Rick Bashkoff: Why Cannabis Needs Unique Software Solutions

Rick Bashkoff: Why Cannabis Needs Unique Software Solutions

Rick Bashkoff: We're starting small. We've got customers who trust us — they're coming to us with problems and saying, 'Hey, look, we use XYZ every day. We don't use this tool, but if you did these three things to it, we think this changes the game for us.' Bryan Fields: What's up, guys? Welcome back to another episode of The Dime. I'm Bryan Fields, and with me as always is Kellan Finney. This week we've got a very special guest, Rick Bashkoff. Rick, thanks for taking the time — how are you doing today? Rick Bashkoff: Doing great, thanks for having me guys, excited to be here. Bryan Fields: Excited to have you. Kellan, how are you doing? Kellan Finney: I'm doing really well, really excited to talk to Rick, really excited to talk cannabis and software. I'm more excited to understand how the West Coast is influencing the East Coast markets. What do you think, Bryan? Bryan Fields: Yeah, I think that's a creative way to try to frame this, but I'm just going to come right out and be honest, since Rick and I both have East Coast roots. Rick, state your location please, and if you had to choose loyalty to the East Coast or West Coast, where would it be? Rick Bashkoff: Yeah, so I am in New York. I live just north of New York City, I lived in the city for about 15 years, I was born in New York. There's no question here — East Coast all day. Bryan Fields: So Rick, our listeners want to know about you — can you give a background about yourself and how you got into the cannabis industry? Rick Bashkoff: Yeah, sure. So I actually started in the music industry at one of the major record labels, Warner Music Group. I followed my brother there, who had a job, and I was kind of looking for what to do out of college. I had a blast — I was in my early twenties, the music industry is a lot of fun. Turns out I'm not such a great corporate citizen, so I quickly started managing some of the relationships with companies like Google, YouTube, and Yahoo back in the day, and I just loved software companies. I thought it was so cool — the problem-solution construct, it's how my mind works. I liked the smaller startups I was meeting with under the Warner Music Group banner, and it just looked a lot more fun and looked like I could do a lot more. So I left in 2008 — best move I made. Within weeks of hitting my first startup, I kind of found home in the chaos, which I know you guys both understand. From there I spent some tenure at two different startups in the New York scene. Around 2016 or so, being part of early-stage startups and being on the business, product, and operations side, I had access to early-stage investing, mainly from raising capital at the startups, but I found it so interesting taking bets on early entrepreneurs. I myself am more the person behind the entrepreneur, but I'm fascinated by the entrepreneurial mindset and problem-solving. So around 2016, some of that stuff started to wear off for me, and I started poking around — lifetime cannabis user — and showed up in the space around 2016 just to get a lay of the land, and had like a borderline panic attack. I felt like a decade late — all this activity had already happened without me even knowing. I made a couple of investments just to try to understand the industry, and within about six months of that first investment my wife sat me down and said, 'Dude, this is happening, why don't you get on with it — you're going to go full-time in cannabis eventually.' So I entered in late 2018, 2019 with a VC firm and spent a lot of time on early-stage investment in the software space. I've been in cannabis about five years now, and I'm currently running a software company with two products: Lit Alerts, which is a sales enablement and competitive intelligence tool, and CanVersions, which is automated email for dispensaries. So I'm back home in the chaos with two early-stage software products, and couldn't be happier about it. Bryan Fields: Before we dive into those companies, I want to know — software aside — your background isn't as a developer, not in coding, correct? Rick Bashkoff: Correct, yep. I've definitely dabbled to make myself a little dangerous — taken some courses through General Assembly or similar to get basics of HTML, CSS, Python. When you're a business and operations person at a startup, you're doing everything, from demos to building the website to updating it. It gets to a point where if I don't know CSS, I'll go to W3Schools and figure it out. That's more my coding and developer experience — I know enough to be dangerous, to talk with our CTO, but I can't build anything myself, although I'm starting to play around with Google AppSheet, which is pretty cool, kind of 'developers for dummies.' Bryan Fields: In those early days you were just a VC, kind of helping bring capital to the space and learning. At what point did you decide to actually get your feet wet and jump into actual operations, and why? Rick Bashkoff: I'm an operator at heart, I think. My investing activity has been much more of a passion project — capital is one of the biggest problems in cannabis, and having a bit of a knowledge base there seemed like a wide-open opportunity to bring capital that otherwise cannabis companies wouldn't have access to. But I'd say I'm definitely an operator at heart, so I was looking for the right companies to jump on board with. I was with a company called Lucid Green for about a year and a half doing some really interesting things in supply chain optimization. I'm looking for that outsized upside but also the stage where there's still a tremendous amount of chaos, because that's what I like and what I'm decent at. I know there's a certain type of person who finds that off-putting — I found it exciting. Kellan Finney: I think that's so perfectly well described, and I think it kind of summarizes the industry as a whole, and the entrepreneurs who operate in here, because it is complete chaos. It seems like your team recognizes the industry is loaded with problems, and that some of the software solutions out there aren't all-in-one. Can you elaborate on that? Rick Bashkoff: For sure. All respect to the first wave, but there's a second wave of software companies coming into cannabis that are ruthlessly focused on the customer, building lean teams, not going out and raising a lot of capital. I think the industry's been trained that way out of necessity because capital hasn't been available. So it's birthing these really young, scrappy tech companies that I think are going to change the way the cannabis tech stack works. If you look outside cannabis, there's way more interoperability and cooperation between different stages of the supply chain. I was at Cannabis Datacom two weeks ago — great convention for anyone looking to solve these issues — and one of the smartest things I heard was that this industry isn't ready for AI until we have structured data we can trust, because bad information in, bad information out. The crew I'm working with finds that incredibly exciting. I think the first wave laid the infrastructure, and now we've got a second wave coming through that will be slightly disruptive but also very much value-add, because we're each going to go deep on one or two things — sales enablement, wholesale, cultivation tech — instead of trying to be all-in-one. I think the all-in-one pitch has run its course in cannabis. We've spent a lot of time over the last two months figuring out who we're going to align with, because customers are coming to us saying, 'It would be great if you did an integration with X.' That's another signal — these early-stage companies are taking cues from customers, not investors or research. Kellan Finney: I think the difference between the first wave and the second wave is that the first wave had a lot of people in a brand new industry where everyone's opinion was equally valued, and customers hadn't had time to give feedback. Now with the second wave there are established customers and data that can feed into decisions about what problems actually need solving. How much did participating in startups prior to cannabis help you understand that this chaos is just par for the course running a software company in general, not just in cannabis? Rick Bashkoff: I love that question, because it goes back to training yourself. There's always going to be people lighting their hair on fire trying to figure out all the answers tomorrow, so there needs to be someone in the company who gets everyone to take a deep breath. I was just talking about this the other day — some mornings it feels like we have five number-one priorities, and which one are we actually going to do while keeping ourselves calm? Some of it comes from raw excitement — we've got a pipeline of features coming directly from customers we want to answer quickly — but there are also boring things, like infrastructure or database cleanups, that just have to happen. One of the co-founders of Lit Alerts, our CTO, if we see a bad signal in the data, we just turn it off. It's a simple thing you can do early at a startup — be proactive about the integrity of your product, don't chase every tangent. If we've got bad data, shut it off for now, figure out the solution, then reintroduce that data stream. That discipline is something I picked up before cannabis that's helped me navigate the chaos here. Bryan Fields: I'm glad you shared that, because I am the chaos, and Kellan is probably laughing because it's true — I saw that interaction and it definitely signaled to me that I'm the chaos. But the way I feel is, if we have challenges and we're not exhausting every opportunity to overcome them — I understand slow-playing critical ones — but for others I'd rather push it forward, break it, fix it, keep it moving, rather than look for the perfect solution. Because at the end of the day, the customer will tell you what's important, and if you're not putting these things directly in front of the customer, you might be arguing about something irrelevant. Rick Bashkoff: To be clear, I have a massive appreciation for the chaos mind, because it's the mind that pushes the company forward. If you're more like me, the operator who tends to be the calm voice, you have to appreciate how the entrepreneurial mind works, how their heart ticks — it's different than the average person. On our team we've got a hustler, a leader, a couple of people who play different roles, and it's important to recognize that balance. There are times the directive is 'let's charge forward, break something, fix it later,' and making the call between the two can be challenging but also quite rewarding if you're working with the right group. Kellan Finney: I think one of the hardest things is that personally I want things to be perfect sometimes, but you just have to push forward and accept we'll put the paint on later. It's hard mentally to accept that and move to the next task. Rick Bashkoff: It really is challenging. Something we've tried to do recently is prioritize based on biggest impact — I know that sounds obvious, but I mean more user time, more value for the customer. It's not always dollars and cents. If we're seeing a drop-off in usage because of X, and patching it reverses that, versus opening up a new state where we don't know what will happen — biggest impact probably means fix the bug today, because current users increase usage and word of mouth follows. Making those trade-offs can be difficult but necessary. Bryan Fields: I think that's really well said. Having that North Star of understanding the metrics of success, and building for that customer, lets everything else fall into place. If you build for the ideal customer and it picks up, people recommend it to friends and colleagues, and that's how adoption works in cannabis software specifically, because everyone's fighting endless problems, and companies need tools that make sense for them financially and that come with some social proof from others that it worked. Rick Bashkoff: When we think about solving problems for the customer, we really try to resist the urge to release cool stuff as opposed to what's been specifically identified. We might not be excited about a release, but it's discipline — our purpose is to serve the customer and solve a real problem, not give them bells and whistles they don't use. That's become common with a lot of data and analytics tools. What we heard a lot was, 'I get it, the data is there, but it's really hard to find what I need and get it out' — which speaks to interoperability. Outside cannabis, companies compete but also agree to the same standards and work together, giving customers the ability to build their own tech stack. I'm looking forward to more cannabis companies getting their feet on the ground and working together, because it means more flexibility for brands, wholesalers, and retailers. Kellan Finney: Do you think there are people who don't have software backgrounds who could fit into these companies — using tools like ChatGPT to take variables and put together the puzzle to solve problems? Rick Bashkoff: Absolutely. We're in the no-code era — if you can build a website, use Google Drive, use basic interfaces, I think you can play, because scrappiness and problem-solving is the skill set needed at a software company. That's more in the business, operations, and customer success track. When people think of cannabis software companies, the first hires are engineers and developers, but right behind that is customer success — not sales-first, because the founders are usually leading sales and scaling the business. Across venture and early-stage software, for about half a decade we got away with raising money and hiring a bunch of people, including sales and marketing teams, instead of figuring out what your company actually is from day one. My co-founders Nate, Cody, and Austin and I joke that we're not really operating a company yet — we've got two products flying, we're excited, but we don't have HR, we're very automated and lean. I think this new breed is flipping the script — we're starting small, we've got customers who trust us, they're coming to us with problems saying, 'We use XYZ every day, we don't use this tool, but if you did these three things it would change the game for us.' When you have that inbound coming from customers, it's incredibly exciting, and I think most people outside cannabis with problem-solving skills can lend a hand and become a great early hire — maybe even head of customer success in two years. That was my experience moving from corporate to startups: I was 27 in a conference room full of 50-year-olds thinking if I don't get out of here I'll be here forever. You still take skills from corporate — staying calm, being a calming effect — I took those from Warner Music Group, where I got yelled at by big executives at 25. Those skills transfer, and I think customer success is by far the most in-demand role. Bryan Fields: What do you think the biggest difference is operating a software company outside of cannabis versus inside the cannabis industry? Rick Bashkoff: Stability of customers, by far. Selling software to enterprise-level entertainment companies, you don't worry about things like collections or massive turnover the way you do in cannabis — there are lots of things out of your control you have to account for. That said, there's real uniqueness to cannabis-specific software because we're solving problems unique to cannabis, so you're going to have software unique to the industry. Outside cannabis there's far less customer chaos, but we feel strongly that's a short-term problem, and over the next few years things will continue to get better and start acting more like a normal startup environment. Bryan Fields: Let's hop into CanVersions — what problem is it solving for the cannabis industry? Rick Bashkoff: Great story. Our co-founders Nate and Cody — Nate is actually a dispensary owner, Bloom Brothers in Pittsfield, a very successful dispensary in Western Massachusetts. Nate's got a great reputation in Massachusetts; he opened the store almost immediately, right before COVID, so he's got real grit. Nate had a very simple problem — as a single-store operator he doesn't have a ton of marketing resources. There are robust tool sets in the market, including outside cannabis — HubSpot, Klaviyo, Mailchimp basically pissed off the entire industry but was here at one point — and then you've got Springbig and AlpineIQ with pretty robust feature sets, but some folks just need very simple tools. We focus on three things: simplicity, automation, and cost-effectiveness. Nate needed very basic automated emails — abandoned carts in line, win-back campaigns for customers he hadn't seen in a while — so he partnered with an old friend who's an online marketing executive and built the tool. Nate started using it, had success, others in the market wanted it, and fast forward to today we're in 120 locations, growing steadily, working with a lot of top cannabis agencies that own the retailer relationship. We know we're a tool in the toolkit — we don't have to own every customer relationship. CanVersions is a great, simple, automated, set-and-forget email marketing solution for dispensaries, and we're planning to expand the feature set based on what our customers tell us. Bryan Fields: My favorite part of that story is that it's twofold — one, he built the tool for himself first because he had a problem and recognized no solution existed, and people with the same problem started using it; and two, the simplicity of it, being able to hop in with a minimal learning curve given everyone's wearing so many hats. If he'd needed a two-week learning curve, half the building would be on fire by the time he got started. Rick Bashkoff: And especially in marketing, cannabis is one of the first places that gets cut as the industry ebbs and flows. If you set up an entire team or system and then the marketing manager moves on, you lose that whole knowledge base and have to start over. With automated, simple tools, they don't experience that downturn as the company ebbs and flows, and you can keep your tech stack in line if you keep things simple and interoperable — we integrate directly with menu providers and other email providers to avoid double-messaging, keeping things transparent. Customers really lean into that. Nate and the team found an interesting use case and sprinted to take care of it. Kellan Finney: Do you have to deal with different state regulations from a marketing perspective — I know some states you can't put up billboards. How does that factor into launching in a new state and maintaining across states? Rick Bashkoff: For the most part, with email marketing there's a set of best practices that gets you to a common-denominator compliance thread — it's not as difficult as compliance differences for security or hard assets. There's a variety of best practices around messaging in email templates that encourage staying within compliance, but it's a challenge — it's an ever-changing landscape. I'm in New York and could do a whole episode on what's wrong with the marketing regulations here. My biggest frustration is that we talk about education being the tip of the spear for pushing the industry forward and decreasing Reefer Madness thinking, but regulators are handcuffing marketing and advertising — those two things competing is very frustrating for someone like me trying to normalize the plant and bring people into the regulated market instead of the illicit one. I'm not the person who should be in rooms doing advocacy with politicians, that's its own skill, but the people who do it are starting to realize the connection: how are we supposed to compete with the illicit market if we can't message the community? I'm hopeful that next time we chat this won't be as much of an issue, but right now it's the thorn in the side of any cannabis marketer. Kellan Finney: Let's keep it going with Lit Alerts — tell us the USP for Lit Alerts and who should be thinking about applying it to their business. Rick Bashkoff: One of the reasons we're excited about Lit Alerts is it's much more broadly applicable — use cases for brands, wholesalers, retailers, even some straight-up cultivators. Nate and Cody had CanVersions going and were looking at what's next, and the problem they went after is wholesalers, brands, and retailers not having real-time data to make critical in-market decisions. Others have attacked this problem, but our approach is different: our data source is actually retailer websites, dispensary menus. We built a crawler, not unlike Google, that goes out and looks at menus almost every hour these dispensaries are open — a tremendous amount of data ingested hourly. We compare the differences between menu snapshots to infer market activity — low quantity, out-of-stocks, pricing changes, all the sales enablement and competitive intelligence tactics sellers and field marketers are trying to replicate manually. Earlier this year our co-founders brought on an initial group of customers to validate the data set, since we're making inferences from menu snapshots — walking the data into buyer meetings to get a signal on accuracy. Our CTO and co-founder Austin built a tool that was dangerously close out of the gate, so by around October we had our first paying customers, and growth has been great — we're at 40 active customers currently with a very active pipeline, and we're getting to the point of being overwhelmed, which means we're doing something right. Within Lit Alerts you can add your own brand or a competitor's brand to what we call the Brands Explorer, sifting through menu listings — pricing, imaging, categories — for real competitive intelligence. Bryan Fields: Can you give us an example with a brand? Rick Bashkoff: Sure — let's say you're Miss Grass and trying to get a retail chain to replace a competitor. You put that competitor into your Brand Explorer, and now you can track their activity at that dispensary in a simple, filterable tabular view showing all the menu items we're seeing in market — pricing, where they're carried, whether they're close to selling out. As head of sales at Miss Grass, you can walk that into the wholesale meeting and say, 'This is what we're seeing in market, we think we can fill this need for you.' On the flip side, if Miss Grass tells a dispensary they're in 70 dispensaries in the state, the retailer can check that in the tool and verify it. There's a lot on both sides — democratizing the data so everyone's looking at the same thing and competing on customer needs and quality of product. We were surprised by the distribution of use cases between brands and retailers — Cody, Nate, and Austin originally thought this was mainly a brand and wholesaler tool, but retailers immediately said this is exactly what they need for competitive intelligence, so we pivoted to release retailer-specific features. We've got something cool coming — like buying an iPhone where you compare models, we're building a UI where you can compare cannabis brands or retailer locations, so a dispensary in Springfield, Massachusetts could add the four other dispensaries within a 10-mile radius and keep an ongoing leaderboard on product mix, pricing, velocity, and more. Bryan Fields: It seems like one of the biggest challenges your team is solving is the accuracy of the data, because informed decisions rely on a data set you can trust — otherwise you're flying blind. Going back to the Miss Grass example, instead of making phone calls and taking a leap of faith, you can see on a dashboard that a product is flying in Arizona and Florida with similar demographics and know to prioritize it. Rick Bashkoff: I want to highlight that our data set is meant to be tactical, not for financial reconciliation — it's a real-time signal. One of our co-founders, Cody, calls one of our screens an activity feed where you can see everything happening with your brand in market in real time — 'This is Twitter for cannabis wholesale.' If you're using a tool like Lit Alerts for real-time signal and backing it up with financial reconciliation at month's end, you get a great read on your markets and can evaluate strategy far more often than waiting for a single monthly report. When I first joined the team around September or October, I asked about seeing historical data from nine months ago, and everyone laughed — nobody using this tool cares about nine months ago, that's ancient history to sellers and field marketers. Menu items from six months ago often aren't even live anymore. That recency is what's powerful, along with the fact that it's dead simple to get in and out of the tool and pull data — simple views people are used to working with — creating transparency in conversations and helping deals get done quicker. Bryan Fields: Was that always the intention from the founders when they launched it? Rick Bashkoff: One hundred percent. Our cheat code is Nate's operations experience and network, Cody's hustle, and Austin's brain as CTO — putting those three skill sets together to make operators in cannabis feel more informed. If you're a seller with information to make decisions, that's game-changing. We hear from customers that up until using Lit Alerts they were flying blind on a lot of decisions. This isn't an app built for time spent — we're trying to affect outcomes. We named it Lit Alerts for a reason: the goal is a customizable alert system that brings you the information you need. We don't dream of everyone logging in every morning — if I get an email highlighting low-quantity and out-of-stock retailers, that's a real problem solved, saving hours of Google searching, menu-checking, and phone calls. There are other solutions like Headset Bridge, and if you have the budget and clout to get retailers to opt in their data, that works too, but it's not as complete as our real-time data set. Making tools interoperable and affordable within budget is really important to us. Bryan Fields: I know you're also an investor in a few companies — can you give a shout-out to some of them, and for founders building in cannabis looking for an investor like yourself, what are you looking for? Rick Bashkoff: Sure, quickly — I started a group called Receptive Capital Syndicate, now 103 accredited investors, looking at the earliest-stage cannabis companies on the East Coast, mainly IP-driven companies — brands, software companies, R&D companies. We don't invest in cultivation or retail; our checks aren't big enough to do the damage necessary there. Our portfolio includes Cantrip, a great cannabis beverage company out of Massachusetts, Miss Grass, and a company called Trym — I'd put them in this group even though they've been around a while, focused on simplicity, automation, and being good at one thing; we've been impressed with their progress on cultivation software. Grit is number one on our list — we need to see that you've gotten around a lot of tough problems, because in cannabis it's not week one, it's the first minute you'll hit a challenge you didn't see coming. One founder we got far down the line with had a bunch of past projects that weren't necessarily successful, but the story of how they got around obstacles showed us they had the ability. Revenue-producing matters too — we're not looking at pre-launch pitches. It's 2024, get your product out, get something done, then raise money. The minute you take on external capital, you work for someone else, even though that sounds crazy — you've got another voice saying chase this, look at this. Hold out as long as you can; it's not easy to bootstrap, ask Nate, Cody, and Austin, but if you can launch your product, book revenue, and have a story to tell, that matters, because the days of raising off a deck are over — probably not coming back in our lifetime. Someone recently compared themselves to Facebook or Airbnb, and that pitch is the wrong decade — capital isn't looking for those stories right now, and a lot of those companies never made money anyway. KPIs I hear from investors I respect are shifting from TAM and capture to profitability and manageable growth; hockey-stick growth is starting to become a red flag in pitches. Bryan Fields: I think that's so important, and I appreciate you sharing that for people who had a different perception of what they needed to do. Rick Bashkoff: I'll add — across all our investments, at the end of the day we're investing in the people, the jockey. Even with product and revenue in place, when we looked at Trym, the operating group there is no joke, they've done this in another industry. Adam and Dylan from Cantrip are seasoned operators for how young they are. And nobody's doing better than Kate at Miss Grass. There's no middle ground when you step into these deals from a founder perspective — either they've got it, or you're not getting the feel. I'd encourage entrepreneurs to find their grit and expose it as part of the process, because that's what people are looking for now. Ideas themselves are cheap — the three of us could come up with a hundred right now, and nowadays you can spit some fire into ChatGPT and get a website and a PowerPoint out of it. Bryan Fields: What is the most expensive lesson you've ever learned? Rick Bashkoff: You've got to be on the same page with the people you're working with daily — that's been a really expensive lesson for me. I like to think I'm a decent judge of people, but I've definitely been wrong, and it hurts when that happens. When evaluating opportunities in cannabis, spend time with the people you'll be working with before you jump in if you can — get a hiring manager or founder out for a coffee, a drink, or smoke a joint with them and get a sense of what makes them tick. A lot of hiring, investing, and deal activity in cannabis happens fast out of necessity — running out of money, exploding growth — so it's not always possible, but the most expensive things in my career have definitely been aligning myself with the wrong people. Bryan Fields: What question do you wish more people asked you? Rick Bashkoff: I wish more people asked me why I'm in cannabis. I got that question a lot when I first got into the industry, and it was a good reminder — I got into cannabis out of pure interest and passion. My wife makes fun of me because I spend every waking moment outside my full-time job reading or talking about cannabis. That question's kind of gone away as the industry matures, and I miss it — I miss talking about the medical aspects, use cases of hemp, the difference between things. When I got into this space, every cannabis beverage I tried tasted disgusting, like a hundred-milligram beverage that tasted like weed — and I'm a joint smoker, I love the smell of weed, but I don't want to drink a beverage that tastes like it. Seeing how the industry has progressed changes some of the reasons you're in it. Kellan Finney: I think it's perfect, there's no right answer. To piggyback on the beverage point and give Adam a shout-out at Cantrip — the first time I gave someone that beverage, they asked if there was weed in it, I said yes, they asked if they'd get high, I said yes, and the confusion on their face was spectacular. I think that's the paradox of opening people up to what's coming. Rick Bashkoff: My mother-in-law, if I asked her to smoke a joint with me every day for the rest of her life, the answer would be no — she drinks Cantrip. But for real, the same reason I lean forward on beverage is that I was walking through a grocery store and thought there's never going to be flower here, never pre-rolls, never gummies, but there's an entire regulated beverage section sitting there waiting to be disrupted, full of ugly Bud Light cans. I think beverage is going to be the equalizer at some point — a lot of it comes down to supply chain issues at this point, but it's an interesting dynamic between the hemp business and the cannabis business, which is really one business, joking on everyone. Bryan Fields: Prediction time, Rick — with tools like ChatGPT becoming widely used, will companies look to integrate more software team members into their core foundation as a startup? Rick Bashkoff: I think it's going to be more about partnering with the right tool sets, like Lit Alerts and CanVersions, rather than bringing that in-house. If you look at the cannabis brands and retailers doing really well, they focus on selling weed, not building software tools or hiring people to build them — they focus on people who can grow, produce, and sell weed really well. Let nerds like me focus on the software tools you need. I don't see cannabis companies hiring software employees; I see them buddying up with software companies and recognizing that software is the game-changer for differentiating in a maturing market — how you create margin as a cultivator, dial in operations, expand to a new market you don't know much about. You're not hiring a software person, you're hiring a seller or field marketer who uses software tools. I think the toolkit is going to get bigger for cannabis companies, and it's an exciting time for people like you guys, Lit Alerts, CanVersions, and a host of others. Kellan Finney: I agree — it's easy to say bring someone in with software experience, but the moment you do, they need a team and resources. If you're already running a vertically integrated cannabis company with cultivation, retail, and extraction, essentially running four or five unrelated businesses, adding an in-house software build becomes an instant distraction from your core business, which is growing high-quality cannabis and selling the product. Tools become a luxury you buy to get better and faster, not build yourself. What do you think, Bryan? Bryan Fields: I think we're all in agreement — it's the old adage of buy versus build. For outside-industry companies with 20,000 employees paying a few dollars a seat, those numbers add up fast enough that building in-house might make sense, which could disrupt other companies. But in cannabis, where resources are limited and companies are already dealing with endless challenges, adding another one in-house seems unnecessary. The bigger opportunity, like Lit Alerts and CanVersions, is finding a problem internally, building a solution for yourself first, and then recognizing it's applicable to the outside world — and tools like ChatGPT can help accelerate going from idea to MVP quickly, given how scrappy the industry already operates. Rick Bashkoff: Agreed — and from an industry-value perspective, it's not efficient for all of us to be building our own software; it just adds to the lack of interoperability. The goal is competing on quality of product and service, not cornering customers. If we can hone in on that as an industry, maybe software doesn't have to be as expensive as it is today — if you're building the way we're building, the business model can be a lot friendlier. Look out for us pushing that envelope, because compared to software outside cannabis, some of what we pay a premium for here isn't as expensive elsewhere. Bryan Fields: Love it. So for our listeners who want to get in touch and check out some of the products, where can they find you? Rick Bashkoff: LitAlerts.com is the best place to check out Lit Alerts, and CanVersions.com as well. If you want resources on the investing side, go to ReceptiveCap.com, and feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn too — I'm pretty active there, posting and engaging, kind of the home for cannabis business. Hit me up there, and we hope to hear from customers and new prospects alike. Bryan Fields: Appreciate it, thanks for taking the time, this was a lot of fun. Rick Bashkoff: Thank you.