Welcome to Toke.TV!
New name, same mission: connecting the cannabis community in real time
Over a Year in the Making
Holy Tokes…What an incredible year it’s been! What started as a cool cannabis concept among friends has turned into one of the most meaningful journeys of our lives, a journey set to significantly shape the future of weed tech, weed media, and legal marijuana as we know it. As difficult as it would have been to imagine us being where we are after our small founding moment in 2014, it’s even more amazing to fathom the tremendous progress we’ve made as a company over even just the last year in beta–all of which was only made possible with your help and participation.
The last twelve months of beta product refinement have surely been rife with their fair share of speed bumps. Lots of speed bumps. But as stated in Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction,” or as we’ve interpreted that rule, “the harder the challenge, the sweeter the hard-earned achievement.” Our Toke With team has been steady in the trenches putting in work over the last year, and now it’s time to reap the benefits of this tremendous effort together, with you our fam bam.
A Highly Engaged Community
Our beautiful Toke With community has blossomed from a small group of cannabis enthusiasts to an ever-growing family of tens of thousands of tokers from around the world. We’ve welcomed talented cultivators, creators, and weed influencers–big and small–since we first launched our baby in April of 2016. With all your support, we’ve been able to dream features and much-needed improvements that would have never been discovered without your participation.
Most importantly, however, you’ve also helped us crystallize the greater mission for what it is that we’ve set out to do. Toke With started out as a simple attempt to leverage live video to bring the cannabis community together in real-time. Since those early days, our platform has organically evolved to adopt a much deeper purpose. In addition to virtually connecting the members of our fragmented community, Toke With has become a window into the world of weed. You, our cannabis community, have proven our hypothesis true that the stoner population is full of beautifully vibrant, productive, and positively-impactful people with so much to offer; it has just long-desired a platform to illuminate this truth, which stands contrary to current stigma. Toke With has become that platform, and now is our time to use its quality content you all continue to create on a daily basis to showcase our true essence as a people and an industry.
What’s Better than TV?
With that being said, I’d like to welcome you all to Toke.TV. Our new name. Our new identity.
A TV is defined as “a system for transmitting visual images and sound that are reproduced on screens, chiefly used to broadcast programs for entertainment, information, and education.”
Coincidentally for Toke.TV (formerly Toke With), when we looked at the variety of content that had been created in-app during our beta, it all could be distilled into these same media categories of cannabis entertainment, cannabis information, and cannabis education. Thus, we realized that providing the ability to virtually toke with someone else, while still critical to our mission, was less important in comparison to providing the ability to successfully broadcast our collective cannabis identity to the world. So, we expanded our vision to become the live-streaming, modern-day broadcast ecosystem for the cannabis community. We use live video to both connect users and, at the same time, to create the image of our quickly-budding community through the lens of your authentic streams.
Light Up and Let Your Light Shine
On Toke.TV, every single one of you is a star. Unlike traditional television, there are no barriers to entry here. You can say hi to mom or dad and tell them you’re on TV. That’s because you are. Whether you’re hopping on Toke.TV for just a few minutes to share some words of marijuana motivation or streaming consistently for hours while growing, trimming, glass-blowing, or more–you’re a star here on our platform! The content you create is beautiful and it matters.
So, light up and let your light shine on Toke.TV. Stream whatever, whenever…but please stream true, true to what marijuana is about. Marijuana is about goodness, positivity. It’s about love. It’s about unity. These are all the characteristics of our collective identity. These are our values. Remember our values the next time you hop in a stream or broadcast one yourself. And remember that by broadcasting you not only become a star on our platform, but you become a star in the story that is the future of marijuana.
From the bottom of our hearts, we want to thank you for being with us on the journey that was Toke With. We can’t wait to see what you have in store for Toke.TV!
Toke well and toke wisely,
Miguel Sugay
Co-founder and CEO, Toke.TV
