After creating one of the most popular consumer websites in the cannabis space, the founders of Leafly have moved on to test the B2B market. They recently launched Headset, a business intelligence platform for cannabis retailers after selling Leafly to Privateer Holdings.
“We’re serial entrepreneurs,” Headset CEO Cy Scott said. “After five years with Leafly, we decided it was time to try something else.”
Having spent a lot of time with retailers and product manufacturers during the development of Leafly, Scott said he realized most cannabis companies don’t have access to good systems and information to help them operate their business more effectively. During the short time frame since Colorado and Washington legalized adult-use cannabis, retail operations have grown increasingly more sophisticated; now they need the business intelligence to match their packaging and marketing efforts, Scott said.
Headset is a platform designed to help retailers maximize their inventory, and better understand their breakdown of brands and prices. It provides retailers with insights about the market around them, what their competitors are doing and what brands they should be carrying based on consumer demand and profitability.
“It really all comes down to maximizing your revenue per square foot,” Scott said. “We’re able to do this by bringing in data from a variety of publicly available sources. It gives retailers a good visibility to what’s happening in the space around them.”
Headset also uses each store’s point-of-sale data to bolster the information.
Washington business owners will be able to take advantage of Headset first, but a national roll-out is planned for the near future, which will include all businesses throughout the supply chain in both medical and recreational markets.
“For product manufacturers, it’s also about optimizing, but they have a different set of problems,” Scott said.
Unlike information that comes from state sources, information provided by Headset for a specific retailer is only for that retailer.
“We don’t share that data,” Scott said.
The goal of Headset and its founders is to move the marijuana industry away from anecdotal numbers and into the realm of real business intelligence.
“We want everyone to succeed,” Scott said. “If they do, the industry will continue to grow.”