Viral Growth Strategy - Vinovest

Growth capitalizes on the intrinsic motivation of your evangelist customers to generate extrinsic results

About Vinovest

Vinovest is the largest holder of fine wine investments in the United States. They are on a mission to democratize fine wine investing, which is a space typically reserved for the elite and ultra-wealthy. Prior to Vinovest, the barrier to entry for investing in wine was incredibly high. From auction and broker fees to the cost of building or renting a storage facility, the capital expense required just to start buying bottles is extreme. Vinovest removes these roadblocks by enabling users to invest with a simple mobile app akin to Fundrise or Masterworks.

What I Did

Defined the Strategy and Approach for improving the virality of the Vinovest platform and presented it to the Senior Leadership Team. We then took action on my initial recommendations.

The Problem & Goal

In the first half of 2021 Vinovest was experiencing record growth. However, over 80% of this growth was driven by Sales activity. In order to hit the lofty 9-figure revenue goals of the company, this was simply not going to scale in time.

The goal: Develop a world-class Viral Loop in the product experience in order to increase organic user acquisition and decrease our blended customer acquisition cost.

Defining a Strategy

Before making any recommendations for action, I wanted to level-set the company on what it means to become “viral”. As a very young startup, the mental shift required to properly support a growth mindset is not easy. Therefore I determined the right plan of action was to:

  1. Research the current state of virality across the tech landscape (with a particular focus on FinTech substitutes)

  2. Develop the “go-to” doc that defined Vinovest’s strategy and attitude towards growth

  3. Present this document to the CEO (and later the rest of the company) in order to begin the cultural shift needed to bring this plan to action

  4. Execute

Below is the end result of steps 1 & 2. While much of the specific recommendations are tailored to Vinovest, the core themes transcend industry boundaries and can be applied to a myriad of different companies and use cases