Modernizing Wine Collecting Productivity w/ Eric LeVine, CellarTracker

With ~1M registered users, CellarTracker (“CT”) is one of the core consumer apps for wine lovers.  When Eric LeVine, Founder & CEO of CT, was last on XChateau in late 2021, they had just taken on investment to expand the business.  Eric gives us a rundown of what has happened since, like launching a new mobile app and adding AI features, as well as what is coming down the pipe.  

Detailed Show Notes: 

CT now at 1M registered users, with monthly active users +40-50% since 2021

• Team has grown from ~10 employees during Covid to ~25

Launched new mobile app 1.5 years ago (2023)

• ~10k reviews in Apple App Store / Google Play with a 4.9* rating
• More modern, visual
• For subscribers: enhanced drinking windows, tasting notes, AI features (chatbot for wines you like, pairings, etc…)
• 3x users registering on monthly basis vs 2021
• Continue to support old app to be more customer centric and work out bugs in the new app

Improved data analytics; overhauled drinking windows, valuation of wines, “what’s poppin” identifying when people are opening wines

Winery analytics: trialed with a couple wineries

• No obvious product market fit
• Wineries interested in what other wineries were in cellars with theirs
• One CA winery had 40% of their mailing list on CT

Historically did no marketing

• Doing more social media, email engagement
• Some paid search, App Store optimization is the biggest driver

Get feedback on what improve with Frill, users can vote on improvements needed and pair it with product usage and usage flows

New features on the horizon

• Starting in-app notifications
• Developing research tool to identify what wines to buy and how much to pay (aggregates price data from reports and ~50% of users report price paid)
• Making AI embedded natively in the application

Add via receipt feature automatically adds (using AI) wines to cellar if you email add@cellartracker.com

• Product pricing
• Was early adopter of “freemium” model
• People were confused by historic “voluntary payment,” only 1/1000 users could say what features are paid
• Added more value to paying users (e.g. - drinking windows, AI features; including some things that used to be free), doubled user pay rate
• Suggesting what to pay is more hidden now
• Can get an annual subscription on website, monthly on Apple App Store w/ 2 week free trial (Apple takes a cut and must cancel through Apple)

Consumer trends

• People looking for values (e.g. - they ask “what’s a cheaper version of x?”) and diversity of wines
• Not seeing a lot of changes in user patterns (e.g. - consumption)

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