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.

The mission behind this is I wanted to make it viable for small family farms to continue to thrive. That meant I had to give them access to a consumer marketplace. Our family farm became one of the vendors and is one of the 2,000 vendors on the marketplace.

Sramana Mitra: Did you write that software yourself?

Nick Carter: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: It was also a solo entrepreneur journey?

Nick Carter: I soon realized that this was not just a technology issue. There’s also logistics. We had to create a complex food logistics system for this marketplace. I partnered with Dan Brunner. His background is in logistics engineering. It was a great partnership. We were able to build it together. To date, we’ve raised three rounds of investment from venture capital totaling about $11.5 million.

Sramana Mitra: The seed round was from where?

Nick Carter: It was from a few business associates that both Dan and I knew and who really believed in us.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise as a seed round?

Nick Carter: The seed was about a million dollars.

Sramana Mitra: One of the reasons two-sided marketplaces are popular is because it’s asset-free. In a way, it’s logistics-free. It sounds like you had something else going on there. Tell me more about what that was.

Nick Carter: A lot of marketplaces logistics is UPS or some common carrier. You can’t take a dozen eggs and a gallon of milk to the UPS store and get it to the customer in a reasonable way. We had to build fulfillment centers. We now operate 34 fulfillment centers around the US where the food producers can aggregate all of their food. We built software that does everything from temperature segregation, last-mile routing, and all the way to gig drivers on our platform.

Sramana Mitra: It was cold storage?

Nick Carter: We use tech to avoid cold storage. We don’t inventory any of the food. It’s all on a just-in-time basis. We built an algorithm that determines how many ice packs are going to be required in order to hold the food at a safe temperature for the duration that it’s in our possession.

Sramana Mitra: You started this in Indiana?

Nick Carter: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the very beginning. How did you get this going? Your father’s farm was the first vendor. What about the consumer side?

Nick Carter: It’s easy to start in your own backyard. I had a network of people who knew me. I leveraged that to get some critical mass to begin with. Once we scaled outside of Indianapolis, that’s when it got difficult.

Sramana Mitra: How many consumers from Indianapolis completed that circle?

Nick Carter: When we first launched, there were seven vendors and 12 customers.

Sramana Mitra: So you did have other vendors.

Nick Carter: Yes, we wanted a diverse offering. We had bread, cheese, and vegetables. My dad just raises beef and pork.

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