Vivino, a startup and app provides recommendations for wine and also doubles as a marketplace for buying and selling wine.  Vivino is now the world’s largest online wine marketplace.  In their latest round of Series D funding, Vivino raised $ 155 million spurred by the rapid rise in their user base from 29 million in 2018 to 50 million currently.  The funding will be used to improve its core technology and personalized recommendation engine, while also expanding its presence in key growth markets globally.

How did a startup which began as a wine rating app end up becoming as big as it is now?  Read on to know about the incredible journey of Vivino.

Beginnings

Vivino was founded in 2010 by Danish entrepreneur Heini Zachariassen and Theis Søndergaard in Copenhagen, Denmark.  It all began when Heini was at a local supermarket to purchase wine and could not decide which wine was good and which was bad.  His only indication to make the choice was to go by looking at the labels on the bottles.  It was then Heini realised that there was an opportunity to build something which lets users rate the wines which was similar to how Amazon lets users rate books and IMDB lets users rate movies.  

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Growth

When Vivino launched, there were hundreds if not thousands of apps available on the market which gave ratings for wines.  Most of these apps were owned by people who are experts on wines and knew the market from top to bottom.  Heini Zachariassen came from a software background and looked at the problem differently.  After talking to users and customers Heini realised the problem boiled down to ‘is this bottle of wine good or bad?’  

At the time of the launch, there was not much information available on the app.  Vivino needed to look at the label on the wine bottle before providing information about the wine.  Therefore, Vivino gathered as many labels as they could and added them to their database.  The first breakthrough came when they offered a corkscrew for free to whoever uploaded the most number of label images thereby gaining 50,000 pictures.  Vivino got as many wine labels as they could find and sent them to India.  There people were manually looking at wine labels, researching information about those wines and adding as much information as possible to the app.  Initially traction was slow, but when users saw the effort being put in adding the list of wines, organic growth slowly increased.  

Vivino focussed on building the best product and not the perfect product.  Considering that there would always be some wines missing, the goal was to go for the best product.  Today they have information on 200,000 producers, 10 million wines and 1.3 billion photos of different wine labels in the app.  Key priorities were based on three factors namely wine rating, price and the taste of the wine.  Vivino built a machine learning tool which reads all the reviews and puts together a structured description of the wine taste.  This feature turned out to be a huge hit.

Today Vivino established itself as a market leader in their space and has over 700 suppliers around the world.  Vivino now has 50 million downloads and is hundred times bigger than the number 2 wine app Delectable.

Let us know in the comments if you have ever used Vivino or will begin using it after reading this article!