Cortland here. I'm trying something new where I occasionally feature other indie
hackers podcasts. This one is called Run With It. It features two hosts, Chris and
Ethan, who bring on guests to help troubleshoot their business problems and
spitball on new ideas. If you enjoy the show, do me a favor, search for Run With
It in your podcast player and subscribe.
Welcome to Run With It, where we bring you business ideas from proven founders.
Each episode, you'll hear a new business idea and the exact steps our guests would
take to get started. We're your hosts, Chris Justin and Ethan Janney. And on
today's episode, we have Alessandro Pepe and Lindsay Gabbard. Alessandro has done
it all, documentaries theater, opened multiple wine bars in Dublin, then returned
back to Rome and ultimately was the mastermind behind Ramesa Rascioli, a wine
bar and restaurant in Rome and that and created the Rascioli Wine Club and
community dot wine. And Lindsay came to Italy five years ago when she was
studying wine in the US. She came to Ramesa Rascioli to do Alessandro's wine
tasting, left and all, fell in love and ever since did a U-turn to get back. She
now is a partner in the business and manages the Rascioli Wine Club along
with partners Alessandro and Mattia. But welcome to the show folks. I hope I
pronounced everything right. I was like in the middle of that, I was like, oh yeah,
it's Italian. Thank you for that correction. So I think that it's really
important for us to start out by acknowledging that this is a first for
the episode. We've got some wine that we are gonna be sampling here throughout
the conversation. This is gonna be fun. It's 5.30 over there. It's a little bit
more respectable for you guys to be drinking than 10.30 am. Free noon here, yeah.
Yeah, I wish that I could be sampling some Rascioli wine but right now I've
got yellowtail. So don't kill me for that. I can see Alessandro's face is just one of my favorite jokes during my tastings about
yellowtail. You've got to tell it now. I used to start my taste, welcome to
everyone, doesn't really matter if you're not a wine expert, whatever you like, you
know, even if you drink yellowtail, I'm sorry for you but you can be here.
That's my start line. I will say that I typically drink better than
yellowtail, not to throw my mother in line with the bus, but I am at her place and this is what I've got.
So that's what we're doing. This is a good example. You were asking about what is our mission and you know, to help people like you stop
drinking that stuff. I was sent by Dionysus which is actually one of the oldest gods registered in the mythology, you know, and I think I'm the
prophet that is spreading the word about, you know, stop drinking industrial wine
and getting back to using wine as a cultural vehicle and that is the main
issue of Rimesa Roshali and that is the main issue of our wine club. I would
love to try to get the mic sound of me pouring my wine. Yeah, Ethan's got his full bottle going there. Yeah, it definitely is. So yeah, Noble
Mission, we will get into that. I want to frame this up for the listener. This
episode is a little bit different. Normally we interview business owners
and ask them to share a new business idea that they have. Occasionally, this is
the second time that I believe that we're doing this, we will dive into an
existing business and try and unpack it in terms of growth opportunities and
things that we can do to help existing successful business owners get more
customers and grow and achieve the goals that they're seeking. So Lindsay and
Alessandra, you are so generous to be able to show us inside your business.
You're going to be so generous to do that and we are going to kick around
some ideas with you to help the wine club and the community that you've got
grow. It would be really helpful to frame this in terms of the impact of the
pandemic. You have a very well-known restaurant in Rome. I imagine that has
lost a good bit of business. Just how deeply has the pandemic affected you
and in what ways in terms of revenue and employees and everything like that? I
wanted to say one thing really quickly. Being American and living in Italy, the
first thing that really really shocked me was how quick Italians are to come
together when it you know when a pandemic happens. So you know the first
thing I feel like you think of in the US is okay we've got to cut costs. Here it
was how do we save the employees. It was a completely different shift and really
we have 27 employees that we have to personally, 30 now actually, we've hired a
few actually even during the pandemic which doesn't ever usually happen but
that was the first issue we had was how do we save the entire team. If they were
to leave you know or we were to let them go where would they go? There was nowhere
so it was immediately the mission was to save everybody and that's where we got
the idea to really start to working on community.one. You two are obviously
very positive which is it must be a testament to a reflection of your
success there. I do want to dive a little bit deeper into the low part that you
were facing and it would be great if you don't mind sharing. Did you lose 60% of revenue?
I have to say that you know the main issue was a psychological and
sociological issue, psychosocialogical with them. It is about dealing with all my
employees and speaking with them and trying to maintain a decent amount of
rationality. We've lost I think 600,000 probably
$700,000 probably. We didn't gain it but the good news is I am a rich
entrepreneur that has no money. I never have money in my pocket. I mean my bank
account never has more than $500 never. No matter if I
gain $20,000 a month or $500,000. I didn't hear any
difference. I don't have a car, I don't have a Ferrari, I don't buy. All my
money is to offer people drink and buy books and trouble. That's it. I
reinvest all my money so I'm free. I somehow became kind of rich
on in the last two three years so I was not even used to it. I remember
one of the first days thing I did, what was the name? He was on the
board of Facebook in 2006 and he was the one that started Zuckerberg to build up
Facebook. I think he's a billionaire right now and he said I became billionaire
like in five weeks he said and then he said I don't know what to do. I
still want to go to the hotel. I still want to wash my socks in the sink
because I don't want to spend the money. If you want the real numbers also,
business I would say is probably down about 60% for us.
We used to do $200,000 a month and now we're going
back. We're going around $900,000. That's the restaurant mainly that we're speaking to.
That's the restaurant. Wine Club is doing quite well but we used to grow. We were 400
members in September last year and at the end of the year we weighed 800
members and now we gain only 100 members in the last year. So we were
projecting to go to 3-4,000 members, 5,000 members and everything was
blocked and now I said why don't we invest all our energy to understand this
strange ocean of shit that is the social media and we're trying to
understand how do we make virtual our real experience.
I'm gonna throw in our first little kind of mind shift here I think. Interesting
because you said your idea is how do you make your kind of live wine experience
virtual, right? That's something you're aiming for and I think that that's a
really great aspiration because you probably have such a great live
experience but one thing that we can talk about and think about today, what
I've noticed is some of the online projects that I've done, it's less
about making it more like the live experience and more about taking
advantage of the non-live experience. So for example, I do some
master classes online in the piano industry where people learn how to fix
pianos, take care of pianos, right? And of course it's easy to think well I need to
go apprentice with someone and sit there right next to them in person and learn
from them or take a class where I get to sit in the same room with them but now
we found there's interesting advantages to having a remote learning. You can
re-watch something instead of having to pay attention exactly live and take
notes on what's happening. You can get a closer look at things if you're in a
group of people and you're trying to learn from one person and you're all in
the same room, really only one or two people get an up-front seat whereas if
you've got a video camera up front everybody's watching from a distance you
can see things. So those are advantages of doing things remotely in that
particular project and in addition I'm not saying not to think about ways to do
things live or to bring that live experience to the web but also think
about oh what are now the advantages that we have. One of them of course is
just the access, global access all of a sudden you have which I think is amazing.
Yeah really the biggest... Sorry to interrupt you I just want to kind of throw
that in there. Really like we were saying before the biggest issue is that of
course our 3D experience was extremely memorable for people. They were traveling
we speak about wine in quite a different way than your typical sommelier
does and so when people leave their minds are open I mean for me I literally
like I said did a u-turn and came right back to Italy because of this place
because to me it spoke to me it spoke to the deep of my heart and what I cared
about with wine which was kind of going beyond the bottle but yeah really trying
to take what we have we're starting to do a bit more with videos I'm practicing
because for me I'm not as good at this but we're starting to try to use more
videos to try to bring this you know bring the 3D experience a bit more
virtually but that's definitely the issue is that you know our signups for
the wine club of course will be lower for the mere fact that we don't have we
don't have visitors in our restaurant at the moment. I think we'll start peppering
in some suggestions for things that you do but before we get to that it would be
helpful to to describe what you've tried so far in a little bit greater detail so
just to reiterate you have two main online businesses or online aspects to
your business is the wine club which is doing a decent amount of revenue and
you've been able to to stave off some of the the issues that you face with the
restaurant via the wine club and then community.wine it's an online
educational platform for people to learn more about wine so it's that the two
assets that you have that you were looking to leverage more to make up for
loss of revenue through the restaurant. Exactly. In terms of getting those
things started was there anything else that you tried and you decided to toss
it to the side or any other ideas that... I think we did everything. We did
everything possibly we did. We did live art auction, we did tastings all over the
world that we went came to New York to San Francisco. After that in this
three months we did five streamings in Langue within the Barolo area with five
different winemakers. We created a group of seven eight people to make a kind of
a think tank. We started to study neuromartic neuroscience and neuromartic
and digital marketing philosophy misbehaving from Richard Taylor. We had
the idea of creating a wine school here at the restaurant directly with
streaming of this wine school. We are promoting the wine club also in Italy
which is kind of an a strange thing because Italians they don't even know
what is a wine club. We are trying to create a virtual. We are thinking about
involving wine students and young so many especially restaurants at the moment
are not working hard. They are not working for the COVID. It's about why
don't you train your team with us? Why don't you train your team and so that
your staff can learn about wine in this easy, efficient, communicative way
because our way of teaching wine is the opposite upside down what they do in
Court of Massa, so many at WSA, Italian so many associations. All these schools
they teach you how to you know all the technical and scientific part of the wine
based on the concept that there is actually a predetermined idea of taste
which is not. There is nothing more fluid and empiric than wine and the main
issue is about that there is no point to learn everything about wine and when you
have beyond two minutes at the table to speak with a customer that usually drink
yellowtail. I'm joking but the main issue is about what do you have to learn as a
sommelier, as a waiter. You have to learn you know the few things that there are
actually related with stories but not just because they're more entertaining
because they are actually the meaning of wine is not its technical data. So that's
the thing it's about I was thinking about this beautiful future in which I
was able to get to four five thousand members which means becoming the first
at the moment I am surely the first we are the first peer-to-peer wine export
of Italy maybe the second or fourth I think we are the first right now but if
we get to five thousand members it means that that we can coordinate the
majority of artisan wine of Italy and Italy is the first the biggest wine
producer in the world with France sometimes and so on. So it means that with
not a lot of you know with a business that is four or five thousand four or
five million dollars you technically are directing a business that is billion of
dollars because that's how wine works. I'll share the story of how it worked. For
example for example champagne okay champagne is three hundred and five
million bottles but who directs the market of champagne? There used to be one
two players, Moi Tennessee, Louis Vuitton, Moi Tennessee and a few others. I'm talking about
Bollinger but not really Bollinger because it's actually James Bond but it's
Ben Clicquot, Dom Perignon and a few others. At the end of the 80s the guy called
Celos started to do a specific artisan type of champagne there used to be a lot
of artisan beautiful champagne but nobody knew about them you have to go in
a in a in a little you know fancy Michelin restaurant to find those
champagne you don't know it you don't know this type of champagne if you
drink yellow there you I'm going back to that but I'm gonna use you as an example
okay thank you for supporting this. We have a big ambition think about Napa
Valle. Napa Valle 99% of Napa Valle wine production is mainly made in the cellar
what does that mean that you could actually make that wine no matter where
the grape come from why because they overripe and they use a lot of oak. Guess
what Napa Valle is probably one of the best wine regions in the world for
climate and soil and it makes no sense why they do that because it's easier
because that's the market you know you are used to that kind of Napa and if you
go to Matthias and if you go to Arnold Roberts or like Kaplanger there are just
a little lost beautiful wine maker they have you know they make an astonishing
terroir wines. I'm joking about yellowtail but what's the problem of yellowtail?
Yellowtail it doesn't taste of the soil doesn't taste of the land it tastes of
the smart of the analogies that in the cellar is able to put some powder in it
so it's like a beverage that tastes like wine maybe it's beautiful but it's the
Coca-Cola I call it the chicken McNuggets of wine you know there's that
type of wine it tastes always the same which the beauty of wine that it makes
you travel with your palate so creative a community of these small artisan is
about creating a sort of a geography of flavors. The specific tactic that I think
that just you pretty much did it here is you know Italian wine maker explains why
you should never drink yellowtail you can record a video with that just your
rant right that could that's something that has potential to go viral not
guaranteed but if it does if you want to learn how to appreciate wine that's
better than yellowtail go to community.wine and we'll teach you what you
need to appreciate you can record that it'd be a two-minute video right it'd be
entertaining for Americans because we do you have the accent the passion is there
and also to someone I drank a decent amount of wine in my life but and I can
tell I don't like this as much as other wines that I've had but I can't tell you
why I can say that it's a little bitter it makes my stomach a little upset
drinking yellowtail but but I don't really know why I can't pinpoint it and
if you can make it so that I feel smarter and I can explain to people oh
yellowtail is no good because this this this and you can explain that to me in
two minutes you've got me hooked that I'm gonna start saying oh this is you
know it's not just this hoity-toity thing to become a small yay I'm gonna
have to take hours and hours of classes you've provided that value in two
minutes for me as I said one other big challenge I should mention was you know
the fact that our community dot wine project is so it's set up to be a global
type of a project it started mainly with Italians and Americans simply because
those are kind of our two or you know bigger markets and so the the common
language was English but having a double language is a bit of a challenge for us
because right now we are not using multi-language on the site for the mere
fact that buddy brought buddy press the platform we use has one glitch in which
like I said the answers for our quizzes cannot be done in both languages so
that's really something that we're struggling with because the Italians
think it's on English the Americans think it's all in Italian and that's I
think partially something where we need to kind of get over that obstacle and to
really move forward properly where users feel comfortable and safe where they are
where they understand I think we suffer from a lack of rationality sometimes as
well which can we suffer more with the American market for that fact if we go
too rational though we start to lose the Italian market and so finding the way to
navigate through that challenge is one of our biggest ones you think Italians
are irrational
Americans are really right after Kobe I don't think Italians are more irrational
than America but anyway this is my just Alessandra Alessandra calm down you're
getting irrational come on you know in terms of other things we've tried mainly
we are using our MailChimp list as our main marketing source we have not really
ever invested much in Facebook ads and in any type of ads with Google or
anything simply because we've never really had great results I don't know
if it wasn't good marketing people before but you know the idea of just
throwing a ton of money at that we're kind of cautious before we go down that
road but that's something we really haven't explored properly our main thing
is we are kind of working on the more of the Seth Godin technique which is
finding your tribes so we know who our tribes are their wine students their
rest you know their restaurant owners their sommeliers wine passionates and so
we need to I think start to utilize our tribes more and utilize our current
members and people like this more to help us spread the word one thing I'll
throw in there just that's been interesting you know the boat I don't
think the boat is completely left on this just because we're still dealing
with a pandemic and quarantine anything that you could do to support individuals
that are in the same situation right of kind of you know folks that are
sommeliers or restaurant owners or whatnot and they're trying to figure out
hey what do we do right now and just getting them together maybe bringing
bringing them experts or people who seem to have some things to talk about on the
topic that's an interesting way to go with that trying to commute create that
community I think you'd mentioned that that one of the opportunities that you
talked about is for restaurants that are under underserved right now having
their sommeliers and coming to help with your platform a little bit so it sounds
like you're you're trying that out regarding the dual language challenge
that to me seems like an almost trivial technical solution like if you could I
don't know throw throw $5,000 at it something it's not gonna be a crazy
amount of money to solve that and just create videos in in both Italian and in
English maybe that's not a perfect solution right now but at least you can
see which market it takes off with more I don't know how many videos that you
have in your platform but as you're describing creating content that's in
between the two you're right now you're for no one because the Italians don't
want you because you're not Italian enough and the Americans don't want you
because you're too irrational so if you can separate it and create create both
pieces you may find one that's a winner and you get to focus on that more down
the line but definitely don't want to be in the middle where people can say no
you're not for me or both camps can say no you're not for me yeah there's
definitely a trend of kind of niching down as far as possible and reaching a
specific market so you know right now you have community.wine I don't think
you could get this domain but it's not it's not whatever community is in
Italian.vino right I mean it's it's community.wine and you could you could
focus on an English English market English-speaking market and let Italians
that can understand it and participate go ahead and do that but by focusing in
on a market that you know is very clear and maybe even you know even beyond just
an American market a specific type of American right whether it's you know you
could even go as deep as is it restaurant owners or is it sommeliers you
know we had a job offer for a chief marketing officer we had at the moment
450 requests of people because we need a guy or a woman or that you know give us
a strategy to all the things we do we we're still trying to figure out the way
to get the out we know that we need to work with people that are close to us
and start there and let the idea spread but a way to kind of grow our our email
base and our I mean we have our of course we can find our own friends emails
and things and our restaurant who own restaurants and things like this but to
go beyond that and to start to find us wine student emails we're really
struggling to so we've used Facebook groups that are interested in wine and
we posted there but we do know that of course Facebook at not Facebook ads but
Facebook posts get to like 5% of people so potentially people don't even see
them but we've kind of used Facebook as a means to kind of put post there but
that's really a struggle as we're you know to try to find it emails and to go
really straight we have a 50,000 40,000 e profiled emails we have like with all
the our things maybe 30,000 followers 40,000 followers 300 videos 400 wine
makers that follow us we have emails of a lot of students and so on we have
900 wine club members so we have affiliate programs how do we create at
the moment we do two three is subscription per day how do we make it
five six seven per day I don't think it's impossible you know maybe I get in
touch with this the digital marketing smart guys and they say and they tell me
so terrible things and we do this this you know we pay this money that brings
nowhere and at the end they're just using our main list you know I've seen
I gave you 17 members of the wine club with a my campaign yeah but that was my
contact I yours you didn't do anything you just sent an email that was
actually I'm talking about an experience so clarify what what our issue was also
we really wanted to reach out and try to find we use a company that created a
funnel for us and they promised that they were gonna have all these great
results we told them to focus on non Risholi contacts so they were focusing
on bringing in new you know newly generation for us unfortunately that
didn't work out so well but the one of the worst things about a lot of these
digital marketing groups and such is that they we have a brand that has
authenticity that is probably the best thing we have going it is for sure the
best thing we have going for us and we don't want to sell this and so that's
really really important to us going forward with with a marketing strategy
is to not fall into a mass promoted products like Coca-Cola and someone who's
selling t-shirts and things like this so we really were trying to you know
promote our wine club in the EU to other people that didn't know us also because
the EU is easier for us to ship in case anything ever happens with import export
with us we were a little bit more protected so trying to develop this
concept in the EU is really important to us as well yeah I think that makes
sense and this is a good action step for the listener out there who may have some
experience with the marketing create a marketing plan and outline what these
guys should do you just lay it all out there this is do this first month you
know second month they've got this year plan you heard about some of the
pitfalls that they faced in the past you heard about the budget that they have
and the authenticity things that they're aiming to accomplish so take that and
and create a plan for these guys we are also interviewing for this so it may be
a position that we could even hire from we are willing to even work abroad with
somebody we're not necessarily focused on working with an Italian only to they
don't have to be local but that's something that we're interested in
possibly is hiring someone for maybe a three four month period of time to
really work beside us and strategize on e-commerce and and marketing strategies
yeah I want to bring in something now this isn't something you guys have to do
but maybe from talking about the advantages you know we could get get
somewhere interesting and you know one big trend right now is is podcasting
itself right we're on a podcast right now Chris and I have a podcast I run a
group where we talk about starting a growing podcast as well and the
interesting thing about podcasting is that you you can have a lot of
advantages at the same time without without a lot of expense it's like it's
like it's like its own advantage like we were telling you before we started the
show it's like oh what is this part of what's the major business we're like
well we're kind of just doing it for free because we get to meet you you know
you're awesome and we have a great excuse to drink a glass of wine and have
a good conversation about business and and so one thing that I keep thinking
back to in this that you want to sort of be an influencer even more you already
are a little bit of an influencer within your community be even more of an
influencer and actually get attraction like so people feel like they have a
reason to pay attention and a reason to engage with you and those are two great
things that you can get out of podcast right you can say hey yeah I know you
you have a restaurant you know me I know you but instead of just saying hey I
have got this thing go just log in and do something non-interactive and try it
out come let's have a conversation you know we'll record it and we'll put it
out there for other people who are working on their business you know and
you can share whatever insights that are that are going on for you with wine with
business the pandemic all this stuff and then it the audience then can also
participate and that's it that's again we've been experimenting with it hasn't
worked as much in this project but in other projects I'll actually have a
bunch of people in on a zoom call you know we have like 50 to 100 people on a
zoom call and they're just kind of enjoying nerding out on whatever topic
it is just kind of being there having a place to hang out and and it gives you
an excuse to meet and brainstorm and determine the future of the industry
really with other people that you respect and also have that influence
where other people go that's great and then beyond that if the people who are
watching and as participants find value in it it can be a source of revenue and
this becomes what people are talking about so I don't know if I'm not telling
you guys to start a podcast although you know it's really fun to talk with you on
a podcast but maybe there's some lessons to learn from that to bring to the
community I think an even simpler way of starting that I think that would be a
great thing to get through but you can even start a Instagram or YouTube series
where it's Alessandro drinks yellowtail or Alessandro drinks whatever this
bottle of wine not the entire thing I don't know how fast to drink wine
probably he's not gonna drink yellowtail but I mean well you start up but you do
that and then you can explain okay this is I'm taking this sit this is what I'm
thinking as I'm drinking this is what I'm noticing and you have that so that
people are seeing that experience and if you want to get more of this you want to
learn how to appreciate wine the way that Alessandro appreciates it join us
at community.wine you'll it's completely free you'll get this palette and be able
to understand what you should be looking for when you're drinking wine so one
question that I wanted to ask you is overall who is the ideal person who's
going to come into community.wine that's a good question I can tell you who it
would be a person like myself so I was studying wine without a compass I was
basically just assuming that if I took more classes and gained more technical
knowledge and more more understanding of wine that that was the answer it took me
coming to Italy to really understand really what wine could be all about and
to me wine has just been the medium for me to understand things on a deeper
level so for his you know history for example for me was it was hard for me to
place things but when I started to learn more about wine and when you know with
Hitler what he was doing with wine back in World War two suddenly other things
started making sense for me but I used wine as the medium in the vehicle so I
think someone who's just curious who's who likes wine was passion for wine but
maybe it doesn't have passion for the alcohol in it like which is which was
where I was I didn't care so much about getting drunk or anything like that I
just found that behind wine there was story there was a way to travel
differently there was it brought you to a countryside and so people who are
curious and who love wine but know that there's something more behind it but
they just don't know what it is that's kind of the person
what happened with Hitler and so forth
Hitler was a non-drinker
Hitler didn't drink alcohol at all so that's a good that's a good point to put more out of the wine club
neither do some other influential political figures I would or at least
claim let's say so I just wanted to say gosh what was it oh well instead of
taking this direction of saying who is the ideal client for community dot wine
question who is already like who's the most enthusiastic of everyone there is
there one person is there five people like you know who are the people that
are already there and what are the defining characteristics you have any
thoughts on that a few of the people that show up more frequently we have a
few of our wine club members that became community members we also have a group
of wine makers there's probably about five or six wine makers that
consistently post on there and respond but I don't know that I could profile
them more more specifically we need to say community at the moment is a kind of
a strange dark that place I mean it's not really working I mean there are a
thousand two hundred people getting there but it's not really a lot of
interaction how well do you know those those five to six wine makers that post
by no longer they're all friends we have like at least I would say 70 80 wine
makers that you know we became friends it was shot it's a big name that they
we've been selling a lot of their wines during the years they came here tons of
times we have a wine maker week here coming here usually yeah not in this
time maybe but you know actually from this from next to Sunday yes every week
there will be a wine maker here so they're all friends I think you've got a
great opportunity actually to not focus on to people who need to learn about wine
as much as the wine makers you've already got relationships with them
other other nice factor although there may be some variation in this in the
pandemic but is that they're they're wine makers you know so they're already
invested in a large project project so in terms of monetizing a community if
you didn't want to monetize a community like that to say oh hey there's a
subscription to be part of this group and it's 50 bucks a month 100 bucks a
month whatever it is it doesn't sound like a lot to a wine maker who has a
vineyard and they're paying you know thousands of tens of thousands of
dollars a month and whatever mortgage is on the property or something like that
so it might be interesting to see like who's there already who's already has
like kind of like X again it may be small but in excitement enough to say I
wanted to put some posts up here why did you want to put some posts up here what
was your goal oh maybe I wanted to even if it was the goal of putting posts there
to get people to try and drink their wines and maybe you're not attracting
those people to the site anymore but maybe you're kind of creating this sort
of community with them and saying hey we're gonna meet we're gonna have this
wine community we're gonna open to the public other people can join that we're
gonna start to become work together to become the influencers in this market
and it will be a no-brainer for you to pay to be part of this community or
contribute to it or whatever the ask is from them because of the value you're
gonna get out of the kind of group the group effort of it you know the group
output so in the interest of cream some tension here I'm gonna disagree
completely with Ethan on that recommendation I'm gonna I'm gonna pull
myself another glass I know you're gonna need it for this snack down I'm gonna put
on here the what Ethan is describing there is is a little bit of creating a
two-sided marketplace where you have both the the wine makers coming in and
the aspiring students who are gonna learn from each other and the wine makers
can sell to those students so the wine makers may pay some money to be part of
that community I think that it would make more sense to focus almost
exclusively on the aspiring students and try and get them into your wine club
directly and you've already in our pre-interview cause surprised that you
didn't highlight this more but during the videos for community that wine part
of the educational content you really benefit from having the wines that are
part of your club as you're going through the learning material and
community that wine so there's a certain percentage of people who are just going
to want to do it a large percentage of people they just want to do it for free
but some people who are really getting into it are going to want to order the
wine and learn more hands-on with the real material so yeah was exactly do you
what percentage of people who are members of community wine start out in
community dot mine and then become a subscriber of the club I have no clue
zero I don't know what you said it was that some of it there was the other way
around right some of the subscribers became members of the of the community
two-way street so no no actually it's it's kind of a circle so some of our as
soon as someone becomes a wine club member they get an automated mailchimp
an automation basically that comes out there tells them that we have this
community and there's a wine school where they can learn more about the wines
that are in the wine club and on the opposite side of that Fabio Amore one
of our our most recent wine club sign-ups was a heavily active community
member who just signed up for the wine club so it actually be one goal I need
to try to find a way to get into mailchimp to figure out we had a 78 it
subs I personally to me I perceive that in a complex business like ours
sometimes we see these waves coming boom of things of people and we don't know
where they come from we try to track them and maybe there was an article like
for example it happened an article on New York Times or carbonara with
salamaria so that one actually gave a lot of you know or Anthony Bourdain they
came at three minutes of for example like ten years ago that boom at the
certain point I received this but most of the time I think it's a complex
amount of things we did community wine we did some videos 12 articles came out
with the different newspaper in you in Italy and we have this affiliate program
so one positioning idea that jumps to mind for me is especially now during
this pandemic it's very topical to have a replacement date night right my wife
and I we can't we're not gonna go out to a restaurant as we as we did before but
if we have a nice bottle of wine and we have this video to guide us through the
experience it's almost a replacement sommelier that we can do any time that's
sort of positioning is attractive and if you can sell it as you know you have six
dates a husband who doesn't do well at planning dates here six that you have
that are pre-planned for you that we're gonna guide you will give you some
advice on the food to order during this time too and you have that entire thing
planned your wife is gonna love it the concept that comes to mind for me as
you're describing the community dot wine and the wine club is the flywheel Jim
Collins concepts where you have a positive feedback loop where more
members in one group feeds more members than the other and it just continues on
there may be opportunities to find out from those individuals what is it that
turned you over the edge right and that's individual conversations with
those people they would love the chance to talk to the two of you right if they
haven't already had that opportunity the people who are most engaged in the
community dot wine they would love the chance to have a 15-minute personalized
consultation you just understand no I was thinking about to do a tasting
challenge involve all our wine club members to open a bottle of the wine
club all together I need to see which platform can do it but to try to do the
biggest tasting ever people all over the world at the same time talking about
the wine club and everything that was the thing you can do that on zoom that
you can have up to 300 people right there people are looking for so this is
an incredible opportunity people are looking for social connection
opportunities they don't have the ability to go out and do a wine tasting
with a bunch of strangers they they'd like to go with their friends but they
don't have the opportunity to do that I know early on in the pandemic we would
play games online but that got boring relatively quickly if you gave me the
chance to do a wine tasting with six of my friends all across the country and
we can come in together and we can you know sit the wine and you talk us
through it that could be a premium thing that you do it you could have a free
version but you could you can charge a decent amount for that so depending on
how tech you want to go first of all if you if you wanted to set something up
is on zoom sell tickets get people to sign up I've had a little bit to drink
but I'll help you guys with that if you need help because I've been setting up
online meetings I don't think I'll go back on that but when I wanted to add
though is depending on how deep you want to get into sort of the technical
cutting-edge right and for the listener might be interesting to hear what some
of the possibilities are there's a software that is just it may not even go
anywhere it's so fresh it's really cheap at the moment it's called topia that I
oh it's like zoom but people can go and congregate in little groups and that is
actually really cheap at the moment because they just invented it it's not
super high quality in terms of the video but it doesn't really matter because of
the sort of interesting factor so that's what I was thinking about with Chris
saying like oh I want to have a little group of people my friends but you could
have a group where there's like thousands of people but his group of
five friends could go over and do their wine tasting together but then come back
to like a main group to listen to what you had to say about it which is kind of
interesting the other thing that comes to mind for me here is I hate to use a
term influencer marketing but I wonder how often if you were to send a case of
this wine to certain celebrities if you send it to a hundred of them you're
almost guaranteed to get one hit and they have a million followers and I
don't know if that pays out but yeah I mean we don't know how to successfully
reach the celebrities exactly but you know who jumps the first person that
jumps in mind he's not super he's not maybe a the celebrity but the San
Antonio Spurs coach look him up Greg Popovich Greg Popovich he has an
incredible palette he's very famous for that he'll go and buy hundreds of
thousands of wine at any restaurant so if you could get one of his players
Chris Paul is probably connected to someone like that you can get back in
front of him and get in front of Greg Popovich you were you were on your way
you're already on your way so I gotta have to ask this for our for our listener
who is you know we're more in the business realm right and Gary V is kind
of the first person that comes to mind when I think of like wine business all
this stuff and I don't even know what he looks like from the perspective of an
actual you know restaurant actual people dealing with wine a database is is that
somebody that you you would seek to align yourselves with or you wouldn't
even bother yeah Gary yeah so I mean he's viral of course he's got a
different way of speaking about wine that's a probably more in alignment with
us than a lot of other people are even a Madeleine Phuket from from Wine Folly I
mean Wine Folly is maybe not our exact they're a bit more like wine 101
they're great for kind of really early on people that are interested in just
really starting with the basics but she does some playful things with her video
she was licking rocks to describe how you know the taste of rock literally
like licking rocks and describing it but yeah Gary Vanderchuk he's got a he could
be an interesting he's got a business sense I don't know if he I think he has
his own wine club though so there may be I mean in terms of him promoting us I
don't know that there might be a conflict of interest there but he's he's
a guy that if you can get him speaking about your thing he's got a big following
I mean just just to spitball a little bit further on like the biggest wine
tasting in the world right ever online first and biggest online wine tasting
right it's like featuring you know you guys Gary V Madeleine Phuket you know
and then they each come up and they bring a wine or two and they offer them
to the people and then not only does each of each one of them bring some
attention to the event but you get to cross pollinate each other's message
lists and audiences and and if you have virtual events yeah we are coming up on
time here we're over time actually so we really appreciate the conversation with
you guys it's a huge opportunity of course you can feel that passion coming
from you so the listener out there who agrees with this take some action create
that business plan for these guys what are some of the things that they can do
to grow the wine club grow community that wine and you know make it through
this pandemic better than before and be that tip of the spear when it comes to
Italian wine making and an appreciation of food this vision that Lindsay and
Alessandro are describing here thank you guys very much for the conversation
it's been a pleasure thank you very much hi see you too for the biggest tasting
in the world okay I'm so excited for it it'll be a ton of fun and next time we'll
have better wine than to listen out there thanks for joining us we'll see you
back with our regularly scheduled programming next week and until then run
with some business ideas