Helping Jane deliver convenience, content, and cannabis
Simplifying the complicated world of legal cannabis for customers
Legalization of cannabis in several states has removed the old challenges of where and how to get it, but it has also created a new issue — the paralysis of choice. There are so many options now that it can be hard to know what’s the best or the most convenient.
Jane makes legalized cannabis more accessible online by letting customers browse local dispensaries and learn more about products before placing orders for pickup or delivery. This accelerated process removes confusion, and saves them a lot of time and money.
The site is the brainchild of Soc Rosenfeld, a former Apache helicopter pilot who earned his MBA from MIT. When he returned from service, he realized that cannabis had potential benefits for a multitude of concerns and issues. He and his brother’s vision to launch Jane stemmed from his own experiences readjusting to civilian life back in the States, as he told Forbes.
Jane needed a partner to help them realize their goal of creating an eCommerce platform that lets people shop and place orders with their local dispensaries online and be able to pick it up fast without waiting in line.
“We want to help cannabis sellers go from ‘brick and mortar’ to ‘click and mortar,’ ” Rosenfeld told Forbes.
In 2017, Jane came to us looking for a development team to help them go from a beta site to a more finished, modern ordering system ready to serve their cannabis customers. We worked with them to create a streamlined approach to user flow that would align with their product goals, getting them from start to launch in under five months.
Busting through the haze
Building a sustainable digital product requires a clear idea of what your product is and how it will grow. It also requires the clarity to know when it’s time to stop building new features and get in front of real customers.
We kicked things off by pairing with the Jane team to define what was necessary to provide a complete experience for customers at launch. Rather than trying to do everything, they chose a few areas of focus and stripped the product down to its essentials, including identifying the most important portion of their audience, streamlining the ordering experience, and adding design elements to facilitate the process.
Challenges to overcome included location-aware search results, user authentication, and making a clear, concise narrative experience starting on Jane’s homepage to easily guide customers through the buying process.
Our team refined the overall Jane product customer experience. This included optimizing the site’s existing design and navigation, and implementing a new search function.
We inherited a codebase that had undergone few tests, so we wrote high-level acceptance tests around the user experience, including registering a new user and allowing them to make a cannabis reservation. We then moved into fixing smaller bugs and adding smaller features to help the experience, while eliminating features that took away from the user experience. This process also familiarized the Jane team with the codebase.
We also made a product roadmap that extended beyond launch for more feature development and the ability to expand into new markets. This roadmap has informed Jane’s post-launch refinements along with feedback from retailers listing on the site.
These efforts set Jane up to quickly and successfully launch, targeting their early customers and leaving enough leeway to develop for their future audiences as more states legalize cannabis.
Room to grow
Jane launched to praise from press, including Forbes, which covered the site’s new online search engine — the only one to provide real-time availability. Jane uses a smart search function to find products based on need, then allows people to reserve it for pick-up or delivery. They were the first to market with this real-time search, beating competitors Weedmaps and Leafly in this space.
Since Jane’s software is browser-based, it makes it easier for both customers and stores to use. It plugs into a retail store’s existing system, so it’s easy for dispensaries to use and update their inventories. On the user side, Jane’s system gives them updates and also eliminates the chance of reading a fake review.
We continue to work with Jane’s internal development team for additional support as they expand. To date, more than 550 dispensaries are represented on Jane, with over 100,000 inventoried products, with plenty of room to grow.
“We feel like the cannabis industry is a ripe candidate to prove this model,” Rosenfeld told GeekWire. “You have a very fragmented market in terms of retailers whereby there are thousands and thousands and thousands of dispensaries across the country. Not a single (company) controls more than one percent of market share.”
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