Building a 2-sided Farm to Table Marketplace from Indiana: Nick Carter, CEO of Market Wagon (Part 5)

Nick Carter: We can prove a few things though. We had gross margin profitability. We’re not losing money on operations. We have been building a playbook for scale. We had practice with opening – what the regulatory problems are, how you find a space, who you need to recruit. They backed us with $5 million

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Building a 2-sided Farm to Table Marketplace from Indiana: Nick Carter, CEO of Market Wagon (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens when COVID strikes? Nick Carter: Everything in our company is measured on week-over-week sales. I can remember my co-founder texting me one Sunday afternoon saying, “We had a nice week today.” The sales volume grew 600% in one week. It’s because everybody had to stay home. They needed delivery. The traditional

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Building a 2-sided Farm to Table Marketplace from Indiana: Nick Carter, CEO of Market Wagon (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: From your network, how big of a consumer base were you able to pull together? Nick Carter: We got to about 70 to 80 orders a week, which is $2,500 to $3,000 in sales. It was enough of a critical mass. Sramana Mitra: How long did it stay in just Indianapolis? Nick Carter:

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Building a 2-sided Farm to Table Marketplace from Indiana: Nick Carter, CEO of Market Wagon (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What year does this bring us up to? Nick Carter: About 2013 is when I started working on food and agriculture. Sramana Mitra: What were you doing? Nick Carter: I started a food manufacturing business. Eventually, I realized that I needed to use my tech entrepreneurship skills to focus on the local food

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Building a 2-sided Farm to Table Marketplace from Indiana: Nick Carter, CEO of Market Wagon (Part 1)

Nick tells a wonderful story of building Market Wagon into a thriving marketplace. Covid has been an immense force multiplier for the venture. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised and in what kind of background?

Bootstrapping a Two-Sided Marketplace: Mort Fertel, CEO of SudShare (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So, from 2017 to about 2020, that’s the phase when you crossed the million dollar milestone. Then COVID accelerated your situation. What happened? Mort Fertel: On the customer side, I mentioned what happened there. It’s a hypothesis. I can’t prove it. I think that with life being so precious and that idea being

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Bootstrapping a Two-Sided Marketplace: Mort Fertel, CEO of SudShare (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’ve got two nuggets out of your initial story. One is using Indeed to get some of the sell side going. Then really building in virality into the app. On the buy side, laundry services Google keyword search. I take it you were self-funding this company.  Mort Fertel: Yes. Sramana Mitra: The business

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Bootstrapping a Two-Sided Marketplace: Mort Fertel, CEO of SudShare (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about on the sell side? Mort Fertel: It might be interesting to note that the first sudsters – what we call the washers – were my wife and I. That didn’t last long. That’s how we started. The key to the growth of the platform has been the same thing. Create a

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