From the L.A. Times blog Brand X comes this story about a Sonoma man who aims to bring e-commerce to the medical marijuana masses.
=================
Entrepreneur and computer engineer John Lee thinks the medical marijuana business has reached a tipping point in terms of its social (and legal) acceptance, and his 5-month-old start-up, PlainView Systems, wants to be the Amazon.com of the burgeoning industry.
Potheads, let’s face it, have never been known for being the most organized people, and many of them have the business instincts of a T-shirt seller at a Phish concert. For some dispensary owners, the ever-shifting rules, regulations and decrees set forth by the various municipalities in the state are confusing. So too are the changing accounting standards that are required of the industry.
Sensing an opportunity, Lee and his team at PlainView Systems have created a business-to-business turnkey solution to the day-to-day managerial and bookkeeping needs of California’s cannabis culture. But it’s not just a stoner version of QuickBooks. PlainView has created an online marketplace for marijuana growers to interface with the dispensaries. The idea is to keep everything totally transparent — hence the name PlainView — and for all parties to have organized receipts and records, which they will be increasingly called upon to provide to state and federal tax collectors.
It’s a smart idea, and one whose time has clearly arrived. The state of California’s cannabis yield is worth an estimated $14 billion — forget corn; pot is by far the state’s largest cash crop — and there is news about cannabis legalization daily. To grab just a sliver of that market share could be valuable indeed. Lee told CNN, “Just in the state of California alone, according to my calculations, medical cannabis is a $200 million market. As that market grows, we want to have a small but significant part of it.”
— Richard Metzger
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.