Building the app while on sabbatical from Microsoft in 2003, Eric LeVine, CEO and founder of CellarTracker, had been close to a one-person show until recently.  Yet, he’s built one of the most useful productivity tools for wine collectors, an engaged community of geeky wine lovers, and a respectable business that he’s now investing in to grow and take to new heights for the benefit of the CellarTracker community.  Eric’s openness and candor provide an in-depth look at how one of the leading wine platforms was founded, built, and where it’s going next. Detailed Show Notes:Eric’s background“Tech geek” to “wine geek”He was at Microsoft from 1992 - 2005; his last project was the “send error report” feature1999 - took a biking trip to Tuscany and fell in love with wine and started collectingBuilt a tool to keep track of his cellar, then let a few friends use it, which morphed a personal spreadsheet into a relational databaseEric created CellarTracker while on sabbatical from Microsoft in 2003, then in April 2004, launched it publicly and left Microsoft a few months laterCellarTracker overviewCore element - a productivity tool to catalog and manage every aspect of the wine experience (e.g., purchasing, tracking, consuming)Byproduct - “Yelp for wine” - the aggregated wisdom of the community from tasting notes, drinking windowsUser base10M unique people visit the site~750k registered users~300k active usersWine database4M wines created135M bottles in cellars9.1M tasting notes in the community + 1.3M professional tasting notesFeatures and functionsOptical recognition of labels - partners with VivinoMost used features - tasting notes (~10M visitors/year on the website, most people reading or researching the tasting notes; ~9.1M tasting notes growing ~750k / year / ~2k / day)Features collectors use - what wines do they have, when do they want to drink them, what are wines worth (the main premium feature)Wine valuations - partner with Wine Market Journal for appraisals, overlaid with what people are paying for the wines in CellarTrackerDrinking windows - updated by users, partnership with review publications to overlay their data for subscribers of their contentSurprise & Delight feature - the ability to print a restaurant-style wine listGeekiest feature - can print unique barcodes for your bottles and use a scanner to check them in and outDefault mode - creates a unique barcode for each specific bottleFor restaurants - uses same code for each wine of a particular sizeConducted research into the wine collector space~18M people in the US store wine at home / in a wine fridge~10% awareness of CellarTracker in the US~5-10% awareness of CellarTracker globallyData analyticsThey just hired the 1st data scientist several weeks ago (as of Oct 2021)They haven’t done a lot to dateUser ratings - can track/follow specific authors, most often used for older wines at auction as one of the only sources of data for older winesRichard Bazinet authored research in 2016 of an analysis of community ratings vs. professional publicationsNever specifically built tools to enhance “influencers” in the system, was anti “gamification” elements to incentivize people to write tasting notesData accuracy - has a team of 4 (some PT/ some FT) to curate the wine database and look for duplicates, use both automation and humans to have duplicate detectionBusiness model“Voluntary Payment” - one of the early “Freemium” business modelsEstablished this because the value of CellarTracker is in the active community, and the data it creates makes the platform more robust and valuableSuggested payment based on the size of collection - avg ~$57/year$40/year for <500 bottles$80/year for 500-999 bottles$160/year for 1,000+ bottlesThe lowest payment is $20, and some pay thousandsThe majority of revenue comes from thisSome ads, but not in the appAffiliate links with Wine-Searcher - the #2 referral source after GoogleKey differentiators of CellarTrackerCellar management - hardcore focus