“Too often, it’s impossible to find which dispensaries have the right products or deals based on your preferences.”
No matter how much information we put out into the world from Talking Joints Memo, friends, relatives, and readers often pester us with one specific question that’s outside our journalistic wheelhouse.
Where, they ask, can we get the best deals?
We also frequently wonder the same thing ourselves. Or at least we used to before signing up for the beta version of TerpHog. It changed our shopping habits right away, leading us to daily markdowns, new products, and more, often at dispensaries we hadn’t frequented before.
The technology seems simple: you answer a few questions about what you typically shop for—i.e. dabs, discounts, discounted dabs within 20 miles of your home, etc.—and then subsequently get a daily email listing drops and deals. But while it may provide an obvious function without any baggage, under the hood there’s nothing that’s basic about TerpHog. Rather, it’s built using data from Lit Alerts, another service from the same Massachusetts-based team which enables cannabis companies to see which stores sell what products and how many.
Impressed by Lit Alerts, last year we interviewed co-founder Nathan Girard about how his small crew built a brilliant product that is capable of crushing much larger competitors. We feel similarly about TerpHog, which launched less than a month ago. With them still offering free lifetime access for the time being, we asked Girard and Lit Alerts CEO Rick Bashkoff to school us and our readers about their latest ambitious new rollout that’s geared toward consumers and not just weed industry folk.
Can you explain in your words how Lit Alerts and your other technological endeavors and overall mission led to TerpHog?
With Lit Alerts, we are helping operators solve the lack of data problem in the cannabis space, so they can compete and grow. What we quickly realized is that this data set of menu insights also applies to helping cannabis shoppers. Too often, it’s impossible to find which dispensaries have the right products or deals based on your preferences. The usual search platforms just list entire menus. Because we crawl these menus multiple times a day, we can now aggregate and analyze those options for you and that’s why we’ve launched TerpHog.
From your perspective, what are some of the biggest problems with other products that already purport (or have attempted in the past) to do something similar?
We felt like there were two improvements that could be made on existing products that may be in the market today. First, there are no signals for when things change or happen, meaning there’s ways to see when something is on sale on a site, but nothing that tells you when it happened in real-time. Second, they don’t deliver the information right to your inbox. This is a big piece of the puzzle for us. So with TerpHog, given that our platform in general works off of activities happening, we can now spotlight that item going on sale or when a new product lands at your favorite dispensary that’s never been there before and deliver that information right to your inbox every morning. We all know nobody needs another app on their phone so we are trying to make it as simple as possible for consumers.
There are countless kinds of customers. TerpHog is adjustable, and could work for people with a range of cannabis kinks and desires, but are there any demographics in particular that you were thinking about in creating it?
Honestly, if you look at the Massachusetts market for example, there are a lot of casual shoppers. They don’t really care about the brands per say, but they know they like edibles and they know they want to get the most for their money. With that, the “On Sale” option was really where this was born as it’s one of the core “activities” we have in Lit Alerts. Wholesalers wanted to be able to see when their products were put on sale by retailers. Being able to easily see in an email every morning where all the edibles are in your area that went on sale (10% off, 20% off, etc.) we feel is a really strong value proposition for many consumers.
On the flip side, there are shoppers who are very particular about what they buy. A lot of times, those items sell out quickly or are harder to find. By setting their preferences, they could be notified quickly about when and where those might surface. The fact that the tool is simple and configurable allows us to provide value to many of the niche customer segments who will find this valuable. Some examples include flower or concentrates shoppers who are very particular about the products they purchase.
What have been some of the biggest challenges so far in developing this product? Prior to the recent launch, what kind of in-house brain trust did you rely on to test and evaluate early phases?
In talking to our Lit Alerts customers, we get asked a lot about consumer data. For many, they are just flying blind on who their customers are and what they want/need. With that, we said to ourselves what if we could use the Lit Alerts backbone to power a consumer facing product that we could collect very basic data, like zip code, favorite brands, and dispensaries, what they are looking for like deals or new products, and even how much they want to spend. Then take that basic data (no personal information at all on the consumers) and give Lit Alerts customers a glimpse of that data to help them make even better decisions.
For example, our co-founder Nate owns Bloom Brothers in Pittsfield. What if he could go into Lit Alerts and see that there are 1,000 shoppers in the Pittsfield area that all set preferences for a new brand in the market, but Nate isn’t carrying it yet. Boom. He can go out and get that product knowing that people in the area want it and when he adds it to his menu, they could see it in their morning email, thus driving sales. So full circle, it was really our Lit Alerts customers that told us they needed some of this kind of data and we are trying to find a way to get it for them and use it daily.
Your development team, which members have described as “doing a lot with very little,” is small, niche-oriented, and introducing new products every year. But timing is important in this game. Super important. Why is now the time for TerpHog?
We feel like TerpHog is a way for us to not only give consumers a better shopping experience in cannabis as a whole, but also continue to make Lit Alerts a must have data analytics platform for every operator. The combination of menu data and insights paired with consumer data and insights is very powerful. Now that Lit Alerts has proven itself in the 15 markets we are in, we felt like it was time to take the platform to the next level as a whole.
Additionally, we feel that we now have many more mature cannabis markets where some of the initial novelty of buying cannabis products has worn off. This suggests that many consumers have actually established their preferences, so the time is right for the TerpHog to go find products for those consumers.
You have mentioned using Bloom Brothers, which shares an owner with TerpHog and Lit Alerts, as your “secret weapon” in imaging these tools. Can you please speak more to that experience and the importance of relying on stakeholders, whether that’s wholesale buyers or walk-in dispensary customers?
Nate Girard is the owner of Bloom Brothers, a retail dispensary in Pittsfield, and the co-founder of both Lit Alerts and TerpHog. Nate was the one who said if we could share some of the menu data we aggregate every single day with shoppers, and then see what choices they select for their emails, I could use that in helping to understand what to carry on my shelves. In the same sense, he said if I know there are 500 people in the area looking for edibles on sale, I can put several of them on sale in my menu and ideally pull those people into my shop. Just like when he said, if we could crawl my menu and let wholesalers know how much product I have left of theirs that could help them know how it’s selling and when they should reach out to me to reorder, which in the end creates a more seamless experience and relationship as a whole.
That was the birth of Lit Alerts. Nate is very good at seeing a problem that affects his store and then trying to find a technological solution for their industry as a true operator vs guessing what operators want/need. We then ask other wholesales or retailers about these ideas, and usually they immediately agree and get on board.
What are some success and less successful stories about the service that you have heard so far? What have you already learned and tweaked since launching just a few weeks ago?
On one of the first days, we had someone select a lot of dispensaries and products as their favorites. That’s going to create a massive email that would be hard to navigate, so we put up a guardrail that you can only select three of each to start. We wouldn’t call that a failure per say, but it’s always amazing to see what people do with a new product that you never thought would happen. You try to think out all scenarios for something and you’re usually always surprised.
I have actually discovered some products that I didn’t know existed since getting TerpHog. Do you see it as a way to expose people to things they may have not realized were out there? Since it’s so hard for companies to advertise?
One-thousand percent. This is exactly why we created this kind of product as mentioned earlier. It’s a way to set some basic preferences, sit back and see what lands each morning without having to spend hours a day scouring dispensary online menus. Even if you’re not ready to buy or visit a dispensary, you get insights into a constantly changing market of new products and brands, sales and more. As you’ve seen, you may get one of those emails one morning and it’s something you’ve never heard of and now you’re one of the first to know about it and go get it because of TerpHog sniffing it out for you.
What does it take on your team’s end to keep something like TerpHog exciting and current? At a time when so many basic tasks can be automated, or are at least in some way easier for small companies to execute than they used to be, on what tasks do you expend the scarce resources of your team’s close attention?
Right now, TerpHog is very much a proof of concept. We are hoping it takes off and people love it. The service runs off the amazing work our CTO and developers have done with the Lit Alerts product. So we spend a tremendous amount of our resources ensuring that the Lit Alerts data engine is running smoothly. Ideally, what keeps TerpHog exciting and current is the retailer and what they are doing to attract customers. If the retailers in MA keep adding cool new brands and products, cycling inventory and being innovative, that will shine through to the morning emails that TerpHog offers and get more and more shoppers excited about cannabis in their local market.
