The Wine List

Summary

33 million people drink wine regularly – and yet most doubt their ability and knowledge. Wine List gives confidence to wine lovers through a home wine course. Following their growth in 2020, Wine List are fundraising to increase content production, wine delivery and scale into 2021.

• 10x subscriber growth from 100 to 1,100+ in 2020
• £45k MRR
• Over 20,000 bottles of wine shipped
• Founded by former head of growth at Thriva – helped to acquire +100k subscribers

Idea

When Wine List founder Josh Lachkovic studied wine, two things happened.

1) his enjoyment of wine went up tenfold; he found interest in every bottle he drank. 2) when he tried to encourage others to do the same course, they all turned away.

20% of the UK's wine drinkers fall into a cohort that is actively engaged. They spend at the higher end of the market. They drink frequently and from a variety of sources. And yet; fewer than 20k people take part in the courses that he took.

Our vision is to bridge the confidence gap in wine.

Today, we offer a home wine course where alongside your lessons, you get two bottles of wine to practice your skills on.

2020 has been big year for growth:

• We've acquired thousands of customers
• Started importing our own wine
• Shipped +20k bottles of wine
• Averaged £45k in MRR in the last 6 months (Revenue Apr-Oct '20: £298k, P&L: -£105k).

But we have a long way to go in our mission to help those 6m wine lovers gain confidence in wine.

We are building a digital content platform that will offer best in class video, with learning quizzes to reinforce knowledge. Backed by both an online and offline community, we're aiming to make our operations and customer experience the best there is.

Covered by the likes of Evening Standard, Metro, Monocole, Drinks Business Metro, Grazia and Courier, we have an NPS of 78, and 95% 5* reviews on Trustpilot from 22 reviews.

Team

Josh Lachkovic - Founder & CEO

Former head of growth at Thriva. Here he helped to acquire tens of thousands of customers in three years, leading to multi-million yearly revenue. Before that was on the early growth team at Pact Coffee.

Josh founded Wine List after studying the WSET. While his enjoyment for wine exploded, he couldn't convince his friends to take the course. He realised that the formality, cost, and process put people off – and that there was a market for learning about wine, if approached more casually.

Chris Denny - Growth

Previously part of the early team at LOOT, and has been through the Reforge growth programme (led by former growth leads of Uber, Pinterest, and Hubspot).

Alice Warr - Operations

Previously part of the early customer operations team at Feedr, then most recently at Gibraltar Vaults, a wine storage company in Gibraltar.