More insights from a licensed cannabis home delivery operator in Massachusetts
Ruben Seyde, who goes by the moniker “The Cannabis Guy,” is the founder of Delivered, Inc, a Worcester area cannabis delivery business based in Clinton, Massachusetts. He’s known for sharing his “experiences as a Mexican entrepreneur”—from cannabis insights, to behind-the-scenes action, and motivation—with his followers on social media, and we found his August dispatch on “5 Things I Learned Operating A Legal Cannabis Business For 2 Weeks” so insightful that we published it. Here’s the followup—give it a read, and be sure to check out Ruben’s service if you are in their delivery area. -TJM Editors
We survived our first quarter of operations, so let’s dive right into it. Here are eight things that my team has seen and learned so far …
1. Our three top-selling products this past quarter were: Mac 31 pre-ground flower (14g) by the Fresh Connection Boston; Limosa 12-Joint Pocket Pack by Garden Remedies; and K Dynamite Smalls (3.5g) by Impressed Cannabis.
2. Our three top-selling brands were: Nimbus Cannabis, Bailey’s Buds, and the Fresh Connection Boston. One thing to note is that only one of our top three brands had a product make it onto the top three products sold list. I can only assume that this is because we had much more variety of the other top two brands, so people were stacking up on their SKUs but not necessarily on any one particular product.
3. Our top three sales categories: flower, vapes, and prerolls. Nothing too insightful, this is pretty much in line with industry norms.
4. Our average basket size dropped to right around $105. This one is a bummer but hey, we gotta listen to the consumer. And the consumer was telling us that in order to reach the sales volume that we need, we needed to drop our minimum even more. So that’s what we did and we are now at a $75 minimum.
5. Our top market is obviously Worcester, but what shocked me is our second biggest market— Leominster. Leominster’s population is around 44,000, whereas Worcester’s population is around 206,000, yet Leominster is right on the heels of Worcester in terms of sales. Now that I think about it, we gotta really analyze what we are doing right in Leominster and repeat that in our other marketing tactics.
6. Marketing is a flipping art. An art that we’re still trying to figure out how to master. Even bringing in the pros at Surfside is only making a minor impact. For the first month of our digital programmatic ads campaign with them, we set a budget of $1,500. I know, that’s not necessarily a big budget, but when you’re a small startup like us, this was huge. That budget resulted in just under $500 in sales for the first month, and my initial reaction was, Big oof. But in reality, that’s not horrible given the landscape of programmatic ads. I think (and hope) that the longer we run this campaign and learn the nuances of our customers, the more we will be able to fine-tune the campaign and improve on the ROI.
7. Our most popular sales days are Fridays. Tuesdays are the second most popular, with Wednesday and Thursday tied for third place.
8. Finally, an overwhelming majority of our shoppers are between the ages of 25 and 44. Probably around 75% of our sales fall in this category.
