The D2Z Podcast
Gen Z entrepreneur and DTC agency leader Brandon Amoroso talks with some of the best in the marketing world. Brandon and guests reveal their top business-growth strategies for anyone in the online space–whether you are a brick-and-mortar business looking to scale or an established online business trying to grow. Consumer marketing is under constant and dramatic change, so Brandon aims to tackle new problems with a fresh Gen Z mindset. The D2Z Podcast delivers insights, strategies, and tactics that you can use and aims to shift how you think about business and your relationships with your teams, partners, and customers.
The D2Z Podcast
How AI is Reshaping E-commerce: Insights from Barada Sahu, CEO of Mason - 124
In this episode of D2Z, Brandon Amoroso chats with Barada Sahu, the innovative CEO of Mason, a company at the forefront of AI-driven shopping experiences. They delve into the transformative impact of AI on e-commerce, exploring how Mason’s technology enables highly personalized customer journeys. Barada shares his journey from engineer to entrepreneur, revealing the challenges and triumphs of crafting cutting-edge solutions tailored to today’s dynamic e-commerce landscape.
Here's what you'll learn:
🤖 AI's Role in E-commerce: Insights into AI-driven transformations in customer experiences with Barada Sahu, CEO of Mason.
🧩 Integration Challenges: Learn about the hurdles of embedding AI into existing platforms.
🎯 Importance of Personalization: Discover why tailoring customer interactions boosts retention.
🚀 Entrepreneurial Journey: Barada Sahu’s path from engineer to CEO and key takeaways.
🔮 Future AI Trends: Predictions on evolving AI trends in e-commerce.
🛠️ Tech Stack Development: Tips on building adaptable and effective tech stacks.
⚙️ Scaling Strategies: Effective approaches for business growth and market adaptation.
Barada Sahu
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/baradas/
Mason - https://getmason.io/
Brandon Amoroso:
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandonamoroso/
Web - https://brandonamoroso.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/bamoroso11/
X - https://twitter.com/AmorosoBrandon
Scalis.ai - https://scalis.ai/
I'm Brandon Amoroso, and this is the D2Z Podcast building and growing your business from a Gen Z perspective. Hey everyone, thanks for tuning in to D2Z, a podcast about using the Gen Z mindset to grow your business. I'm Gen Z entrepreneur Brandon Amoroso, founder and president of Retention as a Service Agency Electric, as well as the co-founder of Scaless, and today I'm talking with Bharata Sahoo, who is the CEO of Mason, which builds an AI shopping engine to power hyper-personalized customer journeys for brands and retailers. Thanks for coming on the show.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for having me. Bharata, it's good to talk to you. I love some parts of your journey and what you've kind of built along the way, so I hope you have a great chat.
Speaker 1:I appreciate it. Well, before we dive into things here, can you give everybody just a quick background on yourself?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know, I kind of talk about myself personally as one of those folks who started out in engineering and became an accidental entrepreneur along the way. I love building things, I love tinkering around and creating products and software for all kinds of builders along the way. This happened to be one of those problems that kind of stuck along and this company called Flipkart in India that's kind of built this e-commerce marketplace in India. This there's a big giant. They've got a few different product lines now but as building out the revenue infrastructure over there a large part of what drives personalization for brands how do you monetize some of these brands' real estate?
Speaker 1:how do you ensure that consumers stay?
Speaker 2:engaged on the platform. And as you're building that, I realized that a large part of it was understanding consumers and understanding what data you kind of share with you to personalize the experiences that you deliver for them. That's really what was at the heart of how we kind of did it over there, and as we're doing that, I realized a lot many more brands in the world, a lot many more creators in the world were launching their own storefronts launching their own products.
Speaker 2:They lack this infrastructure for them, they lack software which can really help them with that. Today, and while Shopify has done a great job in terms of helping brands come online, but really running it on an everyday basis, as you speak to lots of brands, you realize that it's an always-on job. You kind of got to keep on doing it and so I said that you know good problem for us to kind of help brands with seeing that first hand. Maybe some of these learnings you can bring them to brands, and that's really been also the story of me coming out and doing a little bit of Mason and, like I said, we're building this AI shopping engine which helps them automate a bunch of the storefronts, helping you personalize experiences for your consumers, essentially driving more conversions, more revenue for your stores.
Speaker 1:And what made you want to ultimately take the leap to doing your own thing and giving it a shot on your own?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I kind of worked across the world. I worked in the US for a while and worked inS for a while and worked in Europe for a while and worked in India for a while. But you know, in India, and especially in the place that I was at Bangalore, there was this very vibrant, thriving startup ecosystem and everybody just wanted to jump out and do their own things and it's very infectious. And it's very infectious Oftentimes when you're in an ecosystem of that time, you kind of see people trying out new things, building out products, launching these products not just built for local markets but for global markets, and it's super infectious. So that's one of those bugs that kind of bit me as we were kind of doing it.
Speaker 2:And then, with Flipkart, we had seen it first hand. Flipkart was one of those homegrown startups from India which had gone and made it big in the global space, and so this was one of those things that kind of really propelled us to kind of say that, hey, we can dream big, we can try out something on our own, take on some of these problems and make them work for everyone else, and we had seen that we could build software that could really rank amongst the best in the world. That's one of those definite things. But it was also about the people around me. Honestly speaking, it was not just me personally stepping out, it was we stepped out together as a team. There was this bunch of four or five folks together and oftentimes you know the way that you kind of do things is that you do them with the people around you.
Speaker 2:And there were this three or four of us together as a founding team, who really loved working together with each other, and we said that you know, you've got to do this on our own, you've got to try something on our own and give this a shot. So that's been one of those things working with people that I really loved working with and then, obviously, this infectious energy of going and doing something and making a big impact on the world around.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, that's that's really being described close behind. Yeah, I think the continuity is something that's super important.
Speaker 1:Um, you know, it's something that I've tried to keep as much as possible uh, throughout the various you know different ventures, because there's a lot of uh sort of, let's say, first, three to six months of getting to learn uh, you know, how each other works best, who is, you know, best suited to do certain tasks versus others, and all of that you can sort of just pick up and, you know, run from where you just left off, and you don't have to go through that whole sort of like initial learning phase of how to best complement one another.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean absolutely. I mean one of those things that I also like kind of lean in as, especially for young entrepreneurs who are kind of doing it is, you know, there's this compounding effect that always happens as you kind of go through this learning cycle in life or with any of your ventures, is that you kind of learn new things and you kind of add on new stuff on top of it, and so it's like you think about continuity. I kind of like to think about it as compounding effects. Oftentimes, if you have people with complementary skills, you can compound each other's about what you can bring to life, and so if there's people that you're familiar with in terms of doing things, if they have complementary skills, then you can really work off each other.
Speaker 2:So maybe somebody who's good at building somebody maybe who's good at selling somebody, who's good at marketing, and so you can kind of bring these skills together and they kind of compound together to make more than these individual units that they can build together, and so that's super helpful, especially when you're thinking of building and growing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I definitely agree. What are some of the biggest challenges or pain points that you've run into when it comes to distribution of your product within the e-commerce ecosystem? Because you know building it is one thing, but you know second, and potentially even more important, is getting people to actually use it, because you know it could be the greatest product ever, but if nobody uses it then you know obviously there isn't a business there. So how have you gone about? You know, putting on like your sales hat, with an engineering background, to be able to get that distribution?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think, more than thinking about distribution, I think you've got to think about distribution as the number one thing, especially when you're building something. I think the build part of it is. These days it's getting easier, as you well know, there's a lot more help also with AI to kind of build stuff and assist you. But a large challenge is that consumer attention is one fragment and the second part is consumers have a lot of choices, new users who are buying software. For me, there's a lot of choice, especially in the e-commerce ecosystem. It's a super what I say crowded space of software. There's a lot of software out there, a lot of software also promising similar kind of outcomes.
Speaker 2:So it's very noisy for the buyer, on the other hand, to really kind of trust you to kind of ensure that, hey, do I really understand what you guys are doing and whether it can really deliver value for you. So you've got to kind of empathize with the point of view of the buyer, not just of this software and I can get it out to you and I can help you. That's your POV, but you've got to kind of put yourself into the shoe of the buyer from the other side. I think one large part of it is just understanding that you know buyers really want to be helped with the choices. That's the most important thing to think about, especially when you're building software and trying to get into the hands. You really got to step into the shoes and say that, hey, why should I really buy this software? How is it really going to help me? Can they really credibly show that others have used it? Am I going to be the first guy using it?
Speaker 1:Is this going to be risky for my business. Do I understand that some of these can really add value for my products, my category for my consumers.
Speaker 2:So you've got to step into the issues and put on this hat about how can I help address some of these questions that are top of mind, which is can I trust this company? Are they going to be reliably delivering it? Is the service going to be available for me, let's say, there's something going wrong? Are they going to be available to help me with that? And business changes? And so these are very essential questions that you've got to deliver as a seller.
Speaker 2:I don't think selling is just really about communicating your product itself.
Speaker 2:Selling is really about communicating value to customers and ensuring that you can deliver that in a crisp way, and that's that's really been the way that I have kind of personally approved sales.
Speaker 2:I've kind of tried to put on this kind of can I help you first in your business? Can I see that, hey, that we are the right fit for the business and you are in the right stage where we can help you, because oftentimes, like when we talk about and let's speak about it more from our lens to make it a little bit more concrete so you can visualize it we help you hyper-personalize your store If you don't have a lot of traffic. Yet if you're just launching your brand, we can't help you with that. Big challenge of you is that how do you find new customers? How do I have enough traffic coming into my store? I'm not a right fit for your brand at that stage. And so if I'm coming in and trying to sell you my software, it's not going to be the right fit, I'm not going to help you and that's going to be a wrong promise that I'll deliver.
Speaker 2:Oftentimes I try to index on is that is the business of the right scale at which I can deliver value. Do you have enough consumer insights for me to kind of lean on that? And then I kind of come in and say, hey, I know that, you know we probably have great traffic coming in right now in KSO but there's a lot of that churn happening because you don't understand your consumers well enough. But I think that we can do a good job of helping you over there. That's really the right conversation to start having and that's how I really kind of approach the space.
Speaker 1:Did your ICP evolve over time into that, or did you sort of already know from the get-go that that's what it was going to be?
Speaker 2:No so great question.
Speaker 2:I mean, when we started off we were a much smaller stack in terms of having a very pointed solution that was really helping you automate some of your sales communication onto your storefronts before we kind of brought in this entire hyper-personalization universe onto your storefronts.
Speaker 2:So we had kind of come in at this very niche use case where we kind of started off with and that news niche use case oftentimes appeal to more younger brands who really wanted to have a more hands-free approach to automating a lot of the sales communication. So they really just wanted to turn on the automation step back and say that you know, this is good to go. So the icp initially was primarily small and medium businesses in that sense where it was helping them, and medium businesses in that sense where it was helping them automate a bunch of that. But as the product evolved, as some of this working with customers, we also figured out what were those more critical problems that were needed to be solved for them across the board. Because even when you talk about hyper-personalization, it's a blanket umbrella that you can put across everything right, because you can personalize emails, you can personalize SMS, you can personalize within storefront there are different pieces that you can personalize.
Speaker 2:but what's really going to lead to that impact on the business and that has kind of evolved over the years as we have worked with brands. So that's definitely been this learning phase in terms of where we started off with small and medium businesses to now starting to work with slightly bit more scaled out businesses, who are now starting to work with slightly bit more scaled-down businesses who have traffic, who essentially have already existing customers.
Speaker 2:And then we're starting to say that hey, can we plug in these leaky buckets in your storefront journeys that we can help you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do you like? When it comes to reaching that ICP, though, did you find direct sales most effective? You know partner programs, you know referrals for existing customers. Like what would you say that the mix is, and has it evolved over time as well? Because I know, like, for the agency, it was all direct sales to start and then, you know, towards the end it was pretty much just all referrals and no direct sales.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's been evolving over the years. Honestly speaking, it's still a work in progress. I don't have a definitive answer to say that, hey, you know, six months down the line, this is what's going to be working. You know this is, channels keep evolving over a period of time and when we started off, we were very early on.
Speaker 1:I would not say very early on, but we were fairly early on in the Shopify ecosystem.
Speaker 2:We were one of the featured products in the Shopify ecosystem, Shopify and the Unite program, the Unite event back then, and we were kind of one of those featured products.
Speaker 2:So obviously that drove in a lot of visibility onto us, and so there was a lot of inbound, coming in small businesses on the Shopify ecosystem who had come in and kind of used our product and they've seen and known about us, but that has kind of kept on shifting over the years.
Speaker 2:Now there's a large part of sales in the mix, beyond just what you said inbound, coming in from our website, from our traffic, to where we are now starting to. Also, we have this healthy partner program that we kind of work with, both agencies as well as independent consultants who work in the Shopify ecosystem helping e-commerce difference optimize their storefronts. We have worked with a bunch of them. So this makes us started to shift from being purely inbound to where we now have outbound, which is inside sales driven to a mix of partner programs, that kind of work together. Referrals are still a work in progress for us, honestly speaking. Referrals do come in from existing customers, but you know customers are always busy and customers always have a ton of different things to do in the mind. So it's still, I would say, a small mix of how we kind of bring in business but our two largest channels at this point of time are inside sales and partner programs.
Speaker 1:No, that makes sense at this point of time. Inside sales and marketing games no, that makes sense. I think it definitely evolves over time, especially as your product gets more traction in the market and everything just gets easier. I think the first couple of customers are always the hardest and then from there everything becomes a lot more straightforward, aside from on the acquisition side of things, when it comes to customer retention, were there any hiccups or things that you didn't expect on that side of the coin once you onboarded them and were servicing the merchants? Yeah, I mean, I assume it wasn't all 100% smooth the entire time. What were some of the sort of gotchas that you ran into as you started to scale that team?
Speaker 2:One is that you don't anticipate the amount of effort that it takes to make things successful, especially when you're shifting your ICPs. The kind of effort that it needs to make these different ICPs successful is also very different. For example, when you're a very self-serve product, working with small and medium businesses, it's purely about ensuring that the product is well done, it's easy to understand and people can activate things on their own. So it's more about the product experience of such. But as a product evolves in its capability, oftentimes consumers and brands would not have enough of the attention to do completely everything by themselves. They need that assistance back in from you. So, from a retention standpoint is also ensuring that you have service and support to help them activate some of those things, understand how these things work and how they benefit your storefront, and that's not always been a smooth journey for us. I mean, and this journey has not always been smooth.
Speaker 2:We work with a lot of different brands in the mid-market space, but they're also globally spread out Some of them. There's both language barriers in some sense. While there are English speaking geographies, there are also folks from Europe who are speaking French and German. We do not have people who can service them in the same language. That's been one of those language barriers that you have to overcome and deal with. But beyond just that, it's also ensuring that you know understanding their business in full, and oftentimes, when you have people on the service side of things, as a founder you only have so much time. Probably you're building both the product as well as selling, but there's also servicing and ensuring that they're successful with the product, not just using it, leaving them to it, and so oftentimes when you're bringing on people, these people themselves need to be upgraded to and trained to be able to kind of help these customers with, and they might not always have the context of the business, they might not always have that context of commerce. And so for us there has been this challenge of ensuring that we can upscale our own people to be Also equivalent to when we, as founders, giving that personal attention. How can we also ensure that we bring on more teammates? They're also able to deliver that same degree of care to this business, help them understand some of these different pieces of the product, both from how to use the product also understanding how it fits into their business. There has been those upskilling gaps that we have had to deal with while bringing on more folks. The second challenge that I've had from a retention and service standpoint is that, you know, oftentimes there's this degree of customization that are needed, and especially in commerce, you're kind of operating in the space where there's a lot of different products that we kind of spoke about.
Speaker 2:The commerce stack itself is fairly complex, right, while Shopify itself is one product, there's a lot of different applications on that stack itself and especially in one product. There's a lot of different applications on that stack itself and especially in the commerce. There's stuff that helps you get new customers in, there's stuff that helps you communicate to customers on direct channels. Then there's within your storefront. There are different pieces, right from engagement to merchandising, to sales and promotion and maybe and this may be payments and checkout, and so you've got to kind of connect the dots across all of them.
Speaker 2:Oftentimes, when you're making these connections and integrators, you might not have out of the box connectors. It could be bi-directional, by the way. It could be. There's a maybe there's a gap in your product. It could be. Maybe there's the partner with who you're integrating with they might not be ready for the integration. So that's a challenge, but that's a challenge for the merchant who's using it, by the way. For the merchant who's using it, by the way, because the merchant is probably not able to see the seamless communication and it's needed for the end consumer experience. So there have been these gaps, I would say from a service standpoint of one ensuring that we have had the right people and upskill them.
Speaker 2:And the second part of it is that ensuring that the product is also able to evolve and connect with each of these different adjacent solutions that reside in the ecosystem seamlessly, and how do you kind of bring that to life? So those are the two gaps that we're making.
Speaker 1:You mentioned the other solutions in the ecosystem. How do you think about integrations with other tech companies, especially over the past year, where I've seen a lot of historical tech partners start to build products that the other one already offers, and so there's a lot of overlap as well too? So how do you think about the integrations? And then, who has to build them? Is it you, is it the other party? Because I know, like in the case of the Shopify, for example, obviously the other party is building it because they're the 800 pound gorilla. But when it's more SMB, mid-market technology solutions, there's got to be a give and take there of who's responsible for doing the integration and who is maintaining it and all that, all that good stuff.
Speaker 2:I always look at integration as a bidirectional thing. You know it's sometimes the API is available and especially if you're looking at the mid-market segment and the small business segment, especially the software providers.
Speaker 2:You know there's never the API is available and especially if you're looking at the mid-market segment and the small business segment, especially of software providers, you know there's never clean, clear-cut APIs like. Shopify probably has very clear documentation, clear-cut APIs, the developer team supporting that and that's a dedicated team who's kind of getting those like. But even there are shortcomings even within Shopify as you well know.
Speaker 2:Anybody who's been in the Shopify and the Shopify Plus ecosystem, they will know there are definitely gaps in terms of integrations and customizations that kind of get built as custom development. That's definitely a needed part of it, and some of these are not in the industry, so oftentimes it's on the. The onus falls on somebody who's building that customization and integration. But in the mid-market segment, where you have different solutions playing, theis are never clear and there's always a handshake. So you're probably sending some data over, you're expecting some data back. So there's usually speaking while you might be able to create some of these integrations on your site, it might need some customization on these other providers as well, and so it's definitely a chance for you to also have those partnerships with those counterparts. But that also goes back to what you're saying, brandon.
Speaker 2:You know there's now this overlap in terms of you know you're probably encroaching on my product area and this is probably a solution that I might bring on in the next quarter, in the next couple of quarters, and so there's this overlap that's starting to happen constantly and we definitely I'm starting to see more and more of consolidation also happening in this space, where there, you know, there's a lot of smaller apps and now starting to come together, be more consolidated, or there are bigger agencies who are really coming in and saying that, hey, we can completely create a bespoke stack for you and just ensure that you own all of this software yourself, right, and we can help you manage that.
Speaker 2:So I definitely see that's been a trending movement across, and this is not just on Shopify, by the way. This happened across the board. No matter which platform you're built on whether it's Salesforce, magento, bigcommerce I'm seeing more and more consolidation happening across the space. That's definitely been a trend where there's more software which is kind of either getting aggregated under a single umbrella or then a bigger agency will be saying that it will take this bespoke step.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think the bespoke is something that we try to stay away from as much as possible. There's definitely there was a tendency for merchants to want to build versus buy for a certain time there and in some cases it made sense. But as products continue to evolve more and more and features that may have been lacking a couple of years ago are now sort of table stakes within the products, a lot of merchants have sunsetted their custom solutions. The easiest example is like the quizzes that they would build four or five years ago. Spend a bunch of money with like a custom dev team. Build a quiz, you know it would break all the time.
Speaker 1:You very difficult to change the logic, you know not not easy to AB tests. You know report on revenue analytics, anything like that. And then you had a bunch of solutions come to market that you know just have all those natively built within and pay a monthly fee versus having to spend, you know, tens of thousands of dollars and then actually have to maintain it yourself. So I know there's always been a sort of give and take between development and marketing, because marketing would prefer the out of the box SaaS tools that they can actually use and then development would prefer to get to do cool custom projects, but also you know, if those aren't happening then you don't really have a job. So I can see both sides of the of the the dilemma there and how do you think about this?
Speaker 2:this is actually an interesting uh topic, I see, also in terms of diving in. You know there's this condition that you're familiar with.
Speaker 2:This recent news from the plan team where they're saying that, hey, sunsetting Salesforce, sunsetting these other software tools, task tools, to kind of bring these products in-house, and especially now with emergence of AI and some of these code generation tools, really there's this movement towards saying that, hey, we can probably maintain and reduce the cost of software. Do you see that already happening in the space where you kind of see that maybe there are smaller apps which are no longer needed to be paid as a subscription fee, but really you can do it with some bit of code generation systems? How do you kind of see that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I've been seeing a movement towards consolidation where, you know, maybe there's another platform that has released a product like reviews, for example, platform that has released a product like reviews, for example, and it might not be as great as the current solution you're using, but it's good enough and you're going to save a bunch of money by making that transition and you'll get the benefit of having everything just within one platform in terms of easy use, analytics, all that other stuff. So we've definitely seen that more and more, especially email and SMS not having those in two separate platforms. And then these quote unquote super apps are definitely getting wider in terms of the products that they offer. Yopo has email now, sms, reviews, loyalty, even subscriptions. Obviously, each product is more mature or less mature than the other. The subscriptions product is obviously not recharged. The email product is obviously not Klaviyo yet, but it definitely services a certain ICP and over time it'll just get better and better. So I think more and more solutions are headed that path for two main reasons One being that the you know, investors and the money that they have in the business is asking where's the growth going to come from?
Speaker 1:Some of them, who are really large at this point are running into just the fact that the Shopify ecosystem, the TAM, is only so large. So like, if you're a recharge and you already have every Shopify brand using you for subscriptions, how do you go and make more revenue? You have to create new product offerings or expand outside of the Shopify ecosystem, but I haven't seen a ton of success with that in any of the Shopify apps, because there's not a ton of merchants that are low hanging fruit, that aren't on Shopify already, and then the ones that aren't we're talking extremely large enterprise businesses and that's sort of a whole different beast that most of the Shopify apps are not set up to be able to support and maintain a relationship with them. So I think that's one component. And then also merchants are just asking, you know, for additional features and capabilities within the tools that they're already using. So those two sort of combined have definitely pushed things along towards towards consolidation no, I, I I absolutely hear you on that.
Speaker 2:I I think this is a great point that you're bringing about in terms of this just a stack consolidation happening, but there's also this movement towards more. If you've got to kind of expand your time, you either got to. I also see this as a third piece of where you know merchants are also stepping outside and beyond commerce, and an example of that could be a lawyer, a lawyer that has this very e-commerce centric stack, but now they just provide integration for everybody. And so I'm also starting to see there are these Shopify initially products which are kind of started off with the Shopify ecosystem but just looking beyond Shopify to kind of provide the software to other adjacent use cases. And an example could be OK, you're building storefronts but you could be building websites as well, and so if you're a storefront builder, you could become a website builder and you could probably look at other adjacent use cases as well. So there's also this moving across beyond those domains.
Speaker 2:But in terms of just your consolidation, I definitely see this going to be more and more of consolidation as it becomes easier to just build software. That's definitely going to be that way across the sport. But I also see this that it's becoming harder for brands, and especially for merchants, to really use software anymore. So they almost expect that this software is managed for me or you kind of just automate the hell out of this. I mean, everything is auto managed. I definitely see that movement as well, that a lot of brands these days are expecting that you have this service either integrated with the software or else you figure out a way to automate this. So there's this large motion towards both automation or managed software. That's kind of bringing it coming into the picture, and I definitely see that that's also another direction which is happening in this consolidation space yeah, I agree.
Speaker 1:Well, aside from all that, is there one like thing that's sticking out to you in terms of opportunities for Q4 and going into next?
Speaker 2:year either with your business or in general in the e-commerce ecosystem very undertapped aspect of automation and agentic workflows that's not yet been tapped in into in this ecosystem. Overall, there's been a lot of tooling which has been developed and if you look at a lot of tooling, the way that it works is that it will for operators in the group. But you know, especially as brands also face this competition, there's attention fragmentation. You just got to lift the game in terms of where you kind of really put your attention into. So, as I would say that, as some of these opportunities have evolved in consolidating tools and products, we definitely have a pretty large stack at this point of time in terms of where we kind of bring to the table, we try to ensure that we can automate as much of the consumer journeys from browse to buy and show that we can help you identify customers to them and also bring in this analytics and activation to be able to really confidently make these decisions. So I think we'll continue to build on the software stack.
Speaker 2:But I think, just beyond the software stack, I'm really kicked about the fact that we can automate a lot of these operations of software in itself and that, I think, is a very emergent space where there will be a ton of value that might get unlocked for brands and merchants who can ensure that they can run their stores as best-in-class marketplaces do or best-in-class brands around the world do, which is, with a very data-centric approach, but also with this approach, to be able to talk to these agents and then be able to delegate a lot of the work to them. So I think that's an exciting opportunity that I'm seeing. There's obviously some gaps over there and there's some complexity in terms of how you can bring this into life, because it's not one universal agent that you can use, but that's definitely a space that I'm thinking about.
Speaker 1:No, no, that makes a lot of sense to me. Well, I appreciate you coming on and sharing all your insights. This was a really exciting chat and definitely some tidbits for people to take away from here, especially as it relates to the way they're thinking about building their technology stack on their storefront. But before we hop, can you give everybody resources around where they can connect with you and Mason online?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so on Mason, we are on Twitter and on LinkedIn, so if you are on any of these platforms, please feel to reach out to us. We are, you can find us with Get Mason or Just Mason, and we should be there to you. Give me a shout out if there's anything that you want me to help you with, want me to chat about and we can deep dive into stuff. And I think thanks for having me over here, brad, it was great talking to you.
Speaker 1:Awesome. I appreciate it, as always, for everybody listening. This is Brandon Amoroso. You can find me at brandonamorosocom or scalistai. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time.