GrowBuddy: The Google Analytics of growing cannabis

by Anthony Sodd
August 25, 2015

 

Growing marijuana, even just a few plants as a hobby, is a data intensive endeavor. Growers track every variable imaginable in order to learn from past mistakes and create a better product. One missed piece of data and thousands of dollars in cannabis can be destroyed. Until recently, there really wasn’t a clever way to keep track of, and make sense of all this information. That is where GrowBuddy comes in, with a modern digital solution for marijuana cultivation.

“We like to think of GrowBuddy as Google Analytics for cannabis cultivation,” Rob Rusher, CEO at GrowBuddy said. “We want to help people capture data so that they can grow better and smarter.”

GrowBuddy lets cannabis cultivators track detailed metrics about their grow operations. You can track the types of plants you’re growing, what sort of soil or hydroponics you’re growing them in, and how often you water them. You can track plants’ nutrient cycles, current stage of growth and even add pictures. It’s like MyFitnessPal and Google Analytics had a baby, and that baby likes to grow marijuana.

Given the nature of the information GrowBuddy was designed to store, and the current federal laws surrounding the cultivation of marijuana, the developers of GrowBuddy took security seriously. The software works completely offline and grow data is automatically encrypted. If you do decide to sync data to the GrowBuddy cloud, it is sent using SSL and is stored in an encrypted database.

“We don’t track you, we don’t care who you are. We don’t ask for any personally identifiable information. We just want to help you grow,” Rusher said.

The idea for GrowBuddy came about in 2012 when a software engineer visited a friend’s home-grow operation and saw that there was a desire to track data, but that the way it was being done was disorganized to say the least. The operators had been taking careful, detailed notes about their operation, however, that data was being stored in erasable ink on a white board and in a notebook that had been heavily stained by spilled nutrients.

“Using GrowBuddy those growers went from being home growers to operating a 80,000 square foot commercial grow,” Rusher said.

The company currently has over 7 thousand growers using their software. In the near future Grow Buddy will integrate with Monster Gardens’ hydroponics store to allow growers to have supplies shipped right to their doors — unmarked, and in a black box, of course.

 

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