The story of how Homsomm came to be……
Father’s Day, 2013, I got a phone call that forever changed how I think about the work/ life/ family dynamic. My youngest sister called that evening to tell me that my dad was in the ICU in a Detroit hospital - on oxygen. Stunned, I thought, “Here we go.” Thoughts of having to support more than just my own nuclear family started to race through my mind. How was I going to assimilate life without my father? He was hanging on to life with blood clots in his lungs, the doctor said. My father was a very accomplished businessman that worked extremely hard. He was dedicated to helping people and his business units always performed at a high level. His ability to perform all changed in an instant - the moment he stepped off that plane and collapsed just inside the terminal. Fortunately, the person waiting to pick him up got him to a hospital as fast as she could.
In this moment, none of us were there to help him - all of us in different states – including my mom. It was a helpless feeling. My youngest sister, a nurse in Alaska, caught the first flight to Detroit to be with him at his bedside. It took the docs four days to get him stabilized. And it was another five days before he was released from the hospital to go back to Chicago, where he was living at the time.
In those hours, days, and weeks before we realized that he was going to make a full recovery, I had a huge mental shift in how I thought about my work, my life, and my family. I began asking myself, “Am I going to spend my days grinding away at a job that doesn’t fit me OR am I going to do something that makes me get out of bed in the morning?” The answer to that question was the impetus for launching my own business.
Months later, my dad decided to celebrate life on his birthday with his entire family. He took us to Napa Valley. He knows people […wink] that have wineries and so we stayed at a friend’s lovely vineyard farmhouse. In that long weekend, we visited a few other wineries and there the seed was planted for this labor of love called Homsomm. It is the wine app that I’m sure everyone I know has heard about – at least once - but I digress…
On this birthday trip, I began to realize and understand the complexity of wine, and my love for it. Every wine had a story. Every winemaker had ten. As I sat with each winemaker and listened to their stories, it seemed to bring life to each sip of wine. Questions started running through my head:
- How do I repeat this experience?
- How do I share this experience with others?
- How do I help the small family wineries?
- How do I help the average wine enthusiast enjoy managing their collection?
- And can I scale it?
Every stop we made, I bought at least a few new bottles of wine, if not a case. Needless to say, I started collecting that weekend. I think I flew back home to GA with three or four cases of wine. Since then, my collection has expanded and so have my questions about wine. Now that I have been a collector for several years, problems have arisen. Yes, I have wine problems. As my collection has gotten larger - and now combined with my father’s and sister’s wines - the problems have become crystal clear:
- What do I have? (Do I have a nice white/rose/red for this meal?)
- Where is it? (In a room full of bottles, it takes a while.)
- When should I drink it? (Drinking wine at its peak is money well-spent. Otherwise, you’re pouring it over rice and beans, or worse yet, pouring it down the drain.)
- When do I need more? (If I’m down to the last couple of bottles of my favorite Napa Cab, I’d like to know.)
The first three questions were enough to get us started. Fast-forward almost five years and three software frameworks later – with a whole lot of blood, sweat, and tears – and viola! we have Homsomm. It is the mobile app that enables you to snap a pic of your wine bottle, reads the label, and delivers some important information about it. As you add wine to your collection, you will have the ability to view drinkability reports, and tasting and pairing notes, and share lists with friends. Imagine this: You will know the what/ where/ when[s] of every bottle of wine in your collection – the Home Sommelier! (We shortened it to Homsomm so it would fit under an icon.)
There will be much more to come as this story unfolds. Thank you for being a part of this journey with me. I look forward to many more updates about this app and its story very soon.
Until then…#WineDifferently
Josh
