LLMs for wine moms

Happy Monday, all! We've got an eclectic mix of takes to open up the week — wine discovery apps, crypto-based subscriptions (for our newly minted bitcoin royalty), and mindfulness meditation apps. Never a dull day on the Leaderboard! 🍷🧘‍♂️🤑

Somme: Scan and discover wines you love 

The notable feature here is scanning a menu or a bottle of wine to find similarity scores with your preferred wine style. As a long-time wine geek (and certified sommelier), I found the app a bit rudimentary in the profile it sets up - as far as I can tell, you can enter only a single wine, or wine style, which it then measures all prospective wines against. Still, it’s straightforward and provides light guidance in a handy app. The actual similarity score and recommendations feel directionally correct, but not very detailed or compelling if you’re truly interested in wine. That said, it’s a great example of a set of features that are a thousand times easier with modern computer vision and LLMs than they were 10 years ago (when I launched a similar app). I think we’ll see an explosion of compelling wine-related assistants!

Subdoor: Subscribe to your favorite products with crypto

I have a love-hate relationship with subscriptions. The love comes from the service or product they're offering, the hate comes from them having my credit card or bank info. That's why I really appreciate Subdoor's approach. It helps remove the need for my banking information to be spread across subscriptions. I think we're slowly inching towards the promise of cryptocurrency becoming a way for us to interact financially through regular consumer apps. Subdoor isn't perfect, it still has some of the annoyances such as connecting wallets, etc - but it's a great start to private online purchases.

Motion Minute: A timer that reminds you to do certain stretches

This product has one of the simplest feature sets on the leaderboard, but may be tapping into something we all need more of: mindful breaks during the day. I’ve been focusing on meditating more, and simply getting a reminder — right in my face — that I should move my body or take 30 seconds to breathe has a profound impact on my mental state, especially when 14 other apps are vying for my attention.