Video Transcription
Harry Brelsford
Hey folks, welcome back to the Canna tech podcast. This is a special edition. I’m with Peter Vogel of leaf wire. How’re you doing? On a Friday afternoon, Peter,
Peter Vogel
doing great excited to be on your show?
Harry Brelsford
Well, I appreciate it. Yeah, I want to make sure you enjoy the success you deserve and have earned. What is leaf wires.
Peter Vogel
So we built leaf wire to essentially be a Leafwirefor the cannabis and hemp industry. So we’re 100% devoted to the business of cannabis. So this is not a platform just for people to talk about weed and get hired. It’s a platform for people who run businesses, they partner with businesses, everything from the growers to people who work in dispensaries, to the media, the financial people, the scientists behind all of it. So the whole industries, if you care about the business of cannabis, you should be on leaf wire and networking and looking for business partners, looking for investors promoting your events, your new products, everything you do on LinkedIn, you can come to with our 100% cannabis focus audience on the far.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, let me just folks quickly share the screen. It does kind of alter our dimensions on the podcast. Let’s see. Can you see? me try that again?
Peter Vogel
Yeah, I just you know, I could see
Harry Brelsford
that. Yeah, you could. Okay, thank you. Folks, we’re doing it live. So you can see require?
Peter Vogel
There you go. Yep. I can see the fire. I could see it your account. Yeah, yeah. And so just to point out a couple things. Here, you can see up in the top left, you can see Harry has added his headshot and a little description, usually stuff about a job. You can add your social info. And then there’s a news feed there that runs down the center. So any member you don’t have to pay, there’s no fees or anything you can join for free. You can post for free, you can post your own blogs, a lot of people post just industry news from other sources or people love to promote events. We have a little events tab up there on the right. We have about I think at this point 100 events, from Switzerland, to Jamaica to Dallas. Wide. Yeah, it’s there. And they’re all kinds of events. Some are focused on cannabis or hemp or psychedelics, some were focused on legal, some are focused on payments, and we’re focused on women in cannabis. So
Harry Brelsford
here’s here’s one of my favorite the Ben Zynga cannabis capital conference. I’m circling it is one of my favorite events for investors. But okay, so you had events? Let’s talk about the job board. What’s going on with jobs?
Peter Vogel
Yeah, so the job by the way, I’ll be at Ben Zynga in Chicago next week.
Harry Brelsford
Oh, good. So good. Have fun for me.
Peter Vogel
Yeah, so our job board we have about 10,000 cannabis and hemp jobs on there. And it is worldwide. It’s mostly US and Canada. But there are people from some other countries that post jobs but you you could search by type of job like marketing or finance, you can search by city, country, state, etc. But yes, we have 10,000 jobs that we think it’s we think it’s the biggest collection, we pull jobs from multiple places, and then we let people post for free. So I think we I think we have the biggest job board at this point.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah, now that’s pretty cool. Yeah, in preparation for this podcast, I looked over jobs earlier. And, you know, you had a senior analyst with the capital markets and sort of an investor relation role at canopy up in Canada. That’s a real job. I Petermean, that’s, that’s not a bad thing.
Peter Vogel
Ya know, we we get jobs from about 15 different of the MSOs of the biggest MSOs. So, you know, whether it’s I’m blanking like hexo, or medmen, or, you know, Trulieve. You know, there’s tons of jobs from all of those big, big players. And even though I know they’re laying off some people, but there’s still lots of job openings.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah. Yeah, there always are. There’s always adjustments. What was the secret sauce? You know, I told you in an earlier visit, I’ve seen other industries tried to be the LinkedIn of their industry. You somehow nailed it. Is this a template? Or did you have a team of developers that that? I mean, the UI is remarkably similar. Yeah.
Peter Vogel
Yeah, it that’s not a mistake. I mean, there’s definitely you try to copy from those who are the most successful. So I mean, we looked at Facebook, what they how they do things. We looked at LinkedIn. We looked at just the general concept of social networks. Yeah, we do have our own tech team. We use an offshore tech team actually this Since Sri Lanka, and you know that there’s not really a secret sauce, I would say our first version of this needed a ton of work. We’ve changed, you know, everything many times. And I’d say the secret sauce is that we’ve been doing it for four years and spent a lot of effort doing it.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah. And what I also noticed today, I spent a little bit more time on it. And by the way, Peter, I’m starting to maybe twice a week post some of my existing research I shared with you I write for a couple of publications. That’s that’s what you do when you’re a writer. But today, I paid more attention to what I’m going to call the velocity of your site, and you’re getting a fair amount of daily posts for not actually being Twitter or LinkedIn yourself, you know, let’s assume LinkedIn probably has a post every second or every couple seconds, but they’re huge, almost to the point where it gets it’s not meaningful, to be honest. But yeah, but you have good solid velocity. Any thoughts on that? I mean, it’s like you’re, you’re getting a, at least a post an hour, maybe like 39 minutes ago, you’re 42 minutes ago, you got traffic? Any any thoughts on that? Have you seen that? Growth?
Peter Vogel
Yeah, I mean, we’ve definitely seen that grow over the last, I’d say, year in terms of more and more people posting and commenting and liking. And it’s kind of, you know, it’s kind of the whole chicken or the egg, right? You know, it or you call it the OS of the network effect, you’re more likely to post if you see lots of other people posting, and you’re more likely to comment, if you see, oh, that are six comments on that post. So it’s like a normal thing. And if you see 30 people liking something you’re more likely to like so it’s, I think we’re getting we’re not there yet. And now you can’t see me, but I’m making a motion of my arm kind of going up to the right. We’re, we’re seeing more posts, more likes and more comments. And it’s kind of feeding itself a little bit. So I think we’re getting close to some sort of network effect or inflection point, where, you know, it’s almost like if you keep getting emails from people saying, So and so just invite usually, for our look with this person, certainly when once you get enough of those things you finally just join. So it’s like, and then when you get enough people that have joined everyone else sees it. And then it’s I don’t know if you’ve ever heard the parable of the 100th Monkey.
Harry Brelsford
Now, talk to me.
Peter Vogel
I don’t even know scientifically how valid This is. But it was a scientists were studying these monkeys on an island. And all these planes would fly out, fly over and produce would drop out like say, like mangoes, or avocados, they would land in the sand and the monkeys out love the sand loved him, but they’re all covered with sand. So one monkey finally figured out, you could wash it off in the water. Okay. And then they slowly watched other monkeys Follow, follow, follow. And then they reach some point where they’re like just 20 monkeys who weren’t doing it. But then at some point, and they call it the 100th Monkey, once the 100th Monkey did it. Every single of the monkey on the island did it. And then this is a weird part. They say in the island next to them, which there’s no movement back and forth. All of those monkeys started doing it too. But somehow that was like that knowledge was like in the air. That energy or everyone just knows at that point. So it’s, we’re, we’re for our 100th Monkey, I guess.
Harry Brelsford
The No, I like I say, I’ve got it bookmarked. And I peek at it each day, post a couple times a week. You know, what it’s done for me is in the mornings. I peek at Facebook, LinkedIn, I go to leaf wire, and then maybe check one of the news readers one of the aggregators that you know, pulse. MSN is a good example. They pull stories from everywhere. And that’s over coffees. Right, and then I’m ready to start my day. So I consider this you know, a morning bookmark. A couple final questions. I also get emails and newsletter from you talk to me about that. Is that daily, I should be a better citizen and open them off.
Peter Vogel
Yes, yes, we sent we sent a couple kinds of emails. One is a daily that actually now we even do weekends, we call that one to leave our weekend. But what it’s called the daily wire, and what it is, is we basically go and pick like, you know, right, what we were just looking at here and in the newsfeed, we pick the six most popular posts. And that usually means they’re articles about some pressing political issue, or some science or some big business news or something was announced. So we pull the six most popular, we put them in an email. I So it’s kind of like the best of the best. So even if you don’t have time to come back every day, we’re picking the six best things and sending it to you. And we get a lot of positive feedback, we get a ton of people to tell us, our newsletter is one of the few they actually read every day. And they like the self selection, because we’ll put articles in from MJ biz, from Forbes from from New Yorker from, you know, Canada’s Business Times, and we just pick what we think is the best. And then in that email, too, we always put some feature jobs, a feature to vent, so we be promoting something like Ben Zynga right now. And by the way, if if you’re going to Ben, Zynga, there is a release, you’re not you said, but there’s a 30% off coupon on leaf wire. If you go on the Events tab, you can see the discount code. So that’s a good good thing to note as well. But so we so we do that daily email. And then we also do a couple for our kind of advertising partners, we do some like standalone email blasts. So we’ll send an email out that might be promoting, you know, dharma financial as a payment processor, you might be promoting. The the ad you see on the screen, there is a stash stock is a company that does scales for, you know, like big, big crops and farming type stuff. So it’s a way to accurately measure your, your, your harvest. But yeah, it’s like stash stock, we would do an email app for anyone who’s interested in learning more about that kind of, you know, technology.
Harry Brelsford
Yeah. Two more questions. Do you moderate posts? And let me let me, let me add to that, why I’m asking. The other day, I saw a number of posts from one individual regarding real estate. And it was like six posts in a row. And I page down page down. I mean, it’s, it’s fine. But you know, it was pretty blatant advertising. I’m not interested in real estate, do you moderate? Or do you let the free market moderate?
Peter Vogel
So we do have, by the way, on the top of every post, and the top right, I see those three dots. You can block someone, and then you never see their stuff, you could report a post. So we do get some group policing. If enough. I think if enough people report a post to us, it automatically takes it down. Well, until we review it. And that’s what we’re trying to prevent is, you know, anything that’s, you know, laced with profanity or nudity, or Yeah, yeah, no, illegal illegal things. So we do our best. We try not to moderate. There’s been situations where we felt one member was being too aggressive, or rude, too abrasive to another member. And we took that down because we thought it was it stepped over the lines of what we consider kind of professional courtesy. So we do our best not to do that. Because we want this to be kind of an open forum. And like I said, anyone can block someone. So for those real estate people, like I’d recommend, if you see that again, just hit that block button, and you’ll never have to see their posts again.
Harry Brelsford
Okay. And then finally, how to why I built up a few followers, you know, I have a building’s network of friends on this. How do I become a pro? It sounds like I should reach out to one of them and say, Hey, you’re a pro. Can you nominate me? What’s that process?
Peter Vogel
Yeah, no. So we just built we put a pro recently, we don’t even have all the features yet. So that’s why we don’t charge for it. And we set it up kind of like as an invite only, if you see anyone with a pro. So for example, like Harry, you could send me a message and say, Hey, will you send me a pro invite, and I can just send you something, you just click a button. And then some some of the features you get right now you get extra conference discounts. That’s actually one of the that’s one of the best things where we’ve asked a lot of these events to give us two discounts like one one level, and then the next one, five, or 10% Higher. And we put that in Pro. So if you’re looking for our pro, you get that we’re going to be adding a feature where you can see who looked at your profile, kind of like we also have a pro messaging. So every time you write a message on leaf wired into the remember at the bottom, there’s a little checkbox and if you if you click Pro, it’ll it’ll make your message kind of stand out and be bold and blue and it’s kind of like stands out above the rest. So it’s almost like an InMail for LinkedIn. Yeah, but they do it. And there’s a few other features that are coming but yeah, you can you can send a message to me or anyone you see who has Pro and each each person has kind of like a certain number of invites. refreshes every month.
Harry Brelsford
All right, well, I’ll do so. And then assuming speaking for myself that it’s a busy fall, and I still do, or three or four things. So the next cannabis event I’m actually going to go to and I’m putting dedicating the whole week to be mjbizcon. In in November in Las Vegas, so I’m assuming I’ll see you there.
Peter Vogel
Oh, hope I’m hoping to be there. I’m actually my conference schedule is getting busier and busier. So I’m trying to pick and choose things like, like Ben, Zynga, or I’m probably gonna go to the MGM pact, which is, you know, the money. And yeah, those I’ve been liking some of these slightly smaller shows where it’s, you can see, you know, tends to be a little higher, higher level of caliber people. And also it’s just, it’s easier when you’re dealing with 800 word 1000 people versus 30.
Harry Brelsford
Well, yeah, and I echo that, and I get that, you know, again, I, my team, and I were analyst, like you’d see at Gartner, IDC or Forrester and that’s going well and really, in, you know, skipping my step in the morning when I wake up really enjoying it. mjbizcon is kind of the Super Bowl Comdex CES. It’s fun, you know, and I gotta go. I mean, I just I gotta go, but I’m far more effective has been send us I mean, that’s, that’s a direct hit for an analyst.
Peter Vogel
Right? I’m sure. Yeah, you the CEO of every big company is there?
Harry Brelsford
Yep. Well, hey, if you don’t mind, here’s what we’re going to do is I’m going to check in with you, Jimmy, who does the editing on this in the background. She triggers off on my closing. So Jenny, let’s check back in with Peter after the first of the year for two reasons. Let’s go through another quarter. We’ll get through show season. But I’d love to hear what a how you’re doing and then be what you’re thinking about 2020 threes, right, because you’re you’re getting you’re collecting a lot of data and information here. Right. And you’re hearing what’s going on?
Peter Vogel
Right? Yeah, we definitely kind of keep a pulse on. I mean, we work with all kinds of businesses too. So we know some of the growers, some of the dispensaries some of the MSOs the investors so yeah, we definitely talk with lots of groups.
Harry Brelsford
All right. Okay. Have a great day. Thanks, Peter.
