The weed business model 🚬

from start-up to scale up!

Sep 30, 2020

Selling drugs online is not as hard as you think. You can open an online bank account in 2-clicks, create a fake Gmail account in 5-clicks and buy weed in 2 WhatsApp texts. Ubering is possible even drunk, escape games are at every street corner and driving hasn’t been easier with GPS. Basically what I am saying is that creating a business is now simple. Startups come to life every day. If you want to succeed in an online business selling drugs, you are gonna act like an innovative startup. Here are some success keys.

Inside the mafia:

Storytelling

Every business has a story of why they started dealing weed. Some would say it is a myth but I guess, it’s not. “I occasionally dealt in high school, but nothing serious. It really all started two years ago when I was a sophomore in college. I was tired of spending all my money on the pot so I did the math and decided to take the risk and start selling pot.” Most traditional dealers start exactly like this guy, by dealing small quantities to students at ivy leagues then, once expand their offers into the streets with a much bigger secretary. From small transactions to big orders, they aim to maintain trust with their suppliers and customers.

The first rule of making business: Trust

I guess, the biggest mafia movies on Netflix taught us many things. One of them is that business means business, only when there is trust between the parties. Exactly like any business, the weed industry is about building trust, an unbreakable link between 2 people that never met before. Some of the most incredible drug and weed lords in history died or got arrested breaking this first rule. Joaquin “El Chapo” (“Shorty”) Guzmán Loera was the world’s most-wanted drug kingpin and was arrested in a joint U.S.-Mexican operation in Mazatlán, Mexico, after outrunning law enforcement for more than a decade.

Finding the right supplier 📦

netflix animation GIF by Best Served Bold

For every product, there needs to be a perfect place you can get your “fresh meat”. The dark web is heaven. As simple as Amazon with books, Tor is the perfect example of this huge online marketplace where you can buy quite anything. Approximately 96% of the digital universe is on deep websites protected by more powerful passwords than your tradition [Name123,]. Simple as an apple store, you can pay anything at any amount by untraceable cryptocurrencies. Once you become trusted, you can order in quantities and be recommended to bigger suppliers, exactly like TripAdvisor.

2 Qualities, 2 effects

Watching Disjointed on Netflix is enough to understand there are 2 kinds of weed in the market: Sativa and Indica. Watch this video to instruct yourself.

Some may say it’s traditional but I say it’s effective. Another way to find good drugs is to search on Resident Advisor for a good rave that is happening around you and go straight there. Any good dealer would be present at these sorts of events. Well, now the irrelevant question is how relevant a buying mean for drugs is at this moment of the article? Well, it is quite simple: Find the source, test the goods, do better. The old-fashioned competitive advantages ;)

Competitor Advantages📊

Legalize Bob Marley GIF by Feliks Tomasz Konczakowski

Let’s do this. Doing a bench market is crucial to any business, weed or else. There are many ways to do so but the most effective one is to get into the world of weed.

One way is to consume the goods you wanna sell. Yes, be a consumer or at least ask friends around you for their feedback. Trying the right goods from many sources can enlighten the loophole of any business. Try Spotify and Soundcloud. Finding there are not enough podcasts can lead to the creation of a specialised app for podcasts, meet Majelan.
Observe! Yes. Observation can be very fruitful especially in finding new, more effective ways to sell your drugs. Going where your customers go will lead you to how your consumers buy their goods and for how much. An amazing place to watch business in action in the park…
When you finish watching both consumers and competitors, it’s time to attack the internet and new innovative ways to sell. It’s the hardest part for some countries, the easiest for others. In California, easy peezy. In France, meuhhh. You’ll just have to be creative on this one. Find a solution, test it with your first customers and ask their feedback. Improve and move on.

How to hire your business developers?💰

Some say that business developers are the core of every business. Some say that tech geeks are the core. It’s arguable I guess. But to be honest, without good business developers, there is no future for your company. Good business developers in these kinds of businesses are no traditional ones. Networking is the best skill to have. It’s something you acquire over time. Normally, you should be the first business developer. Now, don’t get me wrong. Start small by selling at college then move to the streets and make your way up. No way, you’ll be able to be sold to the biggest and richest kid in New York. You’ll make your network from the ground’s up, like LinkedIn. Think connections, think about how close you are with your clients, think about the amount they are willing to pay. Closer you are with your regular clients, cheaper the goods can be and better quality they expect from you. To illustrate my point, I’ll take a recent adventure that happened to me: I used to rent cars from Sixt all the time. Recently, I rented a jeep for a ski trip. No snow tires, no after-sale services and mistakes on booking reservations. I expected something in return, as I was a recurring client. I never did get a gesture from them. Well, it’s simple, no more Sixt.

Use the right tool 📦

[source]

Startups love new tools that can manage 5K of emails at the same time, 20 to-dos lists and 200K clients at the same time. Well, why not use it! Simply adapt it to your business model.

If you are an e-commerce, you’ll probably use: Wordpress with Shopify or Woocommerce, Crisp chat and Aircall for customer service and Hubspot for your marketing and biz dev work.
If you are a small guy at home managing a team of dealers in the streets, think of investing in a Telegram for a safe newsletter for your customers, WhatsApp business account for your team communication (share location and stuff), Pipedrive for CRM and a blog. Don’t forget to use emojis to describe the goods to your customers, untraceable ;)

Modern Business Model 🏋🏻‍♂️

Today, it’s quite easy to sell illegal or legal drugs online. It takes 2 minutes to create a badass website, SEO friendly and ship your goods to your customers.

Rebranding Online

Branding a commodity is now pretty standard. You just need to figure out your tone you wanna give to your first customers. The friendly one or the serious one? From that, you start brainstorming your name, number or logo everywhere. Start by tagging your school with your stickers then send weekly WhatsApp to your first customers. Once you have your image figured out, it’s time to design a badass website!

So, create a badass website 😎

Buy a public or private domain and start building your website using your color codes. If you are not that entrepreneurial, there are many “eBay” or “Etsy” kind-of-businesses for weed, legal or illegal. Why illegal? Well, in some countries, weed is still illegal so you may want to be on the darknet. If you are actually a badass developer like the guy from “How to sell drugs online fast”, you can design the most beautiful website, responsive to mobile and desktop for better customer experience.

Acquisition Channel: The right product to the right people

Selling drugs online is easy. And, what if I told you that advertising is even easier? With the boom of the internet, broadcasting your offer out is a piece of cake. Many ways I suggest you should follow:

Send a mass email to your classmate by scrapping the school database! Yes. Exactly like Mark Zukerberg did when he launched his first Facebook!
Send over broadcast messages on WhatsApp or Telegram: Yes, new text apps use “untraceable” messages and let you talk on a safe network to all your friends in a glimpse. This tech actually helped businesses around the world to grow exponentially. It will become your favourite acquisition channel… and the cheapest! The cost of acquisition is literally 0. The LinkedIn of your startup! The old phone you will use is actually your secure database where you gather all your customers’ likes and dislikes their phone numbers and addresses. Your baby CRM that any dealer loves ;)
Share a video directly from your dorm room thanks to Youtube :) It may be taken down by Google but I guess it’s worth the 2K first views you’ll get!
Partner with legit people: Marijuana is legal in many countries or states now. Partnering with legitimate business in your country can increase the chance of getting new customers. For example, partnering with Escobar’s grandson can bring you credibility in the goods you are selling ;)

Check your pricing strategy 🤑

Pricing means product quality in most cases. Well here, it’s a bit different. You are selling different goods at different prices for different people. Each customer their preferences. But you must choose one pricing strategy you wanna stick to for newcomers. On average, good quality for 5g of weed is 50euros, the hash is 40euros. Good quality always means the origin of the growth (Amsterdam or Lebanon 🇱🇧 (Bekaa Valley)) and the component (Sativa or Indica and how much % is it). [Source]

Grow your own s*!**

Selling weed seems like a cash cow, but the real money these days is in the real estate that represents the most crucial part of the cannabis business, like McDonald’s at the time of “the Founder” movie! If you have enough daily customers, it’s time to go to the next step: Go worldwide! Going worldwide means starting to invest in plantation sites. You can grow your own weed trees in your dorm room, at your back-yard or at sites. It all depends on the quantity you wanna sell and the frequency.

Shipping & Delivery 📮

To deliver your products to your clients, prospects or newer clients. The old-fashioned way, uber this s***! Drug dealers in Paris are currently using shared bikes and scooters to send products to their customers.

Deliverooooing

Bike messengers travel across town all day and all night long. They are the less controlled bikers in Paris, plus, they are fast! What a good way to deliver your products. La Poste has no policy for drugs in Europe so packaging your drugs in a 0.2euros pack is perfect to send it to your abroad customers. The only problem is that your business won’t be scalable worldwide.

“There is a big population of people who are open-minded about cannabis, but want nothing to do with traditional ‘stoner’ culture.”

Growth Mode 🚀

💣 TREND! Weed vaporizers

In the three years since “vape” was voted word of the year, it’s turned into a synonym for marijuana vaporizers, as well as e-cigarettes. That’s thanks to a growing market of portable devices that make consuming marijuana as easily accessible and fashionably demure as checking the time on a phone.

there are mainly two types of vaporizers: desktop vapes and portable vapes.
clean-up is minimal and usually limited to the tank/chamber and mouthpiece
Portable vapes are also a hell of a lot more discreet to use and carry around.
The vapor from a vaporiser typically doesn’t smell
It is legal in the US and some other countries. For more information on marijuana laws, visit Norml.
We don’t yet know about its long- and short-term effects on health.

💣 TREND! Welcome to the munchies industry! 🍔

patrick eating GIF by SpongeBob SquarePants

Roam around Amsterdam while high is the best experience of your life. You’ll be able to test all kinds of food from different cultures in a very affordable way.

“Munchies” is the world we say when, after smoking weed, start mixing every kind of food together to create something that has no name. A pure creation from your “highness”. Here is some great food to test when high:

KFC family bucket, In & Out Animal Burger and Fries, Taco Bell, Chilli’s for some Nachos, Hector Chicken,…

For more advice, click here.

💣 TREND! Medical Marijuana 💊

The growing number of people who now turn to medical marijuana for relief from such ailments as pain, nausea, and PTSD has also helped normalize its use — and sparked pressure to ease restrictions on medical research to determine where else it might help. Advocates say one of the biggest reasons to support legalisations is the simplest. Marijuana is less addictive and causes fewer health problems than tobacco or alcohol, so the public health concerns used to justify its ban are unfounded.