Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Adrian Tamblin, Co-Founder of Wine Routes, located in Santa Rosa, CA, USA.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
Wine Routes is The Social Network for Wine Lovers! Our desktop and mobile app help travelers plan, find, save and share wine and wineries they visit. Our highly integrated solutions and tools act as the direct link between wine brands and consumers.
Historically, consumers have found it difficult to differentiate wineries based on price, ratings, reviews, amenities, and varietals served. This disconnect has made it nearly impossible to find and plan trips to nearby wineries without the help of professionals, guided tours, or informal recommendations from friends. Wine Routes solves this by enabling users to create their own personalized adventures.
Users can rate, review, and share any wine, winery, or route they come across. The application recommends and suggests wines, wineries, and routes based on everything the user follows and rates. The platform allows for concrete mapping of data in order to help brands make better business decisions and ultimately better engage with consumers.
Our innovative national winery trip planner, coupled with our digital tasting interface, changes the way users interact with the wines and brands they love. Wine Routes provides users with a powerful tool that tracks the wineries they’ve visited, saves the wines they’ve tasted, plans their wine travel, and digitizes the entire experience in one fun, easy-to-use mobile application.
The Wine Routes social marketplace will facilitate growth and direct links between producers and an active community of wine enthusiasts, connecting the two like never before. It’s my true hope that the Wine Routes platform helps many millions of new ways to experience wine.
Your next adventure awaits!
Tell us about yourself
Some say that wine is life, or is it life is wine? Either way, I was introduced to wine at an early age. It was frequently on my families’ dinner table growing up, and I have fond memories of it being at the center of many celebrations throughout the years. As my appreciation for wine grew, I found myself in love with the endless learning process, educating myself on the nuisances, flavor profiles, food pairing options, varietals, regional differences, etc. Being born and raised in Sonoma County and surrounded by top-notch producers, it was pretty hard not to visit and learn more about wine on a frequent basis.
As my palette expanded and my experiences grew, I started being known to my friends as a wine guy. I later found out that this had both benefits and drawbacks. Many of my friends, knowing my passion for adventure, and good taste, would ask me for personal recommendations, such as which wines they should buy and which wineries to go tasting at. Each time this question was asked, it got me thinking about the difficulty of making a good recommendation. Like everyone else, I, too, struggled with the "what should I buy" and "where should I go tasting" questions. I attributed the struggle to a few things, but more importantly, propose a solution.
It’s a well-established fact that wine is considered intimidating to some. Brands of all sizes would like a more democratized approach. There are literally hundreds of varietals and growing regions throughout the world, each with different flavors, pairing options, and price points. I think we’ve all been in a grocery store or restaurant and purchased based on a cool label, a brand we recognized, or a word-of-mouth recommendation. Making a recommendation on something as personal as which winery to visit can be even more complicated. It usually involves asking yourself a series of questions and taking the time to map out a route based on a plethora of possibilities and an endless maze of options.
They say all good ideas have already been thought of, but after researching the digital wine landscape, I found that the industry was behind as it relates to current web and mobile technologies. For that reason, I assembled a talented web development team to address the current and future needs of the industry and tie brands and consumers together for a true and lasting relationship.
My family, team, and love of wine are what motivate me.
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
After 2 years of building the platform and app, we went to market in Oct 2017. A week before we planned to officially launch and tell the wine world about our platform, wildfires came through the region where we live in Sonoma County. It devastated the area, and many people lost their homes, businesses, and products.
Couple that with the fires with harvest, the upcoming holidays such as Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's, and the wind in our sails, and we're quite defeated. Our team broke up for a short time, and we had to work remotely via sprints.
We were able to persevere through subsequent years of fires and, of course, a decline in tourism due to covid. Our team is growing, and we are cash positive.
What's one of the hardest things that come with being a business owner?
Managing and setting expectations with team and clients coupled with dealing with the unknowns and being on 24/7. Work-life balance and learning to delegate also come to mind.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
- Have lots of patience.
- Trust the process.
- Don't give up.
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://www.wineroutes.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wineroutesusa
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wineroutes/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/wineroutesusa
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/atamblin/
If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.
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