Hey listeners, have you heard of ENO-LITICS? Their data analytics platform for DTC and wholesale depletion data has led their clients to grow revenue three times faster than the industry average. Don't just take my word for it. Their client, Jesse Lang, YMaker and General Manager of Lang Winery in the Willamette Valley shared his experience with ENO-LITICS. Jesse, what has been your biggest win using ENO-LITICS? Our biggest win overall is been a program that we put together for some of our single-binder wines, like Freedom Hill and our Lang Dunne Hill's in State, where we offered those wines to customers that had been looking at them previously and purchased them previously. We offered a nice incentive for that and impact was significant. It kind of was very surprising and the amount of sales that we generated was spectacular. Find out more by visiting ENO-LITICS.com. That's ENO-L-Y-T-I-C-S. dot com to learn more. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome to X-Shetto. X-Shetto. The podcast that navigates the business of wine with unique perspectives and insights with your host, Robert Vernick, and Peter Young. Welcome to this episode of X-Shetto. And today we have a returning guest, Eric Levine, the CEO and founder of Cellar Trucker, and he's going to give us an updated view of the Cellar Trucker journey. Eric, welcome back to the show. Thank you so much. You were our guest way early on episode 76, where you gave us your background from Microsoft and took us through founding of Cellar Trucker, so anybody who wants to listen to that episode, please check out episode 76. And our last time, the interview was in late 2021. And Cellar Trucker had roughly 10 million unique visitors and 750,000 registered users and 300,000 active users on the platform. How have things changed over the past four years? Every metric from Cellar Trucker always seems to get bigger over time. So we're past a million registered users heading towards 1.1 million now. Overall traffic and from the internet is probably on a comparable level. We don't look at that as sort of upper funnel quite as much. And then in terms of looking at active users on the platform, we're seeing probably monthly active users up 40%, 50% compared to where we've been, especially since we launched our new app. That's really seems to be a huge driver. So our last interview was sort of at a turning point for Cellar Trucker. You just brought in a series of investors, and we're building a team to help grow and scale the business. How big is the team today? Yeah, so I think when COVID happened, whether we're basically four of us working full time on Cellar Trucker, I think at the point we spoke, we're probably around 10. It's actually closer to 25 now. Actually, we did a really fun company wide retreat. We took the whole team to Santa Barbara, because we're all over the place. We're in 13 different states. So I got to actually just meet a whole bunch of people for the first time in person just a couple weeks ago. I always like to frame that customers don't really care how many people are working on this. But what matters is I think we're finally getting to the point where there's a level of innovation, interaction, and we're able to do stuff that I think customers deserve, and that this business and technology deserve. And thus, you mentioned that one of the key areas to overall our making improvements was on the mobile app. And you mentioned a few seconds ago that that's now been released. How has the uptake and response been to the mobile app? The new mobile app has been fantastic. We launched it about a year and a half ago. At this point, foreign away, the most broad way that people experience cellar tracker is on that new mobile app. Generally speaking, it's been great. Change is always tougher users. So anytime you move cheese or do something new, people are not going to jump up and down saying, oh, wow, thank you so much. So that's what we work through. But the reality is it's gone super well. And I think one of the best metrics is if you look in the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, when you get past wines, apps with four or five reviews, we've got close to 10,000 now. It's 4.9 in both stores. It's the highest rated wine app. I think that's a reasonable reflection that we're doing OK, although we've got a long list of things we want to do even better on. So typical software development is one single source of truth. And we notice that you have the old app and the new app, and we both have both on our phone. And I'm curious, what's the thought process behind keeping the legacy app and then keeping the mother up? Because that just makes development a lot more complicated. We have made our lives a little harder, but we've really tried to be very customer-centric about this. So a number of us used to work at Microsoft. And in many respects, CellarTracker at its core is a piece of productivity software. And so if suddenly someday you're going down to find a bottle of wine in your cellar, you want to consume it, and there's an entirely different user interface, people freak out. So we decided we're not going to do that and decided, you know, let's just take this slowly. We're going to launch the new app in parallel, the people that are excited about change are going to gravitate to that. We've seen a huge number of migrate over there. And there's still a set of people who are very happy with the old app. And along the way, also what that's let us do is get a lot of feedback. We actually do that publicly on feedback.cellartracker.com. So there's something you don't like. People let us know. They vote on it. And we've just been picking those things off. And at times, stepping back and thinking about, OK, are we doing this the right way? Is there some other way we should think about to give them design problems? So anyway, that's a long-winded answer to say. It was a very intentional choice just to try to make change management easier for our users. We feel very good that I think had we just updated the app overnight, it would have been a real struggle for a lot of people. We weren't ready. They weren't ready. So if you were talking about the new app in terms of the new features that are kind of picking up its adoption, so what are the key new features of the new app that have been pushing its adoption? In terms of the new app, from a starting point, it's just much more modern, more visual, trying to balance information density with more modern design principles. The old app was much more textual. I think the other major thing-- and this is where we're really going-- is increasingly trying to present drinking windows and information in, again, more visual ways and a heavy investment now into AI features, which, for the moment, are still-- I call it AI jail, right? The little button in the lower corner to get to it. But increasingly, we're going to be integrating those much more natively into the full experience as we see which ones we feel. Users like a lot, and we're very confident about. So anyway, it's really just about, again, modern app, more powerful, more visual. And that is also where, again, AI. So AI is like a AI concierge, or a sort of a saw. And we were like, hey, what-- I'm eating this for dinner. What-- Why is that peak readiness for it to go with? Absolutely. We have it in both directions. If you're on a page for wine, you can get insights to say, OK, given this wine, what should I pair with it? Actually, the core question is, will I like this wine? And that actually has a lot of personal information about you. And we're doing this not to public chat GPT, but we're doing this with the same engine, but in sort of a private environment. So again, it's highly personalized. But we have the reverse experience, which is you can just chat with your seller and ask it any question about, hey, I'm making this for dinner. What would you suggest? Or I ask it to look at recent tasting notes to find indications of wines that look to be sort of drinking better. And I'd say half the time now to go pick a wine. I just basically chat back and forth with it a little bit. And it's super fun. It's helping me pick wines that I would necessarily go and grab on my own. So just a whole different way of experiencing seller tracker. As you keep investing in the new app, is there plans at some point to sunset the old app? I am sure eventually we will probably sunset it. There is no immediate plan right now. We still see some specific design and technical blockers. There are still some features that are not in the new app that exist in the old app. And maybe a tiny percentage of users use. But for them, it's very important. So we've got to get through that list of things. And I think when we will know when we reach a point, if we're at the point where it's 95, 10 using the new app versus the old app, at some point, then we'll say, OK, it's time to move. But no, I mean, the short answer to the question is for now, we're just trying to be very customer-centric and not force-changing if we don't need to. More caret than stick. So data analytics was a key element of the new strategy four years ago. What has CellarTracker done there? You know, so it's actually been awesome having a data scientist on board. And he is a scientist. He really keeps us honest in terms of trying to understand the data and things we can do. So he has helped us fundamentally overhaul how we think about drinking windows and the recommendations of when to drink wines earlier this year. And that actually cuts across old app new app, because it's sort of the core data things cut across all the experiences. We've totally overhauled the way we calculate valuation of wines, basically just focusing on more recent data. So what you see ends up looking a lot more like what you might see on a wine searcher, except it's not a speculative price. It's actually prices that people have really paid for wines, not what someone wants to charge for a wine. And he has also been-- he's a more traditional data scientist. So I would say he's a little more AI skeptical, but he's helping us sort of keep honest as we're moving to something that's non-deterministic. How do you test that and see where you can get repeatable verifiable results, things like that? So again, really just comes down to drinking windows. Values-- so the last to actually major area is we launched a feature about a year ago called What's Poppin, which is what we call it, Stringability Alerts. And rather than just looking at drinking windows, this was 100% from the data scientist. We decided for any given user we would look at wines in your cellar and see of all the wines in your cellar. If we just look at people who've been very active on the platform recently, what percentage of those wines are consumed? And so any wine where the rest of the community has consumed 90% of the bottles, if you're still hanging on to a bunch, you probably should check that out. The other one that I never would have understood how to calculate, but he's a data scientist. He's got amazing tools is we know what the regular drinking velocity of any given wine is. And we actually see that sometimes they spike. So predictable things like rosés in the summer maybe vintage ports in the winter, but if you do that in aggregate,
across five million wines and then personalize that across everyone's seller. Sometimes it may be that a given vintage of a wine is suddenly drinking well. A bunch of people post some notes, a bunch of people start drinking it. And so we surface that to the user once a quarter to basically say, "Hey, go check out these wines because for whatever reason, people are drinking them a bunch or most people seem to have drunk these down." And people have really appreciated just another way beyond drinking window of thinking about, you know, which wines should you maybe check in on in your seller. And as you know, drinking windows are very subjective, right? It's always a guideline. And so these are other signals. Depends how much you like the taste of old wines. Yeah, exactly. Other things. But if people are drinking a lot, then like the wine will be rare, right? Yeah, and I mean, definitely people want different things. But it's just he's come up with more ways to harness the information from the community. The whole goal continues to be how to be delivered useful insights to consumers to help them. The wines they want figure out when to drink them, what to pair them with, etc. So I know the seller tracker was also trying to develop services and analytics to sell to wineries. What happened with that? What's the status of that? Yeah, you know, we engage with a couple of wineries around sort of a more bespoke data products. I mean, in a simplistic sense, seller tracker, you know, we many wineries don't necessarily know what happens once they sell the wine and it lands in someone's seller when the people drink it. So we look on seller tracker and figure out based on the notes, are people enjoying it, not enjoying it, etc. And so we thought, you know, it might be interesting to see is there's some way we can package up that information and would that be valuable on an ongoing basis for wineries? So we again worked with a couple around that. The other interesting thing is the wineries were very interested in sort of who were competitor or peer wineries. Like, you know, like what other producers are most represented in the sellers of users that also have their wines. So some interesting stuff, I think the net of it though is we just realized, look, we are still very much a B2C company, we're very focused on consumers. And at least in the short term, we didn't see an obvious product market fit to sort of get into the business of selling data to producers. Although that said, we really do, you know, our goal is, okay, the more we can grow seller tracker, the bigger a base of users we have. At some point, we think we reach enough critical mass where some deeper B2B to see partnerships in particular, probably with wineries and not just around commerce, but really around just engagement with consumers on the platform directly in the experience would be interesting. I am sensitive to the fact that, you know, a lot of wineries are very small. They don't necessarily have dedicated social media managers. So they need yet one more tool to interact with, like they need to hold their head. So, but you know, there's definitely interests. And interestingly, the one winery that we did this deep dive data products sort of experiment with, again, they really just want more features and engagement in the platform. But we did do sort of an escrowed crossover of, they basically gave us their mailing list and we anonymized it and compared it to the email addresses we had and they found that like 40% of their mailing list was on seller tracker. Yeah, so that was a driver, it's a California winery. That was a driver for us to think about, look, at some point we know there's features in the platform we could build that I think would be win, win, win for the consumers to have wineries there and engaging useful for the wineries, useful for us. But for now, not, not, not exploring that just yet. As you've tried to grow and scale a business, what marketing tactics have you used and what have you learned from them? So historically, seller tracker was literally just me, word of mouth doing stuff like I played with Google AdWords back in 2007, but basically no marketing. So we have a small marketing team. So we now are actually doing social marketing, we are doing social media. I think the biggest thing we're doing is email-based engagement, actually, you know, used to be maybe people would get one or two emails from me in a year. Now we've got, you know, we're actually emailing with more frequency and some people like that a lot and some people, you know, want to turn that knob down. And then, you know, just experimenting with paid search and more app store optimization. Really the apps are the biggest driver for the business at this point. That is how the vast, that is where the vast bulk of new people are coming from is from the app store. And in our case, especially Apple. And are you doing any form of paid marketing, whether on the app stores or in search, you mentioned Google AdWords? And if there's been effective and like how would you compare with someone who's looking to do something like, what have you found effective in the paid space? The Astro, especially, is huge. Now it's our optimization and paid ads in there is huge driver. And do you have a way of getting direct feedback from your consumers in terms of what is you go to explore all these features that you're based adding AI into everything? Do you have a way of soliciting that feedback from your users on a regular basis so that you know what they're actually looking for? So we do a few different things. We do get just a huge amount of inbound via sort of our support mechanisms. I mentioned earlier, we have, it uses a third-party product called Frill, but it's hosted at feedback.sellertracker.com. Like anyone using the app, you know, we do the obligatory, are you enjoying it, thumbs up, thumbs down. If someone says, not, we drive them to Frill to basically get them to give us the feedback on what don't you like, what can we improve? And they are seeing all of the aggregated suggestions from the rest of the community there. And the ones that are getting thumbed up the most are sort of the top of the list. They basically are getting to publicly vote. And you know, it's not easy. We're basically asking people to bash us and tell us what don't you like. And you know, we try to take our medicine and just keep picking those things off. And it really does help the design and product teams as we try to figure out the roadmap. Like what's going on here? So that's a good way to get like a good backlog of features or changes that users who are not liking the app want, but for the like power users who are like using your app a lot, I'm assuming they're almost more valuable because they're probably quite prolific in your community. And so how are you getting feedback from them to generate these? So the strongest, I mean, honestly, the strongest signals that we see are the actual product usage. And so then another feature, another useful thing for us in the new app is it is fully instrumented. So we understand exactly what flows people are using and not using and are trying to use that to influence the design and trying to also drive engagements to better sort of more modern. And there's a lot of best practice that we never did around just basic onboarding and driving engagement, etc. Starting to do in-app notifications and things like that and so a lot of experimentation. But the net of it is like our users for the most engaged users, they are so engaged just the the inbound health tickets and suggestions that we get unsolicited are amazing. And just the product team is it's nice having dedicated product managers. They are just surfing that information and they're turning around and doing interviews with users. We also do some ongoing random surveys to gauge different levels of engagement with different segments of the user base. So really just trying to do kind of, I think what most companies would say is more modern, best practice kind of stuff. So nothing, not rocket science, but I would say it's a uniquely passionate and engaged user base compared to certainly any software I've seen and I've been building software for 30 years. And so what are the like new features that are on the horizon that your users are clamoring for? The new features people are clamoring for. You know, it's going to be, it's a real mix because increasingly we see users going in two directions. Our core user is the seller management user who is, and that was, you know, our original race on detra is help me keep track of the wines in my collection. I will say as we've segmented and done research on users out there, there is a very serious and engaged set of very hardcore wine collectors who aren't actually that interested in cataloging and tracking every single model. But they all want to answer the same basic questions of what are interesting wines that I might want to buy. Is this a fair price to pay? When should I drink this? What should I pair it with? And so, you know, the kind of secret of seller tracker is that actually you don't need to catalog and track your seller or maybe you have some of the wines in there for us increasingly to be useful in answering all manner of different kinds of questions, even if you're not cataloging and tracking everything. So anyway, there's a lot of desire, I think, to have seller tracker just be more useful in that regard as a, I mean, that's how most people use it actually is as a research tool. And so, that's a lot of the emphasis around AI and personalization. How do we use the wisdom of the community to be useful for you as you are trying to answer basic questions around what wines will I find interesting and so on. In terms of pricing details, are you pulling that from wine search or like, how are you getting current? So, pricing data on seller tracker, we've always done a mix. So we've licensed for a long time data from the wine market journal, so aggregated auction data, although they also have a mix of auction and retail. And then I mentioned earlier, so community average values. Basically, we are aggregating data from what our users are actually paying for wines. And with the data scientists on board actually doing that more intelligently, dealing without liars, focusing more on recency. And we're seeing in particular, we've got a much heavier flow of some of these wines than you would see in any given retailer or even aggregated set of auction data. So the data is really quite good. What percentage people actually put what they pay in? I would say I never do that. Yeah, I think historically it was about 50/50, I mean about half would just tracking the list of wines. So one of the features, we don't talk about it as an AI feature, but one of the features we added about a year and a half ago, we call Advire Receipt. And it's the ability to take a picture of a receipt, literally a paper receipt from a wine store or a winery. or if you buy wine from a wine or a wine store in New York.
you get emailed something, you can just forward it to us. And so you send it to
[email protected]. It matches up the email to your account. We're actually using AI to basically parse out all of the data from that receipt, what vintage, what wine name, what price, what quantity, what size. When did you purchase and what was the name of the store, what was the order number, all that. We jammed that into kind of a bulk import tool. We match up about 90% of the wines and just handed it back to you to confirm the wines and you just add them to your seller. So like for me for the past two years, probably three quarters of my data entry into seller tracker has been doing has been via that. I just remember, I just forward the receipt to add and then boom, a couple of seconds. So anyway, the nice thing about that is all of that data coming in, we're just seeing continual growth in that data is augmented with all of the pricing. So that's useful. - So I could just like foreign my receipt of my email from my retailer and he'll just auto-populate it. - I added seller tracker. - Okay. - Yeah, one of the, 'cause you know, back in the day, I used to, when I lived out abroad, I had a storage unit in Napa. And when I loved, I didn't love their tracking software, but I did love that every time something was sent to that address, they would automatically put it into the system and it was able to track so I could then request specific bottles. I just like, I wish every retailer would just automatically like update and know like a chain of like, hey, look, paid with my Google account. So therefore it knows that it's the data that needs to go to seller track either. I'd get auto-populated in terms of the storage, but like, I guess the email receipt does almost the exact same thing. - Yeah, it's a more downstream way of tackling the same problem. I mean, the dream would be, everything you buy is just automatically populated. You barely have to lift a finger and then increasingly just, you know, hover your camera in front of the bottles on the way out and it just comes out and that's the dream. So it's still some clicks, takes a little work, some intentionality. I will say in, you know, in this age of AI, you know, none of us were talking about this when we were talking four years ago. And I will say that, you know, we are, we see some consumers who are clamoring for it and we see a lot of people who are very skeptical. If you label something AI, that, you know, that actually creates more skepticism. I think it comes back to what we were talking about a minute ago around sort of data and insights. It's just another tool set to help create really useful insights for consumers from their own data. So, our tracker gets better for you, the more it knows about you. But also to aggregate sort of the wisdom of the rest of the community who are all equally engaged and some of them share similar tastes to you. Some of them have completely different tastes, but it's remarkable for finding insights, for summarizing information, for just boiling things down in a way that I could never imagine us even a couple of years ago having done. So, you know, it's been great that we've sort of grown the team, we grew the team when we did because this is really where all of our investment is going. And I think, again, there's skepticism in the world. I'm a huge believer. This is going to fundamentally change, not just wine, but a lot of categories in useful ways and consumer-centric ways. - And so, Solar Tracker was one of the early pioneers of the freemium model where the base system is free to use and people can upgrade and pay for a pay annual fee to have more features. How is that model evolved over the years? - Yeah, we, I mean, I started doing that back in 2003, 2004, right at the very outset, before freemium even was coined as a term, I would say at the time what I was doing was sort of more akin to shareware because our, the sort of model we had all along is based on the size of your collection, we suggest what you should pay. Interestingly, a few years ago, we did go and do research with people who were paying and people who weren't paying, hundred different users and asked them about this. And we had called our models the whole time voluntary payment. What we found is everyone was actually confused by that. They didn't really know what it meant. It, for the ones who were paying, it was more of a Wikipedia-ish kind of common good. Like, I like this thing, I want it to persist. Only one of a hundred users could actually tell you what features they got as a consequence of paying. So we thought, okay, that's interesting. And then there were a set of people who weren't paying, but were super engaged in using the product and could benefit from the freemium features at that point in time, but because they didn't have to pay, they didn't pay. So, fast forward, a year and a half ago, we spent about a year planning, okay, how do we move into a sort of a more modern model? And people are much more familiar with SaaS and subscription products now. And retain the best aspects of what we'd always done, but also deliver more value to paying consumers. Number one, number two, hopefully get more consumers to pay, which again fuels the growth and the investment that we can make into all these features that we want to build for people. So anyway, a year and a half ago, we launched, we basically relaunched it as seller tracker subscription. We did do, I'm a young lady to do this one. So we took some things that used to be free and we made them paid. So drinking windows, which used to be free, and we improved them a lot, actually, sort of tripled the number of wines that had drinking windows and really improved the algorithms there, but made that part of a subscription together. Like every AI feature I'm talking about all these data and insights, these are all part of the premium products or part of the subscription. So, you know, what we found is a lot of people, we didn't really lose people, we got a lot more people who are paying and that is, let us continue to think evolve the product more quickly to do more of the things that people want us to be able to do. So that was, I think, that's the percentage of people who paid before versus now. - I'm not gonna get in this specific pay rate. I will say basically we, of the active users, we doubled the pay rate pretty much overnight. And we still have retained aspects of the old model, which is we suggest what to pay. We do that more firmly than we used to, it used to be you could just write in any value, we had sort of default ones. And so that's a little more buried. We don't let you do a custom value, but basically even if you're tracking a 5,000 bottle seller and we suggest X, you can just basically, no, I don't want to, I'm gonna pay Y instead. And there's no penalty, we don't have any hard enforcement of, oh, you can't enter. If you're only paying for 100 bottle level subscription, you still get everything. - How does that work with the apps? - Usually Apple wants their Android, want their cut. So do you take it through the, having a variable pay? I've never, I mean, I've never really seen an app do that. - So we, so Apple has the concept of web subscription. I mean, they know that there are products out there that exist not just in their ecosystem. And seller tracker has been that where we've had an iOS app together with a website. We were doing subscription long before they came along doing an app payment. So when we launched the new app, one of the things we did very early on is we did launch, so you can, on our website, purchase annual subscriptions, just directly from us. In the, at this point, Apple app, you can purchase monthly subscription via Apple. That comes with two weeks of free trial. That's been a huge, huge driver. People definitely do like the convenience of sort of Apple and their ecosystem. It's challenging, Apple takes a cut. I will also say it's challenging in that. If someone approaches us and says, I want to cancel my subscription, it kind of blows my mind, but we can't do that for them. They have to go to Apple. And Apple, like, I can give them a link. Like, please go here on your phone and turn this off. Or Apple will keep charging you. And I'm convinced there's people out there who've subscribed to like a thousand things and have no idea that they did. And I know that like by me pointing them to where they can turn something off, they're gonna be like, oh my God, what have I been doing for the last 20 years? But I don't know. I like, you know, I mean, I like to be very responsive to customers. You're going through that. So you give the two week free trial. And is that price then you have through Apple? Like that is the default, like, if I'm just an app user, is that a variable or is that a specific price? We expose the same basic concept. We suggest one. And then you can pick a plan, the corresponds to your size. We can't change it over time. We do see users will dial it up and down over time themselves. It's, we basically have the same basic UI and same model. The wine world and all of the beverage I've lost was as seen challenging times over the past few years that declining consumption and less people drinking. How is this impacted solar trucker? Are you saying the same trunks? Obviously, there's a lot of theories on this. And I don't want to pretend to be an authority. I'm in the software business about wine and I'm not directly in the wine business. And I know clearly there are economic things happening out there and I'm hearing a lot of doom and gloom for wineries. We're not seeing a decline in interest. I mean, as I mentioned, every metric is basically up 40% or more in terms of people active on the platform. We're tripling the number of people right now compared to where we were when we last spoke who are registering on the service on a monthly basis. I think what we're seeing is in a world where people are seeing inflation and different economic pressures. People are more intentional. They're looking for values. And what we seem to see is that a tool like solar trucker because that's sort of our core value proposition is helping you understand. Will I like a wine and what's a fair price to pay and what are other people paying for this? It is our belief that if anything, solar trucker is almost more relevant in a period of time like this. - I'm curious with your data scientists, I mean, the two metrics that I'd be looking at would be the number of the average number of bottles that are being added into my cellar, like is that if you're seeing that number drop down or the number of bottles in terms of actual consumption being removed from the cellar, assuming that that would be consumption. I've seen either of those two metrics or those things you're looking at. We do look at those. We're not seeing anything moving down. We just see things moving up. Part of that is again, our, it's expanding universe of our consumers grow. So, but we do look at it, normalize to users together with sort of the overall community. But we're not seeing the world falling off a cliff. We're not suddenly seeing young people disappearing. I think we have seen, I have forever believed that, and this is partly why it created solar trucker that some of wine's greatest strengths, [BLANK_AUDIO]
credible diversity are also what make it very intimidating as a category for people to get into. And I think particularly for young people, you know, it's kind of viewed, I think more as an older person's sort of hobby or passion kind of thing. So it is our hope through technology to make wine more approachable and bring more people in. Are there any other trends you're seeing with SiloTracker and all the data that you have? I'd say two things. We definitely do see signals around sort of more value exploration, but definitely people trying to find you even see it showing up in chats. You know, what's a cheaper version of something like X is a surprisingly common question. I think the other thing is we're seeing just an explosion of movement, not just natural wine, but just so much diversity of wines beyond the very traditional kind of blue chip burgundy bordeaux people on were just I mean, it's the sheer diversity of wines showing up on SiloTracker, the long tail aspects of it and the divergence of different collections. There's a lot of really exciting wine out there. And so I think there's just a lot of increased discovery exploration. I think historically SiloTracker was a very useful tool. If you knew exactly what to come and search on, we're trying to have it be a much more useful tool. If you know you like X and Y, to help take you in other directions as well. So what's next on the horizon for SiloTracker? You know, I've talked about it a bit already. I think we're at the beginning of AI. I don't like to be grandiose, but this is a big deal. And there will be bubbly aspects in a lot of industries. I think this can be a force for good for wine across many dimensions, for agricultural, for winery management. But again, I'm super focused on how is this a tool to help open up wine in interesting ways without dumbing it down and just make wine more interesting, more approachable for a broader range of consumers, both early in their journey. And people who are very engaged and much later in their journey. So the horizon is really about, okay, how do we take the AI features that we've started building already and embed those much more natively in the application? How do we increasingly merge or blur traditional search with AI-based search? If someone's typing Pinot Noir, maybe in their collection, they just want to see what's there. They're doing that as a search across five plus million lines and seller tracker. They don't want a list of 50,000 lines. They probably want something that's a higher level landing page. It's probably more of an AI-ish kind of discussion. And we want to know a little bit more about what's your intention when you're looking for Pinot Noir. And so I think it's really all about that. Exploration, discovery. I don't talk a lot about commerce because it's not our lane right now. I think I did mention sort of the ad-viar receipt feature as an example of something. That's the beginning of a feature to help reduce friction for consumers, to make it easier to find wines that they love, to buy them, to get them into their seller, to know when, to drink them. And I think if we are successful in terms of growing the number of consumers we serve, I think there might be other things down the line. There's not about making so-or-track or commerce business, but it's about, I would say, there's a lot of other businesses that are much more sophisticated and personalized about understanding who you are and what you like and what products are of interest to you. And I think the wine industry needs to come a lot further there. So we have a lot of ideas around what we could do to have seller-track or be a very useful tool for you to make just your wine shopping easier, etc. But not announcing anything yet there. One of the things I always thought was super interesting would be, is like everybody, I think every wine collector I've ever talked to, they're like, I got into this, I got the bug and then, but wherever that first place that hooked you, and so for me would be like Napa or Bordeaux. And you go deep in that area and I definitely overbought. And I probably have a bunch of old Napa that's not necessarily the best stuff for aging. And it's like, I wish I wish there was this like, oh, well, you want to like throttle back and not go so deep so quick because you're going to find new loves along the way and really diverse about the seller. I'm definitely like front loaded in a, it kind of went out of control and bought too much stuff in one area. And I think that's a common trend for collectors that they go, they just think, oh, this is the greatest thing ever. And this is my taste. But as they get into wine, their palate really evolves. And having something that can like curtail that like that instinct to kind of go down that route and be more pragmatic. Maybe that means buying less or buying more things. I don't know, but like having a tool that would help on that journey would be huge. I mean, it starts with people even just knowing what they're buying. Part of the reason I literally created Sarteraker was I made the mistake. I didn't realize when wines would show up on retailer shelves, it would be when they were first on release. And then I close out shortly before the next vintage. So I kept buying the same wine twice because I knew like, oh, I like that producer. And that's a good vintage. And I didn't realize I'd bought it nine months earlier. And I was three months away from the new release landing on the shelf. And I was like, ah, so, but yeah, you know, helping people be more intentional with their buying and ultimately crafting strategies. And but if that's what they care to do, but also just not having it be so much work, you know, the more we can automate it. This is really all about the wine and the technology can just hopefully help you get more enjoyment out of that. Well, I am definitely going to be checking out the semi-might emails to, uh, to get to pop it up because I'm a bunch of wine that I need to get into Sarteraker. And I'm going to use that as a hack. Well, it's good because yeah, the moment you get the email, you just forward it and you can, you can deal with sort of finalizing it later. But then you don't lose it. Forget about it. And suddenly shipping season. You're like, oh my God, what is going on here? So we like to wrap up each episode on a personal and since last time you're on me, I think we've mixed up the question, I'll change up the question a little bit. And what is the most memorable winery visit you've done and why? Ah, that's a hard question. Okay, I'm going to go 2005, Shots an Uff to pop. I just visited my favorite winery, Domain De Pico and had lunch with Lawrence and she's wonderful. Pico is still my favorite wine. But I had a point with at Shavon with Laurent Shavon who I had emailed with a little bit. So Laurent doesn't have a huge amount of English and I have even less French. This was when I was living in Switzerland. So I had driven down there and spent a couple of days in Chappenville to pop. So come from lunch, meet Laurent. And we sort of figure out as I park in front of his winery, like, this is going to be interesting because there was not a lot of shared language. I ended up, you know, three hours later, we're clamoring on top of fermenters. We're tasting everything and he's blind tasting me on stuff. I don't really quite know how he did it because I wasn't, you know, I was really afraid at the outset. Like, there's not a lot of shared language here. And somehow talking about wine, tasting wines, you know, the time flew. I continue to love, you know, Shavon and his wines. But that was just such a memorable visit and literally getting up on ladders on top of fermenters. Let's taste the current, you know, literally the thing fermenting right now. It was wild and I'm worried I'm going to like fall 20 feet off the top of these tanks. But, you know, it was, it was fun. Awesome. That's a great story. It's always interesting when you, when these things that you're going with trepidation and it turns out to be magical at the end of the day. So my son who graduated college, his junior spring, he spent, he did a semester in Paris. And so on spring break, I happened to be visiting and we took a, we took a train down to Avonion and spent two days in Chattanoif de Pop. He's got wonderful French. And so it was really fun to go taste it a bunch of wineries. He's okay with me. He likes wine, doesn't love it like I do, but he loved it. We had two days where he just talked to wine makers. So they would talk to me in English and then the two of them would be done. I don't know. Often the French. He just loved it, right? Because it, you know, he just, you learn so much more about the language, having real conversations. Well, Eric, we want to thank you for sharing an update on Salah Tracker and everything that you guys are working on and how you're making it a more streamlined and easy to be a collector. Thank you so much. Hey, listeners. If you love the show, support it by buying a show notes book. They not only compile two years of episodes, but also organizes them into themes for better learning. They can be an inspiration to listen to or relist into an episode or provide a quick reference of the key learnings from a show. Go to xchatto.com and click on the store page for easy links to buy. Thanks for listening. Until next time, cheers.
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