Uncorking Opportunity
Nicola Yu '25 turned a summer of market research into a $70,000 crowdfunding campaign for her wine preservation tool.
Last December, Nicola Yu (SOM '25) launched a Kickstarter campaign for Preservio, her wine preservation company. In one month, it raised nearly $70,000 in customer pre-orders and was recognized by the platform as a "Backers' Favorite." For a first-time founder at the earliest stage of building a company, it was a meaningful proof of concept and a direct result of the work she had put in long before the campaign went live.
Nicola spent much of the summer after graduation doing something unglamorous but essential: talking to customers. She made repeated trips to New York City, meeting with distributors, restaurant managers, and wine retailers to understand whether the problem she wanted to solve was one that others actually experienced. What she kept hearing was consistent: the wine preservation market offered expensive, high-end systems on one end and inexpensive pumps that didn't perform reliably on the other. The middle ground was largely empty. Those conversations shaped how she and her team would position Preservio for the market.
That customer discovery process also informed how Nicola approached the Kickstarter itself. "We ran a large number of ad tests,” Nicola says of her preparation for fundraising. “We started with small budgets across different audience groups, and closely tracked which messages and customer segments responded best.” By the time the campaign went live, she had a working understanding of who her customer was and what actually resonated with them. The $70,000 outcome reflected that preparation.
Nicola credits her time at Yale SOM with helping her develop the habits of mind that made that process possible. The MBA gave her the tools to interrogate a business idea, to ask whether the opportunity was real, who the customer was, and what it would actually take to reach them. It also gave her a cohort of peers working through similar questions, which proved to be its own kind of resource. "During my MBA I became increasingly convinced [Preservio] had strong potential for the U.S. market," she says.
Preservio is still in its early stages, but another Kickstarter is already in the works – this time in the form of a food preservation tool, developed from the feedback of early Preservio backers. Retail conversations are also underway, and the longer-term vision is ambitious. For aspiring entrepreneurs in the Yale community, Nicola’s sequence – identifying a gap, testing directly, refining the message, and building early credibility – is a process to emulate for any startup.
