Bootstrapping a Two-sided Marketplace: Mort Fertel, CEO of SudShare (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Who built the company? You or your son?

Mort Fertel: Both. We’re co-founders.

Sramana Mitra: The idea sounds great. It came out of your personal observation of your wife’s woes with laundry. It sounds like your son has the technical expertise. What was he doing at that time when he decided to put together this app?

Mort Fertel: He was in high school. 

Sramana Mitra: He was a tech geek in high school.

Mort Fertel: Yes. The administration in high school allowed him to skip all his classes in the afternoon so that he could work on this.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Mort Fertel: That was 2017 and also 2018. Even in his continuing studies in 2019 and 2020, he continued to devote a percentage of his time to develop SudShare. He just recently made the decision that he was going to begin to work on SudShare full-time. We have grown 10,000% in the last year. It’s growing very quickly.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you doing all this from?

Mort Fertel: We’ve lived in Baltimore, Maryland over the last 18 years. Nachshon, my son, was in boarding school in Virginia and then went to Minneapolis for higher learning. My wife and I were in Baltimore, which is where SudShare was launched.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the launch. One of the learning items in a two-sided marketplace is how do you get the two sides of the marketplace to come together. What’s the acquisition strategy on the buy side and the sell side? Step me through in gory detail.

Mort Fertel: As I’m sure other founders have told you, the key to the acquisition strategy is not necessarily great marketing, it’s to have a great product. We obsess about the quality of the deliverable. If that’s awesome, then two things will happen. One is you have a customer for life because laundry never goes away.

Two is they will tell all of their friends and you will get tremendous word of mouth. We used Google AdWords to find an initial customer base. The key to the growth of the platform has been the quality of the service and people being so excited about being relieved by their burden. They post on social media. They make videos. Our customers are our marketing strategy. That’s how we grew on that side.

COVID has been a horrific thing. It’s actually helped us in the sense that it’s put us in touch with our mortality. People have become more introspective and asking themselves, “How do I want to spend my time?” I don’t know anybody answering that question by saying they want to do their laundry. People are looking to outsource stuff.

Sramana Mitra: You said something about Google AdWords. What are people looking for on Google that enabled you to plug into Google keywords and pull out users.

Mort Fertel: Laundry service.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Bootstrapping a Two-sided Marketplace: Mort Fertel, CEO of SudShare
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