
Show HN: Detailed data on every cannabis retailer and producer in Washington - topshelfdata
https://www.topshelfdata.com/
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topshelfdata
Hi folks, I'm one of the founders. Happy to answer any questions. A few
tidbits:

* The data comes from WA public records. Can you believe that every single plant, harvest, and retail transaction is not only stored (that's a law called traceability) but also made available as a public record?

* We have been live since January, 2017, so this is very new.

* The model is SaaS, we have several paying customers already.

* Most of our customers are cannabis businesses in the state, using the site to understand price, competition, and benchmarks (what products to sell etc.).

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ZoeZoeBee
How do you feel about this data being recorded and available, considering
existing Federal Laws supersede state and local laws, making everyone on here
an admitted criminal, if the Federal Government chooses to enforce already
existing laws?

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torbjorn
Americans are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

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ZoeZoeBee
Tell that to the ATF

> As provided by 27 C.F.R. 478.11, "an inference of current use may be drawn
> from evidence of a recent use or possession of a controlled substance or a
> pattern of use or possession that reasonably covers the present time"

Therefore any person who uses or is addicted to marijuana regardless of
whether his or her State has passed legislation authorizing marijuana use for
medicinal purposes, is an unlawful user of or addicted to a controlled
substance and is prohibited by Federal law from possessing firearms or
ammunition.

[https://www.atf.gov/file/60211/download](https://www.atf.gov/file/60211/download)

Obtaining a medical marijuana card, or purchasing it recreationally is an
admission of guilt as far as they are concerned

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tyingq
Interesting timing given that the Federal government has recently shared that
they will "step up marijuana law enforcement". I wonder if some Fed might buy
a subscription for the purposes of initial planning.

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jonlucc
I assume it would be easier to get the data directly from the state
government, right?

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tyingq
If it's aggregated from multiple places, probably not. Cross-agency requests,
I imagine, aren't fun. Especially when it's potentially pissing off the
receiver of the request. I assume Washington is big on "state rights". They
would need to at some point if they planned on using it in court, but paying a
small sum for already aggregated would potentially make the planning part
faster.

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graham1776
I am working on a project processing public data and reselling it, similar to
you. Is it legal to resell public information? What rationale did you use to
defend paying for it? Also how did you arrive at/figure out your pricing?

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topshelfdata
Thanks for the questions. My apologies for the slow response, HN is throttling
my comments. Here we go:

1\. I'm no lawyer, but we did confirm with the state public records office
that we can charge for this -- so yes, selling this data is legal. I think
this is true for other public data sets as well, considering the numerous
businesses that pull public records data, munge, and resell (e.g., background
checks).

2\. The rationale for charging for it was simple: the data in its raw form
requires processing that our customers can't afford to do. If you're a retail
store, hiring a programmer or even Excel-savvy analyst is too expensive. These
businesses are happy to pay a fee to access this data.

3\. Pricing: we spoke with numerous potential customers when developing the
idea and product. Pricing is a part of the product, and was something we
tested by asking for their tolerance.

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baconomatic
I'm curious of why you offer a free tier instead of just a trial period. Seems
like this would be pretty valuable data for other cannabis retailers.

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topshelfdata
We debated this one quite a bit, and ultimately went with a free tier instead
of free trial because: (a) it gives us public free content that can be used
for SEO, and (b) reduces the barrier for trial and sign up.

Finally, the free tier is data from a year ago instead of the most recent
publicly available data (2 months ago), so while retailers can get some
benefit, the paid tier is much more fresh and actionable.

~~~
baconomatic
My mistake! I read that as they can get data for the last year, not that it
was year old data.

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jplasmeier
This is cool! Is similar data available for other legal states? Are you
working on implementing similar services for those states?

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topshelfdata
Traceability exists in all states where it is legal, so other states do
collect this level of data.

However, Washington is the only state with an incredibly transparent public
records law that makes this data available to the public.

Given that, and to answer your question: no, we do not plan on implementing
this in other states -- but we do have some related cannabis industry software
ideas that we will launch in a few weeks.

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sayurichick
what kind of format does the public record give you?

Is it reasonable or do you have to scrape through and make your own JSON?

