Ellen Deng founded Vinofy, the first video-based social wine app for people to discover, share and shop wine all in one place.

They are building a platform and community to empower people to discover, share, experience and shop anything tasty all in one place.

Her vision is to unite people from different cultures and backgrounds over this universal human experience, the love of wine, food and anything tasty.

Q: What's your background, and what are you working on?

Before I took the jump as a founder, I started my career in tech when I joined a fast-growing eCommerce startup (Lazada Group) where I learned entrepreneurship and the rapid scaling of a unicorn tech company. It was acquired by Alibaba with a multi-billion dollar valuation within 5 years after launch. Afterwards, I joined a global travel tech startup as the head of ecommerce and product, leading a team of 9 to build and grow an experience booking platform live in over 30 countries and serving 18 million travelers globally.

Vinofy App is the first video-based social wine app for people to discover, share and shop wine all in one place. We are building a platform and community for people to connect over the love of wine.

In the app, users can make a 30s video to talk about the wine they are having and share with others. We believe that everyone should be able to express and share their wine experience at the press of a button.

Users can also shop directly from the videos that were created by wine professionals, influencers and other wine lovers in the community. They will also earn SipCoins by completing tasks and redeem SipRewards from SipCoins.

Q: What motivated you to get started with Vinofy?

I have lived in 10 countries and traveled to over 30 countries in the past 10 years. Through my travels, I learned that the appreciation of taste is an unique human gift, just like music, dance and how we can connect over it. That’s why I started Vinofy. It is the platform and community for everyone from different cultures and backgrounds to unite over this universal human experience - the love of wine, food and anything tasty.

Q: How have you attracted users and grown your app?

We are still building our app and in private beta at the moment but we are growing organically. We plan to reach out to and engage with people in the wine community to grow the app via referral program.

Q: What are your goals for the future?

We have many exciting features planned on the product roadmap, such as live streaming, virtual tastings, group chat etc. We also plan to launch Vinofy Select, Vinofy Wineclub and Vinofy for Business to help wine influencers,wine professionals and winemakers to engage better with their audience and monetize better on their content.

And it’s not only limited to wine because Vinofy, at its core, is about tastefulness. We will expand to other categories, such as spirits, coffee beer, and cannabis. Our vision is to unite people from different cultures and backgrounds over this universal human experience, the love of wine, food and anything tasty.

Q: What are the biggest challenges you've faced so far?

We are bootstrapping currently to build the app and grow the user base. With limited resources, recruiting a good team is the biggest challenge and highest priority to move forward.