u/openthc

I was doing a round-table with a bunch of growers talking about brand opportunities. When we were talking about sales all were focused on selling to the RETAILER, there was very little awareness of, or method for marketing their brand directly. Thats rough.

And talking about that brand awareness it the conversation began to compare cannabis to craft-beer and wine -- and then took a very hard turn. I did not see it coming.

In craft beer, in wine, the products are "all the same". Beers are generally 4.5-8% ABV. Wines are around 14% ABV. So those products only get to compete on Taste and Brand. And these consumers don't buy for the "get intoxicated" effect. They are buying for social aspects.

Cannabis consumers doesn't have any of this featuers. Our consumers are looking to get baked. The flavour, the brand matters less than the freaking potency.

I do think there is a brand problem; and the construction of the markets for sure restricts what supply-side brands can do for that market share. For those of us old enough to remember Marlboro didn't advertise "buy our strong ass cancer sticks" they said "Come to Flavor country". Does cannabis need a flavor country awakening? Ideas on brand-building beyond that? Which social-network is the most tolerant? -- I've seen brands banned from all of them

We are thinking about offering our POS bits as a managed-hosted offering for smaller retailers, trying to feel out the pricing.

Our small team has been at this a while; on the supply side (since 2014). We've done some (self-hosted) deployements of our POS but don't really have it as part of our managed-hosted offering. Maybe?

It's a pretty plain system: scan the inventory, take the cash, print receipt. It's got minimal feature-set compared to $THE_BIG_ONES_WE_ALL_KNOW.

We don't (yet) have any integration with Weedmaps, or payment-networks, or -- what else?

What's the need-to-have functionality? What's the nice-to-have features?