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Now are the early days for the recreational marijuana market in Colorado. Only nine months ago retailing of reefer was illegal, but now it is legitimate business and all sorts of people are trying to get in on the action. As cannabis leaves behind its illicit past many are seeing opportunity to make this industry as respectable and refined as any other.
“A lot of people think it is the next great American business, but not a lot of people know how to invest in cannabis,” said CEO and co-founder of CannaBuild, Zach Marburger. “We are really looking to legitimize our industry and show there is opportunity here.”
With that in mind the Marijuana Tech Startup Competition is being launched in Denver on September 26th by CannaBuild, a developer of marijuana related digital apps and MassRoots.com, a social network for marijuana. The event will be a kind of hackathon for digital apps focused on marijuana. Cannabuild sees it as an important step towards refining the marijuana market. “It’s a way for us to connect with fellow cannabis consumers and hopefully bring in some new ones,” said Marburger.
“We brought a level of sophistication and professionalism to the app design. Right now the apps are very tie dye-ish. Right now people are having to settle for a poor experience,” said Marburger.“My team is not experts in cannabis. I formerly founded a successful startup called Topple Track that helps musicians fight piracy. We’re not cannabis people, we are technologists.”
To influence the direction of the digital cannabis industry CannaBuild will be launching an API that it hopes startup competition attendees will use to build their applications. CannaBuild’s API will be attached to an also-soon to launched bud tending app. Bud tending is the art of recommending cannabis to consumers: how to consume it, what varieties to consume, and how much to consume for the desire effect. CannaBuild’s bud tending app will connect consumers with the advice of live bud tenders.
Beyond its budtending app and the marijuana hackathon, Cannabuild seeks to be a digital cannabis app development shop. “What we do is create mobile applications that connect anybody that is interested in cannabis as a whole, connect people with cannabis retailers,” said Marburger.
In October, the company plans to launch another app called Whaxy that will help dispensaries display their inventories online. A step toward the online sale of weed, the Whaxy app is not however allowed to display prices.
“In iOS apps you are not allowed to display weed prices. You can display your menu, but you can’t display your prices,” said Marburger. So Whaxy will just help customers locate the marijuana they want at nearby dispensaries.
Corporate reservations to associating with marijuana and unsavory leftovers from its days as an illegal substance mean the market for cannabis is fractured and often run unprofessionally.
“It’s not like liquor stores where you can buy Jack Daniels and everywhere it is the same,” said Marburger. “I’ve been to a dispensary before where I felt like I was at J-Crew and I’ve been to dispensaries where it’s felt like a drug dealer. And they were in the same city.”
“There are people who aspire to do it right. But there is certainly a shady element around in the industry because there is so much money to be made,” said Marburger.
Marijuana has yet to productize like other commodities have, but Marburger said the price of cannabis is falling fast and sophistication is on the rise.
“If you compare these prices to black market prices on the east coast it’s 75 percent less,” said Marburger. “This commodity is going to consolidate and commoditize faster than any commodity ever.”
And, “The fastest growing segment of cannabis is new people to the market,” said Marburger. “We are interested in capturing new consumers. People who haven’t partook on it because of its legality.”
To accommodate those new to the market marijuana sellers are developing less hardcore methods of consuming the drug. Dixie Elixirs and Edibles, a marijuana infused food manufacturer, is experimenting with products like THC infused sodas and THC infused chocolates. The company is catering to newbies as well with lower THC levels.
“Dixie came out with a lot of products that have five milligrams of THC in it. That’s very low, almost as low as you can go,” said Marburger.
Also, “There’s a very strong community around cannabis cooking and recipes, chicken marsala infused with cannabis for example. It’s not just brownies anymore. It’s a very sophisticated wide-ranging culinary movement.”
Whatever consumer tastes in marijuana develop into Marburger and CannaBuild want to be at the center coordinating and refining the market. “In the infancy of this movement, it is really about building a really strong brand and connecting consumers with retailers who are doing it right,” said Marburger.
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