Vivino helps the world’s largest community of wine lovers drink better wine. Through its native app and web platform, Vivino provides its millions of users with rich data and tools to learn about the world of wine, discover new wines, and buy the best wine for them every time. Since its founding in 2010, Vivino has been completely free for consumers to use. With an increased focus on monetization, an initiative to explore the opportunities for a Freemium business model was kicked off in 2022.

As Vivino had built a massive community of dedicated users and matured beyond the startup stage, the natural next step was monetization. And while the company’s eCommerce platform was already generating revenue (and growing), it didn’t directly monetize the community- and software side of the business. The latter had been attempted in the past but ultimately failed on multiple occasions. In 2023, we committed to changing that.

With a worldwide community of 10 million passionate wine drinkers who routinely used our app to look up a bottle of wine before buying, rate their latest discovery, or restock their fridge, we knew we had a tremendous foundation for successfully launching a paid solution. We even believed that some of the value we already created for our users was worth more than zero. And we knew we could do even more. The goal of this project was to provide our most dedicated users with a set of tools and features they would happily pay for - and actually charge them for it.

Vivino’s new Premium offering launched in four test markets in May of 2023. The initial version was meant as a proof-of-concept and had a very limited feature set. After a successful launch, Premium was rolled out to more markets and platforms and is now used by thousands of subscribers worldwide. The offering itself continues to be enhanced as well with new features, content, and other initiatives.

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The first version of Vivino Premium launched in May of 2023. Here’s how we got there.

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Before jumping into design and development of anything new, we wanted to get a better understanding of our best path forward through research. With our initial research we sought answers to the most fundamental questions about our users’ needs and wants, as well as the competitive landscape.

The research was carried out as a collaboration between a Researcher, the PM on the project, and myself.

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Since most of us hadn’t been involved or even employed at the company when similar initiatives were launched in the past, the obvious first step was to learn about those. 

What was included in the earlier paid subscriptions? 

How were they rolled out? 

Why did they fail?

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We talked to colleagues who had worked on these earlier initiatives and got some important insights.

The feature sets of our past paid subscriptions had been decided without a strong grounding in user research and understanding of users’ needs and wants.

Resources had not been allocated to proper post-launch follow-up of earlier initiatives, ultimately causing leadership to shut them down as the MVP versions failed to gain much traction.

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Based on this initial research, it was clear to us why earlier attempts had failed. We were committed to doing things differently.

Ground our decisions in a strong understanding of user needs and what users’ are interested in paying for.

Have a clear plan for evaluating and iterating well beyond the initial launch, and make it clear to management and leadership that launching the V1 is just the beginning - not the end of the project.

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With no desire to reinvent the wheel or duplicate previous work, we started off by reviewing relevant research and project learnings from the past. A lot of research had already been conducted regarding our users’ most important needs, and many people within the organization had valuable insights from prior ideation sessions, user tests, etc.

All of this was reviewed, compared with new findings, and used in all subsequent work on the Premium project.

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To better understand our users’ needs and our opportunities, we did a comprehensive analysis of the usage of our current feature set. We analyzed the popularity of all our features and areas of the platform, but also looked for certain patterns:

What do our power users use the most? We had a hypothesis about our power users being the most promising target group for a paid subscription. Learning about their particular usage of the platform could tell us which of our existing features could be part of a paid offering and in which areas we could build new, paid functionality.

What is heavily used by a small subset of users - and barely used by the majority? This was another way of pinpointing existing features that would be worth paying for to some users, but wouldn’t annoy the majority when locked.

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To accompany the quantitative perspective, we created a survey to dig deeper into our users’ needs, wants, and behavior. This survey was sent out to our most engaged users. Here’s some of what we asked them:

- What’s most important to you when it comes to wine? We provided a pre-defined set of options based on prior research and definitions of user needs, such as “Quickly looking up a specific wine”, “Learning about the world of wine”, “Making the perfect food-wine pairing”, “Getting new wines recommended to me”, etc.

- Referring to the user’s selection above: 

- How well does Vivino help you achieve that?

- Aside from using Vivino, how do you accomplish the above?

- If we had to improve one of the things that are most important to you, what would you want that to be?

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We also included a price elasticity test and asked some more direct questions about the user’s interest in a paid subscription service.

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All in all, our quantitative data analysis and user research served as a strong foundation for the following opportunity mapping, prioritization, and ideation.

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As another key part of our foundation, I conducted an audit to learn about the competitive landscape and how Vivino fit within it. By manually reviewing our ~40 most prominent competitors, including large platforms like ours and more single-purpose tools like wine cellar trackers, I sought to answer the following questions:

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Considering the number and quality of tools, databases, and services that are available - either for free or paid - what value can we offer our users that’s worth paying for?

Additionally, how much can we realistically charge and in what model (e.g., monthly or yearly subscription, or one-time payment)?

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I sought to answer these questions by testing as many competitive tools and platforms as possible, and comparing them to our own. My findings fed into the overall research findings and helped inform our later prioritization and exclusion of certain ideas.

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All research findings were reviewed, analyzed and discussed on the team with input from key stakeholders. This process resulted in a sharpened focus and much clearer mission for the Premium initiative.

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The Premium offering is for the most passionate wine drinkers in the world, whether existing or future Vivino users. It’s for the people who consider wine a hobby, not just something they drink. The ones who drink more and more expensive wine than the average consumer, and who regularly spend money on wine-related products and activities.

A Premium user may be highly experienced and knowledgeable in the world of wine. Or they may be earlier in their wine journey, just starting to learn about everything there is to know about wine.

What unites our Premium users is a shared passion for wine. Premium is for the wine nerds of the world.

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With Premium, we help passionate wine drinkers take their hobby to the next level. We help them learn about the world of wine and enable them to drink better, more interesting wines.

Premium facilitates a flywheel effect that feeds into other aspects of our platform, including the eCommerce part:

1. Better understand your own wine experience and personal preferences, and how they fit into the complex world of wine, so that you…

2. Have fun while widening your horizon by exploring new wines tailored to your, so that you…

3. Get a more fulfilling drinking experience and a deeper appreciation of the wines your drink, so that you…

4. Become excited about analyzing and reviewing every new wine you drink, so that you…

5. [Repeat the loop]

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In other words, we prioritized two key opportunity areas:

- Guided learning

- Enhanced taste profile

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Defining the purpose and direction for Premium was not only important for us on the team, but also for the rest of the organization to get behind this new initiative. Introducing a paid subscription to a community that had gotten used to everything being free was a big shift for the company. Many people internally were skeptical and concerned about what it would mean for the product.

With a clearer mission statement and prioritized opportunity areas, we could alleviate some of the concerns and get our colleagues excited about the initiative instead of them feeling like we were just putting up a paywall on the most beloved features.

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With our foundation in place and a much clearer direction for the Premium initiative, I planned and facilitated two ideation workshops. Each one was dedicated to a key opportunity area mentioned above: Guided learning and enhanced taste profile.

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For each workshop, I invited the most relevant colleagues from our own and other teams in the company. Certain people had worked on associated projects in the past. Some had essential technical understanding of something we expected to work on. Some we just knew had lots of great insights and ideas related to wine education, for instance.

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One workshop was done in a full workday while the other stretched across two days. They both followed a very similar format and agenda though, intended to uncover our key design challenges and a range of potential solutions.

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1. Setting the stage. I recapped our research findings, overall direction for Premium, and our focus for the given workshop.

2. Defining our challenges. Everyone was asked to write down what they saw as the main challenges to overcome for us to succeed. Some participants naturally focused on the technical aspects, some on the design, some on the internal resources, etc. After some time to write, everyone shared their concerns and we had an open conversation about them.

3. Gathering inspiration. With the overall topic of “Guided learning” or “Enhanced taste profile” in mind, combined with the challenges we just defined, everyone was asked to gather screenshots of digital products and platforms they thought could serve as inspiration. Everyone added their findings to Miro and presented the key ideas to the rest of the group.

4. Solution sketching. Following the inspiration-gathering, everyone moved on to individual solution sketching. We kicked things off with a round of ‘Crazy 8s’ and followed up with additional time to refine our best ideas.

5. Sharing and voting. After sketching, we all added photos of our paper sketches to the Miro board for all participants to see. We then went around the table and shared our ideas. Lastly, we all voted on what we saw as the most promising ideas.

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We now had a long list of feature ideas, big and small, from the two ideation workshops, past projects, and various other sources and conversations. Now, the PM, Engineering Lead, and I went through the list and assessed each individual idea. We assessed the ideas’ potential, business viability, and technical scope.

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We also assessed our existing features in the same way. Furthermore, we assessed the risk of all of our ideas. Specifically, we assessed the risk of hurting our “guardrail KPIs” defined early in the project, i.e., the metrics that currently indicate what’s good about Vivino.

For example, one of our guardrail KPIs was eCommerce conversion. We asked ourself, “How big of an impact would locking this feature behind a paywall have on our eCommerce conversion?”. Some impact was tolerable if we believed it would be outweighed by the positive impact on Premium adoption.

Another guardrail KPI was Trust in Vivino. In other words, “If we make this a Premium-only feature, will it erode our users’ trust in our data, wine recommendations, ratings, or Vivino as a whole?”

Using these guardrail KPIs helped us maintain the strong relations Vivino had built up with its community over years, and ensured a continued excellent experience for users on the free plan.

This process resulted in a shortlist of new and existing features that could make up our new Premium offering. With input from leadership, we settled on a final V1 scope. This scope was always intended to be the very first iteration of Premium rather than the final form. We wanted to launch something as quickly as possible to learn and adapt to the user reception and market response.