Alyssa Rapp of Bottlenotes

Alyssa Rapp is the founder and CEO of Bottlenotes, Inc., an
online resource in the world of wine dedicated to educating
and entertaining wine enthusiasts through newsletters,
interactive events, social media platforms, and iPhone
apps. Bottlenotes is geared towards new to intermediate
wine enthusiasts interested in learning about wine, but is
useful for more experienced wine consumers as well. The site
was developed as an e-commerce site that pairs users' taste
preferences with wine selections and allows users to share
tasting notes and exchange reviews with other members. It has
been featured in a variety of publications
including Wine Enthusiast,
Entrepreneur, and Success. Rapp is also the author
of Bottlenotes Guide to Wine: Around the World in 80
Sips.





 




BACKSTORY


Rapp came up with the idea for Bottlenotes while getting
her MBA at Stanford. She says, “I knew I wanted to be an
entrepreneur, but thought I’d probably follow in my
father’s footsteps in the real estate or health and fitness
space. But, I ran a wine club at Stanford Business School
for a few hundred people with a classmate of mine. We did
two to three events a week. I was struck by how intimidated
our relatively well-traveled, well-educated peers were by
wine. While I didn’t have all the answers by any stretch of
the imagination, I felt empowered to find them and to get
experts to come and teach us what they knew.”


OF NOTE


While Bottlenotes was successful from the start, Rapp
realized she had to make some changes to keep her company
growing. She explains, “This role we were playing - as a
wine marketing firm helping wineries and importers market
their wines directly to consumers - in many ways was
limiting our success. I realized we had the model backward.
Where we had looked at the shipping of wine as really the
profit center, and the media business as a cost center,
what would happen if we reversed the model? What if we
thought of ourselves as the Wine
Spectator or Wine Enthusiast of the 21st
century? What that means for the website, is that it has
had to evolve from an e-commerce platform to a media
platform. Our vision for Bottlenotes.com is to turn it into
a vibrant community platform.” Rapp connects users through
newsletters, events, online games and quizzes, videos, and
other social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. Rapp’s
newsletter, The Daily Sip, is received each day by
over 300,000 wine lovers via email and over 180,000 through
Facebook.


PERSONAL


Alyssa earned a B.A. in Political Science and the History
of Art from Yale University in 2000 and an M.B.A. from
Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business in 2005.
She serves on the Board of Trustees for Hubbard Street
Dance Chicago, the country’s preeminent contemporary dance
company, and on the Executive Board of Spark Program, a
non-profit that provides apprenticeships for middle school
students. Alyssa and her husband, Hal Morris, welcomed
their first child Audrey to the world in September 2012.