Building A Modern Brain For Canna-Businesses
Canix CEO Stacey Hronowski wants to help compress canna-costs while conquering compliance with a modern ERP
What led you to start Canix? What pain points did you see?
I started Canix after working as an engineering consultant for a Bay Area cannabis company, building software that would eliminate the double data entry required to create invoices in their manufacturing and distribution software.
In learning more about the space, it became clear to me that there was a distinct dearth of great options for cannabis companies who want to manage their compliance, sales, and inventory systems. The most salient pain point was compliance (California was just rolling onto METRC at the time), so that’s where I originally put my focus.
Cannatech can feel quite crowded or confusing at times — seed-to-sale doesn’t always mean the same thing. How do you see Canix differentiating vs. competitors?
Canix is laser-focused on building the most powerful software platform that meets the unique needs of this industry, without compromising on simplicity, usability, and bloat. Technology is in our DNA, and we leverage that as a strength to build innovative products to solve the most pressing problems for our customers. In a lot of ways, we wanted to be the Mac to existing solutions’ Windows ’95 — where the power is built into the backend in an integrated way.
We started with Offline Mode, after seeing firsthand how many cannabis sites are located in areas without decent reception — and we’ve continued this trend with our Bluetooth scale and RFID integrations, along with powerful data analytics and forecasting tools. We continue to push the boundaries of technology in the space, and we work closely with our customers to address the most salient pain points in the industry.
Our goals: help customers save on labor, reduce frictions in compliance, and ultimately reduce their cost per gram.
You’ve worked in both finance and non-cannabis startups before this. What are you experiencing in cannabis that’s different? What of your experiences has been most leverageable?
Cannabis is unlike any other industry I’ve worked in before — the rapid pace of change and development is far from what you see in the world of traditional finance. Being a nascent market, cannabis also offers a lot more operational challenges when it comes to foundational elements like banking, mature regulation, and comprehensive off-the-shelf products.
For years before I started Canix, I worked on developing a skill that has become the single most important aspect of my success as a product and people leader: listening. Each day, I have at minimum a dozen conversations, across the spectrum of employees, customers, partners, and friends.
My job as CEO is to create a product precisely tailored for our customers’ needs, and a culture where people feel excited and inspired, and that would not be possible if I didn’t listen to those around me. Effectively absorbing feedback, sentiment, and criticism has been essential to excelling at my role.
Cannabis, like other industries, can be a male-heavy industry. Has being a female founder in a predominantly male industry been challenging?
No industry is perfect, but I do think that cannabis is one of the most progressive industries I’ve worked in, especially compared to how high finance or tech can be.
Neither the Canix team and nor the customers we serve have ever made my gender an issue. Moreover, we work with numerous companies that are women or minority-owned, and I’m thrilled to partner alongside others within the industry.
How is the current market, given the cannabis industry turbulence and COVID-19 pandemic?
Things are going well! We publicly launched 1 year ago, and have since onboarded 235 companies, and processed over 4 million plants through our system. We’ve grown from a team of 2 in an apartment in San Francisco to a team of 15 all across the U.S.
On the whole, cannabis is a turbulent industry — there is a constant influx of new regulations or workflows to incorporate into the product, or a new challenge to solve for our customers. But, if it were easy, somebody would have done it already. Artem (my co-founder and CTO) and I have worked on numerous product teams before, and we both agree that the team that we’ve managed to assemble in these last 6 months is the best we’ve ever worked with. We’ve attracted some top-tier talent from large tech companies and competitors in the space, despite the risks and challenges in working on a federally illegal industry — so it looks like we must be doing something right!
What’s coming next/on the roadmap? What’s your vision for the future?
Our product roadmap is entirely influenced by our customers. One of our core values as a company revolves around the idea that we are all owners in Canix. We encourage everyone, from our sales team to our customer support to our on-call engineers, to be constantly gathering feedback from customers and feeding that input into our roadmap.
One of the things that we’ve heard most is the desire to help optimize sales via live inventory menus. We’re planning on releasing that by the end of Q2. We’re also focusing on more integrations (Argus, OnFleet, etc.), so our customers can see all of their relevant information (environmental controls, deliveries, invoices etc.), all within our system.
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