Building the app while on sabbatical from Microsoft in 2003, Eric LeVine, CEO and founder of CellarTracker, had been close to a one-person show until recently. Yet, he’s built one of the most useful productivity tools for wine collectors, an engaged community of geeky wine lovers, and a respectable business that he’s now investing in to grow and take to new heights for the benefit of the CellarTracker community. Eric’s openness and candor provide an in-depth look at how one of the leading wine platforms was founded, built, and where it’s going next.
Detailed Show Notes:
- Eric’s background
- “Tech geek” to “wine geek”
- He was at Microsoft from 1992 - 2005; his last project was the “send error report” feature
- 1999 - took a biking trip to Tuscany and fell in love with wine and started collecting
- Built a tool to keep track of his cellar, then let a few friends use it, which morphed a personal spreadsheet into a relational database
- Eric created CellarTracker while on sabbatical from Microsoft in 2003, then in April 2004, launched it publicly and left Microsoft a few months later
- CellarTracker overview
- Core element - a productivity tool to catalog and manage every aspect of the wine experience (e.g., purchasing, tracking, consuming)
- Byproduct - “Yelp for wine” - the aggregated wisdom of the community from tasting notes, drinking windows
- User base
- 10M unique people visit the site
- ~750k registered users
- ~300k active users
- Wine database
- 4M wines created
- 135M bottles in cellars
- 9.1M tasting notes in the community + 1.3M professional tasting notes
- Features and functions
- Optical recognition of labels - partners with Vivino
- Most used features - tasting notes (~10M visitors/year on the website, most people reading or researching the tasting notes; ~9.1M tasting notes growing ~750k / year / ~2k / day)
- Features collectors use - what wines do they have, when do they want to drink them, what are wines worth (the main premium feature)
- Wine valuations - partner with Wine Market Journal for appraisals, overlaid with what people are paying for the wines in CellarTracker
- Drinking windows - updated by users, partnership with review publications to overlay their data for subscribers of their content
- Surprise & Delight feature - the ability to print a restaurant-style wine list
- Geekiest feature - can print unique barcodes for your bottles and use a scanner to check them in and out
- Default mode - creates a unique barcode for each specific bottle
- For restaurants - uses same code for each wine of a particular size
- Conducted research into the wine collector space
- ~18M people in the US store wine at home / in a wine fridge
- ~10% awareness of CellarTracker in the US
- ~5-10% awareness of CellarTracker globally
- Data analytics
- They just hired the 1st data scientist several weeks ago (as of Oct 2021)
- They haven’t done a lot to date
- User ratings - can track/follow specific authors, most often used for older wines at auction as one of the only sources of data for older wines
- Richard Bazinet authored research in 2016 of an analysis of community ratings vs. professional publications
- Never specifically built tools to enhance “influencers” in the system, was anti “gamification” elements to incentivize people to write tasting notes
- Data accuracy - has a team of 4 (some PT/ some FT) to curate the wine database and look for duplicates, use both automation and humans to have duplicate detection
- Business model
- “Voluntary Payment” - one of the early “Freemium” business models
- Established this because the value of CellarTracker is in the active community, and the data it creates makes the platform more robust and valuable
- Suggested payment based on the size of collection - avg ~$57/year
- $40/year for <500 bottles
- $80/year for 500-999 bottles
- $160/year for 1,000+ bottles
- The lowest payment is $20, and some pay thousands
- The majority of revenue comes from this
- Some ads, but not in the app
- Affiliate links with Wine-Searcher - the #2 referral source after Google
- Key differentiators of CellarTracker
- Cellar management - hardcore focus on scalable needs of collectors
- Good engagement - attracted a set of people who keep coming back
- Community - an “authoritative” audience - more geeky people that are in the community
- Focus on privacy, needs of the community, up-time, neutrality (not affiliated with retailers or other businesses)
- The next horizon for CellarTracker
- Building a team - was only 3 people at the start of 2021, the goal is to be 11 by year-end (data scientists, engineers, UI designer)
- Upgrade & deepen the existing experience, especially mobile app - they have seen a significant shift to mobile over the last 10 years,
- More recommendations and automation of different scenarios
- Connection to industry/wineries/other parts of the wine ecosystem (no natural interfaces today)
- Better understand and engage with the 10M people who visit the CellarTracker website - many of whom use it as a research platform
- Brought on a group of angel investors to reinvest cash flow into the business
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