Scott Reid 0:00
In today’s episode, we have a great guest, a guy by the name of Barada Sahu. Barada, who also goes by Barry, is the founder and CEO of Mason. And Mason is a company that leverages AI to help e commerce brands maximize revenue. They work with 1000s of brands to create hyper personalized shopping experience that that really connect with customers in a very unique way. So if you’re interested about personalization in terms of leveraging it to improve your results this episode, it’s definitely for you. It’s something that I strongly recommend every e commerce brand owner marketer to listen to Barry’s company Mason, which is@getmason.io it’s just something else. I was frankly blown away by this conversation. It’s a great episode. Barry shares these insights on how brands can better understand their customers, and through that process, optimize every touch point in the shopping journey and really ultimately supercharge business growth. It’s a conversation that’s packed with a ton of actionable insights, and he’s just a great guy. It’s a wonderful conversation, so let’s jump into it. This episode is sponsored by E commerce optimizers. Are you an E commerce marketer feeling overwhelmed by the layers of complexity involved in converting website visitors into customers? At E commerce optimizers, we believe that the straightest path to reaching this goal is by improving the conversation you’re having with your visitors from the initial marketing interaction all the way to purchase and beyond. By optimizing every touch point across your marketing strategy, we make it easier for your visitors to become enthusiastic long term customers who stick with your brand for the long haul. If you’d like to learn more about our unique approach to e commerce marketing optimization, head on over to our website at E commerceoptimizers.com All right, on today’s show, we have a guy by the name of Bharata Sahu, and Bharata you go also by Barry, if I’m not mistaken, and and Barry is the is the founder and CEO of a company by the name of Mason. Okay? And Mason is a it can actually be reached@getmason.io I’m going to get that right out at the beginning here. But what they do is they leverage AI to drive revenue for E commerce, brands, anybody companies that are on Shopify, Magento, big commerce, maybe some others as well. But Barry, thanks very much for joining me on the show today. I can tell that this is gonna be a great episode, so let’s just hop right into it. Why don’t you tell us about yourself?

Barada Sahu 2:56
Yeah, well, thanks for having me over, Scott. I know it is a pleasure being here and talking to you, and I think just seeing how our careers have intersected, you’re kind of doing stuff in a similar field. I’m pretty sure this is going to be fun for listeners as well. Well, I’ll just start off maybe with a little bit about myself. I’ll try to keep it short, and then let’s try talking about something more interesting and how we can really help brands and merchants with some of the stuff that we’re building at Mason you know, I kind of talk about my career in two different halves. There’s this first half where I spent a bunch of time on the enterprise side, building out within large corporations, large software for large teams, and this was across the world, right from what you say, building out for Daimler, for BMW, some of these larger names that you kind of work with, and then subsequently did this whole mobile banking. If you guys, any one of you, have used Citibank now, the entire mobile banking stuff across that’s a big project. Yeah, that was across 25 countries that we rolled that out so, and it’s kind of building out the platform to kind of get that to life. And so that’s that was first half of my whole career building out within the enterprise. But then as a build out over there, I kind of had this itch at the back of my hand. You know, you gotta do something of your own. Yeah, move that away. And so, so I jumped out, and I’d seen that, especially the Citibank rollout, how, even as a young company, we are doing this really big implementations across the world which had a big impact on consumers. I jumped out to do my first company, which is kind of this software platform for building applications across mobile, across web, for enterprise applications. So think of it like retool back in the day when retool wasn’t really there. And so we kind of had this whole technology stack to do that early days. We had some early good traction. And. Then there was this very interesting opportunity from this e commerce giant that in India called Flipkart. It got acquired by Walmart, and this was one of those big deals that had happened back in the day. And they were on this look for great talent, for good people on the mobile side would kind of done stuff. And they saw that, you know what? We could bring these folks over to our team, I decided to enhance with them. Spent a couple of years building out the whole revenue infrastructure, this whole content systems, the whole personalization infrastructure. And how do you really drive commerce with content? And that was one of those big initiatives out there. And I saw it all firsthand. You know how to really drive commerce, you need to understand consumers and then be able to create experiences that are meaningful for customers. So saw that firsthand, and that’s really in some way, my segue into what we’re doing at Mason. Very interestingly, these insights firsthand, working in a marketplace, in a scaled out marketplace, really got me these insights, how brands really lack this infrastructure for themselves. And that was really what got me to excited about building this we saw a lot, many more brands now or have the online storefronts, have apps speaking to customers, but really lack this infrastructure on how can I really understand consumers intimately and personalize this whole shopping journey at Mason that’s what we’re trying to do, trying to help brands with a bunch of that during a suite of solutions to help them not only understand consumers, But to create shoppable experiences that’s it for them. And that, that’s that’s been, in some sense, my story. Met a bunch of fabulous folks, my co founder, a lot of my founding team along the way, and and we know he really hit it off. Said that we love working with each other. We’ll jump out, we’ll do something together. And that’s that’s really been Mason, so

Scott Reid 6:57
how many years has it been that? And that’s a great That’s a great story. I love I love the I love the the overview and the recap of your past. How many years has made Jason been in business now? So

Barada Sahu 7:10
we coming up in four years right now as a company, as a product line, we started off slightly adjacent to what we’re building. We did a pivot along the way. But this, product line is right now, roughly about four years old, and we saw this opportunity. And like I said, we knew fairly well. We started off with something much smaller, a long way, as we kind of work together with customers, we discover all of these very adjacent problems, saw this opportunity to bring it all together. And yeah,

Scott Reid 7:39
so I’m looking, I’m looking on the website right now, and you have 8000 brands, trust Mason, so, so that’s quite impressive. 8000 brands that that that work with you to to drive revenue. That’s really amazing. Yeah. So

Barada Sahu 7:56
as we kind of started out, we started out by launching on the Shopify app store as this channel. Of course, over the years, the platforms become a lot more headless. It works with all kinds of different platforms, whether it’s Shopify commerce, Magento, Salesforce, commerce, it’s really platform agnostic, and kind of can work with custom storefronts as well. I mean, we work with brands of all sizes and retailers as well right now. But you know, as we kind of launched off the Shopify app, so, you know, a lot of the Shopify merchants also tend to be very small and medium businesses, and they’ve spread across the world. And that really gave us, gave us this initial impetus. And I remember back when we had launched, we were, uh, rated, and back then, Shopify used to have this event called Shopify unite. They’re still bringing it back now and then. They also used to have this Shopify awards, to award the best apps on the Shopify app store. And that really gave us the momentum. Back in those days, we got featured as the best app and so, so that really gave that initial momentum lot of merchants then got us the visibility, and this was really making their life simpler in terms of how they could really run the storefronts and so, so seeing a great adoption acceptance within the community, over there and then over the years as what I would say is that as the large, small and medium businesses have also now grown up to bigger businesses, they’ve continued to stick around to grow together with US. So it’s been fabulous to see that.

Scott Reid 9:22
That’s, that’s excellent. So why don’t you tell me about what if you could define a hyper personal storefront? I love, I love that, that descriptive copy. What does that mean? Because that’s, is that, and let me back up, is that at the core of what you do, it’s, it’s personalization for storefronts so that the customer experience is hyper personal. Yeah,

Barada Sahu 9:47
I think great point is that, yeah. I mean, personalization is definitely the one of the score pieces of our technology. But, you know, it’s not been a new word, personalization being safe forever right now. But I would say. That the initial wave of personalization. You’ve seen Netflix, you’ve seen the Airbnbs of the world, and we always get tailored with personalized and with Google and everything else, right? We get personalized content all the while. But as that has happened over the years in the internet, we have now started to expect every corner of the internet to be personalized. We don’t want go in and walk into something and say that, hey, you know what, I’ve probably visited your so once, I want you to remember my choices, what I’ve kind of looked at, I want you to kind of have the conversation subsequently, forward and oftentimes as a brand, if you don’t do that, you don’t get to see that customer come back to you at the end, right? Because you say that, you know, it’s too much friction. I kind of lost me on that next point that you’re kind of looking at and at Commission, we try to kind of really bring this so that it’s easier for brands to now bring it onto their own storefronts, onto the customer journeys. And so while the focus is on the storefront, a technology kind of really cuts across on storefronts, on your emails, on your SMS, on your whatsapp, so across all of these different channels, helping, because wides consumer experiences, but really, like, you nailed it. Like, how do I understand customers intimately? The other part that I’ll kind of bring in over here is that, you know, personalizations evolved over the years. I mean, back in the days personalization, we would essentially call the ability to understand people at a cohort or at a segment level, and that was good in customization, right? There’s, there’s, like, a group of people, maybe they have similar tastes and interests, and that’s, that’s good enough. It’s a good start for you to look at. But today, you know, every individual they expect the stores to be for themselves. Does this product make sense for me when I’m going to buy how that how does it fit in into my lifestyle? Does it make sense, whether with skincare, whether it’s a personal wear, how does it look on me? And that’s really what we kind of come to expect from brands. So as that expectation from consumers has evolved, the need for personalization, the state of personalization also has changed. People do not no longer want to say that, hey, this is a segment, and this is a cohort, and that’s good enough. That’s not in today’s world. What’s good is like, Hey, I understand Scott as a person. I understand Barry as a person. I maybe understand John as a person, and be they’re all different people. They all have come from different backgrounds. And, you know, Scott likes Great. Barry likes green, right? You give us our choices, right? And so, so this, all of these things that you got to take into account, to be able to understand consumers intimately. And then we create shoppable experiences, what we call as right? I mean, these experiences can come from, hey, what kind of products that we see, to what kind of offers and promotions that we kind of experience, to even what kind of what you say, merchandising and upsells and cross sells that I get after I buy it. Or how do I use a product that can be tailored for me? What kind of content do I get targeted at next? So all of these are areas for you to kind of have that conversation forward with the customer, where customers feel that the brand now forms an integral part of the lifestyle. And I would say, example of that is, as you know this health and fitness, there’s such a big wave, right? I mean, when we today, when we talk about health, health is no longer like the earlier generation of health. And I think Scott, you probably relate to some of this is that, you know what? We had this medicines that would all be the same medicine for everybody, right? And you’d have these capsules, and that today, when you go in, until the doctor oftentimes goes about understanding you and saying that, hey, what’s your specific ailment? What’s What’s your background history, what your primary care physician has your own history. You want commerce to be exactly like that, products to really understand your history about what kind of products have developed that, what have we browsed? What are my personal choices? And really make products around that? And that’s that’s really where hyper personalization in the space is shifting to, and that’s what we enabling today, and that must

Scott Reid 14:01
really help with product development as well. I mean, outside of, outside of just just the the one on one commerce, the ability to understand wants, needs, desires on a different level, on a more personalized level, would invariably or undoubtedly allow a company to develop products and really get ahead of that product development life cycle so that then they can sell more and be more innovative and bring and bring unique things to the market. Is that a benefit that you see your companies leveraging Absolutely

Barada Sahu 14:34
you nailed it right on. In fact, those one of these brands, which is in the hair care segment. And they initially developed this product where, you know, which was basically a gel product, and as they kind of launched that product, and they did a soft launch of the product, they realized that, you know, the customers did not want to gel. The customers wanted it as an oral supplement, which they could do. And. Could get away with it. So the whole product formulation changed, and you know, so oftentimes the ability to understand consumers will basically you develop, not just deliver products, as you see, get this product out into market, but also be able to create new products that really make sense for them. Because today you help you create product formulations, create product shape in terms of what they need, whether it’s a serum, whether it’s a lotion, what kind of different products are consumers wanting to look at it, right? Where does it fit into the lifestyle? So absolutely heads product development completely

Scott Reid 15:33
and stay ahead of the competition, right? I mean, so that being said, what per this is probably a tough, tough question to answer, but, but maybe not for you, what percentage of companies are really, are really leading into personalization right now, as compared to ones that are just doing it, kind of in quotes, the the old standard way? Yeah,

Barada Sahu 15:55
I think old standard way is what the de facto ways for a large part of the brand ecosystem, and also then think that hyper personalization, as you see, has been difficult, traditionally, very difficult. And there have been two driving reasons why. One is that, if you know, oftentimes there’s been an explosion of brands across the world, globally, there’s there’s lots of brands in different niches which have kind of come up, and they’re all servicing different niches and stuff. But as that has also happened, there’s been competition which has grown, but also because of which, there’s also consumer attention which has got fragmented. Right? Brands do not see consumers holistically anymore. If you’re looking at your own storefront, you’d get a very slice, super thin slice, of why the consumer really came in. Maybe the consumer came in with a specific intent for a specific need, but you only get to see that specific need. You don’t get to see the person as a whole. And it’s been very difficult to implement hyper personalization, because you don’t get to know the customer right. And so when you ask about what percentage of brands really are able to deploy personalization and hyper personalization, it’s really the Uber marketplaces so far who have disability, because they get to see larger spectrum of that, right? And so if you look at Amazon, or you look at Wayfair, or you look at Home Depot and stuff, the reason that they’re able to deliver on that, you know, the customers keep coming back, sometimes for multiple needs. So you get to see that, hey, maybe somebody’s got a chair, maybe somebody’s got a tool for fixing that chair. So you get to see that maybe going through a home decor thing and start to do better servicing, of like, what kind of products would really make sense for them, but it would be very difficult for a brand to kind of get this insights at a one on one level. So that’s been one of those challenges. The second part of it is that brands oftentimes tend to focus on the transaction bit of things and the SEC, a large part of it is that the pre transaction journeys, customer journeys. They’re so as important for you to understand customers. Yeah, right, if you, if you don’t focus on engaging customers, if you don’t focus on knowing and you know, the social networks and Google, they’ve had the largest amount of data, because we have oftentimes frequented them more for engagement. You don’t get insight to that. If you don’t own that consumer understanding at this point of time, you don’t get insight into that. So while you can do targeting on these platforms, and they provide good capabilities, but you really don’t understand

Scott Reid 18:16
you don’t own the data. Yeah, you’re unable to extract the insights that that data contains. Yeah.

Barada Sahu 18:24
And so that that’s really at the heart of hyper personalization, in some sense, right?

Scott Reid 18:29
And so is Mason democratizing personalization for smaller companies, small to mid sized companies. Is that kind of the way, if I’m understanding this correctly, is that something along the lines of, in terms of your value proposition,

Barada Sahu 18:42
yeah. So, so the small and medium customers, for which we kind of bring this very self serve, access to all of these abilities, and so they can get to know the customers better. And there’s a few different ways that we do that, right from, you know, tailoring, ensuring that you can, Hey, have games, quizzes to engage customers at the top of the funnel. At the middle of the funnel, you can have merchant can have merchandising in terms of product bundling, upsells, cross sells, recommendations that you can all bring to the table so forth. And then you can also do promotions in terms of tailored promotions. Maybe you like, you know, a percentage of I like a freebie, somebody else likes a buy one, get one. And so you don’t have kind of offers, kind of coming in, which are tailored for each other. So those are all kinds of ways that you’re kind of helping smaller brands. Because you can look at the market also in the larger brands, there’s actually a different challenge altogether. Some of them have sitting on a ton of data, but they really don’t know how to leverage the data and bring it to life in terms of consumer experiences. So even if you go to the some of these large retailers, while there’s a lot of frequent revisit just and they have a lot of ton of consumer data, it does not really manifest in terms of the shoppable journeys, because you still see the same old shopping journeys. And, you know, I like to say, talk about it in this term. You know, Amazon is coming up on 30 years now, started. Back in 94 maybe just about that. And E commerce is essentially what you say a 30 year old with the date, right? And but over the years, the consumer shopping journey still remains the same. There’s a home page, a list page, a detailed speech, a card page, a checkout page, it almost feels super linear, right? And but the consumer behavior has switched completely. Right today, as a customer, you probably discovering something on Tiktok and Instagram. You want to shop there. You don’t want to go through this whole customer journey that you’ve kind of created for you. And you got to think different for today’s consumers. And I think that’s that’s really where the play is largely shifting to, how do you understand customers, where they’re coming from. How do you leverage their data and now, how can you ensure that the storefronts are more collapsed to create this instant, shoppable journeys of SARS

Scott Reid 20:48
and make it easier for the consumer to do business with? You? Just take out as much friction as humanly possible. Is that what you’re saying?

Barada Sahu 20:54
Yeah, take out as much friction as possible, ensuring you see opportunities for upsells and cross sells help them.

Scott Reid 21:02
So if we were to maybe take a use case, an example, a case study, and talk about it, let’s say that I’m a ten million e commerce brand, how would I partner with Mason to improve my results? What are the ways in which, and you talked about some of those with with giveaways and quizzes? Could we talk about, kind of all the different touch points or ways in which you would help me as a an E commerce brand owner?

Barada Sahu 21:33
Yeah, so I love the question start right? I mean, speaking about now, let’s almost like create in the role of a brand, and how we can read at them. And you know, Scott, you’re the one of a ten million brand, and I’m speaking with you the way that I like to say, you know, you know, Scott, what percentage of your customers today are coming in, into your storefront today and dropping off? What percentage of your customers do you actually have information about which is actionable? That’s where I start to like to have a conversation around before we kind of get down the whole like, hey, what can what can we help them with? Right? Thank you.

Scott Reid 22:11
Look, what do you find? What’s your experience in your responses to those questions? Do? Are people able to answer those questions quickly and easily, or is that something that they struggle with? I’m genuinely curious.

Barada Sahu 22:23
Yeah, so this, I like to see that, you know, people generally tend to have this overall conversion ever what, less than a 2% conversion, less than a 1% conversion, right? Depending on the category, of course, kind of playing in, how long the cycle is, what’s the AOV and so forth. So you typically know your conversion rates. But when you ask them, what percentage of customers do I really know information about in the blank? Yeah, that’s that’s that blank state. That’s an

Scott Reid 22:47
interesting question. That’s a really interesting question, because what do they what do they really have? What do most brands have? They have the name and the email and the address and the products that they’ve ordered in the past? Correct that that

Barada Sahu 22:58
that’s the best at best. That’s all that you know about it, and that’s not sufficient for you to kind of really act upon it. They’re not buying the nuke every other day, so not getting that information. So that’s really where I like to have that conversation about and then I say that what to do this act for most brands, it’ll be like 98 out of every 100 customers that visit on your store on any given day, they’re not going to end up buying from you, right? It’s probably enough. We

Scott Reid 23:24
saw it’s a lot of money on traffic that goes, that goes, it just goes with unable to capitalize on.

Barada Sahu 23:31
And so what you do is that you remarket to them, you send some emails back, you send some SMS back, maybe you send do some display marketing remarketing, or Facebook or meta remarketing, and so there’s different ways that you try to drag them back, but you’re still burning a ton of cash. Use that with those 98 people that never converted. How can we bring that to say that 10 out of 100 people really get you to that? Can we partner with you on that journey? Right? Yeah. And really, part of that is that saying that, hey, I don’t need to own my customer data for me to be effective. Okay? Because at any given point of time, there’s 90 of them. There might be, you know, out of those 98 people, I would say that probably eight more selected something else, 90 of them, they might not still have purchased anything, but eight of them selected something else, and you lost those customers right on any given day, and that’s opportunity cost, huge opportunity cost, and that that’s completely game changing in terms of where your business today is. That’s that’s a huge lift in terms of your business, and the only way for you to kind of own that is to start by understanding those customers intimately and by engaging them, helping them, just like we are having this conversation. And you you know this question answer, this way of us engaging is helping us uncover insights. You need to start having those conversations with your customers. Interesting. Okay, right? You need, you need to start. I mean, whether it’s just like

Scott Reid 24:53
you just excuse me, but just like you would in a brick and mortar scenario, like you’re a local. A local sporting goods store. You’re going to have conversations with people. You’re going to take that data, whether it’s in your brain or you write it down, and you you know however it is, but you are collecting market data through those conversations. And that’s one of the huge drawbacks of online is you don’t have those those face to face interactions. You don’t have those personal those personal relationships, and so that’s what you if I’m hearing you correctly, you’re really kind of tapping into that to bridge it more to you know, you’re able to have conversations at scale and understand the consumer like you would in a local in a local business environment, but you’re doing it at scale across the globe, theoretically, you know, 24/7 365, I mean, so, so that’s really, yeah, it’s quite compelling, yeah.

Barada Sahu 25:49
And that’s like having, like, your own sales assistant in your store at any given point in time. So we got the shopping engine, but really, it’s a shopping assistant for a consumer who’s coming on board, and they kind of get to see all of this. And you know, oftentimes this conversation is also about, like, you walking into the store, somebody asking you if there’s personality there’s that’s involved in conversation. When you’re having this one on one, it’s a human to human conversation. Like the same thing from storefronts today and from all of these online sites is that, hey, if it’s not well designed, that’s a store does not talk to me. So there’s been a big focus on design and lift in terms of quality of design that has happened over the years. But that same thing needs to happen in terms of the interaction being personalized and well designed, and bringing in that personality of your brand to life, so that when customers interact with you, they really are willing to share information. One of those things that’s happened over this generation is that, you know, as the generational shift has happened, people are willing, very willing, to share their own data. It’s not been like, hey, we don’t want to share our email. We don’t want to hear our preferences. They’re willing to do that, but they said that you may back something in return.

Scott Reid 26:57
Exactly. I agree with that, because, you know, it’s a pain in the neck when you’ve gone through all these processes and you do it all over again. I mean, if I find a place, I’m a super loyal consumer, and you know, just locally, you know, if I’m, if I’m doing business with somebody locally, it means so much more to me when they when they remember me, and they say, Hello, Scott, you know what I mean. And so you really are just kind of, you’re creating a an offline environment online. In essence, I

Barada Sahu 27:34
think that’s where the whole thing about as AI has evolved over this years. It’s really can bring that to life today, right? I mean, back, you rewind the clock, back maybe five, seven years. This would have been difficult. Should have been tough, right? One of those things is that while you had the ability to have these data, but really to act upon on the data, and to be able to create these experiences on the fly, this was tough. We’ve seen this rise of this whole generative via revolution over the last few years where now suddenly possible to generate experiences, create content on the fly, create applications on the fly. And that’s really been this driving force about why now, as a company, we’re able to help these brands with that. And you know, it’s super early in the space, but you’re seeing this really awesome results from brands, from retailers, where there’s all these different types of use cases to help customers with this. We

Scott Reid 28:27
were talking about the the online offline, or bridging the the offline to the online in terms of personalization. How would you personalize that for my customers and my prospective customers? Yeah,

Barada Sahu 28:40
so I like to kind of think about it as this first help you identify these customers and learn more about them. That’s the first area that we kind of help with. So oftentimes, like we spoke about this, 98 customers who are kind of dropping out. You do not have any information about them. It’s first improving that pool of customers that you know about. And oftentimes it’s through engagement that you’re kind of doing, which is this, quizzes, games, all of these tailor different and again, like sometimes when you’re dropping off a quiz, you want to resume from the part that you’ve kind of left it at. And so we kind of bring in all of these abilities to personalize, ensure that the subsequent questions follow up from where their answers have come in. So there’s do real time personalization in the quizzes and all of this areas that we kind of to help you understand your consumers a lot better at the top of the funnel. So that’s one bit then as customers are coming down, and then we kind of look at consumer behavior. So here are customers that we know a little bit more about. It’s like, Hey, can I help you resume your shopping journeys. Let’s say I’ve visited the store once I come back to again. Can I see what I have browsed earlier so that I can continue my journey? Can I see my part back in again? Can I get a reminder back about where I’ve lost so that I don’t have to go through this whole journey? Oh, where did I stop shopping at? What did I see? Right? Can I pick my. Being shopped to the ad or to the display unit that I kind of saw, maybe jumped off Instagram to watch something I looked at a read on Instagram, but do not bring me back to the home page, because that’s not what I saw on Instagram. That’s

Scott Reid 30:13
right. It’s not congruent to what, just what brought you the site in the first place. That’s really interesting. You were able to do that?

Barada Sahu 30:19
Yeah, yeah. So

Scott Reid 30:20
what we do is huge. Are you serious? That’s really something else,

Barada Sahu 30:25
yeah. And that is exactly what kind of helps, makes the his journeys frictionless, is where we are able to connect these dots in and so and again, like I said, it could be Instagram, it could be email, it could be SMS. That is that you’re kind of sending on. The whole idea is that you are creating this super connected shopping journeys. They don’t feel impersonal anymore. It feels that it was the whole Internet, whether it’s on Instagram to your storefront, it’s like one shopping journey, right? They’re looking at it from your lens of your brand. They’re not looking at it from, hey, here’s Instagram, here’s right, chewy.com, and they’re, you know, two different pieces.

Scott Reid 31:01
So somebody’s on, if somebody’s on, let me just ask you if I’m on the right track in terms of my understanding. Let’s say that I that I’m on Instagram, or somebody’s on Instagram, and I have a I have a ski shop. I do a lot of I do a lot of skiing, right? So I have a ski shop, somebody’s on and they see Stokely skis. They see an ad for Stokely skis. They come over, which happens to be my preferred brand of skis, for what it’s worth. Yeah, they see a brand for an ad for Stokely skis. They click over, come over to the website. They browse around a little bit, and they’re on the product detail page for Stokely storm riders as a for instance. Then they leave, they don’t purchase when they come back in, you’re serving them up that page. Is that correct that they ended the prior session with? Is that correct? That’s

Barada Sahu 31:56
one part of it is just like bringing them back into the same page, but it’s also the content within the page itself now starts getting burned because that’s that’s important for you, right? You probably watched, you know, Stokely skis, and you’d probably seen this, you know, going down skiing on a slope. You’d probably seen that specific variant of it, but now you probably compared it with some other products you wanted to see that, hey, how does this fit in with a particular shoe type that I kind of have, right? Or how does this look for a particular weather? You know, there’s different type of slopes, sure, absolutely, or different types of slopes. So you want to kind of have the resume, the conversation forward, and that’s really the ability specialized content now getting generated on the fly for you, you see different kind of images that are kind of selected based on where you have kind of resumed at so people to get this very personal experience on the storefront,

Scott Reid 32:49
I can see how you going from a 2% conversion rate to a 10% conversion rate. Baron, so, so that this, no, you know, I’m making that representation, but, but, but, but at the end of the day, that that makes the experience, and that’s, I think that’s a great example just talking through that, because I would, I would think, Oh, yeah, you’re just going to bring them back to the same page. But what you’re doing then is you’re serving up unique, customized content based on the on the behaviors that that individual took, on the on the site during the prior session, is that correct?

Barada Sahu 33:22
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s huge gunners content imagery, and then maybe there’s the next level of it, which is the offers. That’s also part of it. Because oftentimes, you know, consumers are at the end of the value sensitive, and especially in the years, you know, with their interest rates being where they were. Everybody was conservative. They were looking at no where does it head down? Maybe that will see a little bit more of that wallet spending. But really, like people are value sensitive. They want to get the best bang for the buck, and really being able to get them the right offers, the right deeds, which will make sweeten this deal over to kind of say that, you know, Stokes a no brainer. I’m gonna buy this tomorrow,

Scott Reid 34:04
but it’s like a personalized shopping assistant, in essence, or somebody that, you know, they remember where they left off in the conversation, if you were in the in the offline world, if you were in the brick and mortar world, that’s really impressive. And you do that through your technology, leveraging AI. You know, there’s obviously a lot going on in the back end is, are there in terms of packages and products? I mean, do you want to talk about that, like different ways that people can get engaged with you? Because that alone is incredibly compelling to be able to customize the customer journey, the conversion journey, the overall customer experience.

Barada Sahu 34:49
So even as you kind of talk about all of these, I mean, one thing that we like to always talk about is that the value first mindset for us as a company, which has always been, right, you know, we want to make it. Easy for brands to start adopting this, because honestly, speaking, as brand scale, we scale. That’s also mean way that we have delivered value and made value in this ecosystem, that you know what? We want more brands. We want these brands to continue scaling, and they to fight find the right set of customers that they’re looking for them right, not drop the ball by saying that, hey, we cannot deliver this because this was big company tech, and we as a small brand cannot bring this to our store. Somebody doing a 10 million versus somebody going to pets.com or somebody going to DSC, this very different scales of businesses, right? So, so you’ve got to kind of look at it is that, how can I enable that small brand owner to kind of scale, and we have kind of made it easy for them to get that tapping into that value. So when they come in and talk about these different packages, we want to ensure that every part of the storefront, whether it’s your homepage, your list page, your cart, your details, your checkout, we kind of can help you personalize across the board. So there’s different solutions to that do that will help you understand customer journeys. We also want to make it easy so that you don’t have to go about saying that, hey, I need an E commerce specialist. Now to do this, I cannot find it right after, of course, we do work with specialists. We do work with people in the field, bringing in this expert advice. But beyond that, we want to make it easy so you have this pre packaged sets of sorts, almost that you can get started off with easy. Think of it almost like, Hey, I had these set of customers that I already know are jumping out. I can help you identify them. I can say that, Hey, today, let’s get started off with this. And then as I kind of start to see success, I can add on this next layer of customers who probably not yet ready to buy. I can start to learn a little bit more about them, get them

Scott Reid 36:38
so you do kind of kind of get started, good enough to get going, and then, and then you add on over time, as you become more efficient with everything. And that’s because, like with anything, I mean, it’s whenever you’re integrating a new technology, a new process or system, things can be overwhelming. And so what you’re saying is that you’ve designed everything, if I understand you correctly, to make it easy for somebody to get started with you absolutely,

Barada Sahu 37:00
yeah. And then that’s, that’s been the super important bit for us to kind of help brands, because brands oftentimes also lack the resources. You know, as a ten million brand, it’s not like you have 100 member team. It’s no way,

Scott Reid 37:14
right? No, you feel the better, right?

Barada Sahu 37:16
Yeah, you probably have a five, six member team at best, a 10 member team at best, and yet plan to scale from then. And so really, we want to make it easy for you to kind of do that, yeah,

Scott Reid 37:27
yeah. And this is, I noticed that you have on the site in terms of pricing. You have the Grow plan. Do you want to talk about your different plans? You have to grow plan and the scale plan, yeah.

Barada Sahu 37:37
So what we do is that we have these different kind of packages. Again, like, like I said, These packages are flexible and they’re made for you. But honestly speaking, where I like to say that, you know, be looking at whether it’s a $79.02 $99 subscription fee, but really like to think in terms of the value that we derive for you as a business. That’s the first thing that I always like to index on. We have a commission that we take on top of sales. But really, I don’t worry too much about that, because we make you pay back within a month, within a month, pay you back. I mean, as a founder, as a CEO, I say that will give you your money back if we don’t make money for you. That’s

Scott Reid 38:13
that’s really strong. That’s a great guarantee.

Barada Sahu 38:16
You know so and I know that because we know that these brands struggle with a lot of these challenges, and which is why we had this insight. And we said that we want to make it easy for them. You want to get them started off with using the product, but more importantly, anchoring on the value. So we don’t, we don’t worry so much about the subscription fee, honestly speaking, because we make 100 times more than the subscription fee for the brand itself, right? That’s, it’s a no brainer in terms of what you know, the value to what you’re paying for this today is, right? So, so, so that’s what we always tend to index on, is that, can we derive that value? How quickly can we derive that value? And how can you make it easy? Because oftentimes, like you said, getting started is oftentimes the hardest bit. You’re going out to change your lifestyle. You’re going out to be more fit. It’s taking that first step out of the door, getting that first one.

Scott Reid 39:07
Yeah, that’s, that’s a great way to look at it. I mean, it’s, that’s fantastic. Is there any, any, any, anything else that that I didn’t ask you, that you’d like to talk about? No,

Barada Sahu 39:16
I think this has been fabulous to start. I think this has just been great to chat up with you. I’m obviously happy to kind of also see that one thing that I always like is partners in the ecosystem. Yeah, a lot of these brands today, as we’re speaking about it, they sometimes lack this understanding of, how do I methodically, in a scientific way, go about improving conversions on my store? Right? And that’s always been the heart of improving stoke runs. It’s a lot of small pieces coming together. Rather than saying that, hey, I can create this perfect storefront that does not happen, right? Every customer, you’ve got to look at customers in terms of, there are different pieces to the customer journey. Every part of the customer journey. How does it need to be tailored for that specific segment? How do I ensure that I can get in more under. Understanding of that customer and create this. Partners play a super important role in South and experts. They bring in this expertise over years of having learned that. And so what they do is that they help bridge that gap for you as a brand, as you kind of on that scale up journey as a brand, you tend to say that, hey, I need to know somebody who I can trust. They can bring this into my storefront. They can help me go live, right? Because I’m not the expert out here, right? This person, exactly,

Scott Reid 40:29
but this is great. I mean, I’m excited to learn all about it. I mean, personalization is one of those things that everybody hears about. Yeah, they hear about it, it’s, it’s kind of this big and scary thing, like, how am I? How would I possibly do that? Because intuitively, everybody knows that personalization is the way I mean, that is the future, and you’re bringing the future to the present, and you’re making it accessible clearly through everything that we talked about, and the way that you stage things and your any of the investment model to get started with you, all the different kind of ways that you’re able to unlock this potential for them that’s bringing the future to the present so that companies can really maximize the revenue, take much more control over their business. And you know, and we all know anybody listening to this knows that if you improve your conversion rate, if you’re at 3% and you improve your conversion rate to three and a half 4% I mean, that’s a huge it goes all that. It goes right to your bottom line. But if you’re doing that with essentially zero cost for all intents and purposes, let’s be honest. I mean, the return on that, what you’re talking about, that’s just the biggest no brainer going it doesn’t require you to to go from two to 4% or three to 6% that that? I mean, yeah, that’s great. But if you can just go these smaller increments based on where you’re at right now, the whole fabric of your business can change, because now you have all this extra cash, all this extra cash flow that you can take to reinvest back in the business, for new product development, for other enhancements throughout your business, capital investments. It’s just, it’s really huge.

Barada Sahu 42:16
Yeah, you can get in more customers. You can deploy that back to kind of getting more customers, results, things, that you can do more with that. And it’s really about ensuring that oftentimes it’s easier to say that you know what, I know, I can do more marketing. I can spend more on it, but what are you doing in that ticket? Not getting them to be a customer, but

Scott Reid 42:34
but if you’re personalizing like this too, and you’re delivering this, this higher, more curated experience, the value of your traffic investments is just going to go up. And that is such. I mean, if you look at the, you know, marketing as a line item on the income statement, it’s a huge line item on every single company. And if you’re able to to maximize the return on that, on that line item, and, and, and make that more of an investment. That’s just, that’s the game changer, like, that’s the heat. That’s probably the biggest unlock that you could deliver to, to to any e commerce brand owner, is to make their marketing investments more valuable in terms of ROI, and that’s what I’m hearing from you, is that’s what you’re delivering to them, essentially, through your through your technology.

Barada Sahu 43:25
Yeah. I mean, like you said, it’s value first is where we kind of go in with and I know it sounds, uh, always, when you’re coming in from your own company, it’s, you know, everybody promises the moon. But the first thing that I like to always say is that anybody who partners with us, we like to first deliver on the value, which is why, like I said, we start to make it easy. Yeah, you get started with, see that ROI, and then obviously grow from there, right? I don’t want to go in and say that, hey, I’ll change it within a month. Yeah, it’s just impractical, right? I mean, it’s looking at wins, but gradual wins, which layer on top of each other compound. That’s really what this is all about. Yeah, excellent.

Scott Reid 44:07
So what’s the best way for somebody to learn more to what do you recommend? Barry? Yeah. So

Barada Sahu 44:12
I think one of those best places to kind of know more about how to get started with Mason and also to kind of in terms of your own journey of how to do personalization. I mean, of course, go to our website, there’s a bunch of good resources that were kind of prepared together. In fact, we had done this whole guide for E commerce brands to go from startup to scale up. And so I would love for some of our listeners to kind of take a look at it, give feedback, see what it’s there. We keep on creating new resources as well for

Scott Reid 44:44
is, that is, excuse me, is that the E commerce Field Guide?

Barada Sahu 44:47
Yeah, that’s the E commerce Okay, so

Scott Reid 44:49
that’s right in the resources section of the website, yes, and it’s awesome. And

Barada Sahu 44:55
again, like we’re putting out one for how to also do the same thing for your carts. You know? Cards are one of those things that, you know, often undertapped in. People think about the card as an afterthought, but you know, the cart to checkout Dropout is 70% optimizing those cards. And we bring in a new guide over there for purely to optimize cards. And what are some of those best practices globally that we have kind of worked with a bunch of brands just launched out a new solution to help brands with that. And so people should definitely tap into that. And as the holiday season comes in, there’s one more for gifting that we’re kind of bringing into the play. So these are some of those areas that you can find us at. Definitely get us up over there. And at any point in time, you kind of want to reach out. I’m personally accessible on both LinkedIn and Twitter. You kind of want to give me a shot, but I’ll just ping me. I’d be more than happy to jump in see if I can help you somehow scale your breath

Scott Reid 45:47
such such service, unbelievable. And your LinkedIn profile and the website will be in the show notes. I gotta say, too, I love your website. It is so well done. And just for any you know, anybody who’s listening, the depth and breadth of case studies, the way that they’re broken down, it’s really impressive. I mean, you guys have spent a lot of time on that, but more importantly, you have a lot of really, really happy customers that have generated measurable results as a result of working with you. So it’s crystal clear that a lot of happy, well known people that that use your product, and there’s nothing really more to say after that, I would strongly suggest, as we from the standpoint of an E commerce optimizer, this, to me, seems like a no brainer.

Barada Sahu 46:32
Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Scott for those words. I mean, this has been lovely chatting up as well. I mean, I know we did this on short notice, but this is really good to chat up and talk about some of these things.

Scott Reid 46:44
Excellent. Well, thank you very much, Barry. I really appreciate it. And again, the website is getmason.io and all the information will be in the show notes. Thank you very much. It’s been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today, and we’ll definitely talk to you soon.

Barada Sahu 47:00
Thank you. Bye.