How Does Other Marijuana Websites Make Money

[Ted]

I have started a couple threads now about this particular question, but last night I felt like I had a breakthrough...almost. So here is what I know:

• Stripe: No
• Paypal: Fuck No
• BitPay: Absolutely Not!
• Cash: Good, Just Don't Mail It
• Bitcoin: Yes As Long As It Hasn't Been Made Through a Marijuana ______.
• Checks: Not if it's made out to Ted's Marijuana Forum
• Out of ideas.

I could sleep because I had this on my mind until 2am. It sucked and I feel sluggish because of it right now. I even watched "Everything You Need to Know About Bitcoin, Ep 27 of the Vice podcast". It's not even a podcast, it's a video for god's sake. I hate listening to Reihan Salam too. He is probably one of the worst charismatic hosts I have had to listen to to get the information from who he interviews. Okay, it's below if you want to listen to Reihan drone on and on about basic shit that has been repeated multiple times already.

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So I am left with the question "How does Weedmaps make $18M/year if no one will give them processing power?". Ya that one bit me in the ass as I just publicly got turned down by Stripe. I am not a quitter though. While the Mrs slept I was staring into a 5" display searching for a variation of search strings to figure out how the other sites like TMF bring in money. It's not even about profiting with the site. My curiosity finally has the best of me and I can't find answers that are any better than Redditors making the best educated guesses in /r/Weedbiz.

All of this hiding and aliases will be over soon enough. I am more dismayed on how difficult it is to take a dollar for a donation or to sell a shirt if you have marijuana in your name. I suppose it's the trade-off for good search results.

I also learned a lot about Leafly and Weedmaps as I scoured results to late into the night. I wish the directory was like Weedmaps except better, and I hope one day to have the info on strains like Leafly. It won't be happening with a sweet app like I get asked for every single day. Apps are really expensive to build in case anyone reading this doesn't know. You don't download a free copy of Wordpress, get some cheap hosting, and the draw an app in Photoshop. It takes impressive scales to be bringing revenue into the millions.

I am going to do some heavy reading over the next few days, but I wanted to share my efforts up to this point. Also, I hope TMF really gets bigger. Some of the other sites I discovered seem to be only about the money or really shitty experience wise. I would be happy to be at least in the middle. It's hard when you only chalk up 50 new memberships a day though. The big boys get millions of views per month with 50% being mobile. We get about 2K/month right now. That's 5 times better than in November at least.

Edit: I should add that these questions are important because there are many people jumping into the scene and I have found very little on the topic. Maybe there is a reason for that, but I am not giving up. I want to exchange information on the industry at large. In the last 4 days I have come up empty handed. So I figure it's 1 or 2 things. I am not willing do work in the grey area of this business, or I truly can't comprehend the process in being accepted.

I have learned so much since I began this project and couldn't have done it without some really amazing members. The goal is to share information and we are doing that. In the meantime, I will be researching and sharing what I find. If you find it before I do please let us know.

 

[Lila]

Wow, this really got me thinking. I mean the reason people I know go on weed maps is just to get marijuana delivered. I have traveled and every different city has different rules and regulations. In San Francisco it is way more common to just go to the cannibus store, but a couple hours East in the Central Valley, it is way more common to have it delivered. Most people I know just go to whoever is open with the best sale of the day and so forth. I'm not sure where I am getting with this but I'm trying to bounce some ideas off of you. I have also been supporting the legalization of MMJ and recently being in between jobs, I realized that my education, personal experiences with marijuana and other prescription drugs and just passion for helping anyone with an illness I had to get involved. I am so passionate about people with psych meds being able to get off with marijuana that it's crazy. I'll post more about this later but if there is any research that is lengthy or something that I can help you look over please let me know.
A lot of it is the "grey area" and connecting the dots. I'm gonna go on weedmaps and a few other sites and see what the big deal is, or if it's just the fact that it locates marijuana shops/delivery services. I waited 3 hours last night for my medication and I seriously needed it because I'm still detoxing a little bit. 3 hours!! If you could somehow have an interactive live feed of what shops are open, their menu and how long the wait, I would never go on weedmaps again. Now, it's like a homework assignment just to get my meds. I call every place on weedmaps and write notes, then compare times and call again. Also, people here are soo uneducated about Medical Marijuana. It's ridiculous. More education for public, as well as employees at MMJ shops/delivery service, would be awesome. I hope this made sense. I'm literally so passionate about this topic right now that I'm busting at the seams. LoL. Every day some one is suffering that does not have to and until this plant is legal and the scientific and medical research is really underway, I'm not gonna stop reading, learning, debating and typing. Happy 420 and God Bless.

 

[Ted]

I certainly appreciate the addition to the topic and I know that Weedmaps has that app and people find it to be very useful to locate places they can get what they need. Now I can't build that app, I can't build much because it takes a lot of money to do so. Weed maps charges a lot of money to have dispensaries and other services listed. I have even read that they will manually manipulate their listings based on whether or not the business pays them or not.

I don't know about that part of their business and isn't really a concern of mine. Sure, it sucks, but what I am after is how they take payments. Until I can figure that part out I am stuck building out slowly and invested my money in the site and an app wouldn't go into concept during this period. I want to be clear that I am interested in how these places take BitCoin, MasterCard, Visa, Paypal, Stripe without an issue, but I have zero ability to do so without creating fake business names or other methods that I don't want to do.

I firmly believe this information can help a lot of businesses, websites, and even tech companies. My other reason is that building a large site will eventually cost more and more. I want to have a plan that prepares me for future growth and what can be offered here without being blacklisted by payment processors. I wish I could dive into your comment more, but I don't really have anything to offer. An app that would be able to equal or better Weedmaps app would take a minimum of ten's of thousands of dollars which doesn't put a TMF app idea on the table at all currently. This is the area that really is all about the money and the ability to compete with a better product.

I hope someone will be able to offer some kind of input down the road.

 

[LeslieBShaw]

Now there are a lot of ideas to make money online. In general, it is the century of technology, money can be made in any field, even if it seems to us that at the moment it is not possible. Who knew that Facebook, Amazon, etc. will cost more than oil companies, more than the GDP of some European countries. Everything at first was just an idea. Honestly, 10 years ago I thought that online commerce has no future, now I make a lot of money on it. I deal with amazon fba business. That is, with the trade of products. I think it's the most business perspective at the moment for people who don't have capital.