Bootstrapping by Piggybacking: Evenica CEO Sadek Ali (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you tried to go into the Shopify marketplace with another e-commerce platform, that wouldn’t work. That was not an option. You were trying to build your own e-commerce platform.

Sadek Ali: Shopify is a long-tail play.

Sramana Mitra: Shopify, on many levels, is not the right marketplace for you.

Sadek Ali: Shopify and Shopify Plus are great products, but they’re not the best products for the mid-market.

Bootstrapping by Piggybacking: Evenica CEO Sadek Ali (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You had a diverse set of e-commerce platforms that were in that portfolio.

Sadek Ali: That’s correct. We didn’t really know what the platform was. I picked up technologies my entire life. If you understand how e-commerce works, then you know the operational side of it that they’re looking for. We did that and we said, “Let’s make sure our contracts are easy. Let’s make sure we have happy customers and let’s make sure we have a happy culture in this little group of three.”

They liked our hands-on approach and they liked being able to have an open and honest conversation about e-commerce. We got our three customers monetized right away. For two customers, it took us two years. We still had the contract for them, but they wouldn’t pay us a penny. We had to be persistent because we wanted that conversation with them.

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.

Bootstrapping by Piggybacking: Evenica CEO Sadek Ali (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: They replaced you as the CEO.

Sadek Ali: They tried to. I was the Founder and CTO. My business partner was the CEO. They hired a CEO.

Sramana Mitra: The business got replaced by their CEO.

Sadek Ali: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: That didn’t go well.

Building a 2-sided Farm to Table Marketplace from Indiana: Nick Carter, CEO of Market Wagon (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What happens when COVID strikes?

Nick Carter: Everything in our company is measured on week-over-week sales. I can remember my co-founder texting me one Sunday afternoon saying, “We had a nice week today.” The sales volume grew 600% in one week. It’s because everybody had to stay home. They needed delivery. The traditional supply chain could not keep up with the demand.

Bootstrapping by Piggybacking: Evenica CEO Sadek Ali (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You joined that other company, but you kept the software services that was going in parallel.

Sadek Ali: Correct. Then we ended the business when I went to New York. From there, I came home because I felt that I had enough experience to do my own raise with my own ideas. In this next company, I was doing crypto and all that stuff. I learned how to do a raise and had my biggest failure at that point. It was then that I finished my PhD.

Sramana Mitra: What didn’t work in crypto?

Building a 2-sided Farm to Table Marketplace from Indiana: Nick Carter, CEO of Market Wagon (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: From your network, how big of a consumer base were you able to pull together?

Nick Carter: We got to about 70 to 80 orders a week, which is $2,500 to $3,000 in sales. It was enough of a critical mass.

Sramana Mitra: How long did it stay in just Indianapolis?

Nick Carter: The first year.

Bootstrapping by Piggybacking: Evenica CEO Sadek Ali (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You started doing programming work for this one company. What happens after that?

Sadek Ali: Once I had gotten that particular gig, the actual relationship lasted about two years. It happened to be with OpenText. This is where I got immersed with search technologies. I fell in love with them at that time. My brother and I took a look at how to deal with large data intractable problems. We looked at image processing and environmental systems. That led me into doing my Masters.