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?

Nick Carter: I’m from Indiana. I was born in a small town called Russiaville, which nobody’s ever heard of. We boasted a blinking stop light rather than just a four-way stop in the middle of town. I was a farmer. I grew up in the first 18 years of my life on a small family farm. That’s where I learned pretty much everything.

Sramana Mitra: What crop did you farm?

Nick Carter: We had corn and soy. We also had beef, dairy, ducks, hogs, alfalfa, barley, wheat. When I was 18, it was just corn and soy.

Sramana Mitra: How does that journey bridge to this?

Nick Carter: I left the farm when I was 18 because there wasn’t any income left in the farm. I would have been a fourth-generation farmer. Through industrialization, consolidation, and commoditization that has taken place in America’s agriculture, the income just continued to shrink on the acres that we had. I never really considered farming as a future for me.

Today, I farm. I’m 38. I left the farm when I was 18. I dropped out of college and moved to Indianapolis and got involved in startups. I started my own tech startup. I bootstrapped it. It was a software company that did well.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about that. What did you bootstrap?

Nick Carter: It was a CRM software called Address Two. It came out in an era when the only CRM programs were Salesforce, Goldmine, and Act!. Google Contacts hadn’t even come out yet.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Nick Carter: 2006.

Sramana Mitra: Why that? How did you get into this?

Nick Carter: I was a marketing consultant. One of my clients needed a CRM in order to manage the leads that we were generating. I showed them Salesforce, Goldmine, and Act!, and he didn’t like any one of them. He said, “Can’t we make our own?” I had been tinkering in development and self-teaching code. I built the little CRM application that he and his three sales guys used. I went to market with it.

Sramana Mitra: How did you sell?

Nick Carter: We had a lot of referrals. I got involved in business networking. I would go to small business entrepreneurs and networking meetings getting together for events. I just built a Rolodex that way. Everybody there needed my solution.

My pitch was, “You’re going to leave here with a stack of business cards and I have a software that helps you keep track of them and stay in touch.” I got critical mass through that. I was able to grow the company to where I could build a sales staff. Then I started building value-added resellers who were partners around the country who would do the same thing.

Sramana Mitra: How big did that company become?

Nick Carter: We had about a million in revenue and I sold it to private equity.

Sramana Mitra: You were the only person in the company?

Nick Carter: Yes.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Building a 2-sided Farm to Table Marketplace from Indiana: Nick Carter, CEO of Market Wagon
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