Marijuana Business Magazine - February 2018

building their businesses. Scott said that knowledge “really helped guide us in identifying what kind of services we needed to provide. …So having that existing relationship, having that dialogue with previous cus- tomers goes a long way with this second project.” Those relationships also were good for Headset’s bottom line. “It was really valuable to be able to bring some siz- able early accounts to Headset that we might not have been able to get if we didn’t have the background or relation- ship from Leafly,” Scott noted. The LivWell Connection How were those relationships nur- tured in the first place? At Leafly, Scott, Wansolich and Vickers created an executive advisory board made up of industry leaders who also were Leafly clients. The board, Scott said, “provided a mecha- nism for us to get feedback on the Leafly system.” This board also led to many rela- tionships that went well beyond the standard business-client relationship. Consider LivWell, one of the largest retail chains in Colorado that also became one of Leafly’s early custom- ers. Plus, it was a member of the advisory board. The two companies developed a strong relationship, Scott said. LivWell was not just a major account, but a source of advice and feedback. When they launched Headset, the three founders went to LivWell, intro- duced the service and described the types of problems they wanted their software to solve. LivWell also became a beta partner to test the software. LivWell executives, for their part, out- lined their needs and the issues they encountered. “They gave us feedback on the types of dashboards and reports they were interested in utilizing. As they operate at such a large scale, listening to their feedback was critical for building a system that could meet the demands of the future of the cannabis indus- try, which will undoubtedly include larger-scale operations,” Scott said. ◆