Small Biz

Snooth

Launched: June, 2007
Founded by: Philip James
Number of employees: 6
Traffic: 200,000 unique visitors per month
Founder's favorite wine at the moment: Duckhorn Howell Mountain Merlot

What it does: Wine database, ratings, and price comparisons
How it makes money: Pay-per-click referrals to wine sellers

Philip James wanted to create a site that would be for wine what IMDB is for movies. Snooth, based in New York, bills itself as the world's largest wine database. The site now has nearly 2 million wine ratings and more than 1,000 partnerships with wineries, retailers, critics, and others in the industry. The company's biggest challenge was aggregating data from multiple sources in a way that's meaningful to users. "It's compounded with wine because most wines don't have a bar code; no wine has an ISBN. There's no standard database that you can use to help you," James says. "We found the hardest thing is getting recognition in the trade. Suddenly this upstart comes along and says we need your data."

Secret to success: "When you have no customers, it's very hard to get the first one. You do whatever you need to do to get the first financing and first investor, and you do whatever you need to do to get your first customers."