Click here to nominate WineLog.net as the best bootstrapped Start-up.

Web awards are fun. This one means a bit more though. It would really make us happy to receive some recognition for the amazing stuff Kim and I have done with this site.

I guess we’d have to prove two things to receive this award. (1) We’re bootstrapped and (2) Our site is “best”.

Boot-strapping Young Gent
While many of our competitors have received hundreds of thousands of dollars of financing, WineLog has been operating as a labor of love. We’ve taken no angel or venture capital investment to date. What money we do need (for wine, traveling, servers, and little bit of marketing) has come from the founders’ pockets.

While many of our competitors are developed and run by teams of developers, WineLog was built by just Kim and I part-time. For the record, 4 full-time developers = 1/2Kim + 1/2Jason. (The advice from our CEO Bill has been invaluable as well.)

I don’t want to knock the other companies for taking funding or hiring help. I think those are smart moves in many ways. It’s just not our way right now. With so much varied potential in this Wine 2.0 world, we like staying small and nimble so we can find our niche and attack opportunities quickly. That’s what we’ve been doing. That’s what we’ll continue to do.

Press attention is easier to get when you receive investment (partly because investors validate your business and partly because saying “one million dollars” is impressive), and it would be nice to be recognized for doing the opposite: building something great with limited resources.

WineLog is a Success (and the potential is HUGE)
By all accounts, I would say that WineLog is a success. We set out to build an online community for wine drinkers, and at least Google agrees with us.

Real people think we’re great too. WineLog is consistently mentioned as a key player in the “wine social network”, “wine reviews”, and “cellar management” spaces. I think we’re on everyone’s radar. As early movers and proven developers (and with all the super secret stuff we have in the works) people should be paying attention.

Our “numbers” are low by YouTube standards, but amazing to us. Since our launch May 24, 2006, we’ve had 340k different people visit the site (absolute unique visits) and over 1.2 million page views. We reach about 30k+ people per month. 1-2k people per day. To me it is mind-boggling that I could write this blog post and get it in front of that many people.

Our users have made nearly 8,000 ratings and over 8,000 notes and comments. Thank you, users.

And we’re growing! As long as we keep it up and keep our users happy, we’ll have more than twice those numbers by this time next year easy. I’m shooting for 4x, I hope to get at least 3x.

The potential IS huge.
More and more people are drinking wine every day. More and more people are shopping for and researching wine online. Just as social networks like Facebook and MySpace have dominated general web traffic. The nature of a site like WineLog will ensure that it dominates among wine-related websites.

Because of crazy interstate shipping laws and other difficulties, the “big eCommerce players” (Amazon, Yahoo, eBay) don’t have strong wine-related properties. But those laws are slowly unraveling (help free the grapes), and it’s only a matter of time before the big guys want exposure to the wine market. In other words, the winners of Wine 2.0 are looking at some huge buyout deals. Or at least some cushy jobs as VP of Wine Sales at one of the publicly traded companies.

It is a pleasure just to be nominated.
If you haven’t already nominated WineLog for the Crunchie, I hope I’ve convinced you. If you’re grateful for the service we provide (for free), impressed by our business, or just in the giving mood nominate WineLog.net as the best bootstrapped Start-up. Things will continue here as usual, but the recognition would be nice. And an award like this will hopefully keep us on the minds of these tech bloggers and help pave the way for successful partnerships as our business grows.

Thanks, folks. Now get back to finding great wine.