There’s a version of this story that ends with you paying a developer $15,000 for an app that’s basically your website with a home screen icon. Guests download it once during a slow moment, poke around, and never open it again. You get to say you have an app. Nothing else changes.
That’s not the version worth building.
A companion app done right is one of the few places where you have a direct, uninterrupted line to a guest who’s already told you they’re interested. No algorithm. No competing posts. No feed. They opened the app because they wanted to. That’s a different kind of attention than anything you’ll get from Instagram.
Read More →In 2021, the craft beer market was still riding a decade-long wave. New breweries and taprooms were opening across the country, many of them run by small teams who were passionate about their product but stretched thin on everything else — especially their digital presence.
I noticed the same pattern over and over. A taproom owner would have a Facebook page, maybe an Instagram account, and a website that was either built five years ago by a friend or assembled in a weekend on a generic site builder. The hours were wrong. The menu was out of date. The “About” page was a placeholder. And every time a guest searched for the business online, what they found didn’t match the experience waiting for them at the bar.
Read More →Most tasting rooms aren’t running a wine club — they’re running a spreadsheet with a recurring billing problem. If you’ve ever had a member call asking why their card was charged before their shipment arrived, or lost a loyal guest because your “loyalty program” was a paper punch card, you already know the gap.
A CRM built for DTC wine operations closes that gap. But not every CRM is built for your world.
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