About the project

The goal of the cigar profiler project is to build a website to:

• Collect and share reliable and up-to-date information about cigars;
• Make the creation of structured, high-quality reviews fun and easy;
• Help you maintain an accurate inventory, including analytics and reporting features.

What will make this site different from other cigar rating and reviewing sites is this combination of features, as well as the unique cigar profiling technology.

I have been working on this project for six years now. The first step was to develop the rating method. There are, of course, many methods out there already. What I set out to accomplish was to create a method that combines objective judgments with subjective preferences.

Excel-based test sheet

Once the method was developed, it was field tested by different users. Over the course of one and a half years, four users independently rated 263 cigars (status June 1, 2015). In December 2014, I published our own top 25 of the cigars rated that year with the cigar profiling method.

Confident that the method is solid, I then wrote a functional design document of what the website should look like and what it should do. The site will be a free information source for everyone who loves cigars. I shall not get involved in selling or promoting cigars in any way. Instead, I want to cover the basic operational costs (servers, storage) by charging a small annual fee for a few personalized features.

In addition, I am looking into providing website services for small brick and mortar tobacconists who cannot invest in a dynamic online presence themselves. By leveraging the data we collect as a community, we can give something back to these knowledgeable and passionate retailers whose shops we all love to frequent.