Wine 2.0 Site, Snooth, Raises $1 Million Angel Round

Wine 2.0? I thought if anything, wine is better OLD

After a sip of the site, I find it robotic, bland, with a little metallic aftertaste. Adds nothing new to my collection of 2007 Startups de Chateau TechCrunch.

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Wine 2.0 Site, Snooth, Raises $1 Million Angel Round

What does that mean?

It’s a great niche with a global audience. I think they will do very well…

I have been using CellarTracker (www.cellartracker.com) for the past year and find it far superior to any of the other wine sites out there. What it lacks in AJAXy oh-wow-ness…it makes up for in depth and usability of user’s data. No ads, either! This is the site that people with serious wine cellars use. That should make it the standard for all comparisons.

How is this any different to what Dan Cederholm and Dan Benjamin built with Corkd?

@2, Albert - i agree, it is a rather bland site - nothing really new.

and besides, Erick probably only covered the startup because it’s located in his neck of the woods

Not a bad site except for the click-here-to-skip-the-splash-page feature.

One question: how do they expect to make money, or is this a charitable operation?

I guess it’s only news because someone gave them $1 Million.

It’s too bad that TechCrunch only bats an eye when someone forks over a fistfull of cash. Corkd has been around for awhile now, and TechCrunch acts as if it never even existed.

Personally I think it’s more impressive that Cederholm and Benjamin (the “Dans”) built and ran Cork’d successfully without any angel investing. Now that’s a story!

Looks like a good site to me.

I did a few searches and found it to be quick but I haven’t compared it to similar sites. For the wine the site could not find, I was asked to submit the name to their database which is good.

Good lord.

Saying it has 1.9 million reviews is completely misleading. A large percentage of those seem to be aggregated (that is, scraped) from other sites such as wine.com - at least, out of the handful of items I clicked, none of them had a real, human review. All were just scraped reviews.

This is the 2nd time Techcrunch is congratulating a site for simply nicking content from other websites, giving no incentive to visit the original site. The other was some recipe site that had “hundreds of thousands” of recipes, many of which were just being outright scraped from other websites or pulled in via RSS.

1.9 million pieces of content means absolutely nothing if that content is just a mish-mash of other website’s content.

That said, the design and user experience is nice. But I’ll stick with Corkd for now - this site seems a little disingenuous.

Only a million? I pay at atleast 35,000,000 on me and my wifes anniversary.

I actually really liked this site… better than Corkd if you ask me! Corkd was a nice idea, and for the most part well executed, but they came up WAY short in a lot of areas and the site didn’t have half the tools this one does.

Snooth has a much better interface, and the control you have over your wines (wishlist, cellar, etc) feels more robust to me. Friending and messaging is simple, but frankly that’s good - we have enough Facebooks. Plus, it’s really refreshing to see someone using AJAX and slick UI stuff in a good way.

As for the scraping of content, sure that’s a little misleading, but the bottom line is its a wine site, so people will want to read all the information they can about the wines. Who cares where the reviews come from?

I don’t know… I just don’t see where the negative pub is coming from. I thought it was really cool and very well done. Feels intuitive, fast, and the search engine is great. Bravo Snooth guys. I dig it.

Looks pretty similar to Winescorecard.com to me. Maybe Snooth is a bit fancier, but a bit sterile too.

http://www.cellartracker.com ROCKS

reviews from wine.com, huh? Is that even legal?

cork’d
cellartracker
snooth

there were a couple more

The site did not do much for me. It is a nice enough interface but nothing special. I still like to Andy’s.my local wine shop, and get to taste all sorts of wines, excellent, bad and everything in between.

Yeah, but Cellartracker and WineScoreCard look awful and the interface is atrocious. Corkd is nice, but (to respond to an earlier post) it never gets attention because they abandoned the site and haven’t made an update in almost a year (plus it was bought by WineLibraryTV so they’re just an arm of that now).

I think the reviews from elsewhere is legal as long as they are syndicated and not just scraped. They obviously have a deal in place or they’d be shut down by now. Aggregators are all the rage, and this one seems better than most.

What a horrible web design both from a visual and usability standpoint! The site is getting between 200,000 and 250,000 unique visitors a month, but I’d be interested to know how many are repeat visitors.

The home page consists of 1 search box - that’s it!?! How many of you visiting this site knew what to search for? Judging by the hidden “See more searches” link in the “can I see more examples?” pop-up bubble. Even this is poor design… it’s the last item displayed if you happen to be patient enough to sit through the slow scrolling links. Looking at this page (http://www.snooth.com/recent-searches) you’ll see most people haven’t a clue what to type in there! In fact, you’ll see most searches resulted in “hundreds or thousands of results”. Either that, or it resulted in less than 5 (because the keyword search wasn’t entirely relevant… ie. “fine”).

I would bet this is not a site design for connoisseurs - it’s for wine newbies who need a little hand-holding, and unfortunately it doesn’t fit the bill. Sorry guys.

THOSE AREN’T EVEN WINE GLASSES!!!

Wine sites on compete:
http://siteanalytics.compete.c.....?metric=uv

How come the #1 site http://www.corkd.com is not mentioned in the post???

corkd is pretty short on features.

Snooth is has tons of features and is pretty easy to use. Only thing that is a pain is when they don’t have a particular wine in their database - it takes ages for your “add to database” to actually be accepted. Oh and its pretty US centric.

When I read the headline I thought it was about Windows Emulator, geesh I need to get out some more

Re the comments about scraping: the trouble is that it’s not even doing that. According to VentureBeat, some of the reviews are hosted on sites that require paid subscriptions. You click on a review and get a registration page straight to the face. There are few Internet experiences more annoying than “click here for more… more people to pay for stuff”.

As a Chateau Tesco drinker I’ll wait for someone to do the same for real ale

Ok that’s cute, but how a ’search engine’ about wine could give me a search result such as ‘Yquem’ and put some red wine in it (4 out of 10 on the 1st page). 1 million for such a painfull result seems hard for me…

The problem is still the same thing with any kind of product search - when you convert your personal tastes to language or action (typing in a search), you may do so in a very different way from a person who converts their personal taste into a language or action (writing a review).

1 person may say something is fruity, while you may find that wine completely bland and w/o fruit.

You need a way for everyone to try the same few wines, rank them using a simple, well-understood questions “is this wine sweet” “is this wine fruity”, and then match people up who not only like the same wines from this set, but THINK ABOUT THEM THE SAME WAY (ie: both said they give it a 7/10, both said it is 3/10 on sweetness, both said it is 9/10 on fruity, etc.)

Then, you have a trustworthy base to start making recommendations because you know which reviews are valuable to which user.

I believe this is the method that tastevine is using (mentioned in the article)

Frank, we know you work for Snooth.

It’s sooo obvious.

Couldn’t resist, could you?

Frank doesn’t work for us yet, but if he sends me a resume he’ll potentially be working for us by Monday…

Snooth??? Who came up with that horrible name?

So, the only job requirements for being able to work for Snooth is being a suck-up? Nice.

How many years of experience of sucking up do you require?

Ah, Philip, folks ARE harsh here. I thought it was funny.

No, I actually don’t work for Snooth. I just liked the site and appreciate good design. The site looks great and is really easy to use. But for those who think I’m all positive, I actually didn’t like a lot of things. I think the social networking is pretty lackluster, and there’s no way to actually recommend something to a friend. So there’s still work to done there.

But Brian, serious… are you high?? The site looks really clean and slick. If anything, the design and usability are the best part. How is it bad design??!

The recent searches link is interesting - I didn’t see that at first. I too was wary of people not knowing what to search for, but after seeing that it appears to me that they get it. It’s a wine site, and the searches are all relevant wine searches. Seems to me that would be the idea… no?

What a bunch of bitches! The site looks good and will serve as a nice foundation for several evolutions I am sure they already plan to make.

Brian’s comments are especially funny. He clearly is just trying to draw attention to his design firm…LAME!

Well, I won’t give any credit to a website that claims to be a wine dedicated search engine and still, as babozor pointed out earlyer, delivers POOR SEARCH RESULTS.

I checked myself : http://www.snooth.com/search/chateau+yquem
There are 4 red yquem wines listed among the first ten results… Come on! there is no such thing as a red Yquem*.

AS FOR THE 1,9M+ reviews : thanks, for several months, logged in or not, when you clicked on their 5-glass-scale they counted it as a rating! I did it at least ten times unintentionaly! My reviews are random but at least they count among the 1,9million don’t they?

So in a nutshell :
Snooth = good idea poorly executed + worthless self produced content + cool CRAWLED content.

I’m tired of greedy people making a living by stealing content produced by others (cellar tracker etc.)

@joseph,

Thanks for letting us know. I fixed the wines from Chateau d’Yquem. Good catch!

Mark

Yeah well, you should hire me as an independant consultant because there are manyother examples I can give.

At least you listen to your almost ex-users…

Jo’

I agree with Joseph - I’m tired of people just stealing other people’s content.

As for Frank claiming that Cellartracker.com and Winescorecard.com have awful interfaces - I would think it would be more important to know how they do at recommending wines than how slick it looks. Personally, I prefer Winescorecard - their matching algorithm seems pretty reliable. Of course, with $1.3 million, maybe Snooth will just buy them and be done with it.

i dont want to get in the middle of a battle royale over here (lol julie, they are a little bitch aren’t they?) but out of curiosity, why is everyone in such an uproar about snooth using reviews from other sources?

i think you’ve all kinda missed the point. cellartracker is great at what it does: tracking your CELLAR. it’s not a rating system or a good search engine. just a place for people who know they have and want to track it. and winescorecard is not even a search engine at all: it’s just a place to rate wines you’ve already had and they give you recommendations for similar items (albeit good ones).

seems to me snooth is neither of those. its really a place for people to find information about a wine they haven’t had yet. i actually think the issue is their homepage markets them as a recommendation engine when, in fact, the recommendations part of the site is poor at best. but the searching and all the available content and reviews - that’s actually really awesome. sure there are errors here and there, but i’ve been to a ton of wine sites and can’t find any that show as much information about as many wines. i think its great that i can find all this information in one place.

Interesting… good for them! Always good when something new comes… but for me to use it, it has to have a draw.

I’ve been using http://www.winescorecard.com for a while now and Snooth seem to be copying the same concept. I’m sticking with the original for now, until I see a reason to change. I’ve spent a lot of time entering quality data into my profile at WineScoreCard.com

hey… does anyone know how we can check which of these sites ACTUALLY came out first?

everyone keeps talking about who’s copying who, so i did a little digging. based on archives, it looks like CellarTracker is the oldest, but as far as these new “community” and “recommendation” sites go:

Corkd, Snooth, Tastevine, and Winelog all have their first useful archived pages popping up around mid to late 2006? I can’t find anything for WineScorecard before earlire this year.

Anyone have actual dates for these guys…? It’s hard to say who’s first without hard launch dates.

Steven, it’s not perfect but whois can answer the question of when the domain name came into existence. Though the actual presence of data on the site may be later in all cases, it may not be any more reliable to go off, say, archive.org, because it may have taken some time after the site was up and running for spiders to have indexed it.

cellartracker.com 07-Apr-2003.
corkd.com is 04-Oct-2005.
snooth.com is 22-Oct-2006
tastevine.com is 21-Feb-2006
winelog.net is 09-Dec-2005
winescorecard.com is 15-Dec-06

(Full disclosure: I’m friends with the guys who started Snooth, and I do some consulting work for them from time to time. I’m purposely avoiding any explicit statements about who came first here, just trying to answer a technical question.)

As one of the founders of Winescorecard.com, I can say that we formed an LLC in 2006, put put out a teaser page in February, but launched the site in late June. We are still working on functionality.

Corkd, Tastevine, Wnelog, and CellarTracker are pretty established. My understanding is that Snooth launched in June ‘07, but I could be mistaken.

CellarTracker came into being in March of 2003 as a tool to manage my own personal cellar. Then a few friends wanted to use it and one thing led to another…

I incorporated CellarTracker!, LLC in February of 2004 and publicly launched in April, 2004.

Eric LeVine,
Founder, CellarTracker.com

I find it doesn’t have all to many features, to be honest. It looks fancy, but I doubt it’s objectivity, especially after this news.

I prefer two other sites: corkd.com and a rather new one: gurudelvino.com - which has many spanish and south african wines and also very 2.0 stylish.

interesting stuff Gabriel thanks!

looks to me like the oldies are the ones we suspected (CellarTracker, Corkd, Winelog) and the others are all pretty much the same. within a matter of weeks in some cases.

i just get a kick out of coments like this one from Chris, when it looks like snooth was actually out first. “I’ve been using http://www.winescorecard.com for a while now and Snooth seem to be copying the same concept. ”

oops - not quite Chris. i swear these TC discussions are always ripe (no pun intended) with bad information!

Hi there ! I launched http://www.vinogusto.com a few months back and I really enjoy discovering Snooth right now. For the european readers (enjoying talking about wine in French, Spanish and Dutch), I invite them to visit Vinogusto ! Nice to see that wine is a big thing at both sides of the ocean

This news, among other things, has inspired us to campaign for WineLog.net for the “best bootstrapped start-up” Crunchie.

The more I think about it, the more amazing it is to me what Kim and I have done _part time_ and with _zero investment_. We’re truly a bootstrap success story. There are others out there for sure, but if you want to support us, we’ll have a badge on our homepage for the next couple days for nominations.

http://www.winelog.net

Thanks.

I tested Vinorati, vinogusto, winelog, snooth & corkd.
The best is http://www.vinogusto.com, second comes http://www.snooth.com