Unlike many technology company founders, I was inspired to begin my entrepreneurial journey not by a love of ones and zeros but by a passion for wine and human connection.
From the beginning, my career was shaped by these twin interests. I was born in Zimbabwe, raised in South Africa (home of some of the world’s greatest wines) and moved to Scotland, my grandfather’s home country, in my early 20s. There, I had the privilege of working at Skibo Castle. A 13th-century structure, it is now home to the Carnegie Club, an organization founded by Andrew Carnegie, the industrialist and philanthropist who helped shape America.
My time at Skibo set the stage for a life working with people, which ultimately led to the founding of my interest-based social media company, Universimm. The path to its founding was by no means direct. Indeed, I was to cover thousands of miles and take on several different roles before I saw how I could use my understanding of how humans work to disrupt the social media business model.
After Skibo, I worked at the Covent Garden Hotel, in the heart of London’s theater district. As the hotel’s concierge—a job that is, again, all about connections—I looked after countless celebrities, actors, directors and movie agents. Are you spotting a pattern here?
From hospitality, I moved into the wine industry with Majestic Wine. There, I worked tirelessly to qualify as a professional sommelier, a job that requires excellent people skills, plus a nose for a quality bouquet.
Then the travel bug began to bite. What better way to see the world, I thought to myself, than from the deck of a ship? So I became head sommelier for the luxury cruise company Yachts of Seabourn. I traveled the world with Seabourn, but that wasn’t the only benefit. On board, I met a wonderful woman who spoke five languages, had a hospitality background and, like me, cared about what makes people tick.
Life on the waves can be intense. You have to work for months without a break. This is fine for a single person, but once we married, my wife and I decided it was time to seek land. We first went to Stellenbosch, South Africa, an area an hour outside of Cape Town renowned for wine. I helped open the Delaire Graff Estate, owned by the British diamond magnate Sir Laurence Graff, while my wife worked at a hotel on the estate.
Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images
When we’d been there for about a year, she was offered the chance to open a hotel in Punta del Este, which was how we ended up in her native Uruguay, where we live now. It didn’t take me long to find a Ryan-sized gap in the Uruguayan market. I realized that, despite the country’s many excellent wines, no one there was offering tailored wine experiences. That led me to create a company called the Wine Experience. We now operate in 180 countries and offer adventure travel, ranging from safaris to river cruises.
So where, you may ask, does technology fit into all this? Like the vast majority of people, I spent a lot of leisure time on social media. After all, didn’t it promise to connect people and transcend borders?
Not for me. All I found there was frustration and fatigue. All that irrelevant content being thrown at you. All that endless, endless scrolling. Did you know that every day we scroll for an average of 108 minutes? That amounts to a quarter of a mile. After a year, our thumbs have traveled 88 miles. All this takes a toll on mental health too. Because content that interests or pleases us gives us a dopamine rush, social media can become as addictive for some as alcohol or even drugs.
Even with all my scrolling, I found it impossible to find content geared toward the topics I cared about. Nor was there any possibility of forging authentic connections with others. I began to wonder if, given my understanding of human connection, I could do better—if I could fix the pain points I knew I was not alone in experiencing.
My initial plan was to create a social media universe just for people who loved wine. For people like me, in other words. But then we realized we could create a much richer experience if we included a whole universe of interests. That was what gave rise to the name Universimm, a new spin on the Latin word for universe.
Given the dominance of the major social media providers—Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter)—it seemed clear that the only way to tackle the problems they had caused was to opt for a very different business model, one they could not replicate. That was the key to disrupting the market.
In Universimm, users can choose to post in, for example, the photography universe—or even to an even more niche topic within that sphere. They can also tie posts to geography, be that in South Africa, France or Portugal.
By clustering users based on self-selected interests and geographies, we can solve several different issues at once: endless scrolling, the difficulty of forging bonds, the proliferation of social media apps and the toxic spread of misinformation.
Users will no longer have to search forever for content they care about. Since they can go straight to a channel devoted to, say, photography, they have a much greater chance of reading posts useful to them. There is also an increased chance they can forge real connections based on the subjects they love.
Universimm brings the attributes of many different apps under one umbrella so users no longer have to jump from app to app. And by their very nature, topic-based feeds deter misinformation.
We also wanted to build a business model that didn’t rely upon intrusive tracking for revenue. This is possible because we let users post to the countries they live in or those they plan to visit. And since they are voluntarily specifying their locations, they ensure that they see posts relevant to them without predatory surveillance.
It’s a dream scenario for advertisers, which are at last able to target their ads hyper-specifically, based on both where users are and what they care about. If I’m interested in fashion, I won’t mind so much finding out that a new designer boutique is opening around the corner.
So that’s it: the story of how a wine guy found a high-tech way to give power back to users and help them find like-minded friends around the corner—or across oceans.
Ryan Hamilton is the founder of Universimm, an entertainment app focused on hyper-relevant content and niche-topic discussions that is the first platform to allow users to post to specific countries.
