👷‍♀️ Can we build a cannabis marketplace that actually benefits its stakeholders?

First up - download the Jane app if you have an iPhone. Do it now. It informs this discussion and I know you’re reading this on your phone while on the toilet. I’ll wait…

Since joining Jane in 2018, I’ve had the pleasure of hearing a lot of hot takes about aggregated marketplaces:

• They’re stealing your data

• They’re stealing your customers

• They’ll continue to increase their “take rate,” until they erode your margins entirely

• They’re bad for your retail business

You know why all of those sentiments have maintained over time?

Because - sometimes - they’re true.

📕 The Origins

Jane launched as a two-sided marketplace, and was still that way when I joined. We sold listings on iheartjane.com, and we charged $1 per transaction. We envisioned a digital platform that would enable customer acquisition and a better reflection of real-time inventory than anyone else.

We found early success on the B2B side, thanks to some sales hustle. We found limited success on the consumer eyeballs front, because we were tiny and no one knew about iheartjane.com. And we didn’t have a lot of money to buy those eyeballs.

We pivoted from there, in-line with retailer preference to own their own digital ecosystem.

We scaled white label (no Jane logo) menus into half of the market, and lots of people followed us. We found incredible success, specifically with enterprise operators (due to lots of things, but especially because of global management, catalog reliance, and insanely-great support). Now, we’re building custom and semi-custom menus on retailer sites; we’re building native, SEO-enriched menus; we’re scaling a media business for brands and retailers to ensure continued growth and success. We’re providing best-in-class conversion and best-in-class, standardized data as a function of our content catalog. And we’ll continue to do that, and we’ll continue to win.

But now - we have an interesting opportunity to service retailers’ lead generation efforts via Jane’s surfaces - and to do it in a way that is transparent, and honest, and - not icky.

🤢 Why Are Most Marketplaces Icky?

I mentioned some of the shenanigans of large cannabis marketplaces above, but it may be useful to look at a more robust and evolved industry to inform the discussion: let’s look at restaurants.

DoorDash and its constituents exploded over the last decade or so, in-line with consumer adoption of the smartphone. Search for restaurants, look at the menu, order delivery. Simple.

Restaurants were sold on incrementality - and, in large part, it worked. DoorDash brings in more orders. But there’s a fundamental misalignment of incentives between DoorDash and its restaurant partners.

DoorDash makes money by charging a % of order revenue. They have other revenue streams, which came later, but let’s focus on the big one - this “take rate.”

Restaurants have thin margins. Paying a percentage of each order to DoorDash deteriorates these margins. And when DoorDash needs to make more money to satisfy investors, it’s the easiest lever to pull - which mean the take rates keeps going up.

DoorDash also has a vested interest in keeping watch over customer information - because, ultimately, they make money by marketing to end users and keeping them coming back to the app. They don’t want to share many juicy tidbits around buying habits with restaurant partners, because then restaurant partners may market directly to end users and, subsequently, reduce the number of active users on the platform.

In other words - DoorDash doesn’t exist to be in service of restaurant partners. They exist to maximize traffic on their own platform and capture as much revenue as possible per order.

💛 Here’s Something Different

This DoorDash Dynamic (TM) has played out in cannabis as well, primarily because aggregated marketplaces only have one or two surfaces that they care about - their website and their app.

Jane is taking a different approach. We aren’t interest in take rates, and we aren’t interested in keeping your data from you.

If that sounds like bullshit, here’s why:

1. We’re taking an omnichannel approach

That means we’re agnostic to “order origination point”. If a customer orders on your dispensary website via a Jane menu, great. If they order on a brand website that we power, great. If they order on Leafly, that’s great, too, because a huge chunk of Leafly orders flow through Jane rails (bet you didn’t know that).

And if they order on iheartjane.com or our iOS app - that’s great, too.

All of these orders are equal - they all represent an order being fulfilled by a retail partner. (Ultimately, they represent a consumer getting safe access to cannabis). That means we don’t have to be bashful about letting you keep ownership over your data, because if a retailer wants to leverage their customer trends to slam more traffic into their own site to generate incremental orders - that’s great. 

1. We have diversified revenue streams

Though Jane doesn’t exist to make money, we are a business and we do have revenue goals. But! We have a few ways to do it, all of them 100% aligned with our stakeholder goals: SaaS fees for our retail eComm partners; revenue from on-platform media campaigns for brands; revenue from off-platform media campaigns for retailers. And more coming.

That means we don’t have to gouge retailers. We can be good stewards of the relationship and bask in the mutual growth. 

✌️ Who cares about Jane’s app and marketplace?

Great question. Here’s who should care:

Retailers: you’re going to get incremental orders and transparent data.

Brands: you’re going to get a beautiful page on which to tell your story and direct traffic for programmatic campaigns. With transparent data and phenomenal attribution.

Consumers: you’re going to learn about cannabis, shop efficiently, and place orders.

This can be done, and done well. Download the app and let me know how we did so far.

📚 tl;dr

• We launched an app; download it

• Most marketplaces are icky because they take % fees from their retail partners and keep data

• We are agnostic to order origination point, and we have diversified revenue streams - which means we can offer Jane surfaces in service of retail, brand, and consumer goals without being gross

• It is Friday