What Woo Web Agencies Should Know About CBD and Hemp

Kathy: Welcome to another episode of Woo Visions. This is the podcast that talks about the future of eCommerce, specifically with WooCommerce. And I’m here with my co-host Ronald Gijsel. Ronald, how are you doing today?

Ronald: I’m great. It’s so nice to hear you and see you as well.

Kathy: Yeah. Good to see you again. And we have a very special guest. This is someone that if you’ve been in the WordPress space, even for half a minute, you know this person, you’ve met this person at a WordCamp and you were charmed. At least I was charmed. Tyler, Tyler Lau has been a face at WordCamps for as long as I’ve been around them.

A history in the WordPress space, now what

Tyler has worked with Sandhills Development, which you may know from tons of products, such as Easy Digital Downloads, AffiliateWP, Restrict Content Pro. So many different products that have really made their mark in WordPress. After Sandhills was purchased by Awesome Motive, Tyler, you started doing sort of your own thing. What have you been up to since that sort of pin in the map?

Tyler: Thank you, Kathy. Ronald, great to meet you. I appreciate you guys inviting me onto the podcast and yes, you’re absolutely right Kathy, those very nice warm words. Thank you very much for that. But yes, I have jumped away from WordPress a little bit while quietly keeping my hands and eyes entirely involved in WordPress. What I have been doing is I’ve jumped over into the legal cannabis market and started learning more about their challenges and difficulties as that market continues to develop, particularly in North America. And to be honest, it’s happening in about 15 to 19 other countries around the world at the moment as well. And they’re going through very similar challenges that I have found that technology can alleviate some of those issues, or we are aware of some problems that this industry is not aware of entirely. And it does affect them due to the fact that we have these things called eCommerce and online marketing and these all are things that affect their businesses greatly. And many of them are not paying attention to it yet.

An overview of what’s happening legislatively across at least North America

Kathy: Definitely. Now I drive around, I live in Texas now and I’ve lived in California and Arizona. California, I was there where, there’s obviously a huge industry, but even in Texas, I drive around and there’s CBD stores everywhere. It’s definitely sprouting up all over the country, at least from my anecdotal experience. But there’s different types of cannabis that’s available depending on jurisdictions. Can you give an overview of what’s happening legislatively across at least North America?

Tyler: Yeah, absolutely. So CBD is derived from the hemp plant. And hemp and cannabis are very much related, they’re in the same family. And basically one has been trained to lower the amount of THC, the psychoactive compound through agriculture techniques and the other one is, through agriculture techniques, is made to have very high amounts of THC components to it. And these are the psycho active aspects. So at a federal level, the CBD the cannabinoids have been legalized. It’s allowed for you to use in oils and fusions, topicals, all type of variety of products. Research is still continually being done. There’s a lot of medical value to it. I am also careful to say that, I won’t say it fixes everything, because I believe it’s similar to along the lines of ibuprofen in some other qualities, but they have some other things that the regular anti-inflammatory stuff cannot do as well.

So CBD is very popular and because of that, it’s like the stepping stone to the hemp industry, which would have a lot of variety of byproducts, paper, plastics, synthetic plastics made that are biodegradable out of hemp. A whole bunch of industries can come from that. So the CBD businesses are all popping out in sense of a validation towards this industry. And as it’s federally legal and for CBD, you see this across almost every single state and it’s up to pretty much the municipalities or the states themselves to decide if they want to go with it or without it.

For example, you live in Texas, you have no legal cannabis of any kind there at this moment. But at the same time, you can have CBD stores all over the place. And interestingly, CBD stores face some of the similar problems that cannabis faces in terms of eCommerce and online marketing as well, which is kind of interesting.

Challenges that anyone selling any kind of cannaboid product might be facing

Kathy: Interesting. Okay. And so what are some of these challenges that, let’s talk about the eCommerce space specifically. What are some of the challenges that anyone selling any kind of cannaboid product might be facing?

Tyler: The biggest problem is, if you have an online presence, what are you allowed to say? What are you allowed to sell? Is it dependent on the tools that you use that allow you to sell? Is it dependent on the state that allows you to sell? Is it dependent on the country? Are there regulatory institutions that guide what you can and cannot sell? So let’s start with something that’s simple, more like CBD. I can sell this across any country. All right, great. Now I have to check if any of my tools allow me to sell it. Not all hosting companies are comfortable with this kind of stuff. They still see this as high risk business and will put it under that category. And this is CBD, not cannabis even.

Let’s just say that some of these hosting companies are more comfortable with it. Then you have to find payment solutions. You have to find different tools that are okay with letting you use these products. I mean, having them on your store for sale and whatnot. So at the end of the day, I don’t feel like the platforms honestly care. It’s their relationships with the payment processors that have the biggest influence on what your site can and cannot do. Almost more so than even the state or federal government. The biggest restrictions are who’s allowed to process your online payments or even in your store. Because a lot of these stores will have online shops, right? And whether it’s in the physical store or on the online store, they need to process payments. And some of them, I’ve seen one creative group, they use WooCommerce, for example, to online order in the dispensary while you’re walking around. And it’s all electronic payments. There is no cash involved. There’s no terminals. You do it all on your phone, inside the shop.

So lots of little cool ways to go around it, but at the end of the day, does your payment processor allow you to use this? For example, Stripe, PayPal; out of the question. The barrier of entry to get into these solutions to tap payment processors is five times more complicated than a regular business applying for payment processing. You can go to different tools. You just apply, some paperwork, you submit a couple forms and you’re done. And for the cannabis CBD site, it’s 10 times that almost. So there’s no convenient little API, it’s all dependent on exactly what they sell. So if you were a hosting company, you’re like, “Oh, I want to partner with a payment processor for cannabis.” It’d be simply a referral system because at this point there’s so much vetting behind that business that the payment processor would have to do, if they’re careful. If they’re not, they’ll take anybody. And they’re probably using a lot of shady tools.

The biggest challenge is these businesses are using payment processors that they think are legit and they’re pulling the rug from out under them. Either they’re relabeling, low risk tools as viable solutions for these businesses, they operate for six months. The underwriters at the bank say, “Hey, hey, hey, wait a second. Who is this Green Leaf Solutions, Medical Green Cross kind of thing, going on here? We’re a low risk solution.” And they’ll pull that plug immediately. So not only does the payment solution who try to resell that system, are they in trouble and the business at the end of the day, they get their payment solution pulled out from them and they don’t even know why. And it’s because the reseller, the payment solution, because lots of times you can’t go directly to… Like how we can go to Stripe or PayPal directly, some of these solutions, they need several layers of separation, which is in its own right kind of scary and shady too.

Making a place in the CBD and cannabis industry

Ronald: That’s really interesting. And it’s a really nice overview of the industry, but I’m now starting to get very curious of what your involvement is in all of this overview of the CBD and cannabis industry.

Tyler: Yeah. Thank you for asking that. Basically I decided to learn more about this industry. I knew that it was budding and there are a lot of issues going on and a lot of issues happening that weren’t even related to the technology or eCommerce side. So about six months ago, I started looking around at different business associations in different states and whatnot, and started getting involved with conversations of what these problems were, including track and trace from the seeds all the way up to the growing process, to the cultivation and distributed all the way to the dispensaries and to the individual customers.

So finding these businesses who have no idea what GDPR is, they don’t know what privacy law is or if the solutions that they’re using for CRMs or whatever, if they have for example, SLA agreements, for service level agreements to make sure that their stuff’s up? Do they know much about database management? I don’t know much about it, but I know people who do. But I know some basic questions are like, “Your stuff’s not going across state lines, right? Your medical patients are in your area.” And for example, Washington State got in big trouble because their track and trace solution was caught… Their information was getting out of state and they were receiving information from medical patients in other states in Washington. So these are examples of the infancy of this market and industry and the challenges that they’re facing. So a lot of these regular business owners don’t know what’s going on.

What my involvement is, I’ve been finding solutions in the WordPress space and saying, “Hey, you should talk to these guys because you’re dealing with this problem very seriously and it’s about to become a lot bigger of a problem if you don’t deal with it in this manner or this manner. Fortunately these marketers will know how to change all your language that it’s effective, but you’re not saying all the words that you can’t say.” So in that sense, I have really positioned myself to become an industry facilitator in that sense. And for my day job, I do work for a payment processor that I managed to build a partnership with at Sandhills Development for AffiliateWP. And over time I learned from them and they asked me to join them, I did so. And they’re one of the very, very few and what I mean by very few, I’m talking about out of three or four in the country, that are viable solutions.

Ronald: So who are they then? Who’s it you’re working for?

Tyler: I work for a company called Joint Venture Pay. And I can’t help, but to laugh a little bit at the name. And funny enough, the CEO who created the name out of the desperate need of for example, a lot of businesses were getting screwed out of payment processors. So she was in a hard place, California wildfires, her house burnt down. She says, “You know what, I’m going to make a really good payment processor. Maybe not the prettiest of technologies, but it’s the integrity that they have that really separates them.” They donate 10% of their profits. They did it because they lost their home and business. And then people were calling them saying, “We’re having trouble with payment processors. We’re getting gouged all over the place.” So they do a lot of charity type of really good quality work. And so that resonated with me. And about five or six years ago, they opened a sister company to handle the high risk business side. And that includes paraphernalia, ancillary products, CBD Delta-8 and medical and recreational cannabis.

Ronald: So the name was there first and that’s when part two was to go into the high risk categories.

Tyler: Exactly, exactly. And that’s called Joint Venture Pay. People can talk to me about it, but I also wanted to be able to share quality information with what you guys want to know too.

Ronald: And is it only available in the U.S.? Because earlier you shared that other countries are also facing similar problems when selling CBD and cannabis. But from the company you work for, is that mainly U.S. focused?

Tyler: At the moment, it is U.S. focused, but they have an interesting philosophy that they pursue. And it is any solution that they haven’t found, they actively start trying to find it. I won’t name which countries due to NDA, but we do have some partners that are working with several countries with their track and trace solutions for the regulatory aspect. And these countries also need payment solutions. And at this point, they’re talking at national government levels. So while we’ve had a couple entry conversations, I wasn’t sure if little Tyler could be a supplier of an entire nation for payment processing. That would be pretty cool, but we are having those conversations. At the moment, it is only in the U.S. We’re looking desperately to get into Canada and a couple of other countries, but it takes a few more conversations and possibly a few laws to change for that to happen. Yeah.

Thanks to our Pod Friends Yoast and Mindsize

Where the groundbreaking legislative changes are happening in the US

Kathy: Obviously California and Colorado, some of these states have really been groundbreaking in terms of some of their legislative changes. Are you starting to see this happen in other states where you might not expect it?

Tyler: Yes. It’s a little bit of the Wild Wild West right now in this space. And you get these interesting attitudes of different states saying, “We want to do it our way, but we like how that state did it a little bit, but not those other states.” So there’s a lot of picking and choosing at the moment. And for example, Oklahoma said, “We’re going to let everyone do this.” And so right off the bat, they issued 14,000 growing licenses in a state in the Midwest. And we’re just like, “How many growers do you need?” Missouri’s got just a few dozen growers and they have a larger population than Oklahoma I believe. So, it’s just, those kind of things where you’re like, “Hey, are you guys really copy and pasting or are you guys kind of doing your own thing?”

So some of the good states, for example, Colorado, they’ve just made tons and tons of money. I have friends who are in other industries, electrical engineers and whatnot. All their jobs are going to Colorado. They’re like, “Hey, we’re doing electrical systems for entire schools, public buildings, facilities.” I’m like, “That’s great.” And I’m like, “Hey, you’ve been doing this for a couple years now. All your projects go to Colorado. And he’s like, “It’s because they have money. They have pot money from their taxes to pay for all of this stuff.”

How the states handle their legislation is very telling of how much the end price will end up going to the customer. And that has a big impact on the black market effect of cannabis. And that has been one of the other challenges of this. States are getting too regulated and the end cost gets pushed to consumers. The growers and dispensaries make zero money or they lose money and everyone thinks they’re doing great, but the regulatory aspects are too tough or too stringent, or they’re taxed too much. And the end cost gets pushed down to the customer. The customer’s like, “Why would I pay $70 for that, when I can go back to my old guy down the street for 50?” So we were like, “Well, just pay the $20 more so we can have taxes and roads and schools and stuff like that.” And that’s a hard thing to convince people of when the prices are that drastic in some states, right?

But again, these are state by state things. You go to, for example, Oregon, I had a former Sandhills coworker in Oregon and I would visit regularly the coworker. And I would scout out all these places and see what’s going on in the market. They’re oversaturated, it’s the cheapest weed I’ve ever seen. And it’s fantastic. It’s incredible. I’m just like, “Wow, this is great. Why do you have so much? It’s suspiciously cheap. What did you guys do?” And it just turns out that there’s too many growers. But they’re a much more established state than like Oklahoma. They, I think are down to maybe about 10 or 12,000 growers from 14, which is still a lot. And they’re having a lot of trouble getting rid of it. So there’s now a plethora of black market stuff from Oklahoma too. So these are another one of the real challenges of how you deal with this and how does this industry work with law enforcement?

There are a lot of new budding challenges that go into that and do they have access to the eCommerce side of it? Do you need licenses and regulatory aspect? How does the taxation work? Some day, someone’s going to make a WooCommerce calling and that’s going to be dependent on the cannabis taxations and those nuances for all those states. I’m sure someone will do that.

The opportunity for WooCommerce builders

Kathy: If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen in the WordPress space, that’s for sure. Are you seeing opportunity for people who work with WooCommerce, people who work with WordPress to be more of service in this industry with the tools that we have now?

Tyler: Absolutely. So for example, I have sought out a couple marketing agencies to partner with, that focus on WordPress. And I was trying to say, “Hey, I’m in a couple cannabis business associations. There are always people looking for new tools and solutions. Can we talk about, could you be one of the people I refer them to?” And they’re like, “Oh, we don’t know about this. We don’t know what words we can and can’t use. Keywords and those little things. We’ve got this system down.” I’m like, “Well, there are also other things that you cannot do in this industry that no one will tell you and your marketing tools will backfire.” So there are little nuances that a lot of the marketers, unless you’re already in the space, you won’t know, but they’re pretty easy to figure out.

For example, you can’t openly say, “This is for cannabis, for pure consumption and I use it and I will smoke it and it’ll have medical effect or it’ll have a recreational effect.” If you have an eCommerce site and you actually sell that, you have a payment processor, the crawlers on the payment processor will go through your site and they will block you immediately for having stuff like that on there. And that’s ironic, because you could be a medical dispenser and you have to be careful of what you say. Now you’ll see websites that have all that stuff on there, but they’re oftentimes blogs and on blogs, you can say whatever you want. There’s oftentimes not a lot of actual transactional eCommerce going on in there. So, if that’s the case, then that’s a little different.

Now some payment processors are a little more easygoing with it and they don’t really pay attention. And they’re like, “Yeah.” And those are the ones that are red flags too, if they’re not stringent about their due diligence. So in terms of opportunity, there’s tons. I’m waiting for hosting companies to go easier on their policies for cannabis and CBD and hemp. I’m confident that hemp will become one of those large industrious plants for our economy one day. At a global level, hopefully, paper can be taken care of with hemp. A lot of textiles can be taken care of with hemp. Hemp oils and using different byproducts to make plastics containers, the things that’s in grocery stores, all the disposable little packaging things. A lot of that can be done with hemp. So we’re just waiting for this to all happen and watching different players within the WordPress space, for example, developers, they always need developers to make modifications for cannabis sites.

And a lot of these people have no idea what they’re doing in the sense, I see people still using Wix trying to run their dispensaries from and very quickly, they’re like, “Oh, we have to find something else. For some reason it’s not working. And we’re not sure why.” Or the ones who I’ve asked about, “So what do you do with your members or your clients at your cannabis dispensary?” It was like, “Oh, we just have them all on a written list and we just email it all back to each other. Back and forth.” And I was like, “Okay, well it’s all internal.” They’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” I’m like, “You aware of privacy law and how you’re supposed to handle some of that stuff?” And they’re like, “No, you just email people right?” And I’m like, “So when you email your people, do you just like do a blast to all of them? Or do you use an email tool?” Like, “Oh, we just got one because people didn’t like when they had like 100 emails.”

I was like, oh my goodness. I don’t even know what to say here. I was like, so many things happened and I’m just ooh, just anxious about it. So back to your question, Ronald. Is there opportunity for WordPress industry players and individuals, freelance marketers, whatever it may be to play in this space? Absolutely. In fact, I’m not sure why they’re not there right now.

A lot of these people are using tools that they’re not familiar with. And a lot of these sites require not a tremendous amount of custom work, but the prepackaged solutions that are out there oftentimes are not entirely compatible with the problems that this industry has. And at the end of the day, what I have to say about it. And that’s where the WordPress people have room to play in here because we modify and tweak every little aspect of it. We can hire someone to manage your whole site for specific purposes. You can have someone else do for these very specific purposes.

And when you start conveying that to someone who has a business and they’re still using Square for their payment processor, and they’re trying to use Square to do some of their paperwork and suddenly they pull out from under them, they can’t modify their site, how they wanted to, they can’t change the things that they want. They can’t add the things that they wanted to in the same freedom or power that we would have. This is where we have a place to play the WordPress players. Very much so.

Ronald: Yeah. I sense the problems we are trying to solve are so huge, but it’s also individual to different merchants and developers and then depending on where you are based, where you’re selling. Do you think in this case, developers looking at the opportunity, become wary of that and maybe think, “Hmm, actually I’m just going to play it safe. I’m just going to step away from it just in case.” And for somebody like you to communicate the opportunity and also the clarity on the laws, what you can and can’t do or to what extent, is actually a really big part of that. And I know you can’t speak to hundreds and thousands, but maybe we need more people like you from both sides and bring the merchant, the eCommerce business owner and the developer together and say, “Hey, these are the problems we try to solve.” Let’s do it because the opportunity is only going to grow from what I sense.

Tyler: You’re absolutely right. And you mentioned specifically the problem of, it’s daunting because every business is so case-by-case at this point. For example, if you bring out a new product and say, “We’re also going to sell topical solutions for cannabis.” The payment processor may have some rule or like, “Oh, we’re not sure what that is. So we’re going to just say no.” And the business owner has to decide, do I find a new payment processor or do I not make that product?

Ronald: Yeah. Where do you go next? What is the next step? And who do you ask?

Tyler: And who do we ask? So for some of our clients, we’ve loaded, them up with four or five payment processors. The ones that do a huge spectrum of products are like, not one tool can do it all. If you also sell CBD, some oddly, some of the cannabis payment solutions were like, “Yeah, we don’t do CBD.” And I’m like, “But it’s like kind of part of that, the cannabis plant too. You don’t do CBD, but you sell medical marijuana or recreationally?” They’re like “Yeah, yeah. That’s right.” Like, “All right then. Okay. Well, this dispensary also sells CBD tinctures and I have to find another solution to plug into there.” So developers, what challenges does this provide for them? They may not be familiar with the context and situation. So it’s up to myself and the business owner to convey these challenges to them.

But over time, I think it’s not as difficult as you would think for the developer because a business owner at the end of the day, knows what states they can and can’t sell in. They would already have the payment processor and a gateway or something and they would need an integration built. So that’s the biggest area that I’ve seen the need for developers, is just some API integrations between a couple tools here and there. Now are there some that exist? I actually have found some on the repository that are okay and do work. But there are always custom solutions. So that’s why I was thinking about, well, maybe I should talk to Codeable or something and make that available with them, as they have a plethora of experts that would have the chops to put something like this together with appropriate instructions.

Physical shopping, digital only

Other areas that developers have to play is, remember I mentioned, there is a dispensary that you walked in, you go to their website via QR code?

Ronald: I was going to ask about that. Talk us through that solution, because it seems a bit of a part in person payment, POS, but then on an individual it’s like placing your food order at the table and then, table number 12. And it comes over anytime.

Tyler: That’s pretty much it. For example, this was a medical dispensary. So when you go in, you already check with in your medical ID and they have you on file. So you’ve logged in and say, you’ve purchased from this place before. So if you’re a recurring customer, you go there, you log into the site, or you scan the QR code, takes you there, you log in. And it’s live. What they have in the store is live. And if they sell it, you can see the quantity, the stock number, go down by one unit after you pay for it, right? So you add it to your cart. You’re looking around you scan, scan, add to your cart. And then when you’re ready to check out, you hit it and you walk up to the counter and they’re like, here you go.

Ronald: But that technology can be used for so many other…

Tyler: It could be for so many other things.

Ronald: So how did they solve it? Is that using WooCommerce?

Tyler: So I think they used WooCommerce just from afterwards, I went to the site and looked at it. But I think they just used WooCommerce for part of the checkout stuff. Specifically with the QR codes and cart adding aspect. Now, again, at the end of the day, I’m not a developer, so I’m not quite sure how they did this. And I was also a little surprised because, I feel like this is, there should be some out of the box, stuff like this too. So why did they go that far into building all of that? But as I looked around for all the box solutions of, they’re also quite, quite expensive. Absurdly expensive. So I could see why someone would hire a developer to do this.

And I was like, “Okay”, you might be able to get that for a couple thousand, maybe five, $6,000. And some of these other solutions that didn’t look that good were like, “It’s totally reasonable. It’s $25,000 a year for a license per location.” That’s kind of a lot, like ouch right? And just like the numbers in this area, everyone knows that there’s money in here, but they’re doing it so quickly that they’re charging exorbitant prices. You want to have a grow operation and a cultivation. Well, the license is going to be a couple $100,000 for that, issued by the state or something. So there’s a lot of these little difficulties and barriers of pricing that come up. And that’s why I feel oftentimes there’s WordPress solutions that can come in and fix some of this stuff, particularly with the online stuff and whatnot.

I know some CBD stores have tried to use Square and they can do some stuff. But Square also doesn’t really allow a lot of these businesses to open new accounts. They were actually a Square reseller and it’s interesting to see how they operate. I feel like they’re backpedaling consistently year after year, they’re backpedaling a little bit. So I’m finding that more CBD businesses are not wanting to use them. And now they’re looking for other solutions like, “Well, we use these platform solutions and we pay a monthly fee and then they say, we can’t do this. And then we can’t do this. Or for some reason, we want to be able to speak to our customers in this manner. And they won’t let us do this. The marketing tools that they provide, prevent us from doing these things.” And that’s where a lot of the WordPress solutions come in. You can plug in all kinds of different tools and just do it yourself.

And it’s cool to see these businesses really taking on their marketing tools. For example, in Kansas City, there is a lady, a really nice lady, a ceramic artist. And her business is called Wandering Bud, wanderingbud.com. And a couple years ago, she was trying to find payment solutions and she used PayPal and PayPal rejected her… One, they hadn’t caught on that she was selling ceramic accessories, but they didn’t like the word bud in her name. B-U-D was enough of an issue for PayPal to shut her down.

Ronald: Wow. That’s extraordinary.

Tyler: Yeah. And so after that, I reached out to her and I was like, “Hey, I might be able to help you.” And sure enough, now I have an account with her.

Ronald: Yeah. Wow, great opportunity for, yeah. Wow.

Tyler: Yeah, it’s really cool. But also really challenging. And so that’s why, again, just so many little spots for marketers, developers, site… Like people just like manage sites. And that is a really common solution that I think would be available because a lot of these business owners, at the end of the day, they just want to be able to grow their product, to work on their products, to sell their products and they don’t want to have to do much site work. They just want to have their tools work. And I think that’s where our industry has a perfect place to play in.

Learning from the growth of the market

Kathy: Definitely. Are you seeing in some of the states in some of the jurisdictions where you’re seeing more mature or a maturing of the cannabis business, are you seeing things develop there that can be useful in some of these growing markets that perhaps just had legalization across the board? Are you seeing things that people can learn from?

Tyler: Absolutely. The more mature markets, let’s just say the West Coast in that sense and then Colorado. But Colorado doesn’t necessarily have the technology powerhouse that say Washington and California has. So what I mean by that is, there are companies developing tools, POS systems. They’re developing incredible bits of equipment and whatnot that will be used in these newer states and such. So some of the trends that are happening are watching more legislative issues that are happening in the more mature states. And watching the drawbacks of those in terms of the technology that would be a little more relevant for our industry and whatnot. Not as much because it’s the internet and you can go find stuff pretty quickly, right? You can be in Arkansas or something and figure out what the latest tools that the dispensaries in California are using. That’s not too hard to do.

But the real lessons are, for example, how the state regulates these industries and particularly the infancy of how it launches. How does it come to fruition? Are the committees or the Senate or the bills that are passing, are they so cumbersome that the first year of recreational, they just timed it wrong and no one could get their crops right. And it just messed up and people lost a whole lot of money and they stumbled into the next year of legalization? That’s what Missouri did. And a lot of industry players were very, very upset with that in that state, in Missouri.

So does that happen? Yes. All the time in the mature markets states. Other types of lessons from those, people pay attention to the things that they like. For example, Colorado they’ve made a lot from taxes. I think New York’s done pretty well too this year and they’re relatively new on that. And so that’s the part that the newer states want to hear, but again, population and all the different laws that are already existing and then the mindset of their political climate has a huge impact of what the day-to-day will end up being for that state.

Kathy: Gotcha. Wow. This is so fascinating. There’s so much to learn and you’ve got your finger on the pulse of all of this going on, not just in the United States, but worldwide and I, for one, am going to keep a tab on you, Tyler. Watch what’s going on, because I get excited about new technologies and new ways of bringing old knowledge back. So this seems to be just sort of perfect intersection of something that people have known sort of on the underground that was a useful tool for healing and therapeutics. It’ll be very interesting to see how this becomes more mainstream and how technology specifically in the WordPress world, can make that happen. So if other people want to keep tabs on you, where should they find you?

Tyler: Yeah, they can find me at tylerlau.me, or they can go to Joint Venture Pay, jointventurepay.com. That’s our payment solution. You can always reach me there if you need technical assistance. And I’m there as a knowledge resource, you don’t need to use my payment services. Obviously you can, if you’re a business and you need to, that’s fine. But as a sounding board or more insight on what that payment processor landscape looks like. So you can reach me on there. Twitter, you can find me tylermaximuslau. And then I also have a little passion project called Function House. And you can find me there @shopfunctionhouse. That’s the Instagram handle shopfunctionhouse. And you can reach me on there. Talk to me about anything, WordPress, cannabis, cannabis solutions, whatever it might be, I’m there.

Kathy: Excellent. Well, on behalf of Ronald, thank you so much for joining us on Woo Visions. It was so great to hear about what you’re up to and I am looking forward to future success with your venture. Thanks Tyler.

Tyler: Thank you so much for having me on today.