One of my first clients after I started my consulting business in early 2009 was Bryan McCaw, who had just launched an online service focused on helping people make better wine-buying decisions at liquor stores (LCBO) in Ontario.
Like most entrepreneurs, Mr. McCaw was enthusiastic and bullish so when I told him not to expect overnight success, it was not a message he wanted to hear. My advice was to focus on building a valuable service that would attract lots of users as opposed to focusing on getting lots of users right away.
Mr. McCaw was polite enough not to dismiss my pragmatism but, in the end, WineAlign evolved the way I envisioned. Rather than soaring out of the gate, it has slowly but surely added more users. And after two years of hard work, WineAlign is starting to gather some major momentum. In the wake of a strong fourth-quarter, WineAlign now has more than 15,000 registered users.
I caught up with Mr. McCaw to ask him a few question about the milestone and how WineAlign got there.
Q: Did you expect it to take this long to reach this level? What have you learned when it comes to attracting registered users?
A: To be honest, I thought we'd have 15,000 users in the first month or two after our December, 2008 launch. I was convinced that the 'viral' nature of the Internet and the positive feedback on the site would make it an instant success. What I have learned is that the Internet is a noisy, fragmented mess and regardless of what you are offering it takes a long time to build a following.
Q: How difficult is it to be patient when you're running a start-up? Given most entrepreneurs are optimistic by nature, do you think it's difficult to not have instant success?
A: Apparently I'm not a patient person to begin with so it was much harder than I had expected. Impatience also springs from the realization of the lengthened payback on your original and continuing investments. Optimism equals sanity for an entrepreneur. Luckily for me, I was given advice early on that this was going to take far longer than I had expected. I remember distinctly getting that advice and not liking it. That helped me modify my expectations and realize that we were not failing, we were just growing normally.
Q: It's one thing to have registered users but how do you make sure they're engaged and regular users of WineAlign?
A: We're all about metrics so we track everything we can about our users. Like Facebook, we consider an active user one who has used the service in the last 30 days. We also track engagement with the site, things like whether they've invited friends, written a review, used our mobile service, have a cellar, or opened a newsletter.
Q: What does 15,000 registered users mean to WineAlign? Do you think it will change how the company is perceived?
A: We think it's a large number and it is definitely changing how the company is perceived. We are an active community and not a passive newsletter so the quality of the engagement is higher. We've created a new delivery channel and our market is slowly coming to realize our potential. A significant part of our revenue is generated from advertising as we have pretty cool ways to target consumers when they are researching wine purchase decisions.
To put it in perspective, I use the example of the huge Toronto Gourmet Food and Wine Expo. Wine marketers go through considerable expense to get their wines in front of consumers. During the four days about 35,000 people visited the show. Between Dec 15 and Jan 15, we had double that number of visits to our website. While I acknowledge it's not pure apples to apples, it does help to quantify the size of our audience and how we are being perceived.
Q: Any advice to start-ups about managing expectations when it comes to growth?
A: I was recently talking to a start-up and asking them how they were going to get the word out. Their answers were generic with words like 'viral' and 'awareness.' I felt like such a black hat saying they need to have a better-defined strategy and they needed to half their expectations and double their timeline. I'm 90 per cent sure they ignored my advice.
There is no silver bullet. They need to have a mix of social media, SEO (search engine optimization), paid advertising, events and partnerships. I can't emphasize that last point enough. Cut deals to get noticed. It's a morass out there and you are not going to get noticed unless you do everything.
Finally, there is a strong start-up community in Toronto and I would encourage start-ups to attend events like Demo Camp and Sprout-Up, and find people to talk to. I've been amazed at the level of support we have received in the community. People are not going to steal your idea. They're too busy. But they love helping others. It's a very cool scene.
Special to The Globe and Mail
Mark Evans is a principal with ME Consulting , a content and social media strategic and tactical consultancy that creates and delivers 'stories' for companies looking to capture the attention of customers, bloggers, the media, business partners, employees and investors. Mark has worked with three start-ups – Blanketware, b5Media and PlanetEye – so he understands how they operate and what they need to do to be successful. He was a technology reporter for more than a decade with The Globe and Mail, Bloomberg News and the Financial Post. Mark is also one of the co-organizers of the mesh, meshUniversity and meshmarketing conferences.