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 phenomenal experience for the workers and they will tell their friends and family. It’s been primarily word of mouth.

Our sudsters had been our greatest marketing tool for getting other sudsters. It’s not so much what we did; it’s the whole business model. It’s very simple. Everybody wants to work from home. You and I can work from home. We have the skillset to work from behind the computer. There are lots of people that don’t have the skillset to work from behind the computer but would love to work from home.

SudShare is the first and only manual labor work-from-home opportunity. As soon as people realized I can work from home without the typical knowledge-based skillset, there is nothing like that that’s available.

Sramana Mitra: That seeding of the marketplace is one of the biggest challenges in building a marketplace. 

Mort Fertel: We placed a couple of ads on Indeed. That was what you would describe as the seeding.

Sramana Mitra: To post an ad on Indeed, you were then hiring these people to do the work?

Mort Fertel: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Initially, you had some hired people who are doing the laundry in Baltimore. That brought you the capability to fulfill the order. Then the word-of-mouth spread.

Mort Fertel: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: In that Indeed process, how long did you run that ad? To seed that ecosystem, how many do you have to hire to start getting the ecosystem to flow?

Mort Fertel: In the beginning, we started out very slow by design. In the beginning, we had five or 10 sudsters in addition to my wife and I. It was very small. What we wanted to do was as we got orders, we looked at the whole workflow for all those orders very carefully on both sides of the platform. We tore apart the whole experience from the customer side and from the sudster side. We broke down anything that wasn’t perfect and continued to optimize on both sides of the platform to make it better.

We were being interviewed on a podcast by this person who was technologically-oriented like my son. He said, “As you know, it’s very easy to make something complex. It’s very complicated to make something easy.” Nachshon is obsessed with making things really easy for people on both sides of the platform. That creates a lot of work for us. It also creates this user experience. This is new. People have never had a work-from-home opportunity like this before. 

Sramana Mitra: It’s a great idea. I was thinking back on what you said in the beginning of the conversation about marital counseling. One of the things that I have observed is that a lot of women who give up economic independence suffer in their stay-at-home roles. You’re also addressing a core angst of a lot of stay-at-home wives and mothers.

Mort Fertel: On which side are you assuming they’re on?

Sramana Mitra: Sell side.

Mort Fertel: They’re on both. That’s right. 

Sramana Mitra: It is immensely attractive for a lot of stay-at-home women who seek that kind of economic independence. 

Mort Fertel: Although there are a lot of different kinds of sudsters, the most common profile is the stay-at-home mom. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrapping a Two-Sided Marketplace: Mort Fertel, CEO of SudShare
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