Real Solutions for Real Wine

I am excited to announce that I am back in the wine biz. Yno Software is now a business and its first product, Yno Neighborly, was just released as an app on Commerce7’s CRM platform. The Yno Software credo is to develop software specifically for D2C “real wine” producers. These small businesses are near-and-dear to my heart and I hope to help them by producing small, practical apps that will help boost their bottom line without breaking the bank. I call these, “real solutions for real wine”.

The Real Wine Part

I have been a wine enthusiast all my adult life. Living in the SF Bay Area I’ve had the privilege of touring nearby wine regions, including Napa, Sonoma, and the Santa Cruz mountains. Over the last 40 years I’ve literally watched the CA wine industry explode in front of me. A little over 10 years ago I decided to get in on the ground floor as a wine educator. Tasting rooms are magical places where the wine curious become wine enthusiasts. It’s a unique environment where one can see, feel, and smell how wine is made. What they are experiencing is, IMHO, the making of “real wine”. I made the term up because, surprisingly, there is no other definition. We have craft beer and single barrel whiskey, but no equivalent term for wine. Oh sure, there’s marketing labels like premium and luxury, but they have anything to do with how wine is made. We can’t use the word “craft” because unlike beer and spirits, which are purposely crafted to produce certain styles, in real wine we are trying to avoid manipulation. In order to accomplish this we have to source select local vineyards, pick at exact ripeness, ferment, barrel, and bottle in close proximity, thereby avoiding outside influences as much as possible. The result is what I call real wine. It is not engineered for a specific event, lifestyle, or market. It is just an expression of the environment it comes from where each year brings nuance and discovery.

The Real Solutions Part

Here’s the thing. Real wine is hard to make and even harder to sell. The old saying, “if you want to make a million in the wine business start with 10 million” is more true today than ever before. A small winery today finds themselves in a situation where they can’t find distributors (a topic for another blog post), have increased competition, and suffer from declining consumption. So, how does a real wine producer navigate this? Well, there’s lots of advice out there. Most of it is technology based, and, for the last 20 years wineries have been trying to navigate their digital options. As a wine educator and a software engineer I’ve been able to observe this firsthand. In hospitality I’ve seen how lead generation is crucial to conversion rates. In marketing I’ve analyzed e-commerce campaigns and built digital marketing tools. Finally, I worked in wine tech on both business and consumer applications. From all of this experience I have come to the following conclusions:

1. Not all wine producers are alike and different segments have very different needs. Think Home Depot vs. Ace Hardware. If Ace followed the same practices as HD they would be out of business by now. The same is true for wine businesses. Constellation and Gallo operate on a completely different level vs. a family-owned winery. There is little one could learn from the other.
2. E-commerce is a double-edged sword for D2C producers. I expect a lot of pushback on this, but I have seen firsthand results from e-commerce campaigns. Don’t get me wrong EC is an essential sales and marketing tool, but when overused can damage conversion rates. Think about it. Every EC campaign I’ve ever seen contains an offer or discount of some kind. If you’re blasting out discounts every month, why would anyone join your club?
3. Which brings me to my final conclusion. D2C wine producers should be singularly focussed on just one thing…fan acquisition and retention (aka club members).

Fans, by definition, are customers:

• Who love your story as much as your product
• Who will buy your product at any price
• Who will tell their friends about you

Fans are gifts that keep on giving. Once acquired they are relatively inexpensive to retain. They purchase without promotion and boost your reputation in the marketplace. For producers without large marketing budgets, fans are really their only sustainable choice for growth.

Wine marketing gurus are saying that technology should play a key role in wine marketing. On this I generally agree, but their solutions are where I take issue. LinkedIn is currently a-buzz with digital marketing solutions like social media engineering, machine learning, AI, and alike. As software engineer, I frankly find these conversations laughable. Because I know firsthand what they require and how much they cost. OpenAI didn’t acquire $500B in private investments so it can sell affordable solutions to D2C wineries. And the long tail benefits won’t be realized for years…if ever. See conclusion #1. These tools are being developed for the big boys, not small D2C producers.

Real solutions for D2C producers need to be affordable and fan-focused. That’s why I started Yno Software. To build software solutions that will incrementally help D2C wineries acquire and retain fans. That’s what I mean by “real solutions for real wine”.

The YnoGuy