Ask HN: I know this isn't reddit, but please review my cannabis-related startup
Our site is an easy way to keep track of various marijuana strains and the different effects that they have on you. I was a newly-minted medical marijuana patient in California when this idea struck me. Visiting different dispensaries the volume of choices can sometime be overwhelming and they are as nuanced as a fine wine. I started keeping track of how I felt while smoking the various strains in a spreadsheet. Got together with a couple of friends and built the site in a few weeks (slow on the HN scale, I know).
The basic idea is to aggregate all the ratings and allow you to search and filter by the effect or medical relief that you are looking for. A secondary goal with the site was to make it very work friendly. There is no pot porn or pictures of giant leaves. Definitely not geared towards the stereotypical pot heads, focusing on all the other pot heads in the world that you don't know about.
http://www.leaf.ly
86 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadMedical marijuana is still not legal in most states. Viewing the site at work in a state where medical marijuana is not legal would probably raise a few eyebrows if noticed.
FYI: The search doesn't work - I tried a couple of strains listed on the homepage - such as G-13 - and it didn't return anything. I also tried some partial word searches and got nothing back.
Lead generation to dispensaries probably would work best - given the amount of first-time 'freebies' out there, I suspect they'd be willing to pay a fair amount for a new customer.
And I especially like the detailed page for each strain (e.g. http://www.leaf.ly/hybrid/ak-47). However, I wonder if the pie charts are the best way to convey the break-down of each strain. Sure, it makes it easy to see the relative effects for a given strain, but it makes it difficult to visualize the effects of one strain compared to another, because the position of a given effect in the graph is different for each strain. Maybe a simpler bar graph or something of that nature would be in order.
Also, along the same lines, maybe you could make it easier to do side-by-side comparisons. (btw, I also like the "Related" section on the detailed pages)
Comparing different strains is next on the list for features, have a couple good ideas floating around to make it pretty simple.
Also with that in mind, you could get rid of the Top 5 text list, since the data would be similarly efficiently portrayed visually.
Kudos to you for getting in early.
In particular, the state's 1 million Mormons will raise a huge ruckus over anything marriage-related and bring a bunch of other Christian groups into the ring spreading FUD.
Weed, on the other hand, doesn't really have any loud opponents and it's hard to spread FUD around it because it's a pretty familiar topic for Californians and it's already legal medically.
I don’t think legalization this year is as far-fetched as you make it out to be.
But working for tobacco companies seems pretty frowned upon, definitely something I wouldn't share openly if I did. Alcohol seems acceptable though, my mom used to work for the liquor licensing board (Canada) which sells and regulates distribution in Ontario.
Overall the design is quite nice and it's snappy, but I don't really see it as useful. Also, I think the only difference in marijuana strains is the thc %.......
One possibility would be to expand to cover other content like http://www.erowid.org/ if you could vette information and design it as nicely as leafly, I could see that picking up quite a bit of traffic.
The design is excellent, the UI is very well thought out, and I genuinely enjoyed fiddling with it despite having nothing more than a passing curiosity in the subject.
One caveat: make it more obvious initially that the filtering compounds on each other, I was slightly confused at the disparity initially. (I know it makes sense to have &&'d filters, just saying)
You've made something that is pleasing to the eye and enjoyable to use even for people who have no personal investment in the data. That's hard to do.
Great work, good luck.
Like any review site, you'll have to work hard to make sure that it isn't a ghost town when people arrive.
1) Explain how the rating system works. It's not obvious just by looking at it that you only get five point to allocate within each category.
2) Consider bringing the rating system more in line with the academic research, specifically with the book On Being Stoned.
http://www.druglibrary.org/special/tart/tart8.htm
http://www.druglibrary.org/special/tart/tart11.htm
There are several chapters worth of different effects, and since each strain is fairly consistent in its effects I think it makes sense to at least give users the chance to fill out a lengthier survey.
3) Bad design. Good design is supposed to remind you of something. This doesn't remind me of anything. Except maybe a generic web 2.0 looking site like OMGPOP. I'm not sure what the right look and feel is for a cannabis ratings guide, but I'm pretty sure this isn't yet. Maybe something that borrows inspiration from Zagats and Google Maps? You need a design that signals to a first time visitor that this is the authoritative site for this information, and this design doesn't send that signal at all.
4) If you want to start a marijuana-based web startup then you should make software for the dispensaries. This is enormous demand for this and it's completely unfilled. As a website I like leaf.ly conceptually, but as a startup I think it's most likely a really crappy idea.
An API?! Awesome! Seriously, kudos, this is a great site.
You can't post a site on HN if it doesn't have an api!
Is this your personal point of view, or an actual guideline for the site? If the latter, it's news to me, so thanks for citing it.
Also, since this is a startup, how do you plan to make a business out of this site?
Eventually we would like to have dispensaries manage their menus with us. Visitors could see if their favorite strain is available in their area, and dispensaries could notify users of specials via site/email/sms.
"3.5 The Applicant certifies that, to the best of his/her knowledge the domain name is not being registered for any activities/purpose not permitted under Libyan law."
http://www.nic.ly/regulations.php
"WHO DO YOU THINK??! points THE LIBYANS!!"
<3 BTTF
Flagged. (BTTF does rock though)
One thing that's a little odd is that from reading the site's content marijuana looks like a 100% perfect drug. I was expecting to find a section about undesired side effects, ideally for each strain, and particularly related to long term usage. E.g. I've heard pot users say that in some occasions they experienced paranoia, or mild depression.
In all seriousness, currently the effects listed are all positive. Some less than desirable effects would probably be useful such as paranoia, dizziness, etc.
Considering that even the academic studies on this are very unreliable, I think it would be virtually impossible to do this on the site unless you had tens of thousands of users filling out very detailed questionnaires.
Why doesn't the domain become clickable once the story passes a threshold?
Could you add value with an identifying image or other details of how the strain is ID-ed to help keep the data returned from users clean.
1. What do the different colors of the strains mean? It's kind of confusing. From the URLs I'm guessing that the colors correspond to Cannabis sativa, C. indica, and hybrid strains -- it would be helpful to see some explanation of this.
2. On the pages for individual strains, there are lists of descriptors (e.g. a strain might make people feel "Energetic"). These should be clickable, if someone wants to see what other strains are most strongly associated with those descriptors. You already have something like this on your Explore page, so the plumbing for this shouldn't be too terribly hard. You could probably just link to your Explore page with the appropriate URL parameters.
Congratulations on launching, by the way.
Definitely already working on the deep linking to effects.
Love the design, love the functionality.
Brilliant.