Justin Hartfield of WeedMaps is about as ballsy as entrepreneurs get. I mean that as a compliment. Not only is he building an online business that facilitates and profits off of the recreational use of marijuana– which let’s remember is still illegal in the United States– but he’s essentially rushing his small company out into the public markets, via an acquisition by the mostly-unknown but publicly-traded LC Luxuries Limited, which will build a new business around all things cannabis.
Between the anticipated closing of the deal, which will make WeedMaps essentially a publicly traded company on the Pink Sheets and California’s vote on a proposition to legalize marijuana, the next month will be huge for Hartfield– one way or another. Meanwhile revenues are soaring. WeedMaps was making $20,000 a month a year ago, made $300,000 in August and $400,000 in September– all off of just 50,000 registered users.
Obviously, the money-making potential is huge, but is there a greater moral issue here? Hartfield doesn’t see one. Hartfield was the guest on NBC’s Press:Here this week, where he discussed a unique dilemma in Silicon Valley: Having a $120 billion market to yourself in which no VCs want to invest. It’s a reality that’s driven him to this odd, back-door IPO.
It’s also helping make his company a cause. “We want to make buying a share in this company like buying a share in the legalization of marijuana cause,” he says. Hartfield — so unabashedly libertarian he could make Peter Thiel swoon– thinks markets are better ways of assessing public opinion than media or political polls. So, he argues, if people vote with their money for WeedMaps, it’ll be a proxy for how people feel about the practicality of legalization, which he sees as an inevitability. (Morality aside, I take issue with his certainty in this clip. Even in gung-ho California, some medical marijuana advocates oppose recreational legalization.)
But the deal is about more than just finding a way to go public. The new company will acquire and roll-up several smaller companies, likely also around the cannabis issue. Meanwhile, Hartfield is doing a weed/Web landgrab, taking nearly every business model that’s worked on the Web and building a weed version. His core site is like Yelp for weed, containing a database of more than 25,000 strains, where they can be found and reviews on dispensaries and headshops. He even offers an “elite” status.
The company has another site called WeedVote.com that helps get out the legalization vote, and the newly launched WeedMart.com is an online headship and he’s about to launch a new daily deals site for pot– that’s right, yet another Groupon clone, this time to get high. There’s also a feature called “Weed or Skin”– like Hot or Not but where you vote for scantily clad women or pictures of pot. I’m not kidding. While Hartfield isn’t the first to try to make money off of a vice, he revels in it more than most. “We don’t like to be hypocritical, and we don’t think there should be arbitrary differences between recreational and medicinal,” he says. This is clearly as much about the cause as it is about the company for him. Agree with his stance or not, you have to respect the conviction.
In the clip below, Hartfield talks about America’s “chronic fear of freedom” and the challenges he’s faced building this business. Go here for the full episode, which includes his rebuttal to medical marijuana advocates that say recreational legalization is bad for those who need the drug for medical reasons
To summarize an hour of dialogue, you should at some point have a product that your readers will want. You should give a lot of free content away, but even when it comes to content, you can charge for some amount, and if your content is good enough, people will pay for the premium stuff. "You can tell them about ninety percent, and they'll pay money just to get the final ten percent," so they know they have the whole picture, Clark says.
Making money blogging will not happen overnight. Sometimes it may seem like this is possible, but in reality, it takes a lot of work. "Build something that is real and something that matters to people," Rowse advises. He shared a story about how he launched a product one day and literally watched the sales roll in. It was as if he had hit a button, and the cash just started flowing, but then he realized he had been working hard up to that point for over two years, promoting the blog, writing two posts a day, doing SEO, press releases, etc. It wasn't overnight.
You're not scalable, meaning that as your audience grows and more people want to connect with you, there will be a point where it just becomes too much. You have to set boundaries, otherwise you will have no time for yourself and your family.
Eventually, you're going to have to "get real" about how many meaningful connections you can make in a day, Simone says, adding, "That's part of growing up in social media.”
When they say "no one actually wants that much authenticity," they mean that nobody cares about what you did last night, who you were with, what you had for breakfast, etc. In other words, don't show everybody everything about yourself, because you're not writing for you. You're writing for them. Be who you want to be for your audience.
Ultimately, you're blogging and using social media to sell, but you can't just go around selling to people, because they won't have it. It just doesn't work. You have to make them want to buy. "You're selling yourself," says Clark. If you provide enough value to your audience, they will want to buy what you have to offer if it expands upon the value you're already giving them. "The content is the marketing," he says.
Just having a blog is not a business. If you want it to be a business you have to treat it like one, Rowse says. This is basically an extension of number 2.
The most important of the seven points is that no one is reading your blog. As Simone says, there are hundreds of millions of blogs, and that includes blogs on your topic. You have to write it in a way that is fresh, and either entertaining or informative. The good news is that you don't need "monster traffic". You just need a good, steady core audience for advertising to do well.
Surprise: Fox <b>News</b> signs Juan Williams to new $2 million deal <b>...</b>
Fox News Chief Executive Roger Ailes handed Williams a new three-year contract Thursday morning, in a deal that amounts to nearly $2 million, a considerable bump up from his previous salary, the Tribune Washington Bureau has learned. ...
Fox <b>News</b> Gives Juan Williams $2 Million Contract | 89.3 KPCC
NPR has been sharply criticized for terminating the contract of news analyst Juan Williams for remarks he made about Muslims. Williams appeared on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor" Thursday night to respond to NPR's decision.
Fox <b>News</b> Gives Fired NPR Reporter Juan Williams Fat New Contract <b>...</b>
Williams, who has served as a part-time contributor on Fox News since 1997, got an expanded, multi-year deal from the cable channel Thursday. Terms were not disclosed, though a source close to the network said Williams is getting a pay ...
eric seiger eric seiger
Justin Hartfield of WeedMaps is about as ballsy as entrepreneurs get. I mean that as a compliment. Not only is he building an online business that facilitates and profits off of the recreational use of marijuana– which let’s remember is still illegal in the United States– but he’s essentially rushing his small company out into the public markets, via an acquisition by the mostly-unknown but publicly-traded LC Luxuries Limited, which will build a new business around all things cannabis.
Between the anticipated closing of the deal, which will make WeedMaps essentially a publicly traded company on the Pink Sheets and California’s vote on a proposition to legalize marijuana, the next month will be huge for Hartfield– one way or another. Meanwhile revenues are soaring. WeedMaps was making $20,000 a month a year ago, made $300,000 in August and $400,000 in September– all off of just 50,000 registered users.
Obviously, the money-making potential is huge, but is there a greater moral issue here? Hartfield doesn’t see one. Hartfield was the guest on NBC’s Press:Here this week, where he discussed a unique dilemma in Silicon Valley: Having a $120 billion market to yourself in which no VCs want to invest. It’s a reality that’s driven him to this odd, back-door IPO.
It’s also helping make his company a cause. “We want to make buying a share in this company like buying a share in the legalization of marijuana cause,” he says. Hartfield — so unabashedly libertarian he could make Peter Thiel swoon– thinks markets are better ways of assessing public opinion than media or political polls. So, he argues, if people vote with their money for WeedMaps, it’ll be a proxy for how people feel about the practicality of legalization, which he sees as an inevitability. (Morality aside, I take issue with his certainty in this clip. Even in gung-ho California, some medical marijuana advocates oppose recreational legalization.)
But the deal is about more than just finding a way to go public. The new company will acquire and roll-up several smaller companies, likely also around the cannabis issue. Meanwhile, Hartfield is doing a weed/Web landgrab, taking nearly every business model that’s worked on the Web and building a weed version. His core site is like Yelp for weed, containing a database of more than 25,000 strains, where they can be found and reviews on dispensaries and headshops. He even offers an “elite” status.
The company has another site called WeedVote.com that helps get out the legalization vote, and the newly launched WeedMart.com is an online headship and he’s about to launch a new daily deals site for pot– that’s right, yet another Groupon clone, this time to get high. There’s also a feature called “Weed or Skin”– like Hot or Not but where you vote for scantily clad women or pictures of pot. I’m not kidding. While Hartfield isn’t the first to try to make money off of a vice, he revels in it more than most. “We don’t like to be hypocritical, and we don’t think there should be arbitrary differences between recreational and medicinal,” he says. This is clearly as much about the cause as it is about the company for him. Agree with his stance or not, you have to respect the conviction.
In the clip below, Hartfield talks about America’s “chronic fear of freedom” and the challenges he’s faced building this business. Go here for the full episode, which includes his rebuttal to medical marijuana advocates that say recreational legalization is bad for those who need the drug for medical reasons
To summarize an hour of dialogue, you should at some point have a product that your readers will want. You should give a lot of free content away, but even when it comes to content, you can charge for some amount, and if your content is good enough, people will pay for the premium stuff. "You can tell them about ninety percent, and they'll pay money just to get the final ten percent," so they know they have the whole picture, Clark says.
Making money blogging will not happen overnight. Sometimes it may seem like this is possible, but in reality, it takes a lot of work. "Build something that is real and something that matters to people," Rowse advises. He shared a story about how he launched a product one day and literally watched the sales roll in. It was as if he had hit a button, and the cash just started flowing, but then he realized he had been working hard up to that point for over two years, promoting the blog, writing two posts a day, doing SEO, press releases, etc. It wasn't overnight.
You're not scalable, meaning that as your audience grows and more people want to connect with you, there will be a point where it just becomes too much. You have to set boundaries, otherwise you will have no time for yourself and your family.
Eventually, you're going to have to "get real" about how many meaningful connections you can make in a day, Simone says, adding, "That's part of growing up in social media.”
When they say "no one actually wants that much authenticity," they mean that nobody cares about what you did last night, who you were with, what you had for breakfast, etc. In other words, don't show everybody everything about yourself, because you're not writing for you. You're writing for them. Be who you want to be for your audience.
Ultimately, you're blogging and using social media to sell, but you can't just go around selling to people, because they won't have it. It just doesn't work. You have to make them want to buy. "You're selling yourself," says Clark. If you provide enough value to your audience, they will want to buy what you have to offer if it expands upon the value you're already giving them. "The content is the marketing," he says.
Just having a blog is not a business. If you want it to be a business you have to treat it like one, Rowse says. This is basically an extension of number 2.
The most important of the seven points is that no one is reading your blog. As Simone says, there are hundreds of millions of blogs, and that includes blogs on your topic. You have to write it in a way that is fresh, and either entertaining or informative. The good news is that you don't need "monster traffic". You just need a good, steady core audience for advertising to do well.
Surprise: Fox <b>News</b> signs Juan Williams to new $2 million deal <b>...</b>
Fox News Chief Executive Roger Ailes handed Williams a new three-year contract Thursday morning, in a deal that amounts to nearly $2 million, a considerable bump up from his previous salary, the Tribune Washington Bureau has learned. ...
Fox <b>News</b> Gives Juan Williams $2 Million Contract | 89.3 KPCC
NPR has been sharply criticized for terminating the contract of news analyst Juan Williams for remarks he made about Muslims. Williams appeared on Fox's "The O'Reilly Factor" Thursday night to respond to NPR's decision.
Fox <b>News</b> Gives Fired NPR Reporter Juan Williams Fat New Contract <b>...</b>
Williams, who has served as a part-time contributor on Fox News since 1997, got an expanded, multi-year deal from the cable channel Thursday. Terms were not disclosed, though a source close to the network said Williams is getting a pay ...
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