Building a 2-sided Farm to Table Marketplace from Indiana: Nick Carter, CEO of Market Wagon (Part 5)

Nick Carter: We can prove a few things though. We had gross margin profitability. We’re not losing money on operations. We have been building a playbook for scale. We had practice with opening – what the regulatory problems are, how you find a space, who you need to recruit. They backed us with $5 million in the fall of 2020.

We raised even more in the summer of 2021 because the model that we had put together was based on variables that we really had no way of knowing how accurate they were. We finetuned it over the following six months. The money primarily went into customer acquisition. That and new geographies. Opening up a new geography doesn’t take a lot of capex. As I mentioned, we’re doing things very inexpensively without a warehouse. We do have to commit to about $100,000 in operating expenses and customer acquisition in order to get each hub up to a viability point.

Sramana Mitra: Why did you open up at once?

Nick Carter: The need was great and the opportunity was ripe. The supply side was desperate to have market access. The hardest part of any consumer business is getting the consumer to change habits. Humans learn how to shop for groceries when they’re three years old. By the time you’re in your early 20’s, your grocery habits are concrete. All of a sudden, we had an external factor that busted that concrete and forced everyone to learn a new habit. It was a tremendous opportunity. Now we stopped. It’s time to optimize the network that we’ve built.

Sramana Mitra: How is this all scaling right now? Have the hubs found their stride?

Nick Carter: Most of them. We have some that are struggling. It’s difficult in the large cities like Chicago and Atlanta. It’s a supply-side problem especially in Chicago. In order to get enough supply, you have to go in just one direction. We have a few that need some special attention.

Sramana Mitra: What metrics are you comfortable sharing?

Nick Carter: We’re at about $17 million run rate.

Sramana Mitra: That is revenue or GMV?

Nick Carter: GMV.

Sramana Mitra: How about team?

Nick Carter: It was a really big jolt for me. We had five employees in March 2020. Today, we’re up over 60. I now have more VP’s reporting to me than I have total employees than I had a year ago. That’s a big jump in leadership ability and organizational structure. It happened rapidly. Even today, one of the things we’re working on is team dynamics. We have a big team and we’ve been together now for almost a year. We’re still learning to work with one another.

Sramana Mitra: How many people do you need to run a hub?

Nick Carter: We can open a hub with one part-time employee and recruit a gig network of drivers. We can scale that up from there. We can scale the human capital on that side pretty linearly.

Sramana Mitra: All the marketing is done centrally?

Nick Carter: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that you wanted to share?

Nick Carter: For the first time in 20 years, we’re raising pork in my dad’s farm again. My wife and I were able to buy our own small farm in Indianapolis where we have laying hens. We raise produce and goat. When my kids are adults, farming will be an option.

Sramana Mitra: Wonderful! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a 2-sided Farm to Table Marketplace from Indiana: Nick Carter, CEO of Market Wagon
1 2 3 4 5