Who is Oliver Gerhardt?
- Role: founder of RumX. He has been building the platform for 8 years and is still the only person on it full time.
- Degrees: B.Sc. Business Information Systems (Technische Hochschule Ulm, 2015), M.Sc. Computer Science (Duale Hochschule Baden-Württemberg, 2019).
- Tasted himself: 1,713 rums, tasted and rated in his own RumX account.
- Works with: the tasting notes and ratings of more than 53,000 tasters, every day.
- Based in: Stuttgart, where RumX started as a university project in 2018.
From Excel chaos to the first app
In 2018 Oliver was doing his computer science master’s and built an app for a university assignment. At the same time his passion for rum kept growing, and his tasting impressions lived in one big Excel mess. So the assignment became a rum diary for the iPhone: “Rum Tasting Notes”, with a few hundred rums in the database, gathered bottle by bottle from books and online shops.
The entire first year brought 364 ratings, from exactly 46 tasters. Then a rum magazine wrote about the app, the first new tasters arrived, and their feedback was honest: the database was rather tiny. That is exactly what sparked his ambition.
Three moments when it was almost over
The honest story of RumX is not a highlight reel. First Oliver built the app twice for years, for iPhone and Android in parallel, every feature two times, in the evenings after a full-time job. When the community grew faster than he could keep building, he went all in: rebuild the app a third time from scratch, shut down both old apps within a single week, and quit the safe developer job a few months later.
In 2023 came the biggest rebuild: buying rum directly through RumX, with one account and one checkout for many shops. On launch day, of all things, the payment system crashed completely. Four night shifts later it was back up, and today more than 40 partner shops from all over Europe are connected.
Oliver tells the whole story, with receipts from eight years of code archive, in the video further down.
RumX today
The university project has become the world’s largest rum platform: more than 25,000 rums in the database, over 53,000 tasters and more than 320,000 community ratings. For a few months now, AI has been building along as a second pair of programming hands. The decisions stay with Oliver: he defines what gets built, critically reviews the code and decides what is good enough for RumX.
There is also a small team behind RumX. See who is part of it on the about page.
Oliver on YouTube
On the RumX channel Oliver shows what hundreds of thousands of tastings really reveal about rum, and how he keeps building RumX from them. The videos are in German, with English and French subtitles.
How RumX earns money is spelled out on the about page. How ratings come about, and why shops cannot influence them, is explained in the rating methodology.
YouTube channel (in German) →Oliver in the press
Interviews and profiles about Oliver. Every link goes straight to the original.
- Oliver Gerhardt, founder of RumX: Transparency and community for the world of rum.
- Mehr als Cuba Libre: Oliver Gerhardt macht Stuttgart zur Rum-Hauptstadt
- Wie verändert eine einzige Idee die Art, wie wir Genuss heute verstehen?
- RumX: „Begreift Community als festen Bestandteil eures Produkts“s
- Oliver Gerhardt im Interview: Wie RumX zur größten Rum-Datenbank der Welt wurde
- An Interview with Oliver Gerhardt – RumX App and Community
- Interview with Oliver Gerhardt (RumX / Rum Tasting Notes)
- 2020 DIARY: Oliver Gerhardt (Rum Tasting Notes)
- Interview with Oliver Gerhardt of Rum Tasting Notes
- Rum Tasting Notes: Rum-Leidenschaft trifft auf Programmierkunst