To clarify this would be a product on fb? Yes.

I will talk about possible users and their pain points, then about how these users solve these pain points today, and then pick a pain point to focus on and brainstorm some solutions.

So some users for this product could be

1. experienced wine drinkers who really understand wine
2. wine lovers who know a little bit about wine but they are avid drinkers of it
3. novices who are just starting to get into wine

One pain point here is Finding wine that people might like. For the experienced wine drinkers they are looking for unique or high quality wine to expand their palette. For wine lovers it might be around trying different types of wine to find new wines that they might like. For novices, there‘s a pain point around understanding wine- what are all the different types of wine, what types of wine would they like.

another pain point is buying wine. some people don’t have specialty wine shops nearby or their local grocery store or liquor store only carries a limited number of wines and there’s a lack of diversity.

the last pain point I have is understanding food pairings with wine.

I want to solve for a pain point that relates back to fb’s mission of providing tools to build community and bring the world closer together. I think there’s a community aspect to solving how to help people find wine that they may like and specifically I want to solve it with wine lovers and wine novice in mind since they are going to be the larger population but some of the features may apply to wine experts as well.

So in finding a wine that people might like, today its mostly dependent on trial and error. Some people only like one specific type of wine and they don’t try other varieties and they might miss out on discovering something they may like. Or some people tried one bottle of that type and decided that they don’t like that type of wine at all.

I’m envisioning a feature where there’s a page for the specific wine and there’s info about what’s the flavor notes of the wine, how dry or acidic the wine is, all the different wine properties. So there’s a education and category piece and then there’s a social piece where we can rely on fb’s large user base to give more info about the wine. users can rate the wine and write reviews on the wine. users would be able to learn over time what type of wine they like- maybe they like very dry wines for example And then they would be able to find over highly dry wines. we could even give personalized recommendations based on what other people with similar ratings to yours have liked.

Before I jump in, will this product be part of the FB ecosystem? If it’s up to me, although I think wine has a great social element and is shared when people are connecting…I would hesitate to create a product that promotes alcohol consumption on FB. So I would choose to have it live outside of FB.

With that, let me start by making sure I understand the product correctly, talk about some metrics we can target. Then we can think through who our users are and outline some of their needs. Finally, we can come up with some ideas for this product and prioritize what we want to go to market with. At a high-level, the product is going to be designed for people that have an interest in drinking wine

Looking at the journey of wine drinkers, there are people of different levels of sophistication. Wine drinkers may want to discover, learn, buy, share their experience, evaluate quality, look for deals, look for flavor profiles, etc. As we launch this product, the goal should focus on acquisition and engagement. If there is engagement, then we will be able to eventually monetize. For this, we want to optimize for acquisition and retention. A product like wine has communities that can offer strong network effects.

GOALS Since its a new product, I would like to set our primary goal to be # of users’ activated and secondary goal of MAU (people may not engage in wine daily, but monthly).

USERS

Looking at the wine-drinking Journey, we can think about drinkers, producers, distributors, critiques.

Wine drinkers:

1. Sophisticated well versed wine consumers who really know their wine
2. Frequent drinkers who enjoy wine, but don’t really know the makeup and composition of wine. They know what tasted good to them, but not much beyond that.
3. Casual wine drinkers, who drink wine socially, but haven’t really shown a strong interest in wine.
4. People who are completely new to wine, don’t know what they prefer.

Other users

1. Wine critiques who review wines
2. Wine producers (wineries)
3. Distributors (wine shops, tasting rooms, supermarkets, etc) Looking at potential users, I think it makes the most sense to target frequent wine drinkers who have an interest in wine, but aren’t terribly versed in the particulars of wine drinking – this gives us the biggest market potential (lots of people drink wine, and lots of them don’t really know the details behind it). The other groups could get value from this product, but I don’t think that sophisticated users would want to rely on a new product (they are very likely loyal to their sources). For those people who drink rarely or casually, a product is not going to get them to shift their preferences.

Let’s look at some of the needs of frequent wine drinkers who arent so-called experts:

1. They are looking for deals on wine or fair value of wine
2. They may want to understand their flavor profile and know how to identify what they like
3. They want to know what wine experts recommend
4. They may want to save and track the different wines they enjoyed in the past
5. They may want to know how long a bottle of open wine is good for
6. They may want to know how to store wine they have to make sure it doesn’t go bad
7. They may want to know when to open a bottle for optimal flavor

FEATURES To guide our features we can aim to create a product that introduces the masses into the ins & outs of the wine world.

1. Deals / Fair Value: Aggregator that looks at available wine deals relative to fair market value. Users could either get alerts when their particular choice of wine is available % below fmv. Or their could be a weekly deals list of best available values.
2. Flavor profile: To help users understand flavor profile, they can identify which wines they enjoy, based on that the product can understand desired flavor notes, optimal regions, years, etc. It can then suggest wines that are most likely to align with flavor profiles.
3. Experts: Users can follow experts to get their take on wines, see their ratings. People can then test and see what experts are best for them. We can also consider creating a community where experts and wine drinkers of all sorts interact.
4. Timing of wine: Users can see how long wine is supposed to age to reach optimal levels, and with that see if a wine is spoiled based on simple questions they answer based on what they taste.
5. Broad education on wine: How to pair wine, what to look for in certain brands, etc. I would prioritize these based on a simple value and simplicity scale from 1 to 3

Priorities Based on that I would prioritize 1 > 2 > 5> 4 > 3To launch, I would focus on piloting with major wine distributors to promote this “app”. There is a shared interest because users can become more and more interested in wine and thereby spend more money with distributors.

To summarize. I suggest we design a wine app that targets frequent wine drinkers who arent necessarily wine experts. This is an engaged wine audience who would more than likely be interested in improving their wine-drinking experience. We can focus on basic needs like price and discovery…and continue on by sparking aspirations about becoming wine experts themselves.