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 supply chain could not keep up with the demand.

Bootstrapping by Piggybacking: Evenica CEO Sadek Ali (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You joined that other company, but you kept the software services that was going in parallel.

Sadek Ali: Correct. Then we ended the business when I went to New York. From there, I came home because I felt that I had enough experience to do my own raise with my own ideas. In this next company, I was doing crypto and all that stuff. I learned how to do a raise and had my biggest failure at that point. It was then that I finished my PhD.

Sramana Mitra: What didn’t work in crypto?

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: The first year.

Bootstrapping by Piggybacking: Evenica CEO Sadek Ali (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You started doing programming work for this one company. What happens after that?

Sadek Ali: Once I had gotten that particular gig, the actual relationship lasted about two years. It happened to be with OpenText. This is where I got immersed with search technologies. I fell in love with them at that time. My brother and I took a look at how to deal with large data intractable problems. We looked at image processing and environmental systems. That led me into doing my Masters.

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 scene. I built technology to power an online farmer’s market. It’s a two-sided marketplace called Market Wagon.

Bootstrapping by Piggybacking: Evenica CEO Sadek Ali (Part 1)

Sadek has built an e-commerce platform company for the mid-market within the Microsoft ecosystem. Read on to learn more.

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?

Sadek Ali: I was born in Canada. I grew up there. Most of my adult life has been spent here.

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?

Solo Entrepreneur Focused on Autonomy as Key Success Driver: Hank Luhring, Founder of IssueTrak (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much were you pricing?

Hank Luhring: It was $100 a month. This was before the cloud. There was a term back then called Application Service Provider.

Sramana Mitra: I remember that. It was the precursor to the cloud.