Kateryna Eisen.

Katerina didn't arrive at Momploy through a business school case study or a venture pitch. She arrived through lived experience — twice over. The first time was as a small business owner. She and her brother run a Windows and Doors company in the Greater Toronto Area, and at one point she was managing sales, HR, and marketing simultaneously while her brother handled installations and vendors. When she needed to hire, she hit a wall: the platforms designed to fill jobs were built around full-time roles and hundreds of applicants, but she only needed someone for five, ten, or twenty hours a week. There was no good way to find that person quickly and reliably. The second experience came when she became a mother. From the other side of the same problem, she saw how many skilled, experienced, motivated people were effectively locked out of the workforce — not because they couldn't work, but because the traditional 9-to-5 structure had stopped making sense for their lives. Those two vantage points, employer and parent, converged into one question: why isn't there something built specifically for this?

Marketplaces are hard. Not because the idea is complicated — the idea is simple and the need is obvious — but because a marketplace has two sides, and both sides need to be present before either side sees value. If there are no businesses posting jobs, parents won't come back. If there are no parents on the platform, businesses won't bother posting. Katerina navigated this cold-start problem the hard way: showing up manually, convincing the first businesses to try, interviewing the first parents herself, and building local trust through direct involvement before any algorithm could do it at scale. Beyond the marketplace mechanics, there was everything else: the technology, the pricing model, the privacy considerations, the marketing. Every piece had to be figured out without a playbook. There were moments — she is candid about this — where the question 'What am I doing?' surfaced. But the answer came every time a parent signed up or a business showed interest: a reminder of exactly why she started.

Momploy is live and operating in the Greater Toronto Area — Toronto's first platform specifically designed to match skilled parents with small businesses that need part-time, flexible, project-based support. The platform includes features that larger job boards don't bother with at this level: candidate interviews and ID verification, which add a layer of local trust that parents and businesses operating in the same community need and respond to. Small businesses get instant matching and simple, free job posts. Parents get access to a platform that was actually built with their constraints in mind. For a founder who identified the gap from inside it, watching both sides of the marketplace grow is the validation that matters.

Three things Katerina returns to most often. First: the best business ideas come from problems you've actually lived. She didn't research the flexible-work gap in a spreadsheet — she experienced it as an employer struggling to hire and as a mother trying to re-enter the workforce. That direct experience gave her a clarity about what the product needed to do that no amount of market research could replicate. Second: in a two-sided marketplace, trust is the actual product. Anyone can build a job board. The thing that makes Momploy different in the GTA is the local layer — the interview process, the ID checks, the community feel that a national platform cannot manufacture. Third: the moments of doubt are part of it. The question 'What am I doing?' is not a sign to stop. It is a sign that you are doing something real.