Heini Zachariassen, founder of Vivino, is the guest on this episode of the Danish-language podcast Den Nye Standard. The conversation is about how he built the world’s largest online wine marketplace and conquered the international market.
Heini starts the interview by describing himself as a passionate entrepreneur who grew up in the Faroe Islands and loves building things. He also describes himself as energetic, optimistic and positive. Those qualities laid the foundation for his big international success.
The world’s largest online wine marketplace
Heini talks about the road from a secure childhood in the Faroe Islands to conquering the American market, with all the ups and downs that came with it. The urge to create has followed Heini all his life, and as a young man he moved to Denmark to continue his education. There he met Theis Søndergaard, who introduced him to BullGuard and later co-founded Vivino. With over 64 million users and 2.3 billion labels scanned, Vivino is today the world’s largest online wine marketplace.
Heini says the key point of the journey was building a platform without knowing every wine. It took two years before Vivino’s wine catalogue could give customers real value. According to Heini, you have to give people value even if the product isn’t finished. The biggest mistake many companies make is wanting everything to be perfect. When Vivino started, there were around 600 other wine apps, but Heini had one focus: making an app for ordinary people who drink wine, rather than for wine nerds.
Vivino was born with an international mindset
Talking about Vivino’s journey leads the conversation to the international mindset. Heini explains that from its earliest days, Vivino has been “born global”. From the start, the team’s plan was to become the biggest and best player in the market, but thinking globally from little Denmark hasn’t made life any easier. According to Heini, Vivino’s core product is the same in every country, but the algorithm is built on data from each individual country. Only in China did the team have to build the app from scratch, because of the cultural differences.
Heini goes on to explain that he chose to move the whole family to California to push the growth journey forward, while Theis stayed in Denmark and ran the Danish office. The thinking behind it was that “if they win the US, they win the whole world”, and that turned out to be true. Today the American market accounts for just under half of Vivino’s revenue, but leading in Denmark and leading in the US are two very different things. According to Heini, the business world in the US works very differently. Americans are more cautious and used to less responsibility, but Heini stuck to his Nordic leadership style.
“It’s my ambition, but there are others around me who pay the price too”
Starting an international company hasn’t been without consequences for Heini. He describes the choice to move the family as an incredibly hard decision, but also a necessary one. Heini finds it hard to regret things, so he decided to make the best of it. He says it has taken plenty of discipline and prioritising not to work all the time. He would recommend that others settle on the East Coast if they want to conquer the American market, because of the time difference with Denmark.