Show HN: Detailed data on every cannabis retailer and producer in Washington | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Detailed data on every cannabis retailer and producer in Washington

topshelfdata.com

73 pointstopshelfdata19 comments

Hi folks, I'm one of the founders. Happy to answer any questions. A few tidbits:

* The data comes from WA public records. Can you believe that every single plant, harvest, and retail transaction is not only stored (that's a law called traceability) but also made available as a public record?

* We have been live since January, 2017, so this is very new.

* The model is SaaS, we have several paying customers already.

* Most of our customers are cannabis businesses in the state, using the site to understand price, competition, and benchmarks (what products to sell etc.).

How do you feel about this data being recorded and available, considering existing Federal Laws supersede state and local laws, making everyone on here an admitted criminal, if the Federal Government chooses to enforce already existing laws?

Americans are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Tell that to the ATF

> As provided by 27 C.F.R. 478.11, "an inference of current use may be drawn from evidence of a recent use or possession of a controlled substance or a pattern of use or possession that reasonably covers the present time"

Therefore any person who uses or is addicted to marijuana regardless of whether his or her State has passed legislation authorizing marijuana use for medicinal purposes, is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled substance and is prohibited by Federal law from possessing firearms or ammunition.

https://www.atf.gov/file/60211/download

Obtaining a medical marijuana card, or purchasing it recreationally is an admission of guilt as far as they are concerned

The idea that the Federal government may crack down is certainly unsettling. Even without the detailed traceability public records data being available, the cat is already out of the bag.

For instance, by entering a highly regulated industry, these businesses have to submit a ton of paperwork - including federal income taxes, company formation documents, employment information, etc.. Furthermore, to operate successful, they have to advertise, and are already visible in print papers, billboards, trade shows, magazines, etc.

If anything, we hope that this data demonstrates that legal cannabis is an industry just like any other: prices go down as competition increases, variety and quality increase over time, jobs are created, there is significant tax revenue, etc.

One last thing: there is nothing identifying about the customers that is in this data, since everyone pays in cash.

(Apologies for my slow response, comments are throttled, and HN is asking me to wait before submitting new answers.)

Interesting timing given that the Federal government has recently shared that they will "step up marijuana law enforcement". I wonder if some Fed might buy a subscription for the purposes of initial planning.

I assume it would be easier to get the data directly from the state government, right?

If it's aggregated from multiple places, probably not. Cross-agency requests, I imagine, aren't fun. Especially when it's potentially pissing off the receiver of the request. I assume Washington is big on "state rights". They would need to at some point if they planned on using it in court, but paying a small sum for already aggregated would potentially make the planning part faster.

I'd imagine that the state wouldn't be eager to cooperate.

Yes, that is correct. What we have is a subset of what the state makes available as a public record.

The state has this data, and much more already.

Probably not easier at all, quite the opposite.

Raw data may be very available, but to the average investigator not of much use without reporting and analysis being done for them.

I am working on a project processing public data and reselling it, similar to you. Is it legal to resell public information? What rationale did you use to defend paying for it? Also how did you arrive at/figure out your pricing?

Thanks for the questions. My apologies for the slow response, HN is throttling my comments. Here we go:

1. I'm no lawyer, but we did confirm with the state public records office that we can charge for this -- so yes, selling this data is legal. I think this is true for other public data sets as well, considering the numerous businesses that pull public records data, munge, and resell (e.g., background checks).

2. The rationale for charging for it was simple: the data in its raw form requires processing that our customers can't afford to do. If you're a retail store, hiring a programmer or even Excel-savvy analyst is too expensive. These businesses are happy to pay a fee to access this data.

3. Pricing: we spoke with numerous potential customers when developing the idea and product. Pricing is a part of the product, and was something we tested by asking for their tolerance.

I'm curious of why you offer a free tier instead of just a trial period. Seems like this would be pretty valuable data for other cannabis retailers.

We debated this one quite a bit, and ultimately went with a free tier instead of free trial because: (a) it gives us public free content that can be used for SEO, and (b) reduces the barrier for trial and sign up.

Finally, the free tier is data from a year ago instead of the most recent publicly available data (2 months ago), so while retailers can get some benefit, the paid tier is much more fresh and actionable.

My mistake! I read that as they can get data for the last year, not that it was year old data.

This is cool! Is similar data available for other legal states? Are you working on implementing similar services for those states?

Traceability exists in all states where it is legal, so other states do collect this level of data.

However, Washington is the only state with an incredibly transparent public records law that makes this data available to the public.

Given that, and to answer your question: no, we do not plan on implementing this in other states -- but we do have some related cannabis industry software ideas that we will launch in a few weeks.

what kind of format does the public record give you?

Is it reasonable or do you have to scrape through and make your own JSON?

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