Yule Georgieva: Welcome to Chats from the Wine Cellar. I'm Yule Georgieva and I'm so excited today that we have our first in-person podcast with Inventory's own founders, Jeff and Josh Dater. Welcome guys.

Jeff Daiter: Thank you.

Josh Daiter: Thank you. Happy to finally get on the hot seat.

Yule Georgieva: Yes, I know. It's been long overdue. But today is not just a conversation about InVintory, we're actually celebrating a very special milestone, the launch of Opus, which we will talk about. But before we get there, most important question, how did you two meet?

Jeff Daiter: How did we meet? I met him in the birthing room about 20, how old are you now?

Josh Daiter: I think I'm 27 now.

Jeff Daiter: 27 years ago.

Yule Georgieva: You think, at that age, you still know.

Jeff Daiter: I just stopped. Yeah. Yes once I hit 25 I forgot I thought I was 25 for like three years.

Yule Georgieva: I know that'll last with that'll stick with you. So we won't say who's father and whose son, but we know you two are related. So give us a back story. How did you actually come up with InVintory because you Jeff, you were a doctor and when retired you weren't going to do any of this. So why did it start?

Jeff Daiter: InVintory was quite an accident. I basically did retire, as you mentioned, and I had been collecting wine my entire life. I finally went down to my wine cellar to try and enjoy drinking my wine and realized I couldn't drink it. I couldn't find any of my wine. I had wanted to just drink wine, play golf, write screenplays, which is what I like to do, and I couldn't find any of my wine. And I basically said to Josh, who I knew was going through engineering and doing software engineering specifically and artificial intelligence, and I said, buddy, listen, I paid for all your education.

Yule Georgieva: You mean dad, listen.

Jeff Daiter: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Make me something, help me find my wine. I'd been using other apps, I'd been using spreadsheets, I just was not satisfied. There had to be something better on the market to do what we want to do. And out of that small conversation, and I think timing is everything,

Josh Daiter: InVintory was born.

Yule Georgieva: And were you on board right away?

Josh Daiter: Actually, no. So for a while, for me, it started as a way for me to get into iOS development and learn how to build a product from the ground up. I actually didn't know much about wine, and this was something that took me, I would say probably over a year, to actually learn enough about it to say, oh, there's a market here. For the first year, I was like, who's even gonna use this? Like, I don't even know who collects wine. Like, I only know you, who collects wine, your friends, like, who actually does that? And then when we did eventually launch it, it really opened my eyes to the market opportunity that was here.

Yule Georgieva: So how did it actually start? Give us the actual moment. Because there's always, we've heard this story, I've heard this story a few times, but there's a little bit of disagreement. So give us your version Jeff.

Jeff Daiter: My version of it was that I had been looking for a bottle of wine in a wine fridge that I have in Florida and I was having somebody over for dinner and this is the genuine truth I was looking for this special bottle that only they would like and I was pulling out various shells of that fridge frustrated that I could not find the bottle, rapidly went back and forth and all of a sudden the bottle fell off the shelf, crashed onto a ceramic floor, made a mess of everything, and it was the very bottle I'd been looking for. That was the moment I realized that this is ridiculous. Nobody should be pulling out every shelf in a fridge, frantically looking for the bottle they want to find, and that was the consequence of that ill-doing. So that's when it was truly born, when I finally went to Josh and said we have to do this. And it did happen on a vacation in Mexico. I do remember that. And you said this would be easy and I bought into that. It's the easy word. This was a no brainer. And that was a false promise I think.

Josh Daiter: Yeah. Easy? No, not as easy as I thought. We originally built like basically what an inventory management would be if you were to enter every single bottle in from scratch. You thought it was better than CellarTracker. But I remember thinking like we can't launch with this we have to like get a designer, we have to really put our full effort towards this and so I remember we hired someone off Upwork.

Yule Georgieva: Do you remember that?

Jeff Daiter: Yeah, because you did it. And I thought, you know, you always see beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Because you did it, I was sort of proud of it. And I thought, this is already better. Looking back now, and I think you would agree, that that first iteration of InVintory was kind of a bit of a dog's breakfast.

Josh Daiter: Well, I think it's more of a testament to whenever I build something and we release it, I immediately think it's bad. And then we have to, I'm like, oh no, we got to do the next thing. So it's just a weird psychological thing. But I guess if you look at all of the moments where I thought it was bad, we ended up with what we have now. So it is the iterative process of thinking the last thing you did was really bad. Or not bad, but like could be better.

Yule Georgieva: So how long did it take you? Like from the first time when Jeff came to you and said, build me something to when you had the rudimentary version with the purple logo, the original, the OG. How long did that take you? Because you did it all by yourself, right?

Josh Daiter: Yeah. So I think the one in Mexico, I had a prototype in two weeks, but then we needed a designer and I think that took a few months. And then I think we shelved the project for a while because I went to school.

Jeff Daiter: We did, because it was only going to be for me. And it wasn't a product that we, I mean, the business hadn't even started at that point. There was no business. It was just you give me something that's better than anything out there that I can use to help me manage my wines. And that was a full stop after that. I don't think he ever thought this was going to be something bigger than the two weeks he developed that, nor did I actually. I didn't have any desire to start a new business. I had just retired and I thought my life was in this direction. And I guess one thing led to another and here we are.

Yule Georgieva: Well, what is the one thing that led to another? Like you said you shelved it, but at what point did you guys say, you know what, we should actually return to this?

Josh Daiter: Yeah, I was doing my master's in entrepreneurship. And in that program, we actually had to pick a business to develop. And so, because I already had this half-finished project, I was like, you know what, I might as well just make this my full thing. Made pitch decks, made business cases. We should actually pull up one of the old decks and take a look at it. Because some of the things we have today, I think two or three of them were from the old deck that I had originally created for the business class. So it's kind of funny to see how old ideas come back into new. But yeah, it took about a year of doing that to really develop the business and think about the business model. I remember we really thought about what we were gonna do to make money with it. And then one, I guess that is the one thing that led to another, we hired the team and off we went.

Jeff Daiter: Yeah, I sort of, again, I didn't think I was ever gonna do a business, and I found in retirement, in the pseudo retirement, I was sitting in our family room, mindlessly watching an episode of Days of Our Lives, and I thought, is this what I'm like? Yeah, is this what my life is gonna come to? I'm gonna be watching a soap opera? So he had been doing that entrepreneurship masters and I had this problem with wine. He had a business plan. I thought, you know, maybe this was something that was going to keep life more interesting. So and again, it's still sort of start. It was a slow start. It was like, what should we do? How could we do this? It was a free app for a long, long time. There was no thought of monetization. You know, my friends wanted it, everyone wanted it. We didn't have in-app paid features. We had no plan. I mean, you know, the funny thing is taking entrepreneurship and my history in business, everyone says, write out a business plan, top to bottom, get that in play. And for many people, maybe that is good. I've never found it to be the way business really runs. I think you have an idea, you iterate on it, you keep moving forward and life takes you in a direction where you actually have something that you either shelve or run with.

Josh Daiter: You want to know a funny story about all this? That I actually, I remember from time to time, in that master's program, we actually had to take our pitch deck and our business idea and pitch it to a panel of potential investors. I guess they weren't actually investing. And everyone in the class went up and did their pitch. And I went up and I pitched InVintory, like literally, I think, as it is today. And some guy came up to me and was just like, that's never gonna work.

Yule Georgieva: One of the people on the panel?

Josh Daiter: Oh yeah, he's like, you're a smart kid, stop spinning your wheels on this, go find something else to do. I have a friend in China who has a big seller who would not use this. Like that was his one use case. And I pretty much just called Jeff and I said, this guy told me this, I guess it's my first encounter of someone saying something wouldn't work. And it's funny because now fast forward all these years, like it, it has worked. And I really want to run into this guy and just show him what we did.

Jeff Daiter: But there's a lot of naysayers. I mean, you, you, you'll always hear naysayers and I think it's to take that information, understand it, understand what they didn't like about the product, what they didn't see the future being in that product and iterate on that. I mean, I think even negative commentary is worth considering. You know, and a lot of people by the same token will just come up to you and say, this is the best thing ever, and I can discount that also because truthfully, we're probably right in the middle.

Yule Georgieva: And I do think that, you know, like you said, the iterative process, like you're going to learn so much as you go, and there's always going to be surprises along the way. Like one thing that I always think was surprising after I joined is that I don't think I realized, and I had some experience in the wine industry, but I don't think I realized how many large collectors there are out there, right? Like we think about people who collect wine and we talk a lot about the different tiers of collectors, right? We have our free tier, Aspire from the sort of entry level collectors, maybe just getting started. Then we have Prestige, which is for those who have a bit more experience, but then now we've launched Opus, which we'll talk about in a moment, for the higher end collector was the larger home cellar. And I'm always surprised by how many people are out there and to your point I think the guy in the panel probably didn't also didn't notice that or know that that market existed right. So what have been some of the surprises for you guys along the way?

Jeff Daiter: There have been a few surprises actually I thought for example that I had the one of the largest cellars I thought 2500 was large, nobody was gonna have that size of a cellar and yet as we've launched Opus, as we've gone out, I've been surprised just how, not just largely cellars there are. 4,000 bottles, 7,000 bottles, 10,000 bottles, but it's the quality of wine that people actually host. I mean, these are wines that are almost untouchable to me. And I thought, why would anybody have these? But then I really learned that people are absolutely collecting wine like they would collect any other significant asset classes. And these people have big cars, big houses, they take great vacations, and they have great wines. And kudos to that, it's a testimony to just how much this particular collection class speaks to people. I mean, there's nothing like collecting good wine that sort of gets your dopamine levels up and going.

Yule Georgieva: And I think it's attractive for people to get into. Like, I mean, when you started, you weren't that into wine, were you?

Josh Daiter: No, but now I feel like I love wine and just being around it all the time, it's so easy to get sucked into that world and really learn how great it is and how deep and rich the history of wine is.

Yule Georgieva: What is it that you think, just as somebody who's newer to wine than say Jeff, like what is it that has attracted you to wine? What is it?

Josh Daiter: Yeah, that's a great question. Well, I've always liked coffee and so I've always, in the same way that I taste wine, I taste coffee the same way. So I'll have my coffee black and that's so that I can really get the raw taste of the coffee. And I find that the exact same strategy that goes into tasting coffee goes into wine and wine tastes great. So I start analyzing it in the same way. And so that really pulled me in.

Yule Georgieva: Yeah, interesting. It's kind of, there is that category of like coffee, whiskey, wine. I think a lot of people approach it in the same way where there's just so much nuance that once you get into it you get more excited by all the variety.

Jeff Daiter: Just watching Josh drink coffee made me realize he was going to be a better wine taster than I am. My palate is very muted in terms of how I appreciate wine. I'm very I'd say a casual wine drink in the sense that I just I know what I like I know what I don't like. I don't the nuances in between while I can respect them aren't as important to me as because I've had the same wine in two different occasions and appreciated them differently. And I think we've all experienced that. But to be a very good wine taster, and again, I envy that, I think it just brings another level to your ability to appreciate the experience.

Josh Daiter: But I've always had this weird thing where any liquid that I taste, whether it's like a soda or like a coffee, I like swish it in my mouth, but it wasn't from wine. It was like this weird tick that I had that I would do that and I it always helped me just get more flavor out of whatever I'm drinking. It sounds weird that I did this.

Jeff Daiter: But I remember he used to come to me all the time that it used to taste like this Jolly Rancher.

Yule Georgieva: That's his like signature. We talk about this a lot at InVintory right that the context in which you're drinking the wine changes the flavor or it or the experience of it, and so it's not just about the taste. The taste matters a lot, and it's really nice when you find something you like, but then when you're in the... I know you've been to Italy several times, and when you're in the vineyard with the winemaker, then you pick up so much more about that little cultural experience, right?

Jeff Daiter: I remember I had... one of my first experiences when I was younger is we had a Chianti in Italy and it was off. It was just did not come off and in that moment, I decided I would never drink Chianti again, which was a foolish decision because it's great wine and I was introduced probably about three years ago to a beautiful Chianti and I thought, wow, this is that great? So it is about experience. It is about where you are, who you're with, and perhaps even the way that wine was stored at that moment. You know, wine is about impressions, and you can't draw a first impression and have that taint and color the wine.

Josh Daiter: Well, if you think about how memories are formed, it is the culmination of all your senses, right? So adding another dimension to your senses really solidifies that memory even more. Like when we had that bottle of Cakebread at your birthday at Morton's, I vividly remember where I was sitting, what I ate, what wine we had. The wine may have tasted, you know, I may have had better wines, but it just, everything all together, just created a core memory.

Jeff Daiter: Well, this is why in the app, in the free app, one of the first things we put in was almost like a journal, a journal of your experiences, because I thought I'm having all these wonderful experiences with wine, this episode with Cakebread, other episodes with other wine, we were in Italy for example and I met the fourth generation winemaker who made Casa D'Nova. Casa D'Nova, Denario. And we bought the bottle there and it was wonderful. And so I took photos of these events and journaled them, but for forgetting them, if I didn't have that, I would have forgotten them for sure.

Yule Georgieva: Well, that's I think, remember our original sort of vision statement was bringing your world of wine to life, right? Right. And it was, I think, very much around that concept. But actually, I want to, before we get into Opus, this is kind of a lead into Opus, one of the original premises, I'd say, of InVintory, before I got there, like you guys had already come up with this, was to have a visual aspect of finding bottles, right? Because that was the problem in the story you told at the fridge that you originally wanted to solve. So how did, was that just because that was the main problem that you perceived? Because as we spoke about, there are so many other things that collectors want to do. They want to track their memories, they want to track their wish list, they want to do these things, but the finding was really the problem that you wanted to deal on?

Jeff Daiter: The finding was my problem. And you know, every cellar starts off very organized. All the Bordeaux's here, all the Burgundy's there, all the Icewine here, if you have that. But by nature, every cellar is going to fall into chaos. It just happens. And so as that chaos perpetuates and grows, you really can't find the bottle you know that's in there. And you could be, for example, going out for dinner, wanting to take one of your better bottles out for that meal, pay the corkage, and you don't want to take a $75 bottle of wine. You want to take one of the better wines, maybe even a $400 bottle of wine if you have it, because you're going to pair it with a fantastic meal, you're going to pay $35 or $50 for corkage, why not take advantage of that? And so I've had that experience where I've run down to my cellar before, I would look at a couple of labels and say, oh, that's a bigger wine. Not able to really check to see if it was, and realize I brought a $50 bottle of wine and I'm paying a $50 corkage on that wine. So I thought finding the right wine is essential. You know, based on who you're having for dinner, what you're having for dinner, how many bottles of the same you have, what you said about the previous vintage, what this vintage is.

Josh Daiter: And more importantly, finding it in a manner where you're not late for dinner is also important.

Jeff Daiter: Right, yeah, how many times did I used to get yelled at? You know, are you coming up? And if I'm in the cellar, one second, I'm in the cellar. You know, it's like you're hunting for bottles and you got one under your arm, one on the floor, you're looking back behind shelves because you're certain you have that one bottle. Then you start getting paranoid. Does someone come in the cellar and take that bottle? You know, you go through that whole thing because you can't find the bottle you're looking for.

Yule Georgieva: Well, so this is now leads in nicely to a question for you, Josh, because you're the Chief Product Officer. So that kind of is a question about how do you approach the overall concept of product with InVintory, right? Because we have the, like we have a lot of features, right? You need to have something that is feature-rich because collectors want to do so much. But to your point, it also has to be intuitive and easy so that when they're one, two, three, four glasses deep, they're still going to use it. And I think with Opus, we've solved this quite well. But maybe before we get into Opus, and I know I keep teasing Opus, so sorry, everybody, but we'll get there. How do you think about how we approach product in general and balance those two countervailing, almost competing needs.

Josh Daiter: I'll do a little callback to an earlier question that you asked, which was like, what are some of the challenges you realized? And I would say that one of them is how do you build a product for this demographic? But how do you build inventory management is not simple. It's actually, when you get to the root of it, it is quite complex. Like you've got, you know, adding assets, removing assets, updating assets. InVintory can do a lot of things. So the challenge is making this complex thing, simple for people to use. And that is very challenging. Um, but our approach to it is to actually just watch people use the product and watch how people use it and try and mimic their behaviors virtually of about what they do in real life. So if they're, you know, outside their cellar, and they only want, you know, they only want to spend maximum 20 seconds outside their cellar door, we have to build it around that constraint. We can't expect them to sit for five minutes outside their cellar door and type stuff in. So we have to build around what they're already doing and not try and change their behavior because that's way harder to do than adapting to their current behavior. And that's something we're not perfect at, but that's sort of like the mindset that drives product.

Jeff Daiter: Yeah, I would say that you know there are three things that collectors need to do in respect of what we're offering them. They need to be able to add a bottle to a cellar. They need to be able to find a bottle in that cellar and they need to be able to move that bottle out of the cellar. If they can do those three things, much like driving a car, if they can press on the gas, press on the brake, and steer the wheel, they've learned almost everything.

Yule Georgieva: Good analogy.

Josh Daiter: Yeah, they're doing everything that we need. But the car has a radio, it has this, it has windshield wipers, you know, it's got all the extra stuff.

Jeff Daiter: But so I don't want the collector to have to learn all these other features on the first blush. I want them to drive from point A to point B and then get comfortable with the product and learn just how deep we can go with this product. You can do almost everything with respect to cellar management. We put everything in there and we're still putting things in there. But at its core, we want people to be able to drive this vehicle very slowly and easily.

Yule Georgieva: So now we can get to Opus. So, as we mentioned, we have three tiers. Aspire, which is free, that's a free app on mobile and on web. We have Prestige, which is the in-app subscription, gives you some of our advanced features, like market values and the ability to use a route of entry version of our 3D modeling technology, which you'll talk about I hope when we get to Opus. And now we've launched Opus. So Opus is obviously for the... I always describe it as smart home for your cellar. Yeah. How would you describe it?

Josh Daiter: Yeah, something like that, like a Lutron for your wine cellar. That sort of was, that was the, you know, the vision of it.

Jeff Daiter: It's like Lutron, Crestron, Control 4 for your wine cellar. So people who have homes, smart homes, they need a smart device to be able to interface with their their wine cellar And it is I think Opus is again a product born out of need Aspire is a free Tier that allows the wine enthusiasts to just record their experiences learn about wines, maybe catalog a very few number of wines. Prestige as you mentioned has those in-app features, but it's more tailored to somebody who has a wine fridge. It may be a small wine wall, maybe a small collection in the family room. And I was using Prestige for the whole time and I ended up with, because it's a do-it-yourself product, I ended up with 32, 35 sections in my wine cellar. And I thought, if there was any way we could just stitch this together. And then when wine cellar companies started coming to us saying, listen, we're building cellars. We're building cellars for $100,000, $500,000. There's nothing out there that manages the wine cellar properly. We build the structure. If you could help us with the management, because we get this question all the time, we would partner with you. So we actually took our Prestige tier and we built out a 3D model. So it's not just a 3D model of a cellar, it's a smart 3D model. It allows you to interact with your cellar at the cellar door, but even remote to the cellar door, at your computer, on your iPhone when you're in a restaurant or a mobile device. But it really is making your cellar smart.

Yule Georgieva: Maybe we should just, for a bit of context, just explain the sections thing. So as you mentioned in Prestige, you can build out your cellar section by section, so a contiguous area like rows and columns in one rack. So if you have a big cellar like you or like others, it takes multiple sections. And so the question was, can we stitch this together into a 3D model so that when you go to the seller, there's an iPad stationed at the seller door. You can see the whole model, manipulate it, move it around. So that's the problem they solved.

Josh Daiter: Yeah. And what I really like about Opus that's different from our other tiers is that our way in coming up with it and building it was really driven by people requesting these things versus everything we had done previously was Jeff requesting or our team innovating internally and saying, you know, we think this would be good. Let's gauge like what our audience says. But this was like, Hey, I like my sections, but I would really like to see this all together. And so then that kind of clued us in and we got that question so many times. So it clued us into the fact that maybe it should be different.

Jeff Daiter: And what we ended up doing was putting our, we had patented to technology that we ended up putting into Opus. So we really are the only ones doing this in the marketplace. There is a cool factor to having it. There's no question. It looks great. It's just it has an element beside your cellar that nobody else has. But it does employ a tremendous amount of technology. I mean a whole bunch of technology that at one point we didn't even think was possible.

Yule Georgieva: Yeah, I think that's what's amazing is that it is so, to the point about it being simple, it is so simple. Right, I mean, all a collector has to do, they either connect with, and we'll talk about how we get this out to the market and the dealer model in a moment, but all they have to do is connect with us or connect with one of our dealers, send us photos or videos of their cellar, and then our developer builds the 3D model, and then that's empty, it's on an iPad, and you mount it at the cellar door, they just have to upload all the bottles, right? And we even will import the spreadsheets of the collectors into our system for them. So there's minimal work done. So it's super simple. But then as you say, it's actually driven by very advanced technology.

Jeff Daiter: And our challenge is how can you onboard 7,000 bottles in a very quick and easy fashion? What is the most efficient way to take, to get these bottles into the cellar and not having the collector have to do it themselves if they didn't want to. So this was the dealer and making it easy for the dealer, getting the bottles in there, making sure that the bottle is in the right location so when we use our patented Vinlocate technology it finds the bottle each and every time, doesn't miss. We've tried over the years just to sort of tell you how this came about, we've tried RFID, we've tried Bluetooth, we've tried LED lights, we've tried everything, barcoding on bottles. And the more you try to do to a bottle going into the cellar, the more difficult and arduous the process is.

Josh Daiter: The more overhead. People are lazy, it's going to fall apart. No one wants to do that every single time.

Jeff Daiter: Now, aside from the bottle just walking itself into the cellar, falling into the spot, and walking out by itself, there has to be some...

Yule Georgieva: The scene in the... Bottles with legs.

Jeff Daiter: Right, you remember that? Right, I would love to get to there, but we've made it as easy as possible to put a bottle into the cellar, find that bottle, remove that bottle with as few clicks as possible on this iPad, trying to employ every new technology we can. I mean, we're just moving into computer vision now to help us identify bottles on the way out without the user having to do very much. So I mean, we're always on that cutting edge, and this is why we're so excited about Opus, because we're at the infancy of where this product is going to be in six months, 12 months, two years. I mean, we're just beginning and it's exciting.

Josh Daiter: Yeah. My favorite thing about Opus, I think, is the service element. I just love that we can provide that to our Opus customers because a lot of them don't want to inventory it themselves. They want someone to come in and do it and I just think it's a really nice touch to have someone go and do it. It's full service and they really see InVintory or Opus as a package of not only the technology, but I'm getting this great service and someone who can come and be my point of contact for this product.

Jeff Daiter: You know, people will have, you know, $100,000 worth of wine, a million dollars worth of wine in these cellars. There's not any other asset class that they treat so poorly in terms of understanding what it's doing. Opus gives you the ability to manage that asset class, manage your collection in a smart way so you finally have control over it. I mean you know what are the big bottles, which one you should be drinking when. We put out these goal posts of drink windows that you can certainly move beyond but it helps you understand your wine a little bit better and see what you thought about it when you drank it you know three years ago.

Yule Georgieva: I still personally love the gold halo showing you where the bottle is. I still think that looks really cool. It looks like a video game. But I do think your point, Josh, that the dealer model, so I mean, we should probably just explain for context that the way we bring Opus to the market is, obviously, people can get in touch with us directly, and often they do, but we have designated dealers throughout North America, actually globally now, who are equipped to provide Opus. We still build the model just because we have the technology and the ability, but then they will take the iPad with the empty model, go to the collector's home, be the face of the transaction effectively, and we always describe it as like a car dealership, car manufacturer model, right? Like we're BMW, we build the car, the dealer is the, like the car dealer, goes to the home, does the sale, does the service, and they do all the onboarding, make sure all the bottles are placed, so that the collector has a nice organized seller that's ready to go.

Jeff Daiter: So I do think that's really unique. It is and it's not just a win-win. I think it's a win-win-win. It's a win for InVintory. It's a win for sommeliers and wine managers who are looking for extra income, especially during the time of COVID that we just passed. A lot of them were working on the floor and this gave them a real opportunity to start to be engaged in an employment area that wasn't there before. But it's also a win for the collector. So you have this win, win, win scenario where everybody wins. The collector gets a cellar that's well organized, easy to manage. The Wine manager gets an extra source of income potential and we actually get to deploy our product, which is great.

Yule Georgieva: Yeah, it's a very exciting time, right? Because to the point we made earlier, there are so many collectors who want the solution. Like you said, they've been coming to, to InVintory and asking for it. So I'm really excited to see how this is going to unfold. So what do you think is, where is your product brain going, Josh? Like what are you thinking is next for InVintory before we ask the CEO?

Josh Daiter: Yeah, I've got some more like short-term goals and then I've got a long-term vision that I think would be really cool to work on. But in the short term, we still have our web app that we need to release. So that's gonna be over the next six months. And all the benefits of the new iPad version of InVintory, we're gonna move into the iOS version. So you'll get a new design, faster speeds, better performance. We're gonna release the Android app, so we're excited about that. But beyond sort of like the product level and more technology-based things, from a feature perspective, and what I think would be cool to add to Opus is this idea of creating a community and allowing people to connect with each other and trade and see what they have. And I think that that would just be a really cool, neat, kind of like a club that we're creating, uh, within Opus where people can interact with each other.

Jeff Daiter: It's really like a marketplace where people who have an Opus cellar, we know who they are. They respect their wine. They stored the wine properly. They've conditioned it. These two individuals should be able to trade wine or talk to each other and clear the deficits in their own cellar to add on to it, we can sort of facilitate that transaction and create a true marketplace for this. But I think adding on to what Josh was saying, there's the enterprise version.

Josh Daiter: The enterprise version too, yeah.

Jeff Daiter: There's restaurants, a different animal in the sense that there's high turnover. A collector in his own cellar or her own cellar, collects, moves wine in and out at a relatively defined rate, but it's slow compared to a restaurant that may move 100, 150 bottles a night or more. We need to help them facilitate that process, you know, understand how to find that wine quickly, how to serve that wine, and perhaps even sell two bottles of wine to the customer. I think that's the ROI for the enterprise version, the ability to not just serve one bottle but two. It's a very good money maker for commercial operations and I think we can help them with that.

Yule Georgieva: Plus the ability to make sure you have the wine and can find it in your cellar. Like how many times have we been at restaurants and you ask for the 2011 and oh we're out of that but they only come 20 minutes later when your appetizer is already gone, right? So it's your point. It really solves that problem for them.

Jeff Daiter: Or they serve the wrong wine or they try to sell you a different wine than the one you had because they didn't know at the front end that this is the wine they had in their cellar.

Josh Daiter: Yeah, and just like Opus, what I love about this new Enterprise version that we're sort of tinkering with is that they're coming to us. So it's not something that we're just making a guess on. We have golf and country clubs, we have restaurants, we have people coming to us and asking for this layer on top of Opus that might have POS, that might help them do all the things that you and Jeff are talking about.

Jeff Daiter: We even have collectors who have their home collection, another collection in another home, maybe a collection on their boat, but then they have a lot of wine in a storage facility. And they want to be able to, for the first time, understand more than just through a spreadsheet in what is in their storage location. Most people don't know. They know they have wine in this place or that place, but they don't know what that wine is. This gives them almost a virtual cellar in that storage, in that remote location, so they know their total wine, you know, everything they have.

Yule Georgieva: For me personally, I'm really excited about the community aspect that you're talking about, Josh, and also, you know, I'm big on this feature called lists or playlists. At some point we will get to it.

Josh Daiter: That was our brainchild.

Yule Georgieva: Right? I think that speaks exactly to this community, because I mean, if I think about the community that we've already built with an InVintory, it's not only pretty big, but we have some really neat collectors I mean think of a couple of our investors like JJ Reddick Josh Hart who are basketball players, our new brand ambassador Precious Achiuwa -  like there's some really Interesting people in there and the ability to see sort of playlist playlist lists They've come up with share those with others.

Josh Daiter: You know I think that that should share them on social media pull it up on a web browser. Just see what people are drinking So cool

Yule Georgieva: So much about wine is about you know something that you trust or who's credible saying that they like something and then you want to try so I remember we have one collector who had a list how he paired his wines with music

Jeff Daiter: And I thought yeah, nobody does that but he does have the people are interested in doing that I thought it was brilliant and and because it was out of the box. You know who pairs their Chardonnay with a particular track of music and it was very impressive.

Yule Georgieva: Well, do you want me to put on some Miles Davis or something?

Jeff Daiter: I mean, we're having this now.

Yule Georgieva: Is that what this pairs with? I guess we should call. So this is a local wine, Bachelder Chardonnay from down in Niagara. We should call Thomas Bachelder. Ask him. What do you pair it with? What do you pair it with? Anything like that. All right, well, last question. After, gosh, what has it been now, five years of InVintory?

Jeff Daiter: Almost five years.

Josh Daiter: I would say like two, two and a half officially. But five, the other two have been like just those on and off periods that we talked about earlier.

Yule Georgieva: Yeah, the testing stage.

Yule Georgieva: Do you find that now, I mean being father and son and working together and for a while living together, that can add a lot of benefit because you're very close and you can be very honest, but do you find that now you have to drink more wine to get through the week or less wine?

Jeff Daiter: Every week is different. You know, this product started off, I usually say, like two men in the garage and it's gotten bigger. We're in 143 countries. We're serving almost a hundred thousand collectors. I mean the number of calls we get in a per day just meeting new people. I wake up in the morning now and I'm actually excited because I know there's going to be two or three or four calls that day that are going to truly rock my boat so to speak for that day. They're going to be meaningful. They're going to be people I didn't expect to call me up and say, I saw your product. I just had one of these calls yesterday and it was just an amazing call. And it just sort of sets off a new path of thinking and a new path of opportunity. And that's what I love most about this. It's just, it's an exciting time and an exciting place to work. And I'm working with Josh, which is exciting for me. And the whole team has grown and I just a great team. I'm proud of them and I'm proud of what we're accomplishing.

Josh Daiter: Yeah, I think now is the most exciting time for us because almost six, seven, eight months worth of work has been coming to a head and we're really hitting these milestones now. We just launched Opus, we got the marketing site coming out, we got our web app launching soon. Like I feel like we've got this really good cadence going. So it's such an exciting time and soon. Like I feel like we've got this really good cadence going. So it's such an exciting time and I'm really looking forward to the next couple of years.