How a Solo Founder Built SaaS for Farmers Markets

**Fexingo** (0:01)
So, a friend of mine runs a farmers market outside Portland, and every Sunday, she's juggling vendor applications, stall fees, and a waitlist that never shrinks. She told me she finally moved off spreadsheets, and I thought, okay, there's got to be a story here.

**Lucas** (0:18)
I was just about to ask if that's even a real software category. Turns out it is.

**Fexingo** (0:24)
It is. And that's exactly what this episode is about.
A solo founder named Emily Chun built a SaaS for farmers markets, and she's now got something like 400 markets on the platform. But the interesting part isn't the scale, how she got there.

**Lucas** (0:41)
Let me guess, she started with a spreadsheet herself.

**Fexingo** (0:45)
She did. She was volunteering at a market in Ohio, and the manager was literally printing out vendor lists and crossing names off with a pen. Emily offered to build a simple database, and that turned into a product called Marketworks. Not the most creative name, but it works.

**Lucas** (1:03)
Marketworks.
I like it. So what was the moment she realized this could be a business?

**Fexingo** (1:09)
She told me it was when another market manager saw her system and asked if she could use it too. That's the classic signal.
Someone else wants what you built for yourself. She charged them 50 bucks a month, and I think that first paying customer changed everything.

**Lucas** (1:26)
50 bucks a month feels low, but for a small market, that's probably nothing compared to the time saved.

**Fexingo** (1:33)
Exactly. And that's the thing about these micro-niche vertical SaaS products. The price point has to match the customer's pain, not your ambition. Farmers markets aren't tech companies.
They're often run by volunteers or part-time coordinators. So her pricing had to be approachable.

**Lucas** (1:53)
So how does she actually handle the tech? Because farmers market managers are not exactly early adopters.

**Fexingo** (2:01)
That's the key challenge. Emily had to design for people who might not be comfortable with software. So the interface is dead simple. Big buttons, clear labels, no jargon.
She even has a phone support line, which is unheard of for most SaaS.

**Lucas** (2:17)
Phone support? That's a different kind of commitment.

**Fexingo** (2:21)
It is. But she realized early on that her users needed someone to walk them through things. And that personal touch is actually her moat. The big software companies aren't going to bother with this niche and definitely not with phone support.

**Lucas** (2:36)
So what does the software actually do? I'm imagining vendor applications, but there's got to be more.

**Fexingo** (2:43)
There's quite a bit. You've got vendor applications and approvals, which sounds simple but involves health certificates and insurance documents. You've got stall assignments, so the market manager can drag and drop vendors to different spots. And then there's the fee tracking. Most markets charge per stall or a percentage of sales, and that gets messy fast.
You bet.

**Lucas** (3:07)
I've seen farmers markets where vendors pay in cash at the start of the day. That's a bookkeeping nightmare.

**Fexingo** (3:14)
That's exactly the pain.
Emily built in a payment tracking module, and she told me that's actually what sold the product to a lot of markets. They didn't realize they needed software until they saw that feature.

**Lucas** (3:27)
And what about the seasonal aspect? Farmers markets are not year-round for most places.

**Fexingo** (3:33)
That's a big deal.
Her pricing is monthly, but she lets markets pause their subscription during the off season. That's a brilliant move because it lowers the barrier to trying it. You're not committing to a full year.

**Lucas** (3:47)
That's smart. It also builds loyalty. When the market comes back, they know they've got a system that works.

**Fexingo** (3:55)
And it worked. She's got 400 markets now, and she's completely bootstrapped. No outside funding.
She's profitable, which is more than you can say for a lot of SaaS companies.

**Lucas** (4:07)
What's the biggest lesson you took away from her story?

**Fexingo** (4:11)
I think it's that you don't need a huge market to build a great business. You need a group of people with a specific problem and a willingness to pay.
That's it. Farmers markets are a perfect example. There are thousands of them in the US alone, and most are run with paper and intuition.

**Lucas** (4:30)
And that's something big tech overlooks because their revenue per customer is small. But add it up, and it's a solid business.

**Fexingo** (4:38)
Exactly. And she's proof that you don't need to be in Silicon Valley to figure this out. She's in Ohio.
She built this on a laptop at her kitchen table, and she's now making a real income from it.