
Ask HN: Marijuana startups? - mycatbijou
Clearly marijuana is on the horizon. If not recreationally, then at the very least - medicinally.<p>This seems like an easy market for tech companies in terms of low-hanging fruit. Is anyone working on something interesting in this?
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MichaelCrawford
Read the newspapers in Washington State, Oregon and Colorado:

[http://www.oregonlive.com/](http://www.oregonlive.com/)

[http://www.columbian.com/](http://www.columbian.com/)

A significant problem is that banks will not permit accounts to marijuana
businesses, because banks are federally regulated. That leads to MJ shops
having huge stacks of currency lying around, as well as being unable to accept
credit or debit cards, or checks.

I understand Colorado set up its own bank for that specific purpose.

Rather than starting up your own maryjane shop - which everyone and their
brother is doing these days - consider instead supporting the business in some
way. For example a friend of mine makes a tidy income by pointing out to
Medical Marijuana shops that their web sites suck, then offering them
redesigns.

As the proprietors tend to be poorly-informed as to market rates for technical
services, he is generally able to make a lot more as a web designer for
marijuana dispensaries than were he to ply the trade for other kinds of web
sites.

Alternatively you could do SEO or Search Marketing for them. While I expect MJ
shop proprietors know what Google AdSense is, quite likely they don't know how
to place AdWords ads, they don't have the time to, or - as I when I first
tried AdSense - don't know how to advertise effectively, so that the sales
that result from advertising brings in more money than the cost of the ads.

I myself once scored a $30,000.00 contract as a result of the second of two
ten-cent AdWords clicks, for a total of twenty cents. By contrast, bidding on
"software consulting" and "software consultant" set me back $300.00 per month
for several months, yet resulted in nary an inquiry, let alone any signed
contracts.

