Empathizing with Winemakers to Create a Global Wine Community

LITTLEWINE, the world's winemaker-led knowledge platform, empowers wine professionals to learn about and experience wine straight from the source.

LITTLEWINE is a B2B SaaS product that digitizes wine education and information sharing, offering a virtual alternative to visiting winemakers in person. The platform connects wine professionals and enthusiasts with winemakers, promotes product transparency, democratizes knowledge exchange, and celebrates the people and places behind the world's most inspiring cuvées.

The Challenge

LITTLEWINE's objective is to make wine bottle information accessible to all professionals working with wine. Sharing winemaker-generated content is crucial to the platform's success.

The current supply chain often obscures a wine's authenticity behind layers of intermediaries. LITTLEWINE set out to remove these barriers, sourcing complex content directly from winemakers and presenting it in a visually engaging, easy-to-digest format.

We ran user workshops to gather insights from wine lovers, wine professionals, and winemakers. Based on market research carried out with SH, LITTLEWINE decided to focus the initial product on the B2B space. A personalized collection of wines lets users quickly access content about the wines they work with, as well as wines they may want to work with in the future.

The platform combines two types of content:

LITTLEWINE-curated content. Articles and blog posts, information on different wine types from winemakers, and pictures and videos sourced directly from winemakers, all provided through the admin panel in the web app.

User-generated content. Collections by wine lovers, favorite wines, and notes (a post-MVP feature).

The Solution

The LITTLEWINE platform features dedicated accounts and pages for winemakers, where they can upload and update content and add images and videos. Wine professionals can create custom collections, share them with their teams, and access LITTLEWINE-curated information about wine regions and grape varieties.

A powerful search function ensures easy access to wine references and educational material.

Product Discovery Process

The process began with a series of workshops and discussions covering competitor analysis, customer needs, and potential revenue streams. These sessions clarified LITTLEWINE's product vision. We then created prototypes based on our user knowledge and on assumptions backed by market research.

Once the prototype wireframes were ready, we recruited users for testing. LITTLEWINE brought together winemakers, wine buyers, reputed sommeliers, and various consumers: an ideally diverse mix of wine-related perspectives.

LITTLEWINE had full access to the interviewing process, its outcomes, and the updated prototypes that followed. Our tech specialists narrowed the product's scope down to a few MVP estimation variants, keeping only the necessary functions at the earliest stages.

Because our specialists monitored Product Discovery from the outset, they could weigh in on the scope from different angles, balancing technical feasibility with key user selling points.

The outcome: an estimation file with suggested MVP scopes, each with a concrete set of functionalities, ready for pitching the idea to first users and early investors.

The Scope of Our Work

Product Discovery workshops began in late November, with user testing following the New Year. We conducted ten user interviews across two user groups over two weeks.

Want to Know More?

LITTLEWINE's product keeps evolving, and the current strategy focuses strongly on the winemaker segment and knowledge sharing between professionals.

The aim is a reliable source of information for sommeliers and other wine professionals, so they no longer have to browse countless webpages and channels, including social media, email, and pen-and-paper notes, to dig out the information they need.

More information about the solution: littlewine.io

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