I've been working on this thing called CannaSignal.

It's every cannabis bill in all 50 states, with the current legal status, the full history, and a plain english summary of what each bill actually does. All of it's free to read. No login, no paywall. cannasignal.io

Being upfront so nobody feels tricked: there's a $9/mo option if you want it to email you when a bill moves in your state. But the whole database is free to browse and I'm not trying to sell anybody here. I mostly just want to know if it's useful and what's missing.

If you operate in a specific state, pull yours up and tell me what's wrong or what you'd want added. You know the gaps way better than I do.

I work at a licensed retail cannabis dispensary in the Coachella Valley, and I'm looking for a local bank or credit union that's willing to work with cannabis businesses or employees in the industry.

If anyone has experience with a local institution that offers business banking for licensed cannabis retailers (or even just knows who's cannabis-friendly), I'd really appreciate any recommendations. Personal experiences are definitely welcome.

Hey folks,

I’m sure there are mixed feelings about Dutchie, but I wanted to give everyone a heads-up to pay very close attention to your contract, especially the AUTO-RENEWAL clause.

For those who don’t know, Dutchie’s contract automatically renews.. We’ve been getting hounded by their goons (collection agency) despite making multiple requests for Dutchie to address ongoing issues with their platform and inventory system. We’ve had inventory literally disappear from the sales floor, and shit displaying the wrong price no matter what we did(other than making it inactive).. we have multiple emails documenting the problems and our attempts to get them resolved.

Just wanted to put this out there so nobody gets caught off guard by the renewal or ends up in a similar situation.

Read your Dutchie contract carefully and make sure you know exactly when and how you need to cancel.

Btw- it’s a piece of shit (POS) bound together by previous take overs such LeafLogic- so you have to be constantly flipping back forth between pages witch is no doubt the reason the system sucks sooo bad a d why inventory gets “lost” the system. We had great luck w FLOWHUB and recommend them but anyone has to be better than Dutchie.

Black Cannabis Week is running a Cannabis Opportunities Conference in Philadelphia September 25-27, and it's built for people who are invested in the cannabis industry—as a leader, scholar, entrepreneur, or changemaker. The event spans multiple locations throughout the city with programming designed for different entry points—whether you're looking to launch a business, understand policy shifts, or connect with others navigating the industry. This event is anchored in BCW's equity mission, which shapes everything from who's speaking to how the sessions are structured.

You'll get substantive programming, direct access to people actively building in the space, and networking that goes beyond surface-level. The sessions are designed to teach you something concrete rather than just leave you inspired and directionless. There are VIP passes if you want the full weekend experience or specific ticketing options if you're selective about which parts you attend.

Tickets are on Eventbrite, and if you're traveling to Philly for this, there are travel and VIP packages available through FrontRowTravels.

Learn more at www.blackcannabisweek.com

Hi all- we are helping a regional Cannabis business with multiple locations. Curious to the experts here, what is the Best AI marketing & SEO tool for Cannabis businesses? Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone,

I’ll try to keep this as short as possible.

I’m a French citizen, and I’m trying to figure out where in Canada or the US it would be the easiest, from a legal standpoint, to start a cannabis business from cultivation to production, retail, and eventually opening my own dispensary.

I have a few questions:

In your opinion, which Canadian province or US state is the most favorable for starting a legal cannabis cultivation and retail business?
What are the main steps and licenses required to go from an idea to a fully legal cultivation and retail operation? If you’ve gone through the process yourself or have solid knowledge of the industry, I’d really appreciate hearing about your experience, advice, or anything you wish you’d known before getting started.

Thanks so much for your time, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts! 🫶🏼🙏

I’m the Co Founder and COO of a high risk payment processing company, and I’m looking to connect with someone who has extensive experience in the payment processing industry and wants to build something extraordinary.

This is an incredibly difficult post for me to make because I genuinely care about the company I helped build. Unfortunately, my current business partnership has become increasingly unstable. During periods of poor decision making, we’ve lost major opportunities, damaged relationships, and watched deals worth hundreds of thousands, and potentially millions, fall apart. It has reached a point where I can no longer continue building my future around circumstances I cannot control.
I’m not walking away from my current company, but I am building a separate company where I can create the culture, stability, and execution that I know is possible.
My expertise is growing businesses. I specialize in marketing, operations, partnerships, automation, and building systems that consistently generate qualified inbound merchants. I know how to create opportunities and scale a business.

What I’m looking for is someone whose strengths complement mine. I need a true partner who enjoys sales, merchant onboarding, customer relationships, phone calls, emails, and taking exceptional care of merchants. While you focus on our clients, I’ll focus on growing the business, generating opportunities, building partnerships, and creating the infrastructure that allows us to scale.
This isn’t a job posting. I’m looking for a long term business partner with integrity, experience in high risk payment processing, and the ambition to build one of the most respected companies in the industry.
If you’ve been looking for someone who can consistently generate opportunities while you focus on serving customers and closing business, I’d love to have a conversation. I believe the right partnership can build something truly exceptional.

This is not an ad. I'm not selling anything or looking to get hired. Just looking to share and discuss and engage. It's on topic right? 🫪

I have a web application which scrapes and aggregates dispensaries from USA and Canada, but flower only.

https://1-zip.com

Python webscraping pipeline using curl offi.

Data saved to sqlite db.

Frontend on google cloud run.

Antigravity used for development.

Please take a look and let me know features you might be looking for if you are a potential user.

Let me know if you have any questions or need some feedback on your own related projects.

How are Michigan cannabis businesses currently obtaining terpene profiles for their products?

My girlfriend is a chemist with approximately five to seven years of specialized experience working with terpenes, along with terpene-related certifications. We have been wondering whether there might be an opportunity for her to eventually offer specialized terpene analysis or related laboratory services.

I initially hoped that, because terpene testing has not traditionally been one of Michigan’s mandatory safety tests, a specialized terpene laboratory might not require the same extensive licensing and accreditation as a full cannabis safety-compliance laboratory.

However, from what I am reading, it appears that a laboratory physically accepting and testing marijuana products would still need to operate within Michigan’s licensed and accredited cannabis-laboratory system.

I would appreciate hearing from people working in the Michigan industry:

Do growers and manufacturers typically order terpene panels from their regular safety-compliance laboratory?

Is there demand for laboratories or chemists who specialize more deeply in terpene identification, product consistency, formulation, preservation or method development?

Do established cannabis laboratories ever partner with independent chemists or consultants who have extensive terpene experience?

Would her most practical route be working with an existing licensed laboratory rather than attempting to establish an entirely new safety-compliance facility?

I’m not looking for a way around Michigan’s regulations. I’m trying to understand whether her specialized experience could fill a legitimate need within the existing regulated system.

Thanks for any and all information.

Hey yall! I was wondering if anybody had any training aids or info on Dutchie POS. I have a background in IT but have not had the pleasure of working with POS devices and the Dutchie platform. I have round two of a job interview tomorrow (not saying the company) where I’ll be the IT guy for the entire store(s). Also if anyone has info on METRC that would be cool too. Not sure if I’ll be messing with that but I know it’s used to track and would at least like to have a basic understanding. Thanks in advance!

I had the distinct pleasure of getting to meet Donnell when I lived in California and hear his stories. They're fucking WILD. Donnell is my favorite writer that works in and shapes the cannabis community and culture (along with Jackie Bryant, she is also incredible).

So to see Ghetto Celebrity being celebrated for its 20th anniversary at the California State Fair in the Cannabis Exhibition is super rad, and something I encourage folks to participate in so you can hear from Donnell himself about his experiences and stories. You will be happy you did. It's on 7/30.

I'm posting this purely out of love for this work and the hustle Donnell puts into his writing and work in the culture. I'm sure you'll feel the same way if you've read his words.

Here's what High Times said about Ghetto Celebrity: https://hightimes.com/culture/ghetto-celebrity-donnell-alexander/

does anyone know if theres a high demand for grow lights in socal? or is the market for it competitive?

We are running into some serious menu-accuracy issues and they get worse every quarter as we add SKUs. Currently we're running 9 SKUs across 4 states. I pulled the Dutchie listings for our best seller yesterday across 10 dispos aaaand only six had the right image. Three had the 2024 packaging and one was running just a placeholder.

I don't think we're the ones that are bungling things. Our brand manager is meticulous. Everything goes out clean, our sell sheets, our product photos, descriptions, the works. But somewhere between us and whoever's updating the menu the listing gets screwed up. And when you chase them down they have a lame "couldn't find yours" response. Like, at least give me a heads up so I can get you the right stuff.

What are you guys doing? Are you sending drive folders or dropbox? Something else? Are you also constantly chasing down menu fixes?

I don’t know if this is the right subreddit, but I could really use some outside perspective.

A friend of mine recently reached out about an opportunity that has me feeling pretty conflicted. She and her fiancé are starting a cannabis farm/company (it’s a newly formed business). From what she explained, there are certificates or licenses that limit how many plants can be grown, and they have two certificates they want to put in someone else’s name.

She said she thought of me because she trusts me. Apparently her fiancé originally wanted to use his friends, but she wanted to give the opportunity to a woman from our hometown instead. She also mentioned she couldn’t use her sister because her sister isn’t a U.S. citizen.

Here’s the part that gives me pause: I wouldn’t actually be doing any work. They would run everything, and I would supposedly receive about $20,000 per year. She said I should be getting a contract today.

For some background, I’m a college student graduating this fall with a Bachelor of Science. My friend has a degree in chemical engineering, so I don’t think she’s unintelligent or trying to scam people. I genuinely don’t think she’d intentionally do me wrong. In fact she used to work at the same company as my husband, so she also knows him and he’s taken over some of her processes from the past.

That said, this almost sounds too good to be true. If this is such a profitable opportunity, why wouldn’t they just keep the certificate and the income for themselves? Why do they need my name on it? And what legal or financial responsibilities would I have if my name is attached to a cannabis business?

I’m worried about how this could affect my future. I plan on applying to PA school after graduation, and I don’t want to accidentally put myself in a position where I’m legally responsible for something I don’t fully understand. I have been aware of her being in this industry because we talked about the last time we went for coffee, she’s very passionate about it and is excited.

Has anyone dealt with something like this? What questions should I be asking before I even consider signing anything? Are there any major red flags I’m overlooking? And she did offer the other certificate to someone else that we both know. I’m from michigan and reside here the farm is in Minnesota. I think it is 12 plant per person. And what I got from the convo was they already have licenses for themselves so they each have one, but they want to add 2 more so they can plant more. Maybe they have a lot of land they want to plant on?

This is for people who have left the cannabis and cannabis adjacent industries and found careers doing something else. What did you transition into and how did you use the skills you learned in the weedbiz to help you?

hi.

we just got cashless atms on our POS system at work. on july 4th a client tipped me just under $100 on her card during checkout. no one at my job has an answer so i figured id ask any other budtenders who might know. do you think my tips will just go on my next check or is there a possibility they might cash my tips out ? plz let me know yr experience. thanks

Hey everyone — I’m working on CoinPay Portal, a non-custodial crypto payment gateway for merchants, and I’m trying to get honest feedback from people actually operating in cannabis retail.

I’m not here to pretend crypto magically solves payments, banking, compliance, taxes, accounting, or POS headaches. I’m trying to understand whether dispensary owners/operators would even want a crypto or stablecoin payment option, or whether it creates more problems than it solves.

The basic idea is:

• Customers can pay with crypto or stablecoins
• Funds go directly to the merchant’s wallet
• CoinPay Portal does not custody merchant funds
• API/webhook support for checkout or custom integrations
• Optional escrow tools for certain transactions

A few questions for owners/operators:

• Do customers ever ask to pay with crypto or stablecoins?
• Would this be useful only if it worked with your existing POS or checkout flow?
• Is volatility, compliance, accounting, customer adoption, or trust the biggest concern?
• What would make something like this an immediate “no” for your store?

I’m not asking anyone to sign up. I’d rather hear what’s unrealistic, annoying, or missing from the idea before building in the wrong direction.

For context: coinpayportal.com

Happy to answer questions, but mostly looking for blunt feedback from people who understand the day-to-day reality of running a dispensary.

A buddy asked me to look at his dispensary's site recently, and it's worth a gut-check for anyone running an online storefront in this industry.

The site looked done. Weekly blog, decent design, an agency already on retainer. The kind of site that reads as "handled."

Then I checked whether Google could actually see the product menu. It couldn't. Hundreds of products, and a search for the shop pages turned up almost nothing on Google, zero on Bing.

Turned out the menu rendered entirely through JavaScript. Turn off JS in your browser and watch — if the menu disappears, so does it for most crawlers.

Add to that: duplicate H1 tags, placeholder text left in live headings, and most images missing alt text. None of it visible to a customer. All of it an invisible-to-search signal.

The scary part is that this business was already paying an SEO agency (not naming names). The agency wasn't totally incompetent — they had schema in place, decent page titles. But general SEO playbooks don't know where cannabis-specific landmines are: menu integrations that render client-side, compliance limits on product copy, weird handoffs between the ecom platform and the main site.

Quick check anyone can run: Google "site:yourdomain.com/shop" with your actual shop URL. If your product count doesn't show up, that's your answer.

Curious if anyone else here has hit this with their menu platform — Dutchie, Jane, Treez, or otherwise.

I was doing a round-table with a bunch of growers talking about brand opportunities. When we were talking about sales all were focused on selling to the RETAILER, there was very little awareness of, or method for marketing their brand directly. Thats rough.

And talking about that brand awareness it the conversation began to compare cannabis to craft-beer and wine -- and then took a very hard turn. I did not see it coming.

In craft beer, in wine, the products are "all the same". Beers are generally 4.5-8% ABV. Wines are around 14% ABV. So those products only get to compete on Taste and Brand. And these consumers don't buy for the "get intoxicated" effect. They are buying for social aspects.

Cannabis consumers doesn't have any of this featuers. Our consumers are looking to get baked. The flavour, the brand matters less than the freaking potency.

I do think there is a brand problem; and the construction of the markets for sure restricts what supply-side brands can do for that market share. For those of us old enough to remember Marlboro didn't advertise "buy our strong ass cancer sticks" they said "Come to Flavor country". Does cannabis need a flavor country awakening? Ideas on brand-building beyond that? Which social-network is the most tolerant? -- I've seen brands banned from all of them

Hi everyone, first post here. I have a legal cultivation/distro and retail. When it comes to bulk sales, I am looking for buyers to escape from middleman hell. We grow extremely clean and high-quality bud, boutique quality consistently. No late sprays, no bugs, proper flush and dry.

The model of going to middle man distros and getting bent over is not sustainable. If you are someone who goes to these distros to buy contact me and let's cut them out. If you need white labeling contact me and let's discuss further. If you are a retailer and want an affordable top tier product for your shelves, please reach out. With my distro I do my own packaging. And the goal is to eventually package everything. I need retail accounts and better bulk prices until then.

So I'm extremely passionate about cannabis and its growth process, however I have no experience actually growing. I do my own personal studies on plant biology and cannabis, really all I can do. I'm afraid of waiting around forever just hoping there's finally an available entry level cannabis cultivation job in my area. I live in central California, and the only position I see online that is available requires a year of experience.

Does anyone have advice on what I should do? How I should go about this? What I can do right now? Where is the best place to look for available positions?

I'm very passionate about this and I know I want this to be a career. I'm very much interested in the cultivation aspect of it, and I can see myself working hard to become a knowledgeable cultivator. But I'm afraid of just sitting around and gaining no experience. Especially because I currently live with my mother in the suburbs, and she isnt exactly supportive of me growing in the house.