She saw the same gap from two sides. Then she built the bridge.

Katerina didn't find the gap in flexible work by doing market research. She fell into it twice.

The first time was as a small business owner. She and her brother run a Windows and Doors company in the Greater Toronto Area. At one point she was running sales, HR, and marketing at the same time — and when she needed to hire someone, she ran into a wall. The platforms built for hiring are designed for full-time roles and hundreds of applicants. But she only needed someone for five, ten, maybe twenty hours a week. There was no clean way to find that person quickly.

The second time was as a mother. After having children, she saw the problem from the other side: skilled, experienced people who wanted to work but couldn't fit a traditional 9-to-5 into their lives anymore. The structure had stopped making sense, but no one had built an alternative specifically for them.

Both experiences pointed at the same gap. Momploy is her answer to it.

What Momploy does

Momploy is a Toronto GTA platform connecting small businesses that need part-time and flexible support with skilled parents looking for work that fits around their lives.

The pitch to businesses is simple: post a job for free, get matched quickly, skip the hundreds of irrelevant applications that come with national job boards. The pitch to parents is equally direct: a platform that was built with your constraints in mind, not retrofitted to tolerate them.

What separates Momploy from a general job board is the trust layer. Katerina built in candidate interviews and ID verification — features that large national platforms don't bother with at this level, but that matter enormously when a small business in Mississauga is considering hiring someone to work in their home or with their team. Local trust is not a feature you can scale into existence. It has to be designed from the start.

The hardest part of building a marketplace

Marketplaces are hard to start because they need both sides before either side has a reason to show up.

Katerina navigated this the honest way: manually. She convinced the first businesses herself. She interviewed the first parent candidates herself. She did the trust-building work that the platform would eventually automate, by hand, until there were enough people on both sides to create momentum.

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The idea is easy. Turning it into an actual platform — the technology, pricing, privacy, marketing — and getting real people to use it is a completely different challenge.

There were moments, she says, where the question surfaced: What am I doing? But the answer came every time a parent signed up or a business showed interest. That's the signal that matters most for a founder solving a problem they've personally experienced: the reminder of exactly why they started.

Why Toronto, why now

The GTA small business community is large, underserved by national platforms, and operates on local trust. Momploy's decision to be Toronto-first is not a limitation — it's the strategy. Local specificity is what national platforms cannot replicate, and it's what makes a parent or employer feel like they're dealing with something built for their community, not just their search query.

The way people work has also genuinely changed. Part-time, flexible, and project-based work is no longer a fallback — it's a preferred model for a growing segment of the workforce and an increasingly common need for small businesses that can't afford or don't need full-time overhead.

Katerina built Momploy at the intersection of those two shifts. And in the GTA, that intersection is large.