AH! Grailey’s, basically.
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If you’re talking about taking a big chunk of the alcohol market, that’s about building brand names, like Budweiser, White Claw, Gallo and that domain. Celebrity branding can do it. As stated above, that’s conventional, not really a tech thing.
With tech, we already see these facebook ad companies. They carve out a niche of some sort to differentiate what they’re doing (usually scare tactics and deceptive health claims). Then, what they’re selling is subscriptions to a wine club. So, they can broker inexpensive wines from southern France and other such low cost areas, have streamlined costs, take a good margin. They’re selling a curation service. Managed well, that can be more sustainable. But, it’s not unconventional, other than the marketing. And, it doesn’t require VC money.
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FWIW, I totally agree and have scaled my team from 4 to 14 (with contractors) over the past 18 months, and we are hard at work on a lot of updates, backend and mobile especially.
BTW this snippet from the article was interesting:
So I guess CT is a mediocre success? 
I am OK with that. It is important to know one’s lane and what they are good at (and not good at).
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Eric, is there somewhere we can keep track of updates? I don’t think I’ve heard of any since I started using CT.
Yeah, facelifts are SO easy to implement - NOBODY complains 
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We have not historically been great about posting on updates, but part of the expanded team is marketing/comms. So watch our social channels. And sometimes we post here: Release Notes
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Haha - @ToddFrench and @Eric_LeVine, thank you both for all the work you do. No system is perfect, but yours are two I widely use and appreciate.
Hey Todd, can you just make the site “prettier”?
Careful. He might just start placing his selfies all over.
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Cue in Alfert sculpted calf pic from bike!
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Most of the discussion has been on the consumer side of “wine tech”, but curious whether there has been any traction on the producer side? I’m a newbie here and not in the wine industry but on the surface it would seem this might be a promising area (at least relative to consumer).
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what?! i thought the payment plan starts soon!?
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I was about to post something similar. This is a hobby and industry where we can’t even convince people to adopt screwcaps and glass closures en masse. It’s not an industry in which tech should be invested. A waste of money and time.
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Equanimity is a good thing Eric! From my perspective CT is a crazy success. Very high quality product with a devoted customer base and a good enough business model (I assume) to sustain and improve over many years. That’s a winner.
But. From the classic VC point of view, a success is one that returns 10x, or better still, 100x the original investment. This perspective creates massive instability, discontinuities, and barely rational decision making in the face of the desire to get rich/massive. In short - go big or go home (with nothing). It’s a crazy system here in late stage capitalism but luckily there is lots of room for other paths.
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Eric - make no mistake about it - CellarTracker is a tremendous success by many standards, most importantly user loyalty and appreciation (I know I’m just of many who rely on CT on a daily basis). Now, whether it has been financially viable or not - well, that’s for you to know privately. I think your success comes from several factors:
- Sensible Scope - you’ve ramped it over the years in a realistic and methodical manner…your MS and programming background is evident in the modality of growth. Kudos to restraint and sound proof of concept before proceeding to next gen.
- Organic Growth - the challenge with PIX (or dozens of others) is that the influx of investor monies naturally includes rapid growth and risk…often too much too fast. It is a common site in the Tech world graveyard - companies that took on too much debt or staff or bit off huge chunks that could not be digested fast enough.
- Focus - CT isn’t trying to be all things to all users…there are many aspects that could be leveraged, but it would dilute the overall success and core value of CT as an inventory management tool and a community review center.
A hearty THANKS and congrats on the longevity of your labor of love…many of us greatly appreciate it on a daily basis.
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I think from a VC perspective, one issue I’ve heard repeatedly is that while the overall wine market is quite large, because it’s so hugely segmented it’s quite difficult identifying opportunities on a scale significant enough to merit investment. Especially given the very tight regulation and entrenched interests already in place for some parts of that market.
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More generally, a rollup is strategy where a well-funded entity goes around buying out smaller businesses in the same general space, consolidates & standardizes their operations, creates efficiencies, and thereby generates outsize financial returns. Rollups tend to make sense in theory, but can be tremendous headaches in practice
Especially true in this brave new world where Series A round sizes are in the tens of millions…
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