One year on: Dropbox and Vivino toast a successful partnership

It’s been one exciting year since we launched the Dropbox London office. We’re proud to say that during this time we’ve grown our network, and now one in three UK internet users is on Dropbox, up from one in four at the beginning of 2015. Y

esterday, we made a toast to this momentum at a wine tasting event with one of our Dropbox Business customers, Vivino. Vivino is the world’s most popular online wine community and the most downloaded mobile wine app. The company’s 15 million users contribute ratings and tasting notes for millions of wines from around the globe, and collectively, the database makes up the largest wine library anywhere on the planet. Users access Vivino for help choosing their next wine as well as to remember wines they have tried and loved (or perhaps more importantly, not loved!).

The Vivino Rating is the first and only wine rating system that's based on the opinions of wine lovers at every level of expertise, and it’s a huge operation. On a typical day, 300,000 ratings are uploaded by users; the team connects with hundreds of wine merchants; new data is analyzed and entered into the Vivino library; and original content is published to Vivino.com.

“We both put customer experience at the heart of everything we do and we both want to build the best product that’s right for the user.”

Plus the team operates from offices across multiple countries so it's essential that the team is able to work together quickly and efficiently. It’s one of the reasons that, since the company was founded in 2010, Vivino has used Dropbox.

Vivino and Dropbox share a common approach. “We both put customer experience at the heart of everything we do, and we both want to build the best product that’s right for the user,” says Vivino CEO, Heini Zachariassen.

Vivino is a completely decentralized business. With staff working all over the world and from offices in the US, Copenhagen, and the UK. Zachariassen says he does most of his own work using Dropbox Business from hotel rooms, trains, and airports. “The whole international team is always working on the move,” he says.

To help unite Vivino’s mobile workforce, the staff all have Dropbox Business accounts. Across the sales, admin, marketing, and development teams, it’s essential for communicating with each other and getting work done.

“Hassle is costly. Productivity means having the right tools that just work.”

They rely especially on Dropbox Business because the company has no landlines, and they aim to reduce email traffic as much as possible. Getting the technology right is crucial. It’s why there’s no shared server at Vivino either—everything lives on Dropbox Business. “Hassle is costly,” Zachariassen says. “Productivity means having the right tools that just work. When you try to do a job, you want to make sure things are seamless.”

Nowhere is this more important than in the UK, where the team is responsible for finding interesting wines at the best prices for a growing base of 500,000 British users of the app. “We’re working 'round the clock to make sure we can deliver a top product for users in the UK, but we can’t do that in isolation. Dropbox Business helps us to collaborate with our colleagues around the world and ensures we are at our most creative and productive all the time,” Zachariassen says.

Zachariassen is focused on running a business that prioritizes efficiency. He knows how critical it is for the team to feel like they're together in one place. “Speed is very important when you’re not looking someone in the eye,” he says. So it’s no surprise that Dropbox Business is also a key part of the development process for Vivino. The development team uses Dropbox Business throughout the process of building new features. They use Dropbox to sketch out the initial concept, co-write specification documents, and share large Photoshop files during the design phase.

And it’s all happening at breakneck speed. “We all have to be on the same page and be able to move fast, especially when we’re developing new features for the app. We can’t compromise on speed,” Zachariassen says.