10 Questions with Adegga.com’s Founder

By: Eddie Correia on December 11, 2007 
Filed Under Wine Marketing


Adegga.com Social Wine DiscoverThrough Algarvebuzz, we met André Ribeirinho – a Portuguese born Entrepreneur and founder of the social wine discovery website Adegga.com.

If you’re like me, you’ll probably find yourself doing some head scratching every time you’re faced with the seemingly endless rows of bottles at your local wine shop.

Living in Portugal, doesn’t make picking wines any easier, with so much choice it’s sometimes frustrating to pick just one…and lets not get into the considerations….what’s right for dinner, lunch, food, guests… on and on….ah, the stress.

Fortunately, Adegga takes out the guessing; and I now go to Adegga to check wines before heading out to the shop…its become my secret weapon in choosing my wines; so my “wine ego” remains in tack rather than in tatters. Next time you find yourself having to go “pick a wine” and sweating under the pressure to deliver something impressive…click on over to Adegga.com first and enjoy the results.

Adegga.com is currently on an invite bases; if you want an invite, please leave me a comment or email “moses[at]chamainc.com”, I’ll be happy to share some of my invitations.

I recently had the opportunity to interview Adegga’s founder Andre Ribeirinho and asked him the next 10 questions.

Adegga Team

Founders: from left to right: Andre C., Andre R., Emidio

1.What does “Adegga” mean and how did you come up with the name?

Adegga is a play on the word adega (only one g) which means cellar in Portuguese. We wrote several potential names on a white board while trying to come up with a name for our service. Eventually the name Adegga won because it was both inspired by the (strong) Portuguese wine culture but also readable in several different languages. I think that good names need to tell a story and Adegga tells the story of a team of Portuguese internet entrepreneurs that want their social wine discovery service to be useful around world but never forgetting their Portuguese origin.

2.Why a “social wine discovery” and who do you think will benefit from using it?

Friends opinions are the ones we trust most. When a friend makes a recommendation there’s a bond of trust that makes us feel confident.

It’s our real social network that helps us make decisions. On the other hand wine is inherently social and totally prone to discovery (who doesn’t like to try new wine?). The combination of friends, wine and discovery is the basis for our service.

Interestingly, Adegga is useful from the moment you and another friend are using it. You can both share wines you buy, drink or wish. This helps you and your friends make smarter choices when choosing wine.

3.Who is Adegga.com for?

Adegga is for wine lovers who find it difficult to choose wine. By sharing their opinions with their friends Adegga makes it extremely useful for anyone (from wine newbie to wine expert) to share their passion with other people they trust. Any person can use Adegga to search for a wine, see what other people think about it and know where to buy it.

4.What are you hoping to achieve with Adegga?
Wine is sometimes seen as snobby. This makes a lot of people nervous or uncomfortable with choosing and enjoying wine. Adegga wants to make people feel more comfortable by taking the complexity out of selecting wine. With time this will make people enjoy more and better wine.

5.What kind of reception have you gotten so far?
People that love wine, love the way Adegga works. Many of our users send us emails with requests for things that will make them use Adegga better. They show they like Adegga because they want to use it more and more. Moreover, we take these requests seriously when working and developing Adegga’s features, so we actively make the service more useful everyday, based on our users needs.

I’ll give you an example. Some people asked us to add a way to know where to buy a wine directly from their wish list. We have implemented this feature and if you have a wine in your wish list you’ll get a list of shops on where to find that wine and at what price. This feature also works for people who don’t have an account but do want to check other people’s wish lists.

6.Personally, I believe, Adegga could change the way people learn about and buy wine. It just did that to me this past weekend – my wine shopping experience was much easier and I really enjoyed some new wines I might have never considered before. What are some of the interesting ways, users are using Adegga.com?

We knew from other online services that the 80/20 participation rule (80% read / 20% write) is the normal usage scenario. Based on this we decided to make it very easy for people to give their input. By being able to mark a wine as tasted and rate it or simply adding it to a watch list we have made it very simple for anyone to show their opinion on a wine. We are happy that people are effectively using these features and the level of participation and sharing has been very high since the launch of the project.

We are also increasingly looking forward to the way producers and wine shops use Adegga. We have come up with a way to let them manage their own presence in out service. This allows producers and wine shops to take more effective control of their online presence and create an online relationship between them and their (potential) clients.

7.How does someone become a member of Adegga.com?

Getting into Adegga is very easy. By getting someone to invite (email moses[at]chamainc.com) you’ll then receive an email with a link to create an account from there. After this, you can start tracking wines you’ve tasted, adding friends to your personalized watch list and choosing better wines.

8.How have you adjusted from your established job at Sapo to becoming an online entrepreneur?

Being an entrepreneur is very different from having a corporate job. Managing my own time was a very rewarding challenge as I found my self being able to organize my work day in a better way. As an online entrepreneur I also have a physical freedom I didn’t have before. Now I can work from Lisbon, London or Copenhagen since all I need is an Internet connection. But the biggest benifit is the experince of taking something from nothing and seeing it evolve. The knowledge, work ethic and creativity sensitivty needed to get here is something I couldn’t have gained in a corporate position.

9.A 100% online business is still a very new concept in Portugal, how has your leap of faith been received?

Leaving a corporate job is always a challenge. When I left Sapo, I posted about it on my blog. Since then people have been very supportive and I feel that by running my own online business hopefully others will be encouraged start their one ventures and stop thinking that having a corporate job is the only way to go. Seth Godin says “Safe is risky” and I couldn’t agree more.

10.What’s next for Adegga.com?
We have a very ambitious road map for Adegga, full of features that will make Adegga an even more useful and comfortable service to use.

Among this things we have planned a multi-lingual version and bunch of special features for wine bloggers. We believe that wine blogging has made choosing wine easier and there are hundreds of great bloggers producing amazing content. We want people to be able to find the content when they need it.

Filed Under Wine Marketing

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