How SudShare CEO Nachshon Fertel grew SudShare to $2.5M revenue and 3K customers in 2022.

hey folks my guest today is mort fortel he's a serial entrepreneur who started his first business at 18 years old he has a private equity portfolio that consists of sud share two other businesses and real estate holdings sud share is basically uber for laundry we're going to jump into it today more you ready to take us to the top yes let's do it all right so how did you how did you get in is this just a space that's sort of unsexy no one's thinking about and you said there's an opportunity here sort of it started in 2017 with one comment my wife made she was home with five kids buried in laundry and she's like this is crazy i can tamp an app and get to the airport face time someone on the other side of the world but i'm still doing laundry like my grandmother and she was right technology's made everything so fast and easy except for this chore that we hate the most and that takes the longest longer it's actually shocking there's been no innovation in this space since the washer and dryer almost a century ago so my son was in the laundry room at the time and he's a typical teenager he was 16 years old he's like look i'm not helping you with the laundry mom but i can solve this problem for you i'll build you an app so we thought he was kidding but we homeschooled our kids and we taught them you could do anything and he believed us and so he looked at what uber was doing and he went and built this business and it launched in baltimore in 2018 uh and uh we haven't looked back it's been growing like crazy ever since and i've been helping him you know with the business so what is growth how do you measure growth here is it pounds of laundry clean per week or what well we've been growing about 10 to 30 percent a month every single month for a couple of years now but what i'm asking is how do you measure growth is it revenue is it pounds of laundry done is it number of trips to the laundromat what is it we have multiple kpis that we monitor on a monthly basis um of course gmv which is you know fancy terminology marketplace terminology for revenue um also new customer acquisition um those are two key kpis that we look at interesting okay so are you focused full time on helping your son with such share are you managing a larger portfolio of companies as well when it started a few years ago it was mostly him because it was mostly you know creating the technology building the apps all the technology in the background i can't write a line of code so he was working over all that but after we launched and as we started to grow and the apps really got traction so then it really became a business and we became um i mean we were always partners and co-founders but i became much more active in the business at that point i mean now it's the point where i spend 99 of my time on sunshare fascinating and how old is your son today uh he was 16 at a start he's now 21. how much equity did you were able to get out of him we both had a substantial portion of equity but did he did he did he say dad i'm keeping more of it you gotta you're taking less than me uh no no i always had uh controlling interest okay so what did you write sort of a check up front to help him sort of have some money to build the thing or what sort of gave you that that ability to command more equity um yes i i wrote the check he's 15. he's 15 right all right so 21 is he skipping college or is he all in on sunshare he's no college he uh in fact even in high school um well he was homeschooled through eighth grade and then in high school he went to a boarding school but he only um it's called a yeshiva it's a place of religious study for jewish people and normally the curriculum is that half the day they spend with religious studies the other half in their secular studies so for him he opted out of the secular studies and was working on such sheer interesting and then when he graduated high school he actually never graduated coincidentally or interestingly he's a high school dropout um but he didn't go to college he's the co-founder and cto of such chair and spends full time on it now oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're gonna get a different 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you that we have uh over 90 000 substitutes nationwide and what does that mean convert your language to our audience language what does substr mean oh sorry that's what we call the launderers okay so this is that's a heck of a name too but i just finished watching ozark when i hear a laundry or i don't think someone that does laundry i think something else but these are people that do the laundry in cities across around the globe right so this is it's a peer-to-peer marketplace so just think uber for laundry no no i understand that i'm trying to flesh out the marketplace so there's there's 90 are these all in the u.s are they global you all in the us right now okay all in the u.s any any city if i open the app here in austin texas i can use it yep we're in 400 markets nationwide we're pretty much everywhere except for farmland manhattan and san francisco interesting and okay that's interesting so why not manhattan san francisco so if you think about the business model we need our substituters to have a car because they pick up and deliver the laundry as well as do it um and then we need for them to be accessible to the customer so in manhattan not even rich people have cars you know unless uh people that are uh you know sort of middle-income people that are doing laundry for a living and same thing with downtown you know san francisco pretty much every other city nationwide is is is is accessible for our sunsters uh but that's why we're not in manhattan and san francisco and and are these 90 000 building a living on your platform full-time do they all get work every month are they sort of in and out as demand peaks or falls so it's as they wish um we have people that do it full time our top sensor makes about five thousand dollars a month okay um and what does that convert to like can you make how many loads of laundry is that i guess well it's about um i mean they get paid 75 cents per pound so i guess that's what about seven thousand pounds of laundry seven thousand pounds what's i don't even know what's the average what's the average round of laundry measure in pounds you mean the average load of laundry yeah sorry average load of laundry yeah so a typical washer dryer load is about seven or eight pounds interesting okay yes and is it i mean she she's doing it...