Jason Hardy is co-founder of Cann Standard.
What is Cann Standard and what does it do?
Hardy: Cann Standard’s mandate is to define cannabis markets. We log listing information for cannabis products anywhere we can find them, from producer and dispensary websites to larger cannabis listing sites and review websites. We process the data and report on trends in the market.
Why did you decide to start this company?
Hardy: When we became medical patients there wasn’t any comparative pricing information on licensed producers in Canada. Coming from a background in real estate market research, we applied some basic price analysis and tracking to the cannabis market.
While a lot of people were focused on becoming producers or retailers, we saw an opportunity from a data perspective – to be able to track and synthesize data about the industry for a variety of audiences, including academia and investment firms.
What do you see as the growth potential for the company?
Hardy: We hope to grow along with the market. As the market becomes more competitive, our pricing research will become more valuable and necessary for producers and retailers. Inventory metrics are always important to brokerages analyzing the publicly-traded companies so we hope to expand that channel as well.
We recently launched a fee-based subscription service that allows companies to access a variety of reports, with different levels of sophistication depending on their needs. There has been significant interest in this model so we anticipate our subscription base to grow as well.
What are your growth plans for the company?
Hardy: We’re continually expanding to track the growing number of producers, retailers and wholesale manufacturers, both in Canada and the U.S. Our insights have great potential for retailers and producers looking to price their products competitively in the market.
Because we process so many listings, we also have consumer-facing information for those looking for value, quality or rarities within the market.
It seems everyone is talking about cannabis these days. Is there a risk of oversaturation in the marketplace with all the people jumping on the bandwagon to set up different businesses related to this industry?
Hardy: It will be interesting to see how the industry continues to emerge in the coming months. With our pricing data, we can see trends in increases and decreases in the market from the hundreds of thousands of data points that we track.
We’ll be paying close attention to the capacity coming online at the end of this year and into 2019 and will be able to share the data and trends with our consumers.
– Mario Toneguzzi
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