364 days ago, on the 1st January 2009, I blogged my expectations for the coming year. They were not supposed to be wishes, or predictions, but ‘conservative’ estimates. I cringe when I go back and read the arrogant tone I used when proclaiming what we’d accomplish, and I’m glad that many times during this year I fretted that we’d miss these targets and I’d have only myself to blame.
Now, on the ultimate day of the year, its time to revisit these targets and see how we fared:
We’ll work hard, release new features, improve those already there, make some mistakes, correct quickly and carry on. = Not really a defined target, but I think we did this admirably (1 point)
We’ll listen carefully to you, our users - the community that makes this site what it is. I don’t guarantee that we’ll implement everything you ask for. In fact many feature requests, unfortunately, will never see the light of day as we have to prioritize how to spend our time and have to make sure we build features that benefit the most users. = as above (1 point)
We’ll make it a priority to provide a platform for professionals (stores, wineries, bloggers, critics etc.) to interact with our users. = With the release of the store and winery profile pages, we created a platform for these business owners to interact with our users in a powerful way. A winery or store owner, can take control of their content on snooth, develop a following and then market and communicate with their followers in a seamless way. Along with the analytics we offer those that claim their content, its a very powerful proposition. Anyone who’s not involved can claim their content here. We did less for critics and bloggers, although we did sign a major partnership with Wine and Spirits Magazine and worked with many high profile bloggers and critics, including Jancis Robinson. (1/2 point)
The Snooth API will be extended and you’ll see Snooth powering the wine results of some very major sites. = We did this in spades, and Snooth now powers wine results on tens of sites including Yahoo, Epicurious, Hello Vino, myRecipes and many others. We have over 150 companies that use our API from Amazon, Nielsen, Samsung, Twitter and others. This is key for any store of winery adding data to our site, as this extended network reaches over 10 million users per month - which in aggregate makes the Snooth Network one of the 300 largest websites in the world. (1 point)
We’ll grow our monthly user base to over 1,000,000 users per month. = Just! We reached 1 million monthly users this month, with around 1.1 million. I believe Snooth is the first wine site to ever reach 1 million users in a month. (1 point)
We’ll have over 250,000 registered users. = We announced our 250,000th user here, and continue to add 1,000 new registered users per day (1 point)
We’ll generate sales for the wine industry of over $50 million. = I didn’t define this one well, as a lot of the sales we generate we are not able to track (offline, phone orders, iphone, partner sites and so on). However, we have sold up to $50,000 of wine from a single email, we’re sending thousands of qualified buyers to wine stores and wineries per day and we’re reaching 10-20x as many wine lovers as the next largest wine site, so I believe we’ve more than hit this number. (0 points - I’m being conservative, as I can’t prove this as easily).
Net: 5.5/7.0
Not too shabby, and I’m particularly pleased we hit the numerically defined goals.
I’ll not do this again, the board doesn’t like me publicizing these forecasts, so for 2010, I’ll leave it to you to extrapolate. We tripled our monthly traffic in 2009, we had a 600% jump in registered users and we built a network of 10 million users per month. I can tell you that I cannot wait for 2010, the Snooth team is revved up and ready to rock the coming year, and we love coming in to work each day and helping create the wine site each and every one of you deserves.
Thank you for all your support, this is your site, and have a happy new year.
Working in China?! Living in China?!
Marketing Director
Department: Marketing Department
Reports to: Managing Partner
Responsibilities:
Ø Manage the whole marketing activities, I.e: brand building, market research and integrated-marketing functions
Ø Develop implement/evaluate brand activit
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…” by wayno da wino