At your startup, you want to build a product to help people discover wine. What do you do?

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At your startup, you want to build a product to help people discover wine. What do you do?

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Bobate · Answer 1 · 2021-02-01T04:14:01+0000

Assumptions:

Assuming this startup is based in the US
Who are the founders? Wine industry/ Winery owners? Tech guys?
'Discover' wine could mean 2 things - enabling non-wine drinkers to appreciate wine, and enabling wine enthusiats to find new wines to try. For now lets assume both forms of 'discovery' are relavent.
While we focus on US customers, Wine itself is global product. We wont restrict to US wines.

I usually like to start with a vision and goal inb mind,however in this case as wedont have a sense of founder goals/identity I'll start with users and fortmulate a vision based on that.

User segemnts:

Non wine drinkers : Folks who dont drink wine for taste or religious or other reasons. (exclude)
Wine curious : Interested to learn about wine, want to drink more of it.
1. Pain points: Learning about wine can be daunting, Trying bad wines can put them off, discovery problem, education problem
Wine enthusiasts : Passionate about wine. They visit wineries and subscribe to wine magazines.
1. Pain points: Access to wines they want, keeping up with latest info, Access to wine related experiences, access to other wine enthusiasts
Wine industry - Winery owners/manufactures/distributors
1. Goals/requirements - sell more wine. Make high quality wine and make themselves known
Wine industry - Wine educators, reviewers etc.
1. Goals/needs - build reputation.

I'll choose wine enthusiasts as they are already interested and likely willing to try a product that helps them engage more deeply with wine. I also think the wine curious group is interesting but may be more challenging to get them to adopt as they have other alcohol options. Besides, if we build a compelling product for enthusiatswe can find a way to expand it to serve the curiou folks too. The risk of choosing enthusiasts is that they may be a few in number so total target market might be small. I'd surely perform a market sizing exercise to make sure there are enough target customers to make sure the effort is worthwhile.

Solutions:

Wine subscription club + recommendation engine
Wine 'tourism'
Yelp for wine

Wine 'book' club

Solution	Details	Impact	Cost	Challenges/risks
Wine recommendation engine + Subscription	Users key in some basic interests/choose wines they like and we can develop and algorithm to recommend next wines	Low Users h ave magazines/others ways to discover wines	Med	1. Data cold start 2. Validity of recommendations
Wine 'tourism'	Create curated travel experiences	Low Some form of wine tourism already exists.	Med	Can we differentiate
Yelp for wine	Wine reviews	High	High	Data cold start
Wine book club	Select a new wine, match a group of people and get them together to have a hangout to discuss wine they had	High	Med	network cold start

I choose Wine book club as the impact is high and cost low. While there are risks of network coldstart, Ithink ti addresses enough user pain points to become a compelling product/service. I would startoff by creating a quickand dirtyMVP by getting a few people to sign up (maybe via interet ads) and manually setting up a few discussion to make sure there is interest among the target market for such a service. A concern that comes to mind is, will weh ave returning users? It might a once and done type of experience for most people. To overcome this challenge we can expand the service to include other stakeholders such as reviewers and winery owners to create engaging and richer experiences.