Pubdate: Wed, 11 Sep 2013
Source: East Bay Express (CA)
Copyright: 2013 East Bay Express
Contact: http://posting.eastbayexpress.com/ebx/SubmitLetter/Page
Website: http://www.eastbayexpress.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1131
Author: David Downs

WEEDMAPS NOW CATERS TO SOCCER MOMS

The Internet's largest legal weed finder is a weathervane for the 
marijuana movement and the winds of change are blowing toward the mainstream.

The world's largest online cannabis finder, WeedMaps.com, rebooted 
its website and apps on iOS and Android in mid-August, in a symbolic 
and very real attempt to re-orient the site toward mainstream 
America. The sixty-person, Southern California- and Colorado-based 
company has ditched its weedy, original logo for a much cleaner, more 
neutral one: "wm" with a smiley emoticon underneath. The site itself 
is faster and less cluttered, though we experienced some crashes on 
the iPad app, and app reviewers report some annoying bugs.

Founder Justin Hartfield said the private company, which grosses 
about $1.5 million per month in dispensary ads, was worried about 
abandoning its stoner aesthetic with the update. But the future 
beckons, and it's decidedly more staid. "We wanted to be more 
inclusive, and we found out our old logo was offending certain 
folks," he said. "We wanted to be brighter, happier, less cartoonish, 
more professional, and reflect what marijuana is in our culture."

WeedMaps.com started in 2007 when Hartfield, a veteran search engine 
optimization marketer, sought medical marijuana in Southern 
California and was unsatisfied with online directories. Today, the 
company has two offices, lists 3,500 dispensaries nationwide, hosts 
30,000 strain reports and 60,000 weed photos, and sells 60,000 
products. Sister site Marijuana.com rakes in 2 million pageviews per 
month. But WeedMaps had also become a technologically creaky visual 
madhouse before this summer's reboot.

Hartfield said the company spent three months rebuilding the site 
from the ground up on the "super-trendy" database platform Ruby on 
Rails. "We've made a lot of performance improvements and now we have 
a clean slate to run really quickly," he said.

The site runs on a Google Maps interface. Launch the app on your 
iPhone in the East Bay and it pinpoints your location and shows San 
Francisco and Oakland covered in dispensaries and delivery options on 
a map. Swipe your finger east past the Berkeley hills and the deep 
East Bay is all delivery services. Cities like Moraga, Walnut Creek, 
and Concord maintain blanket bans on all storefront dispensaries, but 
WeedMaps connects patients in those suburbs to a vibrant array of 
not-so-clandestine pot clubs on wheels.

WeedMaps users review such services heavily, providing some of the 
only available information on services' reputation and wares amid the 
totally unregulated, hyper-libertarian dystopia of California medical 
cannabis. But the site's old look was off-putting for new users, 
Hartfield said. The old WeedMaps icon was a bud leaf under a magnifying glass.

"Our branding was so in-your-face," he said. "It was a product of 
2007, when dispensaries were a rebellious act. It was still very much 
a Cheech & Chong stoner culture. Now that it's moved from pot culture 
to pop culture, we wanted to represent that."

The new logo's smiley face evokes the happy feeling you get finding 
and using great weed, he said. WeedMaps is planning a slew of 
features for its dispensary partners, and for restaurants, and other 
food delivery services. "So many people are interested in being on 
the map," he said.

So far, early responses have been positive. The app has 4.5 out of 5 
stars in 96 reviews in the Apple App Store. Hartfield said the site 
was down for 30 hours during the changeover, but traffic is back to 
its pre-launch levels of about 100,000 unique viewers per day via 
desktop and mobile platforms. "If nobody leaves, that's a success," he said.

In regards to WeedMaps' new branding, Hartfield acknowledged that 
some of the site's longtime users "have been alienated by it" and 
still prefer the old logo. "They love the pot leaf in the magnifying 
glass," he said. "I love that logo."

But new reviewers also say things like: "I can now move this app out 
of a folder (due to the plant itself not being a part of the App's 
logo anymore, LOL!)"

WeedMaps users mostly check out menus after work, looking for what's 
new and tested, and sharing "what they are smoking on," Hartfield 
said. The site retains some stoner features like a 4:20 alarm.

Due to a policy issue with Apple, WeedMaps can't show weed prices in 
the app. You must click on a link launching a web browser, which is 
clunky. Reviewers also report a variety of bugs: menus not 
displaying; the app crashing; maps malfunctioning. Hartfield said 
more technical changes and updates are to come.

The young entrepreneur has also branched out. One of WeedMaps' 
ancillary companies runs inventory management software for nine 
hundred clinics. And Hartfield's new venture capital firm Emerald 
Ocean Capital is creating even more new businesses. "The deal-flow 
has been tremendous, as has the attention that we're getting, the 
amount of investors that are interested, and the entrepreneurs' 
business plans we're seeing," he said. "We're seeing heavy hitters 
from Ivy Leagues."

And WeedMaps is looking to the 2016 election in California, hoping to 
be involved in a broad coalition that will legalize pot in the Golden 
State. That means less stoner antics at WeedMaps and more appeals to 
the soccer moms coming into the movement.

"We've got to change because the industry is changing and more and 
more people are discovering the beneficial effects of marijuana. The 
demographics are changing us."
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom