Raise a glass to Snooth, a social wine review site that is gaining some traction and recently closed another angel round of financing of about $1 million. Angel investors included Joe Meyer, Kevin Fortuna (both from Quigo) and Ted Jansen (former SVP at Expedia), who are now on the company’s advisory board. The New York City-based startup last raised an angel round a year ago for the same amount. Snooth lets you rate, review and talk about wines. On Snooth, anyone can be Robert Parker. And you see what all your friends are reviewing and rating in your own feed. There is also an iPhone-optimized site, and a full-fledged app is in the works.
Snooth offers data to wineries and wine merchants, giving them an idea of where people who are interested in their wines are located, and makes money from lead generation (when a member clicks through to buy a bottle). The site has signed up 11,000 wine merchants worldwide so far.
In a letter to its shareholders, a copy of which TechCrunch has obtained, CEO Philip James gives an update of the business:
TRAFFIC:
We’ve seen exceptional growth over the last 6 months, and our traffic is now over 600,000 users per month, representing a 400% increase over that time period. In December we generated $1 million in gross revenues for our merchant partners.Snooth is now the largest interactive wine site on the web (in terms of traffic), and we expect to be the largest wine site on the web by Q3 2009.
We are already the largest wine site by number of wines tracked (1.1M), wine reviews (2.1M), registered users (75,000) and we are gaining on the other companies rapidly in this last metric.
. . . FINANCES:
Thanks to the recent capital raise, and with our net burn rate of $60,000 we have a runway of over 18 months, assuming 0 revenue. This is a very conservative estimate as Snooth has been making revenue (primarily from lead generation) for the last few months.
The letter also notes that Snooth provides the wine results for Wikia Search, and ends with goals for 2009. James wants the site to grow to one million visitors per month, 250,000 registered users, and be at a $50 million run rate in generating sales for wine merchants. Snooth’s own revenue is only a small fraction of those sales, typically 10 percent. Assuming it does reach its goal of driving $50 million in sales to affiliated merchants this year, that could result in as much as $5 million in revenues for itself.
If Snooth can keep growing, though, it could become a nice little business. In comparison to the 600,000 uniques James mentions in his letter, Quantcast shows Snooth at 450,000, but with a similar growth curve. Google Trends shows that it has already surpassed Corkd (see chart below), Gary Vaynerchuck’s competing wine review site, which he has admittedly allowed to languish. Snooth is even catching up to Wine.com in terms of traffic. (Note that Wine.com is a wine shopping site, not a review site, although it does have ratings as well. That something called Snooth could be attracting as many visitors a month as a gold-standard domain like Wine.com is impressive in its own right).
I’ve used the site and love it. The UI is great.
That’s impressive traction! Well done to the Snooth team. I wonder if it’s mainly SEO Traffic (they have 1.1M pages for different wines) or just wine fanatics?
Compete’s data agrees with that of Google Trend’s. Interesting to note that Snooth has 769 keywords driving traffic vs. Corkd’s 370 , according to Compete (yes, US data only).
Congrats Philip and all Snooth team! Great achievement.
Robert
http://www.glob...winespirits.com
i’ve used snooth but the UI is not as nice as cork’d. according to @garyvee, he is going to do a revamp of cork’d some time this spring/summer and i can’t wait to try it out then.
one advantage of snooth, though, is they do have an iphone app out (for $4.99 i think under a different name, but it’s powered by snooth)
@shafqat –
I wonder if it’s mainly API traffic that is managing to get measured. Is anyone else using Snooth’s API besides Wikia?
-mathew
http://www.blist.com
I like Cork’d much better. Bad timing either way.
This is just some more “dotcom” bullshi**, pardon the reference to the old “web 1.0″ era.
Hello Michael and to the rest of the great writers here at tech crunch…i am a long time reader.
Today we are soft launching The Daily Bail, a bailout news, opinion & analysis site.
In more detail we are a news aggregation source for all stories related in any way to the institutionally dysfunctional, painfully inept and completely counter-productive taxpayer bailout of failed people, ideas, businesses, pensions, municipalities, states and ultimately, we fear, of our federal government.
The site is not complete but is functional and so we have decided to soft launch now given the strong bailout news flow.
For those interested, click the URL next to my name or go to http://www.thed...squarespace.com
In a few days we will lose the ‘.squarespace’ tag.
Thanks again for allowing us to post and I hope tech crunch readers will take the time to check us out.
dailybail
For me, it’s all about CellarTracker.com. Eric LeVine has put together a great site there over the years, great active community, and I think he is tracking more bottles than Snooth. Plus you can leave reviews, read reviews, find just about any wine known to man, etc. And I gather he’s going to put his social UI overhaul into beta in a couple/few months – which I’m looking forward to.
Cor.kz is an iPhone front-end to CellarTracker…. and we are hard at work at our next version which will add more CT functionality
!
B Ross, thank you for the kind words.
CellarTracker will likely never get mentioned at TechCrunch, because it is not sexy enough for one lone entrepreneur to build a profitable business without seeking millions of investor dollars. (And 500,000 unique visitors per month.)
This is an exciting space, and with CellarTracker I have focused a lot more on collectors versus shoppers. That said, a lot of these site are converging around some of the same scenarios. It will be fun to watch it play out.
Thanks,
Eric LeVine
-CellarTracker.com
That’s impressive numbers! Good job to Snooth team. On the other side, when you got angels investments like they did and still gets, you have the money to make things happen way faster.
People interested in wines should also take a look at another wine social site http://www.vinivino.com.
Tell us what you think?
Guy-Jacques
http://www.vinivino.com
congrats P. James, a good dude and hard worker!
Gary, anything new coming up on Cork’d? It’s still the first place I go when I’m strolling the wine aisles. I think there’s an opportunity for an iPhone app here, I’ve seen lots of others looking up wines in stores too.
Snooth has made an impressive turnaround this year.
The UI is drastically improved. They are a company to watch no doubt. Kudos Philip!
Philip is an awesome entrepreneur. Scrappy and hard-working, he’s put together a great site, a great team, and a great business at Snooth. Congrats, Philip!
I’m impress so many people are excited about the Snooth UI (they may know everything about wine, but they are not very demanding about UI). Let’s be honest, the interface is simply unacceptable, and looks like the alpha version of something that will be released in 2010.
I’m sorry, but your comment sounds like a jealous, unfounded rant. The Snooth UI is really wonderful, and they’ve been improving it continually, which is wonderful to see. Compared to the Cork’d UI, it’s about 10 lightyears ahead..
Not that I don’t have something of a vested interest (I periodically consult regarding systems administration and storage with Snooth, went to school with the CTO, and am friends with all of the staff; that’s as disclaimer, not as bravado), but I’m pretty sure that Philip would be quick to point out that plenty of these plaudits, especially the positive ones about the UI and its improvement over time belong to Mark, Clint, Mike, Chris, and Justin. Not previously noted is solid content and community involvement (for which thanks go largely to Greg). Phil’s congratulations ought to be “just” for making the business run smoothly. Scare quotes, here, mean an enormous euphemism.
Philip has worked long and hard on continually improving the site and adding great new features. Congrats on the funding and traffic!
I think the site has a good name. What bugs me with some startups is names that you can’t prounounce and i think it is difficult to get word of mouth publicity with names that you can’t say or can’t spell correclty.
This is a clever well-run site. Wine.com is in for a fight for the space.
Clark Schultz
The UI is amazing. Wine.com is going down.
Snooth is a great company and team. Congrats P.James and Mark. Remember, take aim at the rich kids, get them in your sites and take them out. They can buy anything, but they can’t buy back bone, don’t let them forget it.
Landed on snooth the other day while looking for a review of a 2005 chateauneuf i was about to drink. Reviews were good, site looked cool.
Btw, I have no idea what this dude Avi above me is talking about.
It’s a (mis)quote from Rushmore. It’s a joke.
I’m somewhat surprised that they only went out for a million. I would think they could raise more based on that traffic growth.
I wonder if that implies anything about actual revenue generation prospects. We’ve certainly faced an advertising drop-off at http://Winescorecard.com
Snooth amaizing UI makes me waste a ton of time there. Nice job on the capital.
Now if Mike would only write about http://tastyplanner.com.
In the google trends comparison I miss Vinogusto (in which I participate): this wine reviews site based in Brussels went live later than Snooth but is already slightly ahead in the race for traffic, according to Google Trends for Websites:
http://trends.g...=all&sort=0
No doubt http://www.vinogusto.com, in 4 languages, is the fastest growing site in this sector.
BTW, congratulations to Snooth for this new funding. 2009 will be a nice competitive year
Perhaps some of you guys would like to help out a bit as beta users? We are a Dutch winecommunity and plan on launching in English and French soon. http://www.vinoo.eu.