Don’t miss out on our latest episode of Cannabis Pros and Marketing Masters! Episode 1 features an exclusive interview with Jessica Reilly-Chevalier, hosted by Nigel Despinasse, where they dive deep into the dynamic world of cannabis marketing.
Episode 1 Guest Jessica Reilly-Chevalier
ND: All right. Hello everybody. Welcome to the inaugural Cannabis Pros and Marketing Masters hosted by the Beard Bros Network.
Today we have a really exciting episode for you guys. We’re gonna be going through marketing and freelancing in the realm of cannabis, as well as covering some different micro and macro topics and what’s going on today in the industry.
We’ll be joined by Jessica Reilly, who is the editor at Fat Nugs Magazine and freelance marketer extraordinaire. So to give you guys kind of an outline of what’s going on, we’re going to start off with the opening discussion, kind of break some things down, go into the interview portion with Jessica and then kind of do a roundup of current events.
So Yeah, to lead it off, man, so much is going on. So many things are happening. The industry is moving fast as always. We’ve got a lot of behemoths kind of coming into the game in terms of media, beard bros, fat nugs. Jessica is an absolute powerhouse when it comes to the editing side of that and kind of making sure everything runs right. Jessica, if you’d like to give a brief introduction about yourself and kind of tell everybody who you are.
JRC: Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Nigel. My name is Jessica Reilly-Chevalier. I am a freelance writer and editor in the cannabis space, and I am also a digital nomad. I live in a 2015 Ford Transit, traveling the United States with my husband and my dog.
ND: Awesome. I have been inside that van, and it is fantastic.
JRC: You have, actually.
ND: I have. You made your way through to Baton Rouge before. Honestly, that is as ideal of a living situation in as small corners as you can get in.
JRC: Yeah, I have the largest size van they make. They don’t make them any bigger than this, so we fit everything in there that we could. We’re pretty comfortable. It’s a good time.
ND: Absolutely. I was about to say a family of three with a puppy. Yeah, I love that. So yeah, you guys, today we’re going to be kind of going through on marketing and cannabis, what that entails, how that goes, being a freelancer in the space, and then kind of what media is, where it’s going in the space, and how we can kind of see what’s coming in terms of the tides of legalization, rescheduling, descheduling, kind of how this industry is forming through the lens of a marketer or as from a media perspective.
So I have been working in the cannabis industry for the past seven years, mainly through cultivation, packaging, facility design, sales and marketing perspective. Then coming into a writing perspective, actually starting off with Fat Nugs as well. So, yeah, it’s a nice kind of a bridge between worlds to have Jessica and I on this call because we both represent Fat Nugs and I’m over here on the Beard Bros team as well. So, yeah, just to kind of lead it off with you guys, I really just want to understand in terms of how as a copywriter, Jessica, you came into the space, right? You worked with other clients outside of the field of cannabis. What kind of drew that magnet to you to say cannabis is where I want to go next?
JRC: I started freelancing four years ago, which is absolutely crazy to think about. And I’ve been working in cannabis for three of those. After I started freelance writing, I actually did it to move into the van. I wanted to build a business that I could run from the road. But we had a couple things pop up in our lives as things tend to, and I had to make a decision in my business. And I wasn’t happy with general writing. I had to niche down. I had to pick something that I could specialize on.
When I sat down with myself and I said, what do I really want to become an expert on? I mean, the answer was just weed. It was that nothing else even came close to piquing the same amount of interest. I love to read about weed. I love to write about weed. I love to talk about weed. I love to read scientific studies and share information. Like if I was going to nerd out about something, it had to be this plant.
ND: I absolutely love that. I feel like there’s a trillion things you can dissect about weed and kind of the different routes that you can go down with it. I know in terms of kind of the amount of clients that you worked with in the portfolio that you’ve built, it ranges anywhere right from human interest stories all the way out to things like the Conigma where you’re covering like a very academic forward things about cannabis. Is there any type of realm that you prefer to play in? Because I know you’ve kind of taken more of a meta role recently as going into an editor and kind of overseeing what comes through the magazine.
JRC: I love the variety. I got that neurodivergent brain that always needs novelty. So I love constantly having something new to work on. I mean, there’s a special place in my heart for the really deep dive scientific articles that I get to do at The Cannigma because I love dissecting those studies into things that are actually understandable for consumers. Cause I don’t know if you’ve talked to a scientist recently. I don’t know if you’ve read a scientific study recently. They are not written for the everyday person. Like they use words you never hear outside of their specific realm. So, I always enjoy doing that, but I love the novelty. I love getting to talk to people. I love the variety of things that I get to write about within weed.
ND: I love that, being like the bridge between, uh, like a bridge of understanding essentially to the masses is like a really important role that a marketer and a writer plays and finding a way to uh, verbalize or, break down concepts that typically are very difficult to kind of chew on and make them palatable for consumers is an unspoken hero type of thing that goes on.
So, I really appreciate it. And like in the same way, right? Like whenever you’re writing, whenever I’m writing an article, right, I send it to you and you’re like, what do you really mean by this? And people have to point that out. That’s the way that you kind of have people really assimilate and understand information around this plant and kind of what’s going on, you know?
JRC: Yeah, absolutely. You don’t need a PhD to understand cannabis. But you do need to take some time to learn about the plant and to learn about your body. It also should be accessible to everybody to do so, it shouldn’t be complicated to do so.
ND: I totally agree with that. I totally agree. And in terms of, you know, transitioning out of that space, right, I know we’ve talked about it like personally a little bit. But what in terms of the clients that you were taking on prior, what fields were those in?
JRC: It was just, I was a general writer, so I was really just trying to take on any clients I could to build a portfolio. It was my first six months of being a freelance writer, I didn’t really have a leg to stand on in any direction. So I was just taking whatever came my way. And what quickly became very apparent was I wasn’t a general writer. I didn’t want to offer a general suite of services. I needed something that I could specialize in and become an expert in to really dig in and get that professional satisfaction. I wanted to know that I knew what I was talking about and I wasn’t just writing.
ND: Right. Give Google more things to eat.
JRC: Yeah, exactly.
ND: I get that. And in terms of like the I guess the the challenges, right? Because I feel like kind of what you were saying earlier, right? I’m the same way. I have massive ADHD and a neurodivergent brain, which I feel is just like a general tendency of writers almost, you know, um, yeah. What’s up with that?
JRC: In terms of doing that, when you chose to go into cannabis, was it one of those things where you were like, I know enough about this to where I’m going to start building that knowledge block and expanding it out and then taking clients as it goes? Or is it one of those things where I feel like as writers, a lot of times we have to almost educate ourselves in public and really build an understanding as we’re going through the writing process. So what was that in terms of, um, I guess, bolstering that knowledge of cannabis and like being really confident in saying I can take work from you because I know I’m going to deliver exceptional results.
JRC: I love that phrase, learning in public. Cause that’s exactly what you have to do. And when I came into cannabis, that’s what I had to do. I didn’t have any cannabis clients. I didn’t have a portfolio that I could show people to say, look at my work in cannabis.
So I created a blog. And I started writing about what interested me about cannabis on that blog, just so I had something to point to, to say, look, I’ve written about cannabis before. It was for myself, but don’t worry about that part. I can write about cannabis for you. I can do the research. I can cite my sources.
So I really had to build it up as I went. I mean, when I started, I didn’t even understand that CBD interacts with different endocannabinoid receptors than THC. You know, I did not know much more than most people know. Weed will get you high, that’s about it. So I really had a lot to learn, even as somebody who already had a good relationship with the plant. I had a lot to learn.
ND: Oh, I love that. That’s kind of quintessential for people to understand because part of this episode, right, is giving people an understanding of what it takes to get into marketing within the industry. And I think oftentimes and you probably see this, too, whenever you talk to marketers or people who are curious about breaking into the industry, it’s one of those things where you will almost never feel confident enough to be able to tackle the topics that are as wide ranging in the world of cannabis as it is. Like the public education and the willingness to be wrong or stumble through things is almost an absolute necessity. And then you take that to an extreme by being a freelancer and saying, I’m going to do this at kind of a reputational risk. You know what I mean? But I know that I’m going to push through to get something done.
JRC: Yeah. You have to be willing to be wrong in public. I always tell people, I am not a scientist. I do not claim to be a scientist. I don’t have a science background. I’m just somebody who likes to read about weed. And sometimes that’s reading studies. Sometimes that’s books.
I just like to absorb all the information that I can. It doesn’t always mean that I’m going to get it 100% right. But after three years in this industry, yeah, I know a hell of a lot more than I did when I first came in there. And that’s just that willingness to learn in public.
ND: I love that. Yeah, that’s the truth. It’s almost one of those things where the industry is also learning at the same pace that we are, if that makes any sense. I feel like every other week something comes out about a different cannabinoid, a different layer of terpenes or sulfuric terpenes or whatever it is that comes out that adds a different depth of knowledge to what’s going on in the world of weed. I love that. Just to give that, again, to shout that out to everybody who wants to enter the space through a marketing perspective.
You’ve got to be willing to just be open to educating yourself and like being potentially wrong about the things in the effort of trying to, to give that information more out to the public, because, um, weed is still a mystery to a lot of us. No one’s been able to study it except for the past maybe decade. And it’s been a sliver of what it’s going to be in the future. So I appreciate that. I love that. That was very much a similar perspective from where I came from too. I’ve always been like a weed nerd, so to say, right? Like I’ve, I’ve never, I like, it’s one of those things where, and like you said, neurodivergent brain, your brain kind of just latches onto the things that it cares about. And it really just shuffles away all this stuff that you don’t care about. Right, so I really can’t care about things that I don’t care about, which is terrible to say. Uh, but it’s the truth.
When it came to working in weed and learning and weed, that’s why I’ve hopped around a bunch of different roles in those fields, just because I genuinely just want to soak up a bunch of different things about weed. Whether that’s from how to package it, whether that’s from how to cultivate it perspective, how to trim it properly, how to uh cure it properly. Anything like that, and I feel like that knowledge base and that kind of hunger for knowledge is what gave me that knowledge base to feel comfortable about writing about this. This is something that I think is also something that holds people back and I think from both of us on this honestly it’s a good perspective, right?
When it comes to successful marketing strategies in cannabis, people feel like they don’t have a whole lot of, I don’t want to say wiggle room. Cause there really isn’t like, you know, a lot of places where you can’t make wellness claims or anything like that.In terms of the restrictions that you have, how do you get creative in seeing what successful marketing strategies are within the cannabis world?
JRC: That’s a good question, and that’s a tough question because I can’t tell you how your business should be creative. That’s the thing about creativity is you have to be creative in the cannabis space, and I can’t tell you how to be creative. You have to figure that out for your business. sometimes you don’t have to get super creative you can get billboards you can use seo which is a really really important tactic for any business in this cannabis space is seo huge huge tactic but I can’t tell you how to get creative you have to know your company your brand your product and your audience to know how to get creative in a way that works with them
ND: Absolutely speaking through that brand voice to really connect with people and then have that somehow amplify the message
JRC: Yeah
ND: I double down on that though. I like, that’s probably in terms of, I think, you know, you’ve seen stuff like Cann and Weedmaps. They’ve taken kind of, to be fair Weedmaps is not weed directly, but they’ve taken a bunch of different campaigns in terms of trying to raise awareness through advertising or different commercials or things like that. I think they found a lot of success in that, I just don’t know how that’s translated out into the world of buyers of people consumers who are buying I think from an AdWeek perspective. It was really well adorned and loved which is great because I do think creativity pays dividends. I think those real tangible results are what a lot of businesses are looking for, especially since they’re going through overregulation, overtaxation and all the things that are kind of slowly bleeding our business out, you know. But SEO is the top dog, I feel like that.
JRC: It is, and I love Cann’s commercials. I think they do a great job. They have a willingness to look silly that allows them to go the extra mile as creatives. But like you said, that doesn’t necessarily translate into consumers. And it just shows you don’t have to do that in order to get people to be aware of your brand, come to your website and buy for you. Your creativity doesn’t have to be big and splashy. It can just be a different approach to the same problem.
ND: Oh, I really like that. There’s a…sorry for the small tangent. There’s a term that my friend in medicine told me that’s called obliquity. And it’s whenever you’re taking an x-ray or an MRI of something. And if you’re looking from just one perspective, you may not catch something. But if you take multiple screen images from different perspectives, you might actually catch the problem, which I feel like is a really great way to put that.
JRC: Yes. And to put it in perspective of a team, you want cognitive diversity for that kind of thing. You want people who think very differently because they have very different life experiences because it gives them very different perspectives on the same problem, giving you that 360 on, let’s call it a broken bone to solve it, to solve that problem, to fix that bone, whatever you need to do.
ND: Right, right, right. And echo chamber is never going to be the thing that that. Especially I feel like in a marketing perspective, right? You want this diversity, like almost like warring thoughts on things, so that people can really come up with something that’s innovative and different.
JRC: Yes, absolutely. If you have everybody in one room who comes from the same place, has the same perspective on life and has had the same experiences, you’re never going to get as far as a team that is very different because they bring that cognitive diversity to problem solving.
ND: Absolutely. And like, you know, it’s great to speak to a certain segment of an audience, but you don’t want to literally speak to the same person all the time.
JRC: Exactly. Your ideal customer shouldn’t look just like you 100% of the time.
ND: Absolutely. And in terms of kind of your, because I know it’s kind of your net that you’ve cast is very, very wide in terms of like the work that you’ve taken on as of recent, right? I think the editing, the staff writing, and then having these freelance jobs where you’re working as a marketer on payroll for different companies. How do you systemize all this, I guess, to say, right? That’s something that I’m curious about is like, how do you because I personally write now I’m juggling clients. I’m trying to do sales, I’m kind of working through a bunch of things. And you just seem to steamroll all of it. You get all of it done, which like this is kind of I’m not going to lie. This is kind of off topic,I’m just genuinely curious from a perspective of seeing you really get it done. How do you do it?
JRC: I mean, this is not a cannabis problem. This is a freelance problem. How do you systematize? How do you get through everything that you need to do? And it’s, I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it’s an ongoing struggle as the person who runs the business and the person who’s responsible for all of the business. Like I have a hard time keeping myself on track for a lot of days, you know, the neurodivergent brain just wants to go different places all the time. And it’s not always in front of a screen for three hours, writing an article.
So it is, we’ll call it an ongoing challenge of blocking time for certain activities, blocking time for writing, blocking time for editing, blocking time for going through different drafts of the same article for a client. So really just like grouping my tasks together in ways that I think I can convince my brain to knock them out.
ND: Right, right. Instead of having it focus on something for a little too long and then it starts grazing to a different place and then you completely lose track. I understand that. I struggle with the same thing. And when you’re a business owner, it’s like no one’s holding you accountable except for yourself, right?
JRC: No one knows if I don’t get my stuff done except me. And that can be such a problem.
ND: I do love that. I try to just put things on a billboard or like not a billboard, on a whiteboard and essentially just something that I have to look at where it’s just kind of shaming me if I don’t get it done. You know what I mean?
JRC: I have so many different lists. I have a paper planner. I have an Excel planner. I have my calendars like. I would stick it on my forehead if I thought that would help me keep on task.
ND: I was about to say, I’m the literal same way. I need something that’s in front of me, keeping me on it at all times.
JRC: Yes. And then I need my time to go, you know, walk around, see a sunset, do different things that keep the creative juices flowing and don’t let it dry up, you know?
ND: Yes. So in terms of that right, I think personally I’m a big walk guy, like I need to go on walks. We both have dogs right, I feel like dogs of course there are firewalks which is kind of a a hack as a freelancer in some ways because you really can’t get in the hole for like eight hours at a time you know you have something that like kind of is like licking your leg and trying to get you out of the house
What are your main sources of inspiration when it comes to creating content? Are you somebody who goes out and, you know, research is a big part of it, of course, right? You want to find pieces of content that are relevant, that you can kind of assimilate an understanding of what’s going on with. But what are the other things that kind of help put that mind map together of what I’m about to create for this company? How I’m going to create a content flywheel for them or something like that?
JRC: Yeah, I’m big on, and this is easier said than done, but I’m big on not overthinking things. Like just letting it percolate in my brain, walking away from it, doing something else, trying my best not to ruminate on it, not to force all of my energy and attention on it. Just let it kind of percolate through my system. So when I sit back down, I have a clearer perspective on it, because there’s the research part of it. And then there’s the brand voice part of it, where you have to use that creativity to make sure that not only are you giving the information, but you’re saying it in the way that the brand wants it said.
ND: Right. Having those like whitelisted or blacklisted words not be on it and like having an understanding of would they say it like this? If I have a person sitting across from me right now, is that what they would say?
JRC: Yes. Oh, they would never say this or this is not how they would phrase that. You know, some brands are funny. Some brands are snarky. Some brands are very serious. Some brands use passive voice, like just knowing every time I drop in there, what kind of voice I need to be in, because it’s all the same words. It’s all the English language. It’s just about how you arrange them.
ND: So true and it like brings magnitudes of difference for the people who read them you know uh I think the best thing that I’ve kind of like come to the conclude not come to the conclusion of I think anyone who smokes weed knows this but as you get older, there is no cannabis consumer, so to say. It can be a 75-year-old granny, or it can be a young mid-20s professional, or it can be a soccer mom, or it can be this whole wide world of people consuming this plant all around.
Having an understanding of… Who am I talking to? What am I doing? I personally love Reddit. I don’t know if you’re a big Redditor when it comes to your research. I think it is a phenomenal tool to just get really unfiltered opinions about things and see what people are thinking.
JRC: I like Reddit when I’m doing a lot of strain research because a lot of brands make it very challenging to find their lab results and that’s shitty of them, but you can always find them on Reddit. And you have next to them their unfiltered opinion on what it’s like. A lot of New York brands do this. A lot of brands do this across the country. They have to test. They have to provide COAs. But God help you if you want to find them. But Reddit’s there for you.
ND: Reddit is always there. And I think the thing about cannabis consumers, like avid cannabis consumers, is that they want to give you their feedback because they just want a good product. They don’t care about anything else except quality products that’s made from good people for the most part, right? And I don’t know, it’s one of those things where why not have a level of transparency when it comes to what you’re creating? Which I guess we could ask that about where our food comes from and everything like that as well, but.
JRC: We don’t have time for that rabbit hole.
ND: Exactly, but I love that. So inspiration is mainly you taking in the information and then letting it kind of, letting your brain kind of work out the Rubik’s cube that is creating this piece of content. So when you come to it, you’re ready.
Like you said, not forcing yourself to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, being a person, going for a walk, watching a sunset, going to the grocery store, hanging out with my husband, just allowing myself to know what I need to do. Tto know the subject matter that I need to write about, and then trust that I have been doing this for long enough that when I sit down to do it, my brain will be ready for it.
JRC: I love that. Oh, I love that. It’s like riding a bike to some extent. You just got to get comfortable and stretch.
ND: Yeah and at some point like riding a bike you can just get into it you don’t have to think about how fast you’re going or how your feet are pumping you can just start riding, you can just start typing
JRC: Absolutely
ND: And in terms of I guess the the negative of this right whenever you’re going through um blocks right and I’m trying not to sound like a high and mighty writer about this. But I feel like there’s whenever you approach enough of a same problem over time, you you come up with either a system or a thought pattern or a way to kind of combat it right. And when it comes to writer’s block or creativity flow stopping up or feeling very uninspired, I guess to say, what is the way that you push through it? Is your methodology, I’m just going to bulldoze through until we get to the other side? Is it, I’m just going to go ahead and watch enough sunsets to where I feel ready to do it? Because a lot of times we’re on timelines. You know what I mean? There’s deadlines for all these things. When you’re a freelancer, you’re constantly on deadlines. You don’t really have the luxury of ruminating in writer’s block. And the thing that I learned very early on in my writing career is that the first draft is the hardest draft to get out there.
And I still to this day tell myself, sit down, write the shittiest piece you can write, and then it’s done. All you have to do from there is edit it and rearrange it and make it beautiful. But if you do not put down whatever you have in your head, however it comes out, however ugly it may be, you will never get through to finalizing the piece. So it’s not glamorous. It’s not fun. But the way through writer’s block is to sit down and type those damn words.
ND: Oh my God. I love it. It’s times like that. Conversations like this always reassure me. I’m not going to say that I’m not crazy, but they reassure my craziness when I feel about things. Right. Because I’m the same way. I’m like, even if it is an absolute load of crap, get the words out of you so that you can at least see how to change things, structure it and make it coherent to where you’re delivering a good product.
JRC: Exactly. And if you ask any writer who’s been writing for long enough, they will tell you the only way through writer’s block is to start writing. You cannot watch enough sunsets to get yourself out of it. You just have to release the first draft into the world and deal with the consequences from there. But if you can’t wrench it out of your soul, it’s not going to get any easier to do so.
ND: Oh, I love that. Wrench it out of your soul. That’s what I feel like every time I write a first draft that I’m not happy about writing. I feel like I’m just pulling it out of myself because I’m so resistant to it. And then once it’s down on paper and I go back to it, I’m like, hey, this isn’t half bad actually. Good job.
JRC: But at the moment I feel like you’re punishing yourself. You’re like why is this even happening right now. I know I’m so much better than this, but it’s like why am I even a writer? This is terrible, this is the worst sentence I’ve ever written, and you just say that every single time until you’re done. Then you go back and you’re like, hey not half bad, good job
ND: Exactly. You’re questioning your entire career choice around this and then you go back and you’re like why was I so mean to myself about this.
JRC: Yeah I think it’s just part of being a writer.
ND: Yeah, it is and this is just more of a general opinion on your end in terms of something that I feel like the industry always talks about, like always talks about. And you know, I mean, you for sure know this, when it comes to the can of curious argument, right? What is your perspective on speaking to the canna curious folks? Because I think this is, and especially I’m going to, I’m going to kind of throw some coals in the fire on this.
There is a huge discourse around like hemp, THC, hemp, THC beverages. And when it comes to that, what is, I guess not specifically hemp beverages, but when it comes to the canna-curious crowd, and the market opportunity that arises from them. Do you think that the effort that a lot of companies are putting forth in it are worth it. If the juice is worth the squeeze, I guess to say?
JRC: Simply yes. And that is because most people still have not tried weed or if they have tried it, they’ve tried it once and they ate an edible that their cousin’s brother’s sister made for them and it was terrible and they went to the shadow realm and they never want to touch it again. Now I understand. that 20 percent of consumers buy 80 percent of products.
I am part of that 20 percent. I buy a ridiculous amount of weed every month because I love it. But everybody else in my family is canna-curious. And if you are not speaking to them, even if you want me to buy most of your stuff, if you are not speaking to them, you will not capture their attention or pique their curiosity.
We are still exceptionally early in the cannabis industry. And if we do not focus on helping canna-curious people understand their bodies, the products they’re putting into them, in the expectations for experiences, we are not going to convert people. The problem most people have with cannabis is you do not get consistent effects from experience to experience, especially if you don’t understand the difference between strains or dosages or how edibles hit you or how the chemicals convert in your body.
There is still so much that people need to understand about cannabis to feel comfortable with it the way they feel comfortable with alcohol. So you can sit there and say, canna-curious people don’t make most of the sales. You’re right about that. But they will someday, down the line when weed has been legal for 20 years and everybody knows what an endocannabinoid system is and they understand the difference between THC and CBD and CBGA. You can’t convert these people if they don’t know what the hell they’re buying. And they don’t know what the hell they’re buying.
ND: Oh my gosh. I love that. Wow. And that’s my hot take. Great case for this. Oh my gosh. Because I’m like beaming over here. I apologize. I’m just smiling like an idiot. I… I thoroughly feel the same way.
The future of cannabis to me is one that is run through an effect-driven state, which we have now. You see in a lot of states, you have Wana or Wyld, CBN gummies being the top-selling thing, which really shows that people want sleep, to be honest. That’s one of the things, we’re like the tip of the iceberg when it comes to chiseling out what a customer and a consumer experience is gonna be, right?
We have a whole host of, you know, 130 different cannabinoids that we can dive through. We’re learning new terpenes every day that augment the consumption experience. And all of these things, all of these things are going to be different variables, ratios, and things that you can change a consumer’s experience around to say, whenever you walk through a dispensary, you know, maybe in 10 years, 20 years, whatever it is. You’re saying when it’s a standardized experience, someone can walk in and go, well, you know, I’m hanging out with a group of friends and I kind of just want to feel lighthearted, goofy, silly, and have a really good time. You’ll be able to get given a product that specifically is made for something along those lines.
JRC: Yes. The most incredible thing about the cannabis plant and the 130 cannabinoids and the terpenes and the flavonoids and everything else is how customized your experience can get when you understand how it works. It is incredible. The combinations you can make when you have control and knowledge about your product, but most people don’t understand that you’re going to have newbies taking 10 milligram edibles and not understanding why they got too high.
You’re going to have People who’ve been smoking weed for 30 years saying, hey, 100 milligram edibles isn’t enough. And newbies not understanding how much they’re actually taking. There is so much that is deeply personal to a cannabis experience in the way that it is not with alcohol or with coffee or with any of these other substances that we use because of your endocannabinoid system. And if you are not educating your consumers on their endocannabinoid system and why things have the effect that they do in their body, you are letting them down.
ND: Absolutely. And this is the importance of a writer who knows what they’re talking about, folks. Just going to put that out there. Having someone who can speak to your audience and let them know that this is a deeply personal relationship with this plant is a massive part of your marketing strategy. So that was, I mean, I, you know, cherry on top. I can’t even say how perfect that was. Thank you for that. Somebody needs to have strong opinions about that.
JRC: I love strong opinions. Strong opinions are what keep this industry moving forward. If all of us were sitting on our hands, nothing would get done. I mean, that’s just the truth of it.
ND: So kind of switching gears, right? I know we just talked so much about your freelancing career. So thank you for opening up about that. I kind of want to switch gears to your role at Fat Nugs being an editor and the role that you’ve played in kind of moving the magazine forward and kind of systemizing things to where, you know, it’s running, it’s running, it’s running, it’s running. And like, It’s on and up right now. I think the trajectory of the magazine is going amazing. In terms of working at a company where… It’s a magazine, right? And that’s the impetus that started it all was to create something that people can really feel in their hands and look at and see cannabis culture within.
What do you see the future of cannabis media being in the next five or so years? What does that look like? Do you think that becomes, you know, state by state run media sources? Is it international media syndicates? Is it national media syndicates like a Beard Bros Pharms or a Fat Nugs magazine? What does that end up looking like to you?
JRC: I mean, I don’t think it’s pigeonholed. I don’t think it’s one or the other. I think it’s a combination of all of those things working together because that’s what it is in every other industry. You know, in the wine industry, you have local wine magazines. I’m in the Finger Lakes region. Finger Lakes wine is a huge thing, but you have national magazines to talk about California too. You have international magazines. You have ones that are specific to France. It’s not all or nothing. It’s a combination of everything. And despite what people may think in our digital world, print is not dead. Print is not dead. People still want to hold things in their hands. They still want that tactile sensory experience. Even if it’s just pure nostalgia, print is not dead and digital is not your only option. You don’t have to be digital media if you don’t want to be.
ND: Absolutely. And I think a lot of times when it comes to printing things in spaces, What is do you see as being a hold up for people? What’s driving the thought that people don’t want something physical? Because I think we’ve both encountered naysayers in this space. And then you go ahead and you give someone a magazine and have them look through seeing that really crisp, clean imagery and everything. And you see their eyes light up. And it’s like, well, what is what’s the disbelief coming from?
JRC: This little brick that we all carry around with us 24-7 because it’s easy to forget how different it feels to sit down and read a real book over a Kindle. It’s easy to forget how it feels to read a magazine if the last time you picked one up was in your dentist’s office. People still love the same things that they have always loved. It’s just easier to forget that they love that when they’re scrolling on Instagram or Reddit or YouTube all day.
ND: Right. Spend so much time in the digital world and we put so much emphasis on the digital world that we forget how much we all truly enjoy the physical world too.
JRC: Absolutely. I think that’s been a, uh, I kind of don’t want to open up a whole can of worms, especially with our new divergent brands going on. But I feel like the time on our phones has, um, It’s just created different expectations of the way that we consume things, right?
There’s like a large thing of people wanting short form content or not wanting to put the effort, so to say, into reading more long form content. Where that’s going to be a lot of where you get the nuance of things, where you get the real understanding of what’s going on versus short form content.
I might be able to give you a punchy one, two and tell you the big idea. But what fills in those cracks, you know, and I think something like a physical form of a magazine is like a very good way to kind of take you, it grounds you. It makes you a little more present in terms of what you’re looking at, what you’re reading and understanding a story.
JRC: Yeah, I mean, your phone is great and Instagram sucks you in. But when it dies, yeah, you’re going to reach for that magazine in your bag. When you’re sitting in bed and you don’t want any more blue light before you fall asleep, yeah, you’re going to reach for that magazine on your nightstand. Like there is still so much relevance to print media, to physical pieces of content, because we still need that presence in the physical world. We need that grounding. We need that reminder. It’s not all digital all the time. And it doesn’t have to be. And it’s not good for us to be.
ND: Absolutely. I mean, it messes with your eyes. It messes with your brain, your serotonin and dopamine. It’s all messed up with these things.
JRC: Like if you care at all about your brain health, you still want things in print because it’s so different for you. It’s a different experience. It requires, you know, different muscles in your brain or neurons, whatever the right word there is. It requires you to think about it differently.
ND: Right. No, no, no. And I totally agree with that. You’ve just had so many clippable things in this episode. I feel like these are fantastic
JRC: Happy to provide short form content.
ND: That’s awesome.
JRC: I had a question for you about the the hemp space and what’s going on with that and how marketers can perform in that space and how they can do it successfully, but I feel like it kind of harkens back to what we were talking about before where you said one shoe one size doesn’t fit all.
Essentially right you have to speak to your audience the best way that you know how. I’m sorry I’m putting words in your mouth and feel free to tell me if you’ve got anything else that you want to say on the topic because I am curious, I’m genuinely curious. I don’t know if you have any clients in the space or anything like that, but it’s been a mastodon. I mean it came through with force, so what’s your thought as a marketer?
JRC: I mean, I’m not here. I know there’s a big argument about the ethics or the morality of like pure D9 THC versus hemp derived. I’m not here to weigh in on that because the bottom line is consumers want options. And you can be a purist. That’s fine. You can believe in hemp-derived cannabinoids. That’s fine.
The market demands options and consumers want products that they can buy from where they are. And the big limitation of pure D9 products is the fact that they’re federally illegal. And people ship them over state lines all the time. I’m not saying they don’t, but you can’t put that on your website as a business practice.
With hemp-derived cannabinoids, you don’t have to worry about that. And you have an inherently bigger potential market because you’re not limited by shipping concerns. So I have clients that do have hemp-derived products, and the idea is still the same. If we’re working on an SEO plan to capture the right search queries, to bring people into the website at the right time in their buyer’s journey, and to get them to transition to checkout.
ND: Okay. I love that. Yeah. Because I think what I’ve seen, or the way that I’ve seen it is a smart play, so to say, and please, hemp crusaders out there, don’t. Don’t conflate me with saying anything that’s against this. I love the mission. I go and I buy beverages from my local grocery store, all that.
But I think a really smart arm has been licensed, regulated companies kind of developing a hemp derived cannabinoid arm to be able to play within this field because it’s a lot of lost revenue otherwise. And you’re out here getting taxed 40 to 70% on things and you really can’t afford to lose anything. So to insulate yourself, I feel like it’s been a really good moat to kind of enter this space.
JRC: Well, and for better or for worse, hemp-derived cannabinoids give you a bigger audience. I drove into Louisiana and they had hemp-derived D9 THC beverages in the liquor section of the Publix. And I was shocked because Louisiana does not have a recreational market. It barely has a medical market. And there are weed products in the grocery store next to the liquor.
ND: Preach.
JRC: For me, again, it ultimately comes down to education. Consumers should understand what they’re buying and they don’t. And I know they don’t because the cashier at the grocery store warned me, oh honey, those black cans, they’ll send you to the hospital.
Well, they were 50 milligrams of D9 THC per can. Yeah, I bet they sent some people to the hospital when they’re throwing them back like a four pack. They need to understand what they’re consuming. And I don’t have a problem with hemp-derived cannabinoids. I have had some products that I enjoy.
I have a big problem with a lot of the conversion into others. I don’t like the D8s and the D10s and the HHCs. But I understand that consumers want availability. They want options with products. They can’t get D9 where they live. So they’re going to go for D8. They’re going to go for D10. And they deserve to understand how and why that’s different.
ND: Oh, I totally agree. And that is where voices like yours in the Cannigma make a big difference because you’re out here showing these people what it is. But I totally agree. And I think I could totally be wrong, but Crescent 9 was probably that black can that you were looking at.
JRC: It was. It was. I took a photo of it because I was like, God damn.
ND: Yeah. They have been taking the South by storm. It’s crazy. They have been playing a really big part in the ushering in of beverages, but it’s true. I don’t think you can look across that. I mean, and the way that it works in those stores, it’s a small aisle that’s like THC beverage dedicated, but there’s zero education around these things. There’s nothing that anyone’s saying in terms of what you should take, what you should have if you’re a beginner, if you’re an intermediate, if you’re an expert level consumer or whatever that means.
JRC: Yes, like even the cans don’t have instructions on them. The boxes don’t have any suggested dosing. And that’s a missed opportunity for those brands because they are, for better or for worse, normalizing weed in those states where weed is still very stigmatized. So the next step there as they normalize having weed in grocery stores is to help people understand how much at a time to take.
ND: And it’s part of that brand equity play, right? If I’m telling you what to consume as a different type of consumer, I’m trying to insulate you from a bad time, which inherently builds trust in the brand because I care about your experience.
JRC: And that’s really what consumers want. Because on the other side of that, if you drink three 50 milligram cans and you have a bad experience, you’re never going to touch those again. And you might not understand why you had a bad experience.
ND: Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Oh, I love that. Thank you for the thoughts on that. I appreciate that. So the next thing that I want to cover, kind of the segment that we’re going to pull into is this is going to be three different topics that have kind of been happening in the macro stage around the industry. And I want to know from a Jessica Riley perspective, what you see the impact of these things being right. And I have to, I have to, I have to bring this up.
Dutchie’s 4/20 outages. I mean, they you know, and I’ve seen some posts since then of people talking about it. Some people are saying it was 20 percent of stores that went out. Some personal stories were talking about how it was, you know, retail workers were scrambling because there were outages for five hours or more. What do you see as the impact of this and what it’s going to have on the industry? Is this going to be a changing of the guard in terms of best in class POS or what?
JRC: Potentially, yeah. I mean, I hope this serves as a catalyst for companies across the country to really vet their partners well, because you don’t just need a big name in the industry. You need somebody who knows their shit. You need somebody who is an expert in what they do. You need somebody who understands what they’re doing very well, not somebody who’s trying to do everything and be everything to everyone.
And, you know, the first year Dutchie went out, Sorry, it happens. What are you going to do? You know, one of the first big illegal 420s. Fine. The second year, you’re like, hmm, that’s not great. But OK, they said sorry. This year, I haven’t even seen a public statement from them on that.
And I think it goes back to what you were saying, like cannabis consumers really care if brands are listening to them. Well, so do cannabis companies. You have to listen to your customers, whether you are B2B or B2C. Because if they see you at trade shows spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on booze and they see you at award shows paying for your entries, but they can’t get a hold of a real person between the hours of nine to five from East Coast to West Coast time, they understand that they are not your priority appearances.
ND: Absolutely. And then that goes into a whole thing of kind of simplicity for simplicity’s sake, right? If you want to focus on something, focus on doing it well. If you want to go ahead and acquire a bunch of companies or expand your services out to a million different things, be sure to do them well. If your core product offering isn’t performing as it needs to be, maybe you need to scale back and check your operations and understand what’s happening because retailers aren’t feeling the love right now.
JRC: They’re not. I mean, three years in a row is pardon my language, but fucking embarrassing, bud.
ND: It really is.
JRC: It really is. And it doesn’t matter if it was only for 20% of companies. Eight hours of outage, five hours of outage on the single biggest day of cannabis sales in the years is frankly unacceptable. It’s a failure of what you promised your customers you were going to do. And everybody in business has made mistakes. Everybody in business has failed a customer or two. But when you have a failure that’s this large, it’s indicative of a systematic issue.
ND: Absolutely and that is a gross oversight right, you need to be checking on what you’re creating the product that you’re shipping to your customers and constantly checking in with them to make sure that things are going well. Like you said, if we have a track record of two years of this going haywire, that should be your biggest concern in the world. That it doesn’t happen a third time in a row and like talk about a pr crisis.
JRC: Oh, crisis. And they haven’t said anything, have they? I mean, I haven’t seen anything. I have seen Dutchie customers coming out and having said that they spoke with individuals at Dutchie, but I don’t think that that equates to the company.
ND: It’s not the same thing as a public statement.
JRC: Exactly, I totally agree. I think you just gotta come out and say we know we up to be honest again you know and we’re sorry. We know we let you down, we let your staff down, we let our staff down, because they’re taking heat for this now and we’re sorry. It’s not that hard to apologize, it really isn’t. And it goes a long way when you deliver a poor customer experience to take that accountability and to apologize. It can change it.
You know, I live in a vehicle. I’ve been to a lot of mechanics in the past year. I’ve had some poor experiences, but the ones that turn around are the ones where people take accountability and say, hey, this is how we let you down. This is not the experience we intended to deliver. And we’re sorry. And here’s what we’re going to do about it. You have to be able to take accountability. You can’t just stick your head in the sand and say, well, people will stay and it won’t be an issue going forward.
ND: Absolutely. And that is what turns customers into evangelists in my mind, right? Accountability is a huge part of that. I’m going to root for you. I’m going to fight for you. If you go ahead and you come out and say, we’re here for you and I’m going to change how we’re operating so that we can better serve you.
JRC: Yes. And it’s embarrassing to make a big public mistake. Like I totally get that. There’s a lot of shame involved with it. But if you can’t swallow that and apologize to people who have trusted you with their money for years, then maybe you don’t deserve their money anymore.
ND: Killer, killer. So, okay. That was perfect. I mean, that, and you know, I, it really was, I mean, and I hope that serves as an understanding to anyone building SaaS in the space. Don’t spread your wings too far, too fast. It is, and I’m not, I’m not, you know, I’m not making this like a Dutchie slam fest. I just think.
JRC: No, this goes for everyone.
ND: Absolutely. Three years in a row is a really difficult thing to put on retailers, especially when it’s a time where they’re drumming up the most sales. They’re having an opportunity to have multiple consumers who could potentially come back. But now they’re having this experience and they might not. And that’s revenue loss. That’s lifetime revenue loss. Like that is difficult.
JRC: It is. Yeah.
ND: And, and so the next one, I want to, I’m going to move it off of SaaS and back into the world of, of, of weed people.
We’ve seen a lot of MSOs moving out of highly competitive states, right? More and more and more of this is happening. You know, are, you know, the big four essentially have moved out of places like California, Oregon, um, Washington places where essentially there’s been a long established tradition of, um, for lack of a better term, fire cannabis, with a lot of retailers in the space, like a lot of retailers, they can’t keep up. And I’m curious about your thoughts on this, right?
Because if you are a company, and we kind of spoke about this personally, where you have some companies who are charging $65 an eighth in one state, and then you move like almost one to two states over and they’re charging, you know, $35 an eighth or less. And you’re sitting here going, the economics doesn’t seem quite right on this. And sure, taxation plays a part in it, but these MSOs are having like hundreds of millions of dollars of a war chest to work with. They have shareholder money, which, you know, is less than you can say for a lot of cannabis companies out there.
So what do you think is the impetus to drive that back? Are the margins too thin for them? Do they just see that they can go into these states that have limited license structures and really wreck it or what?
JRC: I think it comes down to two things, and I think it has less to do with MSOs than it does the consumers and the plant itself.
Number one, like you said, cannabis consumers can be very discerning, especially people who like flower. I know good flower when I see it. I know mid flower when I see it. And I have no problem with mids. As a volume smoker, I am more than happy to pick up a queue of $50 weed and not have it get me sky high every single time, like justice for mids, first of all.
But cannabis consumers are very discerning. And it’s easy to grow mids, but it’s hard to grow good weed and I think that comes to the fundamental truth about cannabis which is this is not a plant that you can grow at scale like we are very used to doing with our agriculture. Cannabis is not a plant that you can treat like soybeans and corn and just grow hundreds of millions of dollars in one field and everything just kind of homogenizes. Cannabis is far too complex in that we have evolved alongside this plant, we have our endocannabinoid system, which is made to bind with both our endogenous cannabinoids and external cannabinoids.
And I just think it’s something that grows best in the ground, in the sun, with a couple of people who really know what they’re doing in small batches. I think it’s less about the MSOs and more about the fact that cannabis is not going to play well with the consumer model we have come to know really intimately. And people are going to have to accept that cannabis does best in small batches.
And that if you want to have an MSO in multiple states, well, maybe you’re worried a little bit less about your in-house brands. And maybe you acquire a couple different brands in each state that produce really good weed. And then you just white label it for them. I don’t know if it’s necessarily about the MSOs, I think it is about the disruption that is working with cannabis.
ND: Wow, I love that. Make a, I mean, a personal plant, right? It works individually best and you need personal growers for it, right? And it’s unique, right? Like, it interacts with each of us differently because your endocannabinoid system is as unique as your fingerprint is. And you see the appearances of certain chemicals in cannabis that are grown in greenhouses and outside that you don’t see in an indoor grow.
And I know, I know people love indoor grown because it’s beautiful, because it’s resonance, because it reaches 30% THC, honestly. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s what the plant wants to do. And I know we’re not in the business of knowing what the plant wants to do. We don’t care about that. This is capitalism. We will bend the plant to our will. But when you have compounds appearing because it has grown in the sun that you don’t have indoors, that tells you that you are missing something by doing things the way we are used to with cannabis.
JRC: Absolutely. Once I was talking to a cultivator and they told me, you know, bag appeal is a trait that people will breed for just like anything else. And I never really thought about it. And, and, you know, a lot of people might be watching this live stream going, duh, but like, I never really thought about it from that perspective.
I always think about flavor chasing, I always think about bud structures. I always think, you know, what the, the, the, the nose that comes out on it these different traits, but really what we’ve done over time is that people want something that when you open up the turkey bag it looks fantastic. Outdoor grown weed doesn’t always do that for you, even though it can deliver a more exceptional experience
ND: It’s crazy because it’s not going to look the same because it’s not covered in THC trichomes, but your experience is going to be different. I smoked some weed in Maine that was outdoor grown. That was 13% THC. And I was like, perfect. This will be a nice afternoon weed. I’ll smoke a joint, get some work done. Nobody. I was higher than the last time I smoked 21% weed because it had such a robust chemical profile. And the entourage effect is something that we really ignore in pursuit of THC percentage. And that is a consumer-driven error, in my opinion, which isn’t to shade consumers.
JRC: I gotta disagree with you. It’s not consumer-driven. Consumers don’t know what they want because they don’t know what their options are. Brands are saying it’s consumer-driven because they can charge more for high THC weed and it’s easy to sell like you sell alcohol. That is wholly the responsibility of brands to educate their consumers and not just push the dankest shit they have on the shelf for the most money they possibly can.
ND: Okay, so then I feel like this creates a chicken and the egg scenario, right? Because I think consumers not being educated is what ends up with them saying, oh, I need the master kush that’s 30%. But I do totally agree with you that it is, the burden of responsibility also does fall on the brands. And it is driven-
JRC: It is partly consumer driven because you have the 20% who buy 80% of the weed who’ve been smoking for 20 years and going in and saying, I want some shit that’s going to get me sky high. But just because you have been smoking the plant for 20 years does not mean you understand it. It does not mean you understand cannabinoid profiles. It does not mean you understand what terpenes you like. It does not mean you understand your endocannabinoid system. It does not mean any of that. So they’re coming in here as people who feel like they’re knowledgeable because they’ve been smoking for so long and they don’t know what they don’t know.
ND: Absolutely. Okay. I like that. Ooh, I want to, I want to talk to you more about this later.
JRC: I have very strong feelings about this. And it came up at NECANN when I was in Boston, it was at Jill Carrero’s presentation for Orange Photonics and testing. And I was like, no, this is not a consumer problem. This is a brand problem because they want the most money possible, because they’re not willing to put the time in to educate their bud tenders, to educate their consumers.
ND: And it’s true. I, you know, part of one of my former jobs, right. It was vertical racking. So you know, we would help build out facilities. And in that process, you’d speak to growers, and they would kind of let you know what’s going on in their market.
And I had a guy who was essentially getting, you know, 30% over market pricing in a very competitive area in California, because his cultivar was dumping terpenes and high amounts of THC. And kind of like what you said, maybe the main 13% on the open market is going to fetch significantly lower than that, if not under market pricing because they need to get rid of it. When in reality, it can deliver just as quality of an experience from that chemotype being so spread out, you know?
JRC: Yes. And I think that goes back to your question about the canna-curious. Even though a lot of us in the industry don’t like to admit it, we are still canna-curious. There’s still a lot we don’t know. And we have to stay humble and open to learning about weed because even as people who love it, we still don’t know everything there is to know.
And we have to be open to learning about different ways we can change and customize our experience and not just say, well, I’ve been smoking for 20 years, so I can handle 35%. Well, okay, fine, but are you going to have the best experience there? Did they breed for THC at the expense of terpenes? What is the minor cannabinoid profile like? Is THC even the best cannabinoid for what you’re looking to get out of this? Have you ever stopped to consider that?
ND: Preach, preach. That is like the, I think intentional consumption is going to be kind of the mark moving forward to understand like you have to approach this plant with intention to understand what you want out of it. Otherwise, you know, why flood the market with Everclear? You know what I mean?
JRC: Yeah. People don’t want to get drunk all the time and they certainly don’t want to get couch locked all the time, but that doesn’t mean they understand what their other options are.
ND: And I feel like, you know, a challenge, I guess, to say to our community and our industry is that think a lot of us especially when we’ve put in some level of time here and who’s to say what is a significant time stamp within this industry since you know there are people who have been in it for 40 years. But I think having everyone recognize to a degree that we all need to continue our education and like consistently keep moving the bar forward on that is something that hopefully will resonate out to us all being evangelists for the plant and advocates for the plant. And that helps affect the consumer base to start asking more questions around what am I buying? Why am I buying it? And what is this going to give me? And how does it affect my system?
JRC: Yes, you need that humility to be open to learning new things because it’s not vodka. You can’t just rip a shot and know how you’re going to feel. You know, Peanut Butter Breath and Sour Diesel may do two completely different things for you.
And I think it’s humility for knowing yourself too, because like your endocannabinoid system is complex and it is personal. And if you are not interested in understanding yourself, then you’re certainly not interested in understanding cannabis.
ND: Ooh, make everybody look in the mirror, Jessica. I see you.
JRC: Humility.
ND: Yeah, give it to them. Yeah.
I just, uh, had an understanding that, um, I ran this over a lot. Um, but I’d be willing to go a whole nother hour with you though. I already know it. Um, but I want, I want to just wrap this up with, um, you know, again, we’re, we’re speaking to a lot of people, as you can see in the comments on the side and the industry shout out to all you guys. Thank y’all for tuning in.
But you see, we have a lot of people who are professionals in this industry, but I still think that there are some people who are going to be watching this that still want to enter the spaces that we’re in. And as someone who works in both freelance marketing and as an editor at a media publication, what’s your advice for somebody that wants to enter that specific area of the industry? Not so much just entering cannabis. I feel like that is something that people talk about. I’m not going to say ad nauseum, but like a lot of people talk about getting into weed a lot. People don’t talk as much about getting into media, maybe they do about marketing. But what’s your perspective and opinion? Because I’d love to hear it.
JRC: You have to be willing to put yourself out there and you have to be flexible with what that looks like. It could look like commenting on people’s LinkedIn posts and starting to meet new people. It could be starting a blog so that you can start to build your own platform because you haven’t been given the opportunity yet. It could look like sending out 100 pitches and dealing with rejection for all of them. But you have to put yourself out there to move the needle. And it’s not fun to do that, but it’s the only thing that’s going to do that.
ND: Absolutely. Ooh, I love that. And it’s, it’s one of those things where I always tell people. Jjust get really become friends with rejection. Like, get really cool with rejection. Cause once you get told to screw up, it objectively sucks.
JRC: It’s so uncomfy. It’s disheartening. Like people can be mean, but you can’t, you can let that sit you down, but you can’t let it stop you. You know, if you need to close your laptop and take a walk, do that. That’s fine, but open it again tomorrow.
ND: Absolutely, damn right.
JRC: Speaking from experience.
ND: Yeah, I’m in the same road. I was about to say I’ve had so many people tell me to go to hell over just pitching them something and it’s like…
JRC: I’ve had people tell me I will never succeed as a writer, that I will not make it in this industry. Like, people get mean and personal quickly and you just have to say, okay, I heard you, but it doesn’t mean that I have to keep listening.
ND: That’s the truth. And yeah, perseverance and resilience is something that I think, one, benefits you in this field, but also benefits you in the wider field of cannabis because people have been trying to kill us for a long time now.
They’re trying to strangle out the industry right now with overregulation, overtaxation, and a whole host of other things. So, if there’s anything that you guys pulled from this, I hope it’s understanding the nature that Jessica brings to her work and to what she does in the field of cannabis because it’s driven by passion and it’s driven by a hunger for knowledge that I think everyone should try to emulate.
JRC: Thank you.
ND: Yeah, of course, friend. It was fantastic to talk to you, dude. I feel like we get, you know, we get our weekly calls on. We get right into it. We waste no time.
JRC: Those are weeklies. Those aren’t really connecting. So I appreciate it.
ND: Tell everyone where to find you on the internet, whether that’s for, you know, LinkedIn purposes, Instagram, whatever it is.
JRC: You can find me on my website, which is www.jessicareillywriter.com. Same thing you see on the screen. You can search me on LinkedIn, Jessica Reilly, and you can find me on Instagram at Canna writer, and I would love to chat with you.
ND: Absolutely hit her up folks. Uh, my name is Nigel Despinasse and you can find me on LinkedIn. You can find me at Nigel_deez on any social media platform. And you can reach out through Beard Bros or LinkedIn to get at me.
This concludes our first episode of Cannabis Pros and Marketing Masters. Again, we had the lovely Jessica Reilly with us. And thank you guys for tuning in so much. I hope you guys have a fantastic rest of your day, a great weekend.
And spark up something for this Friday. Take it easy. Kick back. Enjoy yourself. All right. Bye, you guys.
Bye, Jessica.
JRC: Bye.
Hosted By Nigel Despinasse
A graduate of Brown University, at 27 years old Despinasse taps into a younger demographic of up and coming cannabis connoisseurs who are already stepping up to help decide where weed goes next. This next generation of herbal entrepreneurs are far more curious about alternative cannabinoids and consumption methods, which also aligns with the trail that Despinasse is blazing with his own personal relationship with the plant.
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