Cuban Cigar Website – a Conversation with Proprietor Alexander Groom (Part Three)

[JohnS]

And so dear friends we've come the end of our three-part conversation with Trevor Leask, Rob Ayala and Alexander Groom and the reference site we've all come to appreciate here at Friends of Habanos forum, i.e. Cuban Cigar Website. Along the way I know you've come to learn a few things about the website that you didn't know before such as:

• Cuban Cigar Website may have an American .com domain but it is Australian.
• The website started to take shape circa 2006.
• Alexander Groom offered to help Trevor Leask with the site, via his programming skills, around 2008.
• The website was gradually passed onto Alexander's stewardship by Trevor over a period of a few years. In 2014, Alexander was given full proprietorship of Cuban Cigar Website.
• Alexander has added a Collection Management feature in the last year which assists you with your cigar inventory. Personally, I can't speak highly enough about it!
• You might have been aware that you could support the running of Cuban Cigar Website via donation but did you know that you could assist Alex by sending cigars? This will allow him to photograph cigars under controlled lighting conditions which are suitable for hosting on the website.

I've thanked Trevor and Rob previously, now I wish to extend my gratitude to Alex for taking the time to provide us his back story in regards to Cuban Cigar Website. I think you'll find it quite informative and humorous. I hope to follow-up at some stage late this year/early next year another interview with Alex as to how the site is 'traveling'.

Thank you for your well wishes and support!

John.

[JohnS]

Cuban Cigar Website a Conversation with Proprietor Alexander Groom

Initial interest in Cigars and Cuban Cigar Website

John Stivaktas: How did you first become interested in cigars?

Alexander Groom: The first cigar I ever smoked was at age 19. One of my friends married young I was his best man and was charged with organising the first bucks night any of us had ever attended. I had no idea what I was doing, but it seemed to me like you couldnt have a bucks night without cigars, so I bought a handful of $3 plastic wrapped ones from a little tobacconist. We smoked them on the steps of Parliament House as the night was winding down. Most of my friends hated them and tossed them after a few puffs, but I took to it right away and nubbed the vile thing. At my second ever bucks night a few months later I invested in a Monte 4 and never looked back.

JS: How did you become involved with Cuban Cigar Website?

AG: In 2006 I was working as a programmer at a web development company, and somehow went from basically being the work experience kid to running the show in about three months. I was making what seemed like crazy huge amount of money at the time, but it was a lot of stress that I was vastly unqualified to handle and at the start of 2008 I flamed out spectacularly and fled to Japan to teach English and generally do anything but stare at a screen all day. When I arrived the job that I had lined up fell through, but as I had plenty of money saved I wasnt too desperate to find another one, and just took little casual gigs here and there, worked in a bar, taught a few classes, played a fake priest at weddings, recorded the voice of an elevator, that sort of thing. I had a lot of free time and very fast internet, so I was spending a lot of time on FoH, playing poker and so on. Rob used to occasionally run these little contests where he would post a thread and the first 10 respondents got sent a cigar for a blind tasting. I had gotten myself into one and I wanted a list of every cigar fitting the dimensions to narrow down my options. It was a big drag to do this on CCW at the time I had to go through and manually compile my list on a piece of paper so I emailed Trev and suggested he add a search function. He liked the idea and thought hed have a crack at doing it himself, so I offered to mock him up a little something to get him started. I dont think it occurred to me at the time that my involvement would go beyond a couple of hours over a weekend, but seven years later here we are.

[JohnS]

Innovations and the Collection Management feature

JS: What innovations/changes have you brought to the website since your initial involvement in 2008 (or was it before this)?

AG: The first thing I was involved with was the shift from a flat HTML driven site to a proper database driven web application - to the average user there probably wasn't a noticeable difference, but it made things vastly easier for Trevor to update as he now only had to make changes in one place to have them replicate out across the site. I pushed the search function pretty hard in the early days because it was a feature I wanted to use. I always felt that it was underused, to be honest, and I guess thats because it's pretty complicated. It's incredibly powerful though once you know what you're doing. Other than that I was pretty much just the implementation man: every few months Trevor would have an idea and then I would build it for him. The first big change I did entirely on my own was the collection management stuff about eighteen months ago now.

JS: How has the addition of the collection management at Cuban Cigar Website changed things?

AG: If there's one lesson from my involvement in CCW it's that if you need a tool you should just build it for yourself and then let others make what they will of it. For each run of reviews of my personal website (Dusky Beauties) I try and smoke my way across all the limiteds for a specific brand, and what I really wanted was a way that I could scroll down the brand pages in CCW and see what I had and what I needed. That is exactly what collection management does.

It's been fairly successful I think - at last count there were about 800 active users with over 150,000 cigars in inventory.

Trev was more inclined to do research and write essays than I am the pages he produced on history and production processes and 'whatnot' will always stay there, but I'm unlikely to add to them. The features I add will be more tech-oriented stuff like the collection management.

[JohnS]

Improvements and Ratings

JS: What type of email requests do you get. Are they mainly suggestions for improvements?

AG: I get about ten emails a week asking how to buy Cuban cigars in the US, and usually one along the lines of "I bought these super limited barber-pole Cohiba anniversary cigars from a guy in a parking lot in Las Vegas - I don't doubt the authenticity as they smell fantastic, but I can't seem to find any mention of them on your site. Do you have any info about them?"

My favourite moment was the morning they announced the softening of the embargo - I hadn't even seen the news yet, but I woke up to six emails from people asking if they could be the exclusive distributor for the US.

There was also one great one a few years back from a typewriter collector looking to identify a scrap of band under one of the keys on Ernest Hemingway's typewriter. It was solved in a thread on FoH (turned out to be a stamp).

Other than that there is a lot of "your site lists so and so as discontinued, but I recently found a 2015 box" and the occasional "X regional has now been released." I get a suggestion for an improvement about once every six months. I usually implement them pretty quickly if it's something that's reasonably simple. Feel free to suggest improvements.

JS: I personally love the rating and flavour profile aspect of the smoking collection that you have for registered users. This allows users to keep track of their cigars, what they rate their cigars out of 5 based on criteria such as elegance and balance and how often they smoke their cigars. Do you see this rating system developing into something potentially down the track...like the Top 5 rated cigars of 2015 or all time for example?

AG: One of the criticisms I'd heard a lot over the years was that the site didn't have tasting notes, but I had always been loath to add them as they are so subjective. With the collection management stuff it seemed like a good opportunity to do crowd-sourced 'objective' reviews.

One of the problems with it is that I think people interpret the meanings of the ratings differently - some use a five for strength to mean "this was a very strong cigar", while to others it means "this had the perfect amount of strength." I plan to tweak the algorithm so that one user who reviews the same cigar a lot can't bias the ratings as much - at the moment the most reviewed and highest rated cigar in the system is the PSD4, but it's largely thanks to one user who reviews two or three of them every day (600 and counting) and almost always gives it a five in every category.

There's certainly a lot of potential there to make it searchable - highest rated cigars, cigars most commonly attributed coffee notes, that sort of thing. Before that can be useful though I need to build up a decent database of reviews - at the moment there are around 5000, which is starting to get there. If the dataset ever gets big enough you could even drill way down and search for specific box codes, which would be a very interesting tool for the vintage market.

[JohnS]

The Future, Alex's Personal Blog and Support for Cuban Cigar Website

JS: Where do you see CCW headed in the immediate and long-term future?

AG: I plan to do a big update about once a year, but don't have anything solid for this year's one yet. When I first did the collection management stuff I posted a thread asking for suggestions, and the big one that people asked for that is still outstanding was prices. It's a bit tricky with currencies and taxes and so on, but I think it has some interesting potential for people to see what vintage stuff they have is trading at and so on. So maybe that if I can figure it out.

For a long time people kept asking for a mobile version, and a few years ago I built an iPhone app to the point where I submitted it to the app store for approval. They ultimately rejected it because it didn't really offer the user anything that they wouldn't get from going to the site in a browser, which honestly was fair enough. I thought about rejigging it when the collection management stuff came out, but ultimately decided that the time would be better spent doing the main site responsively so that it would scale to any size screen. That's another good candidate.

JS: I love your personal blog, duskybeauties.com, it is so witty and funny! Describe for us what it is and how it came about.

AG: When I first started working on CCW Trevor offered to pay me for my time but I refused, so instead he would send me the occasional care package of cigars. These would sometimes include exotics – anniversary humidor cigars and so on - that I would put aside for some future special occasion. After about five years of this I had more exotic cigars than I was ever likely to have firstborn sons, so I started Dusky Beauties as an excuse to smoke them. I’ve always been a bit of an aspiring writer, and I like storytelling and playing with prose, and that all comes together in DBs; the idea is that I will start smoking a cigar, and something in that will trigger some reminiscence, and then I’ll tell the story cutting back and forth between tasting notes.

I’m sure it’s not for everyone, but it seems to have a small loyal following.

JS: How can we at Friends Of Habanos, as members, support you with the work that you do for Cuban Cigar Website to help keep it up-to-date and a viable reference and resource on Cuban Cigars?

AG: The most important thing is to send the info. I subscribe to a few different LCDH newsletters and I run my eye over the topics on FoH every day or so, but I don't spend a huge amount of time chasing stuff day to day, so if something new gets released in the B&M you frequent, please, drop me an email. Likewise if you find any other mistake in CCW I’m at [email protected].

The next thing is to send cigars. I think one of the great strengths of CCW is in its images, and the only real way to get these consistent is for me to photograph them myself. Some people send photos which I use when I have to, but there is really no substitute for photos taken under the same light with the same gear. Most important are regionals and exotics that I can't just pick up, although really any new release would be good. If you're a fan of Dusky Beauties then there is a long list of exotics I am trying to chase down for future seasons. If you think you might have something to contribute then you can always send me a friend request on CCW and see my collection and wishlist.

My mailing address is:

Alexander Groom
Parcel Locker 10069 63954
Shop 1, 250 Elizabeth Street
MELBOURNE VIC 3000

You can also send cash. There is a PayPal link on the front page of the site to [email protected]. The site costs a few hundred dollars a year to run, so while it's not like I'm going to shut down the site if donations don't make this level, definitely the more it brings in the more time I’m inclined to spend on it. In an ideal world it would make enough that I could work on it full time, but we need about a 7000% increase for that to happen.

Feel free to help out, too. If you're a graphic designer or something and want to take a run at it, by all means send me a mock-up. That's pretty much how I got involved.

Finally, if you don't have info, cigars, cash or skills but would nonetheless like show your appreciation, I am always receptive to beautiful women, quality liquor and assorted luxury products.

[Fuzz]

Great work, John!

[ayepatz]

Nice work John. 3 different and fascinating viewpoints on a great cigar site! Thanks!

[Boosted]

Fantastic work John! I truly enjoyed reading all three segments. Thanks for doing it.

[airtrade]

Great set of interviews JS!

Love the Dusky Beauties review/stories!

[Dimmers]

Have enjoyed this series, thanks!

[oliverdst]

Few times I had the opportunity to talk to Alexander he semeed to be a very nice guy.

[CanuckSARTech]

Very unique perspectives from all three. Thanks for sharing this John, and kudos to all four of you for putting the time in to complete this little undertaking.

Well done all.