In this episode of ICONS, host Roman Kirsch interviews Heini Zachariassen, founder of Vivino and current chairman of the board, who is now building Vota (vota.org), a quality rating system for restaurants. Growing up on the remote Faroe Islands (population 50,000) between Norway and Iceland, Heini developed the entrepreneurial belief that you can walk to parliament and knock on the prime minister's door to create change. This island mindset shaped his approach to building global businesses. Despite knowing nothing about wine, Heini transformed his intimidation at wine store "walls of wine" into the world's largest wine database with over 15 million wines and over 70 million users. Starting as a simple wine scanning app competing against 600 other wine apps, Vivino succeeded by focusing relentlessly on match rate over aesthetics, achieving 70-80% word-of-mouth growth with near-zero marketing spend and reaching a billion-dollar valuation during the 2021 boom. Through surviving the COVID boom-bust cycle and transitioning from community to marketplace, Heini shares hard-won lessons about founder-market fit, data moats, and building sustainable consumer businesses in competitive markets. Today, he remains connected to his Faroe Islands roots, regularly visiting home where they now boast a two-star Michelin restaurant while he builds a whiskey distillery to help diversify the local economy beyond fishing.
Topics Discussed:- Transforming personal pain points into scalable consumer products
- Building community-driven marketplaces with authentic user engagement
- Surviving boom-bust cycles and venture capital market volatility
- Creating defensible data moats in competitive consumer categories
- Scaling from product-market fit to marketplace monetization
- Managing founder transitions and maintaining company culture
- Leveraging AI and emerging technologies in established product categories
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