The problem: Wedding registries are a $19B market. Wine is almost entirely absent from it. Nobody has built a purpose-built wine registry that connects couples directly with winery partners.
What I'm building: Everwine: a registry and marketplace where couples build a personalized wine registry (guided by a taste/occasion survey), guests purchase through a single unified checkout, and winery partners fulfill directly. The registry occasion solves the wine gifting UX problem: guests aren't browsing a wine shop, they're buying a wedding gift from a pre-curated list. Price sensitivity goes down. Purchase intent goes to near-100%.
The interesting technical problems:
— Multi-tenant Commerce7 API integration. Commerce7 is the dominant DTC ecommerce platform for wineries (~3,000 clients). Each winery is a separate tenant with its own credentials. We need to pull real-time inventory and push orders across 20-30 winery accounts simultaneously using their App Partner architecture (private app installs per tenant, not stored credentials).
— Stripe Connect for multi-party payment splits. One cart, one checkout, orders routing to multiple fulfillment parties. The winery is the merchant of record for compliance reasons.
— Webhook-based inventory sync at scale. 100 req/min rate limit per tenant, but Commerce7 now supports cursor-based pagination with no rate limits for core objects. Need smart caching architecture to handle concurrent registry visitors across multiple winery tenants.
— Geo-restriction logic. DTC wine shipping is legal in ~40 states but rules vary by winery license. Need state-level purchase eligibility checks per winery at checkout.
— Taste profile recommendation engine. The quiz is a core differentiator. Need something that actually generates meaningful recommendations, not just a skin on top of static selections.
Why this is buildable now: Commerce7's App Partner Program makes the multi-tenant architecture clean — wineries install your app, grant scoped API access, you never store their credentials. Stripe Connect handles the payment split problem. The hard part is the integration layer and the recommendation logic, not novel infrastructure.
Previous attempts: ThirstyNest (2017, Wine Enthusiast spinoff) tried a version of this as a retailer model, not a marketplace. Faded without a public postmortem. No one has built the winery-as-fulfiller marketplace architecture.
Why me: Based in Napa with 15 years experience in the wine industry and strong network. Direct access to winery DTC relationships. Have already had substantive conversations with wineries about the Commerce7 integration model and the partner program. Understand the beverage alcohol compliance landscape. Not a tech person — which is why I'm here.
What I'm looking for: Someone who has built marketplace or multi-vendor ecommerce systems. Commerce7 API experience is a genuine plus (it's niche but it exists — there's a developer Slack). Shopify API experience transfers well. Stripe Connect multi-party payment experience highly relevant.
Stage: Pre-product, pre-funding. Running manual concierge beta before building. SAFE-based angel round being structured. Meaningful equity for the right co-founder.
Happy to share the full technical spec document and architecture thinking. If the problem is interesting to you — even just the Commerce7 multi-tenant integration puzzle — reply here or email crhelper@gmail.com