Wine is something that you like to talk about with others. You tend to trust others with their recommendations on wines. You obviously, most of the time, drink it with people. As long as the e commerce experience doesn't leave you alone with the wine, it may help, but it will help more if you make the consumer feel that he's not alone and that there are others, even if he doesn't know them, but others that he is virtually connected to them. The purchase
of that wine and that wine and that wine. Sit back and grab a glass. Wine Talks with Paul K. Hey, welcome to Wine Talks with Paul K. And we are in studio today in beautiful Southern California, about to have a conversation with Moshe. You can say Moshe or Moshe. Moshe is the Hebrew version. If you want to use the biblical version that it's Moses. Ah, Moses. But Mo. Mo. Yes. Moisen from Whining Introductions. In just a moment,
have a listen to a podcast I did with Zach Arman. It's also available on YouTube. He is spearheading distributor program for Armenian wines and bringing some of the best that are made there. It's very interesting to listen to his conversation about bringing not only wine from a region of the world that's not known, but grapes that aren't known as well. And give us a review. If you have a good review to give us, go ahead and do that. If not so
good, then let's just leave it alone for now. That's how our egos here at the podcast world get going. But now, while we're here, here, have a conversation with Moses Wiseman from Whining. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. You know, I, I had to say something funny because whining, and you spell it W I, N E, I N G, as in, as you said, complaining, which there can be a lot of complaining in our industry. That's
probably. I've been hearing that quite a lot. Yeah. One day I was playing golf with, with Buddy Hackman, the famed, you know, comedian from the 70s, the 60s and 70s, and he saw my badge which said Wine of the Month Club, and he goes, I have a Wine of the Month. I want to go to Miami. I go, well, that's, you know, I feel very honored to have been joked about by such a famous guy. But anyway, not why we're here.
I, I saw your LinkedIn page and I thought, you know, this is interesting because digital marketing in our world is, is obviously, you know, preeminent for anybody. It's what it is now. And it has been for a little while and you create a platform. This, I didn't catch this for wineries or direct to consumer companies or what, what's the platform, who's it, who uses it? All of the above. It's basically a tool for whoever
sells wine. And although the main focus, at least in terms of the traction we're seeing is from wineries, we do have retailers in countries where it's legally possible, even importers using us. And we are also starting to see B2B use cases where importers are selling to either distributors or distributors or wineries or importers selling to restaurants and
retailers. The, the, the, the concept of collaborative selling, which is what we do, I'm sure we'll talk about it applies to any circumstance where you have an audience, a high intent to buy and a good deal offered to that audience. That's the triangle that we address and it's applicable in many levels of the market. That's an interesting platform.
And we're at the, maybe not delve into all the details for the listeners, but the idea that you are crossing from, you know, business to consumer, from business to business, from import to distributors. And you said something interesting, which is in the countries where it's legal, which is a huge, you know, hurdle because just in America alone there are 50 different rules of doing this. What does that mean when it's legal? What, where do you having those issues?
In Europe and in Israel, which is where we've had up until now all of our use cases, we're just getting our first onboarded US customers, We importing wine and then selling DTC is doable. I mean it's allowed. You do not need a specific license to import, another one to distribute and another one to be a
retailer. So we do have small importers, boutique importers that do need to manage end customers and with no one in the middle, they're interested obviously to sell to wholesalers, but they're also interested in a direct sell to end consumers. And again a collaborative selling functionality is something that solves them a lot of digital problem for, but also in some
cases cash flow problems. Because with the collaborative aspect for importers, we're sometimes enabling importers to pre sell stock that they didn't even buy from, from wineries and then they import it, etc. So that's interesting that when people come to you, are they looking, are they retailers primarily or looking or wineries or distributors or wholesalers depending on the country and what the legal, you know, rules are for selling direct to a consumer at that level but are these
companies looking for a contemporary solution to, you know, we all know wine sales are down a little bit right now worldwide. But one of the things that Covid taught a lot of distributors was that if you go dtc, you can shave off, you know, you can add some margin to your product because you don't have to. You can skip, you know, one hand in the pot. But that was easier said than done for most because let's face it, they're different businesses all entirely. Is this digitally bridging that gap?
So we try to. Although I have to say that most of the demand has come from wineries. Putting the the US context, for now, the demand has mostly come from wineries. Because of this. Again, I'm speaking with all modesty. I'm new to this part of the world, but all I've been hearing is people know that they're going, they're about to hit some kind of an iceberg with club members and club signups going down and the fact that the ones who nurtured the club mentality, baby
boomers. No, no disrespect, I think you're a bit older than I am, but I'm not that young. But those. I am a baby boomer. Yeah. So these people are either drinking less or stopping to drink or sadly leaving us. And now you need to address a new up and coming type of wine consumer. If that Gen Z person is even a wine consumer and you simply can't sell to him
or her in the same way. And thinking that you could bank on your club signups and club management and ask long time commitments for large quantities from a totally different type of audience is literally, however you want to call it hitting an iceberg, banging your head against the wall. So we're looked at as some, as a tool that sells differently. If I may, maybe a couple of words about it. So our tool is a tool that on one hand is, is linking two needs from opposite sides of
the market. It's linking the need of a winery to sell cases and the need of buyers, not necessarily to buy per case. What do I mean? A lot of people don't know it or afraid to admit it, but the official statistics for wine buyers globally, not only in the US globally, is that between 80 to 85% of wine buyers are not case buyers. They buy somewhere between one to five bottles, meaning all of the case offerings as they are today are simply irrelevant
to most of the markets. So you need to try and sell to them separately. And our tool enables the seller to take his case offerings, whether it's one, 10 or 15 offerings on their different wines. And instead of limiting the e commerce, E commerce part to be individual, meaning only one person can buy a case, we're turning that e commerce functionality to a collaborative one and basically enabling many people to collaborate and reach those case levels together.
And the case level doesn't need to be a case level. Wineries can offer 5, 10, 15% discounts even on 2 cases or 3 cases. But the idea is for people to join in and buy them together instead of letting them try to, to buy them on their own. I see. That's interesting. I've written two from scratch now. One was very old 1993, when we wrote the subscription model of what, of what we did here at the Wine
of the Month club. And then I was writing a system. We just finished getting ready to populate it with inventory before I sold, which I thought was going to be probably the leading DTC customer facing piece of software available in the marketplace. Never launched it, but it was quite robust. And the robustness came from,
you know, 35 years of hearing what the customers had to say. And then the reason I brought that up was one of the platforms, one of the movements toward consumer convenience was the fact you could fill a case with various wines or you could. And I'm not sure that took hold. I'm not, not saying I support this necessarily, but I'm saying that it was a certainly prevalent,
prevalent thought process in the industry. And that was, well, what if we hang on to that five bottles that they put in their shopping cart, sell them the five bottles and then we'll add five later and then as soon as they get to a case, we'll ship it because of the economies of scale with, with shipping costs. Cool. But I'm not sure that that was necessarily a real feature that needed to be exploited. Have you seen that? Again, I think that no matter how you play, we're getting into
details of, you know, digital and e commerce stuff. But I think that no matter how you play with a person's e commerce experience, as long as he's still alone in that experience, he will buy more. Sorry, he will buy less. Yes. And it's even more specific into wine because wine is something. And by the way, in parity we've done this with spirits. We're constantly getting approaches to do it with olive oil,
coffee beans and even cheese. My co founder is Dutch, so you know, selling a tire of Parmesan is very similar to selling a case of wine. But anyway, back to my example, wine is something that you, that you like to talk about with others. You tend to trust others with their recommendations on wines. You obviously, most of the time, drink it with
people. So we claim that, I mean, claim that as long as the E commerce experience doesn't leave you alone with the wine, which is, I think, still what you were referring to, it may help, but it will help more if you make the consumer feel that he's not alone and that there are others, even if he doesn't know them, but others that he is virtually connected to them in the purchase of that wine and that wine and that wine. And that's what our statistics, statistics show.
We, we've done this over 85 times now in France, Italy, Israel, where I'm from, I'm now starting up in the US and putting aside the turnover part, which is higher, what's been the most interesting is the conversion rate statistic, meaning the, the percentage between the people who clicked and entered the platform to the ones who actually bought. Mm. So in standard E commerce today, if you have a website and you have somewhere between 2 to 3% of a conversion rate, you're probably doing something
right. That's right. So ours is 7 to 11. Wow, that's very high. Okay. And it's, it's not rocket science. We take a group of people, we connect to them virtually, we give them a common goal, a limited amount of time and a good deal. Some kind of an incentive, a compelling event, the psychology of E commerce will take over. It's very natural and very human. That's an interesting observation because
you're right. We were one of the month club and I think we had a very loyal base and we had been around for so long, we were at three and a half, almost 4% conversion rate. And we were very happy with that. And I don't think people realize, you know, that's very. People come to a
website, only three of them are going to buy. I think, I think if you start out in the E commerce world and you, let's say you're a young person, you, you're into Instagram and Facebook and you, you think that I'll probably get 15 of the people to buy, but they don't, you know, it's, it's not real. That's not real. But 7 to 11 is quite high. How did you see this need then? You know, where did you see this need from? As a buyer yourself or as a distributor or what?
Yeah. So a bit of history. So up until this project started, about a Year and a half ago, I was a salesperson for 18, 19 years, selling enterprise software to the financial market, mostly to banks, stock exchanges. But I'm also an only child to parents who had one of this is the 70s and 80s, one of Tel Aviv's first high cuisine restaurants. Really? Wow. So I was all of the time around white tablecloths. Wine was always there. My parents at home were drinking wine in
coffee mugs. It was part of me. So I enjoyed it a lot. I did WSET levels 2 and 3, got my sommelier certification from the court of Master Sommelier. And I'm a heavy wine drinker, hence also a heavy wine buyer. However, over time, because I wasn't selling, I was working for Israeli companies, but I wasn't selling in Israel. I was always traveling, mostly in Europe. Touch wood. I'm. I'm an expert in bottle packaging in suitcases. I have a very high success rate
anyway. So over the years, I literally never bought wine wines in. In Israel because I was very sensitive to value for money, not because I wanted cheap wines. Value for money is not cheap. It's just I saw the prices of a good Bordeaux in France, and then I came home and saw the same wine imported. It was double, sometimes even triple the price. So I kept buying as I was traveling and filled my wine fridge. Then Covid
happened and it was rough for me. I mean, obviously we were all drinking more, but I was stuck because I couldn't buy, you know, in. In the prices that I was used to buying. And, you know, I. But we couldn't travel. So at. I don't even remember how. But one of Israel's leading retailers had something that he did twice a year called grand, say, which is two occasions where everything is sold only by the case, either
six or 12 bottles, because European cases are six. But he also offered 12 bottles and there were good discounts for it only if you buy a case. So I went over. It was this big warehouse, everybody with their masks, lots of people. And then I'm not a case buyer. I drink a lot, but I don't buy cases. And as I was there, I saw the great deals and I started calling up people,
my friends and texting. And then when I gathered enough people to buy this, I don't know, case of Rioja or case of Chateauneuf du Pape, I needed to first of all get their approval, then take the wine, pay for it, take it home, and then have it, you know, they needed to pick it up. Quite an
operation. And while I was doing it at that warehouse, I literally saw almost all of the people and there were tens of people there doing exactly the same, meaning manually taking case deals and turning them into like a collaborative purchase, like with, you know, pencils. And it was like, it felt like a war room. And I said, okay, there's something here. Let's turn this war room into something digital.
And then after studying and reading and also appreciating this amazing opportunity that I suddenly have to link one of my passions to my professional experience. You know, we read a lot, we investigated a lot. And then I saw that a lot of the initiatives or ventures that try to take group buying and alcohol and link them right from the end user side, meaning being an open marketplace, something that you need to nurture, get more users, maintain users, get.
It's a lot. It's a big headache. And I felt that, at least in the example that I saw, those formats also diminished to some extent the brands that they were selling. Because here was a website or a group telling the winery, hey, we're 3,000 people, give us the lowest price you can on the wine. And my emotional sommelier part didn't like that. So we literally did 180% degrees.
Yes. And going and giving this tool, but giving it to the seller so the seller can decide what does he sell, when, for how long, what are the minimum amounts he wants to put, and possibly offer a discount or offer a limited edition to something. What's the stock availability and what is the cost? So are you taking over then? Let's say you come, you're in America. You said you just started here and you've got.
Obviously the myriad of laws here is probably daunting compared to the rest of the world, but definitely, if I'm a winery and I come to whining, I say, look, I have an e commerce site. And let me back up to Covid. Like you said, it's very important part of the, of the transformation of the wine industry. Because I was headed to Napa just before it was February and stopped. And I had a conversation with a wine writer at the Napa Valley Register. And she was
saying, look, what are we going to do? These wineries, you know, they don't have. Some of them don't have E commerce robust enough to handle a shutdown of their tasting room and provide a service to their customers. They're farmers, they don't understand this. And so when you take this idea to the street, are you supplanting their current e commerce site with yours? No, that's part another kind of advantage that we have.
As I said, because we're not an open platform that's like live there all of the time where you constantly see deals when if you go to whining.net, it's what we do, but you won't see any deals there. I see. Right. So we're not asking the wineries to move their e commerce activity to us. We are a tool, meaning whenever they want to use us. And we know that it's not all of the time, it's sometimes when, as I said, remember the
triangle I mentioned in the beginning? When they know they have a. A digital or physical gathering of an audience with a high intent and a good deal that they want to offer to them. So our tool, you don't need to install it, you don't need to integrate it with anything you do a very easy onboarding process which takes minutes to set up the deal that you want to do. And then you get from us a URL which is your own dedicated time limited e commerce
webshop, just yours. And if we have many deals in parallel, each seller will have a different URL. The challenge that we're facing right now, and we love challenges, is indeed your unbelievable and exhausting and I don't know what words to say. Keep going. Fulfillment compliance reality. So since we're a startup and we need to tackle challenge by challenge right now we're first trying to prove that the collaborative selling thing brings value
to the wineries. In trying to prove that, we are trying to focus the first use cases in use cases where the shipping isn't an issue. That means physical events, that means winery visitor centers after tastings, festivals, etc. Those are the things that we're starting with in parallel. We are working and this was a big development even for us, and I'm sure that
you're aware of it. This new development with C7 buying the SAS part of wine directly, for example, makes it very natural and make it clear for us to have our
app available on the C7 Marketplace. So that's something we've already started and until then we're working on integrations with other fulfillment partners to help us bridge the gap once the use cases step out of the tasting room into something that is digital and on social media so that the platform could be able to charge, invoice and conduct the fulfillment. It's complicated, but it's definitely not impossible. And we are already a few
steps into that process. And I really hope that somewhere between a month to two from now we will have all of that fulfillment support, leveraging partners to do that. The reason there's consolidation on the digital side of wine fulfillment, like you said, Commerce 7 and Wine Direct, it's happening also in the distributor world. The importers there, there's less of them now because they're being gobbled up. And a lot has to do with the sales volume of
wine in general. A lot has to do with logistics issues that you just mentioned. But you're, this concept that you're talking about seems to be giving the little guy a chance to get his, his or her wares on the street in some kind of volume and, and circumvent the distributor network, possibly, you know, save some margins for themselves because we, this is the main issue and it kind of flies in the face of some of the digital, I'm gonna say digital wars that are going on because there is a lot
of platforms for a lot of different things going on and people are trying to capture this market, capture the wine trade in software, but most of it deals with not premium brands where you're talking about $200, 300 a bottle, $50 a bottle, they're talking about the $15 wines that are sourced from Europe
at whatever prices. And so I think this is fascinating because it really is what, and I'm interested to know the conversion rate now that you have 7 to 11% is showing you or telling you that there's a need for people that needed to get access to a bottle or two of something interesting that they want to put in their cell, they want to drink, and here's
a way to do it. Paul, I agree, but just to clarify, the thing is, it's great that you gave the bottle or two example because it's not like we're trying with this concept to turn those non case buyers to case buyers, right? Not at all. But we are trying to turn these one to two bottle buyers to three, four and five buyers. And it may sound small numbers, but that's 100% more if that adds up. So I mean, you're
definitely right, I have to say. And this is, I mean there's a big disadvantage in being someone that's not from here to try and do this, but I also think there's an advantage in it because I may, I don't know if it's because I'm Israeli and that's our mentality to not know, to keep being persistent and keep. But I, I have to say that the feeling I've been getting from the, I've been here for three straight weeks, three times over the past 10 months. Participated in a few
symposiums. I wouldn't say very far from being an expert, but I'm sensing the first feedbacks and the general feeling. And I have to say that what's frustrating is that I keep hearing a lot of talks about challenges and complaints. I call it an orgy of complaints and not practical solutions. Meaning, okay, there's a problem. We know it's fulfillment. We know getting people to the winery. We know club signups, we know club dropouts, we know Gen Z, we know.
We know all of that. Okay, and, and this has come up also in the way we got introduced, you know, in LinkedIn discussions, a lot of these general discussions about the issues. But let's talk about concrete solutions. I'll even give you one example, and I won't name the person, but like a whole post. And I guess we're following the same people. Okay, but a whole post on how to, to change your club strategy,
your American Winery club strategy. And I'm reading these, this post, and it's long and it's getting so much traction and lots of write on, you know, encouragements. And I was like, how about you say something like maybe club is dead? Instead of trying to see how can the same model work for a new type of audience. How would you consider changing the model? It's all lip service. Yes. It's
just, it's just hypothecating. And it's from people that haven't experienced this, that haven't been through the ringer, that have not had to switch gears midstream. I've said this before on the show. My last year in business, I sent 33 million emails. I had to do 300 different promotions to get the sales volume I would have gotten 10 years earlier
on a million emails. And so until you've done that, you can hypothecate and talk about all you want, but you cannot learn anything by talking and getting people to say, yeah, you're right, because it's just lip service. Your solution is a good one. And I think all the chatter you, you hear about out there is not addressing the core problem. Like, in other words, they're saying, oh, Gen Z's
aren't drinking. Well, they are drinking it. And it's been generations, thousands of them have eventually come to that glass of wine that expresses an emotion, a feeling, a time of day, a time of life. And so whether it's Genji's come in their late 30s or in their early 30s or the millennials come later, earlier. It doesn't really matter. They will come because that's the product. That's what it's
about. And selling monolithic wines in the supermarket has its place in the world because we need people to come to the trade. But once they experience a good glass of wine and wine from, let's say, one of your customers who, who has created a brand that might be a little more expensive and so we can't afford to buy a case at a time, experiences that wine, they're not going to go back. And so it's just a matter of time. This is the part that bothers
me. Maybe you can shed some light on it. We are tending to, with those kinds of posts, argue about metrics that are irrelevant. I mean, wine is not a metric. Wine is an emotional product and it takes emotion to buy it and decide what to buy. And maybe that's what, maybe that's the value. What you're doing, you're connecting emotions between people on a particular product. Correct. They're just
expressed digitally. Right. You know, the point I'm making about the digital thing is that we're trying to refine your conversion rates a result of, not because of. In other words, you create this conversion rate because of what you're doing for the people that are trying to buy. It's not because you're massaging metrics, trying to figure out how to get 7%. That's not what you're doing. It's bass ackwards the way people look at this. And so
this is an important feature for the listeners. And for if this, if, if trade is listening almost invariably the years, I've hired consultants and I had a lot of them and some, some were horrible. And, and because they were driving the metric, just trying to drive the metric, they're in Google Ads or they're in Facebook ads or they're doing and just massaging things to get the metric to move 10%. And here's the example. I hired one of the greatest. In the
early days of social networking, I hired one of the greatest guys ever. And I won't mention his name because he's still very good. But in this case, it was his first company. And they, they showed me after I paid them 2500amonth. This is many, many years ago that they moved Facebook from the 9th revenue generator in the back end of my website to the 7th. Now what happens? The consultant says, hey, I was successful. Look what I did for you. Because we, we massage stuff.
We got it. But that, that equated to like, I think it was $250 in sales volume to go from ninth to seventh on a monthly basis. It cost me $2,500. That's not very Israeli now, is it? No, not at all.
I also have to say that again, as the outsider, it feels like we spoke about consultants and I don't mean to bash them, not in any way, no. But, but most of the consultants that I've talked to, as I was trying to, you know, get a sense of what's going on, get a feel of who's on the ground, I think I talked to maybe 20 to 30 people at least. And there's also this fear of like when you
have your added values and consultants. So there's, there's branding, there's marketing, and there's the e commerce parts, meaning the one that's related to conversions, the one that's much more quantifiable, the one that maybe consultants are afraid of touching because their possible failure will be clearer. So I see a lot of consultants mostly focusing on the branding, social media, marketing side.
And it's, it's interesting that there aren't, or at least I haven't encountered them, the ones who pride themselves of being the wine converter or the one that's not only dealing with social media and branding and how do you, how should you call your winery differently, but the ones that are dealing with. Okay, how can we sell more. Point. I, I was at the Santa Rosa, what was it, DTC symposium. It was my first time I was here. I think it was not too long ago. Yeah, yeah,
like March, I think last March. Yeah, a year ago. And again it was like how to do all these sessions about how to promote club registrations and converting people from winery visits to club registrations during visits. And like the, the number one recommendation there, which spurred a wow from the crowd was to set up a selfie spot at the winery. And because people just sense that, okay, if we get them to the winery and we give them a good experience at the winery, they'll most
likely register to the club and buy more. No, that's not how it works. Focus on how do you make them buy. Not this, just the experience. And the experience that is a prevalent part of what's going on in the industry and you're, you're hitting on it. It's an important part. The one thing that I think most of these self promoting LinkedIn and post people are that they, they, they're putting everybody in the same bucket. Every wineries in the Same bucket. You're
all stupid, so to speak. You don't know what you're doing. And I think myself, there's a lot of really smart people in this industry. In fact, many of these wineries are there because they made it did well successfully financially, politically, socially, in a previous career. So they're not dummies. And so. But there is a movement of experiential, a marketing, because I believe, after all my experience, that social network advertising and marketing is going to
implode on itself. You won't be able to afford the cost of acquisition by the time that the congestion clears and get traction with your brand through that, you have to provide something. I don't think selfie, a selfie spot at the winery is really the best idea, but certainly having people come there is some value to the idea that every time I get that package, and I'll tell you what I think most of the problem is, every time I get a package from that winery, I'm going to remember that day. I'm
going to remember that experience. My wife and I just came back and we, we went to Cathiard, which is owned by the proprietors of Smith or Lafitte in Bordeaux, and they took us on this journey in their Range Rover around their vineyard. I will remember that. I will go back to do it again because it's so interesting. Will I sign up for their club? You know, as a trademan? Probably not, but somebody
else might. So I think the experiential part of this industry is, is very important as part of innovation is concerned. But, but I think one of the club problems that you're talking about is that a lot of people think that that club membership at a winery is just getting old stuff, you know, just clearing out the warehouse every time they get a shipment. Because how much wine can you make? How many different brands
do you have? How many different edit, you know, in French? How many etiquette labels do you have that you can continue to send wine directly to consumer as a winery, eventually you're digging into something that's not part of your regular inventory or you're making it just for that. And that could be juice that's not from your vineyard or not from, you know, the source that you hope to have. So I think that's one of the issues that a lot of people are having with club membership at a winery,
which is, what am I getting? Am I getting a true representation of that brand and that winemaker's, you know, skill set? You know what? I. I agree, but I Don't necessarily think that less of a heavy consumer like you would expect the same thing from a winery. It would be nice to find a statistic of the ages of current existing winery club members in the US I wonder how low is the percentage of people under
35? It's going to be lower. I mean it's going to be. Baby boomers are going to be the, I mean mine, mine were, the last time I did it was 35 to 58 were. And this is probably about seven years ago when I actually ran the statistic. Right. But you, but you can get that data anytime. I mean it's on Google. If you have your website connected to, you know, the Google, the analytics. This was just to say that a younger audience doesn't want 6 or 12 bottles or even 2 times 12 a year
bottles from the same winery. He doesn't want to invest the money that those bottles cost. And, and thinking you could sell to that audience in that same way is simply looking at the sun and, and, and saying it's raining or the other way around. It's the other point I wanted to make from that. You're talking about the Santa Rosa conference which was, you know, people also think that marketing is some one thing and you know, marketing is a
combination of many things and it's. Oh yes, multi pronged approach and you. And some pieces are successful and more successful than others. Again, this is very funny. You know, selfies, I hate to say it, but when, when I would do a trade show, toward the end I had a selfie booth and I kept it to remind myself, you know, it really didn't do anything. People signed up for the free stuff and that was pretty much it. But those are, I think that your approach,
the fulfillment side. Who does then? Who does then? The fulfillment side of the. So let's say I come to the website, I've collaborated with another virtual customer and we split a case or we got 5 and 2 and 5 and 2. Whatever it is, who fulfills those orders? The wineries filling the orders. It could be both the fulfillment and their, the, the wineries and their fulfillment partners. So, so they're using a third party to fill the orders. Yes, one that very soon I hope we will
even be bringing it. Meaning we won't send them to, you know, to look for it and not limit them to, to, to fulfillment partners that they're not working with. I mean we're trying to build a model which will make it first easier for us to connect to that fulfillment partner from an invoicing and charging perspective but on the other hand make it very easy for the wineries and free for the wineries to be onboarded to that
fulfillment partner. So that legally everything is, it's like the last mile in the mid to long term. I think being on platforms like Commerce7 will be the way that we mostly work. And if you're asking me about possible, I mean I'm not thinking about it, but exit strategies, we didn't build a platform here. It's not this huge tool. Some people can look at it and think oh it's just a functionality to some extent. So exit strategy, maybe these one stop shop software houses instead of developing
such a feature themselves, which they can by the way. This isn't a patent, this isn't rocket science, but we're gaining ground. They could develop it or buy it. Well, but that's, that's an interesting point. And I talked about 1993 when I wrote my first feature set for a database driven catalog company and we, we wrote the subscription side of it. And even to this day its features were more robust than Commerce Sevens or big, Big Commerce
or woocommerce, all those guys. It was still better. It was still better. It just was the written archaic language. And so that, that became an issue for me and maybe see, see where you fit in this. When I went out to find an engine to run the new software, the new website, you end up with this Nucleus, this engine and then you've got a bolt on, let's say the shipping package and you bolt on the compliance
package and you bolt on, you know, CRM. And all of a sudden you know, you've got this Covid looking, trying to be looking cell. And the problem is nothing that's bolted on is talking to each other. Right. And so those relationships kind of got in your way if they didn't because they had to go through the main database every time. And so we were trying to find a solution which we did a couple of things to make it work. But where do you fit in in that Nucleus?
I'm not afraid and not ashamed to say I still don't know. You know, we're learning what's the best way should we fit? If so, how? What's the easier way to do it? Again, we're not Monday.com. we're a startup with first round of funding, touch wood, closing on the second run right now. So we need to, we have an MVP working a minimum viable product. So whatever we do next will need to be gradual. Smart cost saving. I don't have yet the privilege of thinking, you know,
15 steps ahead. We're going to solve each product problem at the time, proof each proof point at the time because it's complex. And I don't want to think that I could solve everything by simply building a new platform that will compete with everyone at etc. On the contrary, I want to go slow so I make sure I don't put my foot on, you know, the wrong piece of glass. What's the, what is the number one objection? When you speak with a winery proprietor, even just a
GTC company, what do they say? Yes, this is a good idea, but. Okay, having started this worldwide, like every. Country is probably different. It's different. Exactly. So I can tell you that Israel, which is where we first started, is a very adopt digital adoptive oriented country. It's being used by a lot of products worldwide as a test case. But it's a bit of an extreme test case because we're very
digital. So I can tell you that for example, in Europe, in Italy and in France, while in Piedmont they God forbid selling wine on a digital platform that is gamified. What are you talking about? So there's this digital adoption state of mind, first on the side of the winery, but second, they were asking, oh, our customers aren't used to buying this way. Maybe we shouldn't connect them with other customers. So there's this digital adoption instinctive response
in the US rather. First of all, people get it very fast. I mean, they get the concept very fast. The discussion on explaining the concept are usually much shorter discussions than when we've had in Europe. But then almost. Second or third question, it's the fulfillment part. I mean, it's like, I'm amazed. It's like this country created this. It's like an ongoing cloud and everybody's trying to figure out how, you know, hard will it rain, how difficult it is.
It's like everyone's really making it hard for people to sell wine. You know, it was funny you said that I just drew a cloud on this paper here in my notes and it's. Yeah, so true. It's a great analogy because I can tell you after doing this for so long, nothing really changed that much. There's a, there's a fight out there with a couple of companies to be the preeminent fulfillment house. But the problems because of the interstate shipping issues
are the same whether you fulfill it yourself or somebody else fulfills. And I'll give an example. We went up at some point to see a fulfillment houses years ago. My Wife and I, and only because the guy was Armenian and he owned the company, I thought, well, we'll go visit a nice Armenian guy and see what he's doing. And he had a beautiful. Maybe it was a hundred thousand square foot warehouse and it was packed with the brands that you
see every day, some of the best brands of Napa. But then we went to the return aisle and here's these two rows of three high pallet racks stuffed with brown boxes, all returns. And my wife and I looked at us and we said, wait a minute, they got the same problem we do. It doesn't alleviate that problem. And so it probably adds a layer of headache to figure out where that box is sitting and when it's going to go out next to make sure it fills.
So we always did our own fulfillment here. And so that problem hasn't changed. It's always going to be the same because of, because of our issue. So that's a slow moving needle that you're probably not going to solve on your own. But it's interesting. Thought you just had. Which one? No, before that. Not only are you dealing with different countries with different mentalities and different rules, but you go into Piemonte, which is still very
rural in its approach. And just to highlight that we went from Pimonte straight to Bordeaux and you're talking about two different complete worlds of wine. Not only character, but thought process. And here Pimonte is really rural. And I can see them saying to you, you know, what are you talking about? Gamifying? And that happens. And so every time you go into a different region or different country, you probably have different outlooks on
what you're trying to do. Yes, I, I have to say that there are also quite a lot of similarities between the profiles of the winery owners that I see here to the ones in, in Europe. Because, you know, you would think, not being from the States, maybe just as an outsider view, that things here are so modern and everything is digital, but they're not. Even the winemakers here are, as you said, rural people and farmers. And it also depends. I mean, this industry is so amazing. It also depends on
each winery by itself. Because I can tell you that where we've had success in Europe, it was Piemonte, Tuscany, Alsace, in the wineries that we were successful. And this links to history, etc, there was always, always this either daughter or son. There's like the, not the ugly duck, but the younger generation coming on who said, hey, dad or mom, this is what our generation wants. I mean, you may not Know the definition of the word gamification? Yeah, but let's try
it. Let's try it. So in addition to the, like, actual wine stuff, there's always. There's also these cultural dynamics around the winery, which, I mean, I don't want to work with Robert Mondavi. I mean, with all due respect, you know, but I don't. These are not. I'm looking for the smaller ones because that's where we feel we can bring more value to the table. And you get a decision that way. We'll wrap this up. All right. At 52 minutes. But does this work
at the point of sale, the tasting room? Like, can the software be nudged at that point? Like, if somebody walks in, they're standing there with two people. Let's say two couples go together and they want to buy three bottles. Exactly. The. The winemaker, in the example that you gave, just as he, as he puts down at the end of the tour and the tasting, a price list with us, he can decide what he wants to offer and then put down a QR
code. Yeah. And then the phones just scan it and they go to that dedicated time, limited sale just for those two couples. Now, I have to say, when it's two couples, success won't be that big. It's usually groups of 8, 10, 12, 15 people when there's a screen in the tasting room, especially in common tasting rooms here. This is something that I didn't see in Europe. It's new to me. I mean, I've become very familiar with them over the past 10 months.
But joint tasting rooms of a few wineries, like either in Sonoma in Napa. Yeah. This is classic for. For whining because it could also connect customers of the different brands there. And. Go ahead. The on. On the spot pickup issue, that saves us a hurdle. It's a very interesting thing. I'm going to cite these two stories and then we'll. We'll wrap it up. But one, early in these years, we did a lot of this as part of our marketing. Again, the multi prong idea of marketing. And we
were very successful for 25 years. Standing at a booth, at a show, signing up members only. We didn't. Couldn't sell wine. But there was also the home wine tasting party. And this is a classic example of this because you couldn't, if, if I went to do a home wine taste, but I can't bring them three bottles of a Chardonnay and four bottles of a Sauvignon Blanc to distribute. So I, I would go around the room at this. Let's say there's 10 couples there and
say we have six bottles of cabernet ordered. I need six more. And we would upsell to fill that case to make it work. Right. To get the price. And it was very successful thing. We would sign people up, and then we would sell the cases. But it had to be a case because I wasn't going to split a case, deliver it somewhere. So that. That
works, like, physically as well, not just virtually. But the other thing that was important that you said, that you talked about, and the reason I brought up this idea at a wine tasting room is we were at a tasting in a tasting room in Paso Robles, a very good friend of mine. And we walked in as the first. In the morning, the taste room had just opened. He and I walked in the front door together. And the first thing that his representative said to him was the first question he
had to her. How many members? Yesterday wasn't how many bottles? Wasn't how much Cabernet wasn't how much Syrah. The first question, the first metric, the first thing you wanted to know about the previous day's sales was how many members. Yeah. And this. This could change that. Like, why would. Why wasn't there a thousand dollars in sales? It's the wrong question. Yeah. Really interesting.
Well, it's been a pleasure to hear about this and unwind it a little bit and sort of, you know, put it on the table and see what you're doing. I really fascinated. I'm so glad we had a chance to talk about it. Me too. I'm sure we'll talk again. And you at any time you want to discuss some of the headwinds you've come across in this process. Happy to take the call and chat it out. I need that shrink. Yeah. Couch kind of thing. So thank you.
My head is clear now that I've sold the company, I'll tell you that. Such a pleasure to have you on the show. Pleasure is mine. Thank you.