, what I saw was that they were using... It's a little icon to show like 30 minutes from a farm to table, right?

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Kaus Manjita:
And so things like that just builds so much trust, it's so transparent, it doesn't take away from the experience of me shopping with their store, and, more importantly, it gives me a really meaningful, important information in like less than a second. So I think that it doesn't matter whether you're in fashion or you are in electronics, you should really look at a bunch of these beauty and F&D brands and see how they're leveraging experiential elements within their stores to really showcase very important information, which could very easily be boring, but repackage it visually to make it super interesting.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I think that's a great example, that farm to fork 30 minutes. Yeah, we work with a very large retailer. They've got about 300 stores and that's a big thing them is very much that local... They've got that local element, and if you go and... They have a lot of different verticals within their business, but they sell vegetables, as an example, and most of the vegetables come from a farm in the local area. So it mentions that, in the store, on the website obviously as well, and that's a big part, that local sustainability, community. Yeah, I think that's been a huge growth in that area but for the right reason I think is the key there. Yeah. Brilliant. Okay, so if we were to have you on in 18 month's time, you were coming back, and what do you think you'll be talking about in terms of retail? What do you think are some of the things that our listeners should be looking out for?

Kaus Manjita:
Hmm, and it ties back to the whole it's getting so busy for consumers like us to even discover new brands, just new brands. It's an interesting anecdote there. About 20,000 new fashion and apparel brands went live on Shopify every month last year. That's crazy. In the US-

Richard Hill:
Yeah, that is crazy.

Kaus Manjita:
...20,000 new brands coming only in fashion. That's crazy numbers. And so it's definitely so hard for consumers to keep up with new brands and keep discovering them, have time to develop a one-on-one relationship with the brand. And then it ties back to that. How do you ensure that you have that mental space and the bandwidth to actually create those experiences, create the community, create that relationship with your customers? And if you, as a business, you're operating every day in how do I ensure that things are just up to date? Simple things like price drop. A lot of teams spend... Literally, I was speaking to some folks on Reddit. Apparently, it takes a team five days to get all the data on people who have gone to a PDP and have dropped off and get that data and market like, "Hey, there's a price drop on the PDP that you were viewing five days back and make an emailer out of it, send it back out," because that information keeps changing, right?

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Kaus Manjita:
And simple things like that, if you're just spending so much time not leveraging tech or not essentially putting all of these on autopilot, then you don't have the bandwidth and the space you need to really develop the right strategies for the relationships that you need to build for the community that you need to build, right?

Richard Hill:
That's a great example. Yeah.

Kaus Manjita:
Yeah, so I think setting up the engines in your business, in your storefront, so crucial your technology do whatever, but essentially set up your business. You can definitely use Mason. That helps you. If not, we have a lot of open playbooks. You can implement it yourself, but get that out of the way, because you don't need to be operating your 24/7 business. You need to be thinking about "How am I a community and a great brand that people love?" But leave the day-to-day operations to systems and put those systems in place.

Richard Hill:
That really resonates because obviously, we have a ad agency and quite often, we might be working with a brand that's got 20,000 skews. Now, if we have ads with pricing, if you are manually changing your pricing in your ads for 20,000 products, it's a nightmare. That's never going to happen. So your ads are going to be wrong. Your pricing is going to be wrong. The through rate's going to go down. Your conversions are going to go down. Your is going to be poor. You're going to cancel your ads over... That process might take a year before you realized and figured it out, or you just get disillusion with the ad department or agency, whereas if you're using technology AI, dynamic insertion of price variable, and set it to update every four hours with your ads, your pricing is in effect... or every hour, it is up to date on your ads. Your competitors, it's probably not. 90% of them are probably not doing that, probably not even got pricing there because they know that they're never going to keep up with it. So you put price in there, and that's an example leveraging tech like yours. That's brilliant. Okay. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure, Kaus, to have you on. Absolute pleasure. I'm cracking. So I like to finish every episode with a book recommendation. If you were to recommend one book to our listeners, what would it be?

Kaus Manjita:
Hmm, so that's very hard, again, for me because just hard for me to choose, but I'm going back to an old one. So I'm recently re-reading, rather... I'm a big science fiction fan and I'm re-reading Isaac Asimov's The Gold collection, which are a bunch of the short stories written in the early days. So, of course, everybody knows Asimov for The Foundation series and so on and so forth, but this is a interesting nugget of a collection. And when you read back on what was science fiction in the '70s and what it is now, I mean, there's such a big gap and it's so interesting some of the terminologies that he uses. But the reason I would like to recommend this is because the beauty about Asimov's science fictions was that it always had the fundamental human crook in it.

Kaus Manjita:
So, for example, the short story, I'm not going to do a spoiler, but it's about this robot that starts developing this intense urge to write. And he just wants to write and he's like, "Should I write thrillers or should I write satire or whatever?"

Richard Hill:
Wow.

Kaus Manjita:
Yeah, I know, and he actually writes on it. And some stuff happens. His owner essentially doesn't get too happy about it. And so some things happen over there. But the interesting thing was that in Asimov, in all of his books, it's always about three laws or robotics. So every robot can't harm human, can't do this, can't do that, but the interesting thing is that for this robot in specific, his urge to continue to write, that becomes his number one rule that overrides all the laws.

Kaus Manjita:
And I felt that was so interesting because fundamentally, all our social rules and constructs are exactly the same. In the end, why do we do our businesses? Why do we build our brands? Why do we try to solve some problem with technology? Because we have this intense urge to do something, right?

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Kaus Manjita:
For a brand, it's about, "Hey, I want to bring... This product that I love and I made so lovingly, I want to bring it to everybody else because I know that I would use it and I would love it and it's great or it's yummy" or whatever it is, right?

Richard Hill:
Yeah.

Kaus Manjita:
And that urge is beyond all the pain you have to go through every day to operate around and scale your business. And I think that was very interesting for me. So a bunch of his stories are always about the human emotion.

Richard Hill:
That sounds very interesting. Yeah, I'll get in the basket myself. I'll get them in my basket. So the guys that want to find out more about yourself, more about Mason, what's the best way to do that?

Kaus Manjita:
I'm on LinkedIn. I'm actually big on LinkedIn. So just hit me up, Kaus Manjita or Kausambi Manjita or just search for Kaus and Mason and you'll find us or just DM me on Twitter @K-M-A-N-G-I-T-A and yeah, we'll try to hook you up with something interesting in case you want to give Mason a spin.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. So I think connect with Kaus on LinkedIn and have a look at Mason and, well, thank you so much, Kaus, for being on the show. I look forward to catching up with you again. Thank you.

Kaus Manjita:
Take care. Thank you so much.

Richard Hill:
Bye-bye.