To those of you that have kept up with us, we appreciate your readership and support. Everything has been invaluable for a couple young guys trying to start something up. As a marketing company, we’ve
been able to grab a few clients and expand our online marketing ability. It’s all about developing a knack for what’s interesting or cool or fresh. It’s been a fun experience not only growing, but keeping ourselves fed… and a little buzzd too.
However, we all have the big visions and the projects we’re working on and we’re still trying to figure out exactly what to do with Tastevine — we were caught up in the wine 2.0 euphoria of ‘07 and put out a wine community and recommendation engine that had some value. However, every time people saw us as the Facebook of wine, we knew that something was off. We realized that in the effort of creating something that would make wine fun, sexy and fluid, we actually found ourselves not even using what we created!
Why is this? Probably because the only type of people that were attracted to a wine community are winos themselves. Not people like us that don’t know anything about wine. People that are young want a sexy brand that brings in new wines from around the world that actually taste GOOD — young palettes like ours are picky and we need something subtle, sweet, but yet still sophisticated. After we find a brand with these type of wines, we’d love to use them to develop our taste and get involved in an online system that helps us find new recommendations.
So how do you make this work and actually build something that will help us learn about our taste in wine and help us find cool wines without the intimidation factor — oh ya, and how the hell do we find a business model that would get funded? After Snooth came out with $1M in funding we had a BOD from a top 3 US wholesaler offer us 500K to rock it out, but to be honest, we didn’t want to waste his money.
However, after a year, we’ve realized the importance of tenacity and persistence and have had ourselves an epiphany — we’re going to create our own wines! Tastevine wines! We get to taste them to make sure their right, we get to pick where they come from, we get to throw the parties to see how people like them, and oh ya, we get to finally have some wines that can initiate us into the damn system that we built! The really cool part is that we can finally team up with the partners that got us into this game and import and distribute some great stuff. All of sudden things have become fun again.
