A startup story

Part I of a multi-post series

Welcome to the first post on Bloomblog, where we will actually write down some of the crap that is going on at Bloombox, where we make cool software that helps cannabis dispensary owners live less aggravating lives.

Quickly, a little background. I’m Sam, the CEO. In February of last year (2016), my co-founder Tim and I had the idea to start this whole thing. In this post I’m gonna tell you about it.

⚡ Inspiration strikes

What brought us to it? The very best inspiration for products: we personally felt like it needed to exist. For ourselves.

After all, I am a patient myself. I frequent a dispensary called Abatin Wellness, which, by the way is awesome (shout out to Scott, Pearl, Kris and the whole crew!). For ages Abatin had used paper menus.

Here is a simulation of what that was like, since it is not that way now, and so we must settle for an approximation of that ancient act:

What it is like to use paper for things

Just kidding. That is from an infomercial. But, seriously — it’s 2017, and I can filter my music by artist, genre, album… year, composer… and a song costs $0.99 —maybe even less now in a post-Spotify and Apple Music world.

What about an $18 gram?

We should have something better than paper, especially for such a complicated and high-demand product as cannabis.

After being a customer at Abatin for years, all it took was this: one day, I was making a purchase, as usual, and I asked, “why paper menus?”

Kris, the awesome budtender helping me out, confessed she wasn’t sure. She admitted they made them in Microsoft Word.

Depicted above: Using Microsoft Word to make menus.

It may sound silly, or perhaps antiquated, to use Word for something as specific as a menu. Surely there is software for this, right? If that doesn’t sound silly to you, allow me a quick retort.

🏔️ A challenge appears

When you think about menus, there isn’t much to think about. At first, they seem like a solved problem. Dispensaries in 2017 are exciting and special places, though. Like snowflakes, or the wild west.

When an entrepreneur opens a new restaurant, or cafe, or some other well-understood establishment, she/he has all sorts of vendors, software solutions… infrastructure, essentially, in place to help them out. Certainly, in most industries, established and unambiguous compliance law is a given. This could not be further from the truth for cannabis.

To make matters more interesting, dispensaries have unique requirements when it comes to menus. Whereas a restaurant’s menu usually sees only seasonal updates, and a cafe’s menu changes basically never, a dispensary’s menu changes multiple times per day, sometimes even multiple times per hour.

There are tons of diverse vendors and product types — Korova, Kiva, Koala T in just the K category of edible products alone. Some product categories are only now maturing to the point of coordinated brand capitalization, and all categories are expanding rapidly.

These circumstances converge to produce a pocket of unbridled, painful complexity, so-to-speak, from the cannabis dispensary owner’s perspective:

Not to mention the paper involved. Abatin’s menu averaged about 15 or so pages. Ignoring the environmental impacts, and assuming a conservative 3 prints per day, minus U.S. national holidays (Abatin is open 7 days a week), that’s:

(~350 days) *
($23.99 for an 8-ream case of paper / (500 sheets per ream * 8 reams))
* 3 prints per day * 15 pages =

1,050 prints
15,750 pages, split over 4 of those 8-ream cases

and a grand total of… $94.46.

That means one dispensary, for one year, only counting paper costs, amounts to this, and about $100 (assuming you have no other copying or printing to do, lol):

Poorly photoshopped because they were so heavy.

That doesn’t factor in the cost of the trips to Staples, the ink to print them (printer ink is often more expensive by the ounce than human blood), and so on, and it doesn’t amount to much expense.

Most important of all, a dispensary manager/owner/staff member’s time is wasted — and the ramifications of that are less defined.

Considering that, the informercial GIFs start to make sense. You try resizing blue and green dots in Microsoft Word three times per day, and paying a noticeable amount of money when you do it, and tell me it doesn’t pain you, like this gentleman:

Confusion and pain: not gender specific.

One of my mentors (the brilliant Kyle Wild over at Keen IO, check ’em out) used to say something pretty smart. “It doesn’t make sense to walk around with a hammer in your hand looking for a nail.” He was right, and he was pointing out what I continue to find aggravating about so much of Silicon Valley proper: a lack of focus on real problems.

“It doesn’t make sense to walk around with a hammer in your hand looking for a nail.”

In all its glory and humility, here was a real problem.

Tune in next week for Part II.