Here’s What I Took With Me. We did a lot right. We also made some painful mistakes that, in hindsight, are obvious. Now that I’ve built Vintiga from scratch, a few lessons are crystal clear.
If you don’t control the platform, you don’t control the outcome.
We built on BigCommerce. At the time, it made sense, faster to market, less engineering, and an existing ecosystem.
But here’s the tradeoff no one talks about: you inherit someone else’s roadmap, limitations, and priorities.
That means you can’t move as fast as you think you can. You can’t fix core problems at the root. You’re always negotiating with your own foundation.
Build for someone real.
The most effective work we did was always tied to a specific customer. A specific type of winery. A specific workflow. A specific pain point.
Whenever I tried to get the team to generalize for “the market,” things got diluted. Clarity comes from focus.
Small teams build better products.
The best progress we made came from small, focused teams with one clear decision-maker.
When the team got bigger, things slowed down. More alignment. More tradeoffs. Less ownership. Big teams don’t build better products. They build consensus. That’s a killer.
Speed is a product decision.
We weren’t slow because people weren’t working hard. We were slow because the system was complex, the dependencies were heavy, and the coordination cost was high.
Speed isn’t just execution. It’s architecture and team design. If those aren’t right, everything feels harder than it should.
The takeaway.
I didn’t fail because we didn’t try hard enough. I failed because the foundation made it too hard to win.
So with Vintiga, I built it differently. We own the platform. The team is small and accountable. Speed is designed in. And everything starts with a specific customer.
The best part about the All-New WineDirect experience? Everything I learned went straight into Vintiga.