Ask HN: I know this isn't reddit, but please review my cannabis-related startup

Might want to get a backup domain... Libya isn't necessarily someone you want holding your company by the balls. It also appears they don't want offending content on .ly domains:

"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

Good tip! I remember how ruthless the Libyans were in back to the future.

I suppose if I'm to spend my karma it would be following up with comments such as this one:

"WHO DO YOU THINK??! points THE LIBYANS!!"

<3 BTTF

This whole submission and all of the comments belong on Reddit. Just because the title says "I know this isn't Reddit but...", doesn't make it OK.

Flagged. (BTTF does rock though)

ಠ_ಠ

I registered pr0n.ly and they ended up revoking it.

I think as marijuana legalization becomes more of an inevitability, the stigma surrounding this very real market opportunity will disappear.

Kudos to you for getting in early.

I'm wondering what the market on this site is, adsense I guess?

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.

Well, I would guess it will probably become about the same as working for the alcohol or tobacco industry.

Except that marijuana has never directly caused death (ever), is less addictive (almost non-addictive physiologically) and thus is far safer to use.

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.

That is what we are hoping, November will be the first test for California.

it's not going to happen any time soon. Look at the voting on prop 8 and imagine how much less controversial that is than legalizing weed.

I could be wildly mistaken, but I would think that marijuana is actually less controversial in California than gay marriage.

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 think you're wildly mistaken. I live in sf and know plenty of people in this community. Think of all the old people, the parents of 18-22 year old kids, the precedent it sets, etc. I'd be pleasantly surprised if that goes through, but it's not the first time it's been tried and I'd put $100 right now that it won't happen this year.

I’m 21 and my parents are in their 60s; we’re Judeo-Christian, we typically vote Republican, and we live in LA County. We briefly talked about this a number of months ago and I was surprised to hear them express that they might vote for legalization (mainly due to the additional revenue, less stress on our law enforcement system, etc.).

I don’t think legalization this year is as far-fetched as you make it out to be.

Yes, those people probably don't support it, but there isn't the loud controversy that you see over gay marriage. Most people are on one side or the other, but pretty close to the "meh" line, with probably more fervor on the pro-marijuana side.

Yes, you are way ahead of the game (social media-wise)

I agree - and like the site. Good clean design, am not an expert in the area but could get a sense of the different indices right off the bat.

There is definitely a need for a website like this. Right now the way strains are rated is terrible and tells you nothing about what the effects are actually like. Usually the descriptions just say something like, "uplifting and energetic" or whatever. Meh. My criticisms would be:

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.

Decent site. Probably not something you can raise money with or easily sell given the uncertainty surrounding marijuana laws in America, so I'd focus on revenue immediately and hope to make money out of cashflow.

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.

It's a very nice design as other have pointed out. I like the periodic-table-theme for the different strains.

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)

Thanks, the visualization of effects is definitely something we went back and forth on for a while. Ultimately settled on the pie chart just so we didn't spin for too long, and it's five minute implementation with google charts.

Comparing different strains is next on the list for features, have a couple good ideas floating around to make it pretty simple.

If you stick with normalized data (add up to 100%), though a pie chart may be visually appealing, I'd still go with a sorted bar graph. I always look for the most prevalent effect or two, and it takes me a couple of moments to maneuver around the pie chart to find them. A bar graph would fix it. Perhaps even statically ordered by labels so you can easily compare two strains visually.

Also with that in mind, you could get rid of the Top 5 text list, since the data would be similarly efficiently portrayed visually.

Another reason the pie charts probably aren't the best representation is because it implies that the different effects of a strain all add up to a whole. E.g. if the "lazy" effect gets larger, then the "sleepy" effect must get smaller, which we know isn't necessarily true.

You're right, hadn't thought of it that way.

I like the scatter plot with four quadrants, I think that's a good way to visualize things

http://www.leaf.ly

Why doesn't the domain become clickable once the story passes a threshold?

Simple and nice design; especially spot-on is the periodic table look & feel which is visually easy to remember.

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.

It is the perfect drug!

In all seriousness, currently the effects listed are all positive. Some less than desirable effects would probably be useful such as paranoia, dizziness, etc.

+1 for indicating paranoia. I had never experienced that from marijuana before and then a few months ago I tried some that made me flush the rest down the toilet.

"undesired side effects, ideally for each strain, and particularly related to long term usage."

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.

I love the irony of a pot site that took too long to build.

Like any review site, you'll have to work hard to make sure that it isn't a ghost town when people arrive.

Agreed, nothing worse than a review site that has no activity. That is one of the reasons we made the barrier of entry so low, no account required to review, etc.

When you say the site is "work friendly", I would imagine the site will still be added to many employers' list of restricted sites. I'm not sure that the actual content of the site would be the issue, rather the general category (i.e. drug related).

Medical 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.

Yes, that's true. I guess my definition would be if you are at a somewhat open workplace that isn't actively blocking sites, then you can be relatively comfortable having it up on your screen and not need to minimize it when anybody walks by.

It is a good thing we have smartphones.

how will you get people to remember to use leaf.ly?

Badges? It's become kind of cliche as of late, but it might work. I've known many a pot-smoker who were (overly) concerned with their rep as a connoisseur, as it were.

or cannabisseur (see my other comment)

Definitely an issue, even I am sometimes hesitant to get off the couch and go to my desk to write a review. iphone & android apps are in the works to help alleviate this problem. Also hoping to start partnering with some dispensaries and provide them with branded stickers for various strains that they can put on their meds, provide basic information and maybe a qr code for quick access.

Nice design, good looking site. In a mostly legal state (colorado) this wouldn't raise any eyebrows - denver or boulder.

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.

I know :(. We used the bing API to quickly set up search but they appear to be terribly slow at including pages in the index. After approximate one month, they are still only showing the homepage. Working on an alternative now, users definitely getting stuck.

From an SEO perspective, doing a "site:leaf.ly marijuana" search in Google resulted in only 6 results. "Cannibis" only shows 7. Adding more of these references and/or putting them in the URL may help.

Lovely clean design. Two things:

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.

You are right, the colors represent whether the strain is hybrid, indica, or sativa. Initially we played with coming up with some sort of hash based on the effects that would generate an rgb value, then similar strains would be a similar color. Couldn't get it to ever look very good so we stuck to the three color scheme.

Definitely already working on the deep linking to effects.

How do you recognise the different strains? I see 51 different labels, are you sure that people are naming the strains in the same way?

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.

The names you get from dispensaries should always be correct. If buying from a dealer on the street you may or may not be getting what they tell you (most likely not). The seed banks that originally create the strains will sometimes go as far as trademarking the name.

Nice site. What's your goal for users visiting? I see a signup link at the top right, which will be missed. If you want to get users to signup there should be a big signup button somewhere in the middle of the page.

An API?! Awesome! Seriously, kudos, this is a great site.

Signup is definitely nice but our main goal is to get as much data as is possible right now, so make it as easy as possible to submit ratings.

You can't post a site on HN if it doesn't have an api!

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.

Just personal.

For some reason, the effects listed for this strain, "MK Ultra", don't line up at all with the description...

http://www.leaf.ly/indica/mk-ultra

That is interesting. Could be because there is only one review and that guy is some sort of super human. But really it illustrates the usefulness of the site over other sites that post a single persons perspective on a strain.

Nice design. Did you do it yourselves?

Yes, team is two engineers (or developers?) and one designer.

I have some design comments.

How about mouseover states for everything that does something, buttons, links, the three top of page links etc

Couldn't understand the -0+ rating system quickly enough. Actually going back to it I can't understand it at all and don't want to give it any more time figuring it out.

All type rendered in Museo via typekit is very ragged for me. I think most of it would look better via cufon.

Overall very impressed, both with the concept which I think has a lot of value and the design.

Awesome, I had this same idea recently. I wanted to call it Cannabisseur and have the logo be a smug cartoony guy like the reviewer in Ratatouille, but smoking a joint or something.

I just didn't know enough about cannabis to really follow thru with it. Plus I came across http://nugporn.com/ and figured there were other strain reviewing sites like it.

Photos would be a good addition. It's not hard to believe that someone is calling/selling something under the wrong name.

Photos are left out intentionally because of the SFW aspect. That and I have always thought it a bit silly to just have macro shots of pot all over the place like most sites. I guess it could be useful in our case for classification purposes.

This made me remember that post from endlessvoid94. He has a site also related with marijuana consumers, who might be your target audience. Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1519535

BTW: I liked the clean design too. It kind of calls you to explore it.

The "explore" interface is really slick, but I can't link to or bookmark a search filter to share with anyone. It'd be easier to spread the word if I could pre-filter strains based on someone's particular needs/personality, and link them directly to that.

Also, since this is a startup, how do you plan to make a business out of this site?

Bookmark & browser history on the explore page is in the works.

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.

Excellent font. I was slightly disoriented after hitting the [Blog] link, and expected to still be at your site, but ended up at postereous - no biggy, just threw me for sec. I started adjusting the size of my browser to see why the background image wasn't aligned properly.

I really like this site. Even as a non smoker I found it really interesting to browse and read about the different types of strains available. It will be interesting to see how you can monetize but I think the backbone is there for a site that is easy to use and informative.

Need to update the top link on the about page: http://www.leaf.ly/company/about

The 'Discover New Strains' link is missing its CSS

Very nice. I'd love for someone to do this for cheese actually.

cheese.ly

Fantastic. I am looking forward to using it once recreational cannabis becomes legal in California.

Visit your local doctor this afternoon and you can enjoy the site tonight!

Awesome site, if only I didn't need cancer to get medical marijuana in Washington. :/

Yeah, it's cool but probably not worth getting cancer for.

Ha, definitely not. I meant it in the way that in California I could get it for things I have, but can't in WA.

very nice site, though the length of the "high" attribute is kind of hard to gauge, esp. if you're a chronic smoker.

True, and I think the reviews are most useful if you are filling them out while high, at which point you don't actually know how long it will last. That attribute isn't currently surfaced anywhere so we may end up scratching it at some point.

yeah, regardless, its a great start to building an official database of strains. well done

Gorgeous UI - are you a freelancer?

I am not, but our designer is.

Who is your designer?

Best. Site. Ever.

Love the design, love the functionality.

Brilliant.

Glad you like it!

you might also want to add some more general "about" and "guide" pages. nice web design

I don't smoke, but this is a remarkable web app.

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.

Awesome! Thanks for the feedback.

How do you plan on monetizing the site?

If dispensaries are for-profit, lead-gen could be a decent way to start out.

ads for munchies