Cannabis software platform offers joint solution

BOULDER — For a pair of Harvard graduates with degrees in psychology and behavioral economics, private equity and hedge funds provided a lucrative career path.

But in Colorado, the grass was … legal.

Lured by the budding possibilities of applying their expertise to the sprouting sales of recreational and medicinal marijuana, Jake Levin and Andrew Duffy founded software-development company Best In Grow and this spring unveiled an eponymous management solution for cannabis retailers they hope will be a joint asset for dispensary owners and workers alike.

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Levin, who serves as chief operating officer, had been a management consultant at Investor Group Services and an analyst at National Democratic Institute, a division of the U.S. State Department. Chief executive Duffy was an investor at hedge fund Bridgewater Associates.

“I was focusing on consumer diligence, and Andrew was doing macro trend analysis across thousands of industries — two polar opposites in the finance world,” Levin said. “But turning our eyes west, we became interested in how we could bring our expertise to the cannabis industry.”

According to their promotional materials, Best In Grow “empowers the frontline employees of cannabis retail with a powerful suite of most effective, efficient, and easy-to-use workforce management tools that translate to hours saved, engaged employees, delighted customers, and meaningful boosts to the bottom line. It provides a collaborative environment for cannabis brands and manufacturers to engage with the most important influencers in the industry: budtenders.”

As the fledgling industry took root, Levin said, “cannabis consumers get inundated with bad information or no information. Consumers knew nothing about the product they were purchasing and consuming. So budtenders were very influential, and kind of occupied this really fascinating role in the new industry.

“It’s similar to selling natural foods or outdoor gear,” he said. “Customers at GNC or REI more often than not rely on the expertise and guidance of the employee in the store. The employees work there because they love the outdoors. Some people work in restaurants because they love food. Some work in movie theaters because they love movies. Budtenders work in cannabis because they’re enthusiastic about it. So we set out to build a tool for those budtenders that could be a real lynchpin for success of the industry as well as specific brands.”

Manufacturers of edibles, ointments and other cannabis-infused products “were really obsessed with winning the hearts and minds of those budtenders, with free samples or in-store pop-ups, but they didn’t have a scalable way of unlocking, understanding and leveraging the influence of a budtender,” Levin said. “So we thought about how we were going to bridge that gap and unlock influence of the budtender, using our experience in economics and psychology.”

The pair completed a $650,000 funding round that closed last July, luring venture capital through institutional and angel investors and the Canopy Boulder accelerator. In June they aim to complete a second round for $2 million through institutional investors, using the capital to expand into new markets.

The company launched in January with 35 dispensaries on board in Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts and Ontario, as well as five partners such as Wana Brands.

“For now, we’re opening up the platform to any brand interested in working with us,” Levin said. “We’re not charging now, just building our footprint.”

The platform, he said, is meant to be “a modern-day internet for employees, designed to work something like Facebook or Twitter — with a social feel to it. But it also manages employee scheduling, communications, SOP checklists, compliance and regulatory updates, and learning modules. That’s the internal part. Externally, the brands have a presence, and can disseminate their resources to captive audiences.”

It’s meant to be a two-way street for manufacturers as well, Levin said, because they can get not only point-of-sale data and analytics but feedback and insights.

He sees the platform’s training role as breaking new ground as well.

“In traditional training, a lot of companies have learning programs or modules — pretty much like slideshows or videos, and you can take a quiz and all of a sudden you’re trained. The manufacturers want to give sales people a nugget to regurgitate at the point of sale. I think that’s an antiquated approach, and not like millennials or Gen Z are used to learning or can most effectively learn. So we use more ‘native learning’ — all the ads look just like posts, and we use the same approach to training. Small, bite-sized training modules.

“The majority of tools now are for desk employees,” he said. “Our tool is designed for a deskless workforce.”

Eventually, Best In Grow will monetize the platform by offering varying packages with rates based on number of locations and services sought, with the highest tier integrating with point-of-sale and payroll.

“Our primary model is for brands that are spending a lot of money accessing budtenders but don’t have the tools to do it sufficiently,” Levin said. He anticipates that 70 percent of his company’s revenue will come from brands and 30 percent from dispensaries.

Basically, Levin said, the suite of operations and management tools can enable cannabis brands and dispensaries to “harness the influence of the frontlines of the cannabis industry. “Best In Grow enables dispensaries to organize, manage, and communicate with their whole workforce. It enables brands to learn from and educate the people who stand between their products and their customers.”