In today’s multi-screen world getting your product in front of consumers may be easy but is it impactful? As many of you know winning customers isn’t easy, but did you know that customers are more likely to buy from a brand who provides educational content. Educational content about your product that is truly relevant and useful to your customer can not only educate them, but can also help them solve problems and persuade them to purchase your product. We meet with Danny Gold of Zoltrain who helps drive sales with educational content delivered right to customers phones.
Video Transcription
Harry Brelsford
Hey 420MSP Harry here. We’re back with one of the influencers. So Danny, I want to be one of the first to congratulate you. You have been named one of the most influential visible cannatech influencers in the world by 420MSP and marijuana Venture Magazine. So congratulations.
Danny Gold
Oh, thanks, Harry. I I’ll try to live up to the the title there. I don’t know if I’ve ever been paid as an influencer before. I almost felt like I was too old for that, but honored.
Harry Brelsford
Well, there we go. So So tell me about yourself first. And then your company is ZolTrain out of Denver, Colorado. So what’s your what’s your background? How did you get to where you’re at today?
Danny Gold
Yeah, I’ll try to I’ll try to keep that brief. I like to talk and I like to educate so you know, you know me from we’ve we’ve stood side by side at some of those presentations. So get us going. My background, I’m actually an engineer by trade. So I come from the tech side, have worked in startups for the better part of 15 plus years now, mostly here in here in Denver. Background in media, entertainment, and educational technology, and a lot of b2b SaaS company. So a lot of behind the scenes, tech and systems there have always been in Colorado, since we legalized since amendment 64 here, so I’ve seen the industry grow. And I’m always excited by and excited by industries like this. But also there’s never been one like this, there’s never been a new market created with as much potential and I know, we all love, superlatives, and big grandiose statements, but I think it holds true, there’s a there’s just nothing quite like it that’s come onto the market, post prohibition in our lifetime, where you get to see that and internationally. But we’ve obviously seen it, you know, here in the States. So I’m excited by that I was in media streaming before, which I thought was such a foundational shift. You know, I worked in media entertainment, you know, from blockbuster through the streaming transition, which took about 12 years longer than we all thought. But seeing that, you know, this cannabis just dwarfs even a big shift like the streaming wars. So that excited me, I love hard problems. I’ll be honest, I don’t know if I understood quite how challenging it would be. Not just to be in a disruptive, innovative industry, but in something federally illegal. So that’s been a wake up call. That puts a whole nother layer of challenges on top of it. But that’s what I live for. And that just comes back to being an engineer for trade. Give me a problem. I’ll obsess over it. And that’s what I love to do.
Harry Brelsford
What’s your company?
Danny Gold
What is altering? Do? We are cannabis education company, first and foremost. So we kind of put it under the umbrella of brand activation from our from our technology. And we’re really looking at, you know, how does the consumer make an educated purchase decision in cannabis. That’s what it’s all about this, this is a brand new market. It’s a it’s a brand new plant to a lot of people. Almost any product that you can pick would be brand new to somebody, even a long term user, and the things that are coming out next year and the year beyond and the delivery methods we don’t even know I mean, there there’s, you know, labs all over the world inventing new delivery methods, extracting new compounds combining compounds in there, you talk about something that needs education, psychoactive products, you know, that effect, you know, variety people differently. And so many people coming to cannabis looking for different effects and impacts requires education. So we kind of look at it as you know, brands think they need to do marketing, but marketing and cannabis is education. So brands have to do that through retail and delivery channels. Most of them don’t have a direct to consumer yet path. And we really enable right there in between, you got a cannabis brand. It wants to get to consumers, you got to work through a retailer, a delivery company, which means educating their staff and finding paths to educating the consumers that are coming to those services in those stores. So our team builds educational content, and we build a platform to deliver that really in a mobile first kind of social media scrolling like environments, we’ve got a mixture of engineering team building the platform, and content team working with brands to really nail the educational content. And that’s the mix and kind of the secret sauce we bring to it is that instructional instructional and content design and an innovative tech platform to present the content and allow some unique opportunities to engage with both the retail workers and consumers
Harry Brelsford
harder than it looks I back in the day I did some courseware development for Microsoft was small business server and you worked with instructional designers and curriculum developers harder than it looks.
Danny Gold
Yeah. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s nearly impossible. We talked about challenges in cannabis and you take something that’s challenging anywhere, you know, we’re really we spend a lot of time watching how this target audience consumes information. And it sounds simple. It’s no surprise, they’re on their phones. They’re scrolling, you know, you look at how media is delivered, you know, Instagram, Facebook, tick tock, and we borrow that. Yeah, yeah. So if it’s engaging, if it’s if it’s vertically scrolling, if it’s vertical video that autoplay is all these techniques that go to our general kind of social media channels, we’re using to make the training more engaging. So it’s not that courseware you know, no offense, we’ve developed a lot of that as well that, you know, you kind of kick back and you watch the widescreen video, and there’s, there’s resources on the side there. And we kind of played with that. That’s not really where our audiences and how they consume content and how you make it memorable. So that’s where we started building the tech platform to say, We walked away and honestly said, I wish we could put the training on Instagram, if everybody’s just gonna be on Instagram all day. Can we use Instagram as a way to deliver training, we did the next best thing, which is we replicated the best parts of Instagram and tik tok and all these platforms, and then create a content specifically for it. And that’s really, you know, the secret sauce that we’ve found to deliver that.
Harry Brelsford
Hey, last question before lightning round. Is your education. I get the lifestyle side, but are you on the medical side? So maybe, maybe some fighting some kind of battle and they want to learn more?
Danny Gold
Right? Very good question. And it’s, it’s all challenging in cannabis, because there’s a lot of regulations about what you can say and can’t say, and a lot of medical states you need a medical provider to answer medical questions or shameless plug for a great nonprofit, something like the leaf nurses network, which is leaf for one one.org. Free hotline, you can call if you’ve got that question. Most stores and most door staff or even medical dispensers are not allowed to answer those questions. differ state by state always say I’m not a lawyer. But in general, the safe practice is you can not answer medical questions or talk about drug interactions or talk about affects or benefits of cannabis products. It’s interesting because people will put the name sleep on a product, and you can call your product sleep. And that’s somehow not claiming things in there. And it works great. But if somebody said, Well, this helped me with sleep, it’s it’s a it’s a gray area. If you can say that or not? Well, you might want to read the package on it. But there are great medical providers and nurses in medical states. A lot of times I think in places like Pennsylvania, they have to be staffed with a pharmacist of the store to answer those questions. So you’ve got a license Medicare’s a matter. But we love doing so. So I’ll say our part of it is we actually train a lot of those medical providers. So we provide education, to cannabis nurses and medical providers. So they know what products are in the market. What the dosage is, you know, what compounds are in them? And a lot of things to consumers, you know, we’ll put in there, what are the ingredients? Is it gluten free? Is it vegan? Does it have melatonin in it? Does it have five HTP. And there’s compounds that consumers need to be aware of that might interact with other things they’re taking, or things they’re looking for there? So the short answer is, we’ll always say right education to everybody. And we strongly support the medical marijuana, medical cannabis, consumers and states and retailers out there. But call a medical professional first before you take it from us.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, yeah. All right, lightning around a name of a handful of events where people might be able to see you.
Danny Gold
Oh, great. We’ve got mjbizcon coming up next week, a little short term. We’re watching this pop on a plane come out. We’ll be most mostly at the MJ unpacked event, which is a side event, which is a little bit more of our target audience. Blizzcon kind of catches everybody. A lot of cultivation and a lot of extracts really cool equipment. It’s worth walking the floor to see the scale of the cannabis industry. But not all our target audience MJ unpacked is more brands and retailers and new products coming to market. And that’s where we interact. So we’ll be over at MGM packed. We’re hosting a panel Friday morning on cannabis innovation and new compounds with a lot of great cannabis scientists stuff I love to geek out about and I’ll be with a bunch of other cannabis geeks on the panel, talking about really, really deep cannabis science stuff. I think Hala flowers in California is one of the coolest events. They have a few different flavors of it now it’s at the Santa Rosa fairgrounds. It’s also down I think the Palm Springs one is in December. It’s a pretty exclusive show but it’s it’s very high in the activations are great. It’s a consumption or it’s actually a place you can go try new products. products, usually one day, they open it up to consumers. But the brands go crazy there with their activations. It’s really, really cool to see. Even if you just go on their website and look at some of the content that’s coming out of hollow flower. Yeah, well, I would say that those are those are kind of the two that resonate. And we’re always looking at at a lot of smaller, but also, you know, we’re still in a pandemic here. So it’s interesting to see what’s coming out of the woodwork and how these things are starting.
Harry Brelsford
Yep. Final question. Any favorite blogs that you’d like to read?
Danny Gold
You know, I I’m, I’m one of the people that over subscribes to blogs and never makes it through it. I’m sure you can commiserate there. Honestly, my one tip would be get on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the most active candidates, work and community. Most of the blog posts will make their way they’re not so I have a hard time pushing just one because I don’t find that one provides it but when I carve out time daily to look on LinkedIn, get involved in the conversation, follow the cannabis hashtags, connect and follow some of the cannabis people on there that post regularly you will find everything you’re looking for and you’ll find all the great blogs and newsletters through it. But I have found LinkedIn is the best aggregator for me of that content. And actually it’s valuable enough even for our business and myself that I carve out time to try to be active on there every day. You are You are anything sir. That’s
Harry Brelsford
why you’re an influencer again. Congratulations. On behalf of course for 20 MSP and marijuana venture magazine, and we’ll see you at the next show.
Danny Gold
Absolutely. Thanks so much.
