From the Tiny Faroe Islands to a Billion-Dollar Wine Empire: Vivino’s Heini Zachariassen

When competing against 600 wine apps, Vivino succeeded by obsessing over match rate rather than visual design. While Apple featured competitors for their beautiful interfaces, Heini focused exclusively on whether users could get data on the bottle in front of them. This "best product, not good product" philosophy meant being the best at the one thing that mattered most, even if other aspects were lacking.

Heini attributes Vivino's success to building for their own demographic - wine newcomers seeking quick answers rather than experts wanting detailed tasting notes. This founder-market fit prevented them from building for wine connoisseurs (a small high-end audience) and instead created a product for the mass market of intimidated wine buyers who wanted simple, fast guidance.

While traditional wine critics rated 20,000 wines per year, Vivino generated 100,000 ratings per day through community engagement. This scale advantage allowed them to cover every small vineyard globally and create defensible competitive advantages through data depth and breadth that traditional experts couldn't match.

With 70-80% word-of-mouth growth, Vivino faced the challenge of not disrupting their core scanning experience while building additional features. Heini emphasizes the discipline required to keep optimizing the primary growth driver even when it creates a "two-edged sword" that makes other features seem less important by comparison.

Vivino's biggest surprise was discovering users wouldn't buy wine immediately after scanning bottles in stores. This forced a product pivot to build wine discovery features (explorer, recommendations) to capture purchase intent when users were actually ready to buy, rather than assuming the green "buy" button would work in scanning contexts.

Heini advocates for maintaining spending discipline even during capital-abundant periods, asking "would you spend this money if you only had half?" He emphasizes that constraints improve decision-making and that founders should consider secondary sales during peak valuations rather than always believing the optimistic trajectory will continue.

The transition from community platform to marketplace required maintaining user trust above all else. Heini's philosophy was never to compromise on serving users the best wine recommendations, regardless of margin opportunities, because losing community trust would destroy the entire business foundation.

Vivino's success metric became users who scan wine bottles consistently for 10+ years, creating an ingrained habit. This long-term retention focus proved more valuable than aggressive user acquisition, as these engaged users became the foundation for sustainable marketplace growth and word-of-mouth expansion.