Content creators, eCommerce store owners, and anyone interested in building a no-code tool: This story is for you! Here’s how Kausambi built Mason, a no-code platform designed to power eCommerce content for every channel: web stores & sites, PWA, native apps or connected devices. We hope that her learnings as an entrepreneur, her motivation for building Mason, and the highlights of her journey inspire you with new ideas!

Here’s her story.

Hi, I’m Kausambi Manjita! I’m based between Bangalore, India and Toronto, Canada. I'm a 3rd-gen content nerd, serial product builder – and now, a no-code evangelist. I've always been passionate about making technology accessible to everyone.

When I'm not building stuff, you'll find me in the midst of people: Entrepreneurs, brand builders, developers, marketers and designers, over zoom, on podcasts, or around the extended no-code or eCommerce family.

Back in the day, I used to run my own food blog and dabbled in a jewelry subscription business. Food photography and recipe-testing continue to be close to my heart, and I fill that through weekend cooking and sharing recipes on Instagram.

The launch of Mason

Last year, my team and I launched a company called Mason. It's a no-code storefront platform to power growth for modern eCommerce brands. It's a headless middleware that brings your data, design, and channels together to power stores that convert… all in a matter of minutes.

Whether it’s product launches, sales and discounts, inventory updates, customer reviews, in-app help, in-funnel sales; you can run your store hands-free, and convert more browsers to shoppers.

Here's what Mason helps you with: It's packed with a complete set of powerful content blocks for eCommerce: CTAs, Offers, Bundles, Coupons, all with built-in templates. Mason also helps automate workflow between your catalog and store's backend to trigger engaging content and update storefronts instantly at all times.

Lastly, you can ship your content to any channel: web stores & sites, PWAs, native apps and even connected devices.

Brand owners, merchandisers, and eCommerce managers can create rich storefront experiences without having to code. And adding on to that, there's no more hopping between tools as Mason comes with multiple integrations to make eCommerce content creation super-efficient.

Mason has won the NASSCOM Emerge 50 awards as the top new commerce platform to watch out for! It was a proud moment for me and for my team.

Powering storefront merchandising with ModeMagic

ModeMagic is the Shopify version of Mason (and of course, it's no-code too!). It's an all-in-one store automation app that helps power storefront merchandising with badges, banners, and product list cards.

ModeMagic basically lets you:

• Add unique product badges, labels, animated stickers & icons to your product images to highlight discounts, new arrivals, best sellers, out-of-stock products, or more.
• Create product descriptive images showcasing a combination of product photos, feature highlights, and icons to best highlight your product USPs.

The app is now trusted by 10,000+ eCommerce teams and has won Shopify Commerce Awards 2020 for the Best App User UI! Oh yes, we also got to #2 product of the week on Product Hunt!

The motivation behind Mason

After building products and solutions for eCommerce over the past 15 years, I've seen firsthand how the landscape is changing fast, every year. Self-served toolkits like Shopify and Wix made "getting online" easy. But growing online is still a hard win!

Large marketplaces and VC-backed brands teams have an unfair advantage of getting access to the best in class tech (teams or platforms) to run their stores. On the other hand, your regular brand struggles to grow online, losing up to 50% of its revenue to this technology chasm.

Fast forward to the pandemic, this has become an even larger problem, as everyone started selling online and the competition was fierce. In order to grow in this omnichannel, online-first world, customer experience has to be seamless across touchpoints. But to do so, brands needed multiple toolkits and skill sets.

The question for me was this: How do I help brand-owners run successful online stores that deliver an always-on shopper experience? That’s why we built Mason. With Mason's no-code automation, my team and I aim to simplify this.

We want to make eCommerce tech more human, and more accessible for the thousands of eCommerce brand-owners, and help them run a successful business.

My highlights in the entrepreneurial journey

Building, launching and scaling with a distributed team during the pandemic was an interesting challenge. We overcame this by connecting over making. We're a team of makers, and that is what defines our culture as a team today.

The icing on the cake? Despite all the hurdles, we bagged the Shopify Commerce Awards 2020 for building Best App AND got to #1 of the day / # 2 of the week on Product Hunt!

My experience has taught me a few things that will help any maker out there!

1. Iterate, Rinse, Repeat: There’s no such thing as a perfect product. Eventually, you’ll reach a stage when you can fine-tune your long-term plans on the basis of these iterations.
2. Have mentors: Remember that what sherpa is to a mountaineer, is what a mentor is to an entrepreneur. Reach out to your mentors for help, critical feedback, and insightful conversations.
3. Have resilience: Life is a roller-coaster ride. Things might look bad initially or while you are in the process of managing your new venture. In such cases, do not forget to pick yourself up and show up every day. Life is full of ups and downs anyway.

Make sure that you don't wait for the right time or the right opportunity. As I said, there's no such thing as a perfect product. So, don't look for perfection when you start making. Just trust the process of making and keep iterating!

Thank you for sharing your story with us, Kausambi! You can follow her journey on Twitter here.