Seattle-based Headset has been plowing the cannabis retail point-of-sale data fields since 2015, when it exclusively focused on Washington state. Over time, the company steadily expanded its analytic chops to include more markets, and today it tracks product sales and performance in 15 markets that it categorizes as Legacy (California, Colorado, Nevada, Oregon, and Washington), Emerging (Arizona, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Michigan), and Canadian (Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Saskatchewan). Core services include Headset Retailer, Headset Insights, and the recently launched Headset Bridge, which utilizes real-time data from retail menus to provide Headset clients with “a new layer of cannabis intelligence.”

CBE had the opportunity to speak with Headset founder and CEO Cy Scott about the addition of a new data product, the changes the industry is going through, and how companies like his meet the needs of an economically stressed industry that is simultaneously growing, contracting, and maturing. Scott had just returned from Hall of Flowers in Santa Rosa, California, which offered a convenient entry into our conversation.

“It was quieter than last year,” he said of the B2B trade show. “It was still a fantastic show and well-attended, but last year was crazy.”

Did he attend with any specific goals in mind? “It depends,” he said. “Generally, I’ll go as we work through partnership agreements or bigger accounts and having that face-time is always helpful. I went to this one for some of those reasons, but also because I really like to see what’s going on in the brand landscape. Most of the brands we track were exhibiting, and sometimes it’s nice to go beyond the name and the metrics and talk to the brand owners, the decision-makers, to understand where they’re going, and that adds some color to our quantitative data.

“I had an opportunity to talk with Wyld, the gummy manufacturer,” he added. “They have a new product line they introduced at Hall of Flowers. They do really well in any market they’re in, and they race up the charts as far as sales, so just curious – what are their goals, what are they trying to do by introducing a new brand, and what are their expectations – having those conversations. For this event, specifically, I was able to do a lot of that, and then finally, I do a podcast (High Rise) a couple times a week, and I was able to do some interviews for that while I was there. And it’s just nice to get away from the computer screen every now and then.”

Citing Wyld as an example of a brand that has become multi-state and a tangible sign of an industry whose players are growing up fast, did that not speak to a need for Headset to not only expand its footprint but introduce new products?

“A little background on Headset,” said Scott as he began a detailed reply.  “As I’m sure you’re well-versed, we source our data primarily via the retailers, which means we work directly with dispensaries, we have relationships with the stores, and they give us permission to access their data through their point-of-sale. And this gives us some advantages with the frequency of data; we get it in real time, and we see everything in the point-of-sale system from the basket, the transactions, and the customer profile, to inventory, you name it. So, that’s where we’re coming from, and now with Bridge Signal, which we just announced, we’re actually layering in new datasets.

“As far as growth goes,” he continued, “it’s certainly all about us expanding our retail footprint and getting more and more retail cooperators, data cooperators, to work with Headset. We’re in about 3000 stores right now and growing at a good clip. We are focused on emerging market like Illinois, where new licenses are getting issued at a pretty rapid pace – they’re going to have about 120 new stores opening up as these licenses come out – or markets like New Jersey that are just starting up. We work with retailers there and the reason we do that is we need a sample of data to be able to project out industry trends. Once we have a sizable sample – like in California, where we don’t have every retailer, but we’ve got a very large percentage of retailers – that enables us to project out and say this is how well Wyld gummies was performing in this market.

“We’ve been around seven years, and in the early days, there was no California market,” he added. “There was Colorado and there was Washington, maybe a handful of others on the adult-use side that we were focused on, and we’ve been spending our time continuing to expand that footprint. In order to do that, it’s about new services, it’s meeting the needs and expectations of the clients, and clients are always changing, even the retailers. When we started Headset, there were no MSOs. The largest retail groups were single-state operators in places like Colorado, and companies like LivWell, which had a footprint of 10 to 15 stores.

“And so,” he concluded on the subject of strategy and growth, “always growing our business to be able to meet the needs, to make sure we’re relevant as the industry matures, and continuing to do that. Growth is a big story, but it’s not only the geographic footprint but the sophistication of our services, and the types of services, because solving problems for the industry from a data perspective is always changing. On the one hand, it’s great and fun and exhilarating to constantly be changing, but it can be so exhausting. There is no other industry that is changing as rapidly as the cannabis industry.”

Headset currently supports retailers and dispensaries in every legal market. “In every market, we have retailers and dispensaries that are connected to Headset,” said Scott. “However, we do not provide market data in every market, and the big reason for that is because we have to do a lot of statistical work on those markets, we have to have a database of all the products that are sold in those markets, and there has to be enough demand for the market data, and there are some markets that are maybe smaller medical or adult-use, and there’s just not a lot of demand.”

What about a state like Maryland, which is medical-only, but which is steaming towards adult use with an upcoming referendum in November, so one might assume that data would be useful not only to businesses but to anyone making up their mind about the upcoming referendum.

“Maryland is a great example,” said Scott. “For all the points you made, Maryland is something that a lot of people are looking at and a lot of people are thinking about, and we actually do provide market data in Maryland for that reason. That one is definitely on our list, and we’re really excited for when it does convert to adult-use.

“We have a good list,” added Scott of Headset’s market coverage. “It’s in maybe 15 markets that we provide our market intelligence, and I think 20 when we include the Canadian provinces. We just launched a Massachusetts read, Arizona is teed up to go online soon, we have a deep read in Illinois, and so we’re always adding more, but most of our subscribers are buying data from the larger, more mature markets like California.”

Was he referring to Headset Insights? “That’s right, that’s our market intelligence,” replied Scott. “Insights would answer questions about the competitive landscape for you. So, if you wanted to know how Wyld was competing with Wana in California or in Oregon, that’s what you’d use Insights for. It’ll tell you their sales performance from a dollar perspective, a unit perspective; it’ll show you SKU and product level performance; it’ll show you the customer demographic. The competitive landscape is in there and our customers use it for all sorts of reasons. Brands use it to stay ahead of the competition or for product innovation. Wyld introduced Good Tide Edibles. They saw trends in the data coming from the solventless concentrate category, and they decided that they needed a product that answered that, and now they’re hoping to capture that trend using data for opportunities. Scenarios like that are what you get out of Insights. To get a comparable service, it would be something like Nielsen or IRI for the consumer-packaged goods world. If you’re a Procter and Gamble and you want to know how one of your brands is performing, you would subscribe with a Nielsen and IRI. That’s kind of what are our Insights product provides.”

Is there a difference between the newer mostly Eastern states that are limited-license, with fewer retailers, and the more open markets? Does that make a difference, and as the industry matures and contracts, will Headset need to find new revenue streams in order to grow?

“Good question, and it depends on the market,” said Scott. “In limited-license markets, the MSO-dominated markets, the tradeoff is that they’re often buying a lot more in the way of services. They’re larger clients for us in that regard. It has to do with the fact that their footprint is much larger, and their internal resources are much larger. MSOs will have a data analytics team internally, and they’ll buy data from Headset that covers every market and every category, and our different services as well.

“They are a much larger client for us versus the median client in a market like California,” he added, “which is maybe a brand that may have a footprint across the state, in Northern California or in Southern California. They might be buying fewer services, but there are more of them, and when you think about that picture, there is a lot of consolidation happening amongst smaller brands. When that happens, instead of having two contracts we have one contract for the combined company, but often those contracts are bigger because the combined company is bigger, and they have bigger needs when it comes to data.

“That’s one way we mitigate it,” he continued. “Another way is new service. We are constantly looking at what can we introduce from the data that we have. We’ve got one of the best lenses into this industry that’s out there. We see so much going on as it’s happening, and there are a lot of ways that we can translate that into services. Things like the new Bridge Signal product are a good example of that. We identified a need in the market, identified new data sources that would be able to provide us the kind of information we needed, and then combined that with the data that we have, enabling us to create a service that is completely net-new and it’s not something where a customer would choose one or the other. Often they’ll buy an Insight subscription and a Signal subscription because they answer different types of problems.

“With the fantastic news yesterday,” he added, referring to President Biden’s recent pardon announcement, “I think over the next six months we’re going to see a lot of the groups that weren’t as risk tolerant in the early days coming around, like what we saw in Canada with legalization. You’re going to see a lot of ancillary, a lot of financial services, a lot of private equity firms, a lot of consumer-packaged goods companies, beverage and alcohol companies starting to kick the tires a little bit. We have some services that speak to those audiences, but I expect those audiences will continue to grow over the next six months, and especially once we have a scheduling event happen – descheduling or rescheduling – then for sure they’ll come pouring in. So, continuing to have the right services built on data that meet their needs is a big part of our growth story.”

Do you have to increase your server capacity frequently to meet demand. “We do,” said Scott. “We ingest a lot of data, so we do have to do that. We use Microsoft Azure, which is like AWS and Amazon, you know, that’s nice, because you just pay them more money, and they give you more servers. We don’t have to buy hardware, but we’re always mindful of response times and things like that, and there is a lot that goes into it. Google spends a lot of money on getting search results to you in milliseconds, and we try and do the same thing, even if it takes longer than milliseconds.”

Building Better Data

Are Headset Insights provided courtesy of humans in addition to machines? “It’s all delivered through software,” said Scott. “There are a lot of screens that [clients] can explore; a lot of data that they can filter. We do provide a light level of analyst services and customer support to help people navigate. Headset. We also work with consultants that are experts on Headset, and we can direct people to those groups if they need a bit more support, but primarily we’re a software business, we’re not a consulting business. We have a handful of hours that we might apply to customers as needed, but our analysts are more focused on helping build out Headset.”

I mentioned a recent interview I did with the CEO of one of the leading MSOs, and how effusive he was about the use of data, how essential it is to their business, and they utilize not only their own data, of which they have a tremendous amount, but also data from third-party companies. The question was, when it comes to the speed at which people need data, and the immediacy of the decisions that they need to make, do they really require real-time data?

“That’s great question and an interesting anecdote about the MSO CEO,” said Scott. “It’s really refreshing to hear, we hear it more and more, and it has been a long road over the seven years since we started Headset coming off of Leafly, which is the company I founded before Headset. There were no real brands at the time; it was just a lot of strains – this was back in 2010, when we founded Leafly. And then, when we left to found Headset in 2015, it was getting there and you saw more brands taking up shelf space, and an industry maturing. I bring this up because if you fast-forward seven years from then, you’ve got MSO CEOs coming from other verticals and understanding the value in this data. It used to be people would say, ‘I make the best product,’ or, ‘I grow the best strains,’ and it sold. But it’s so competitive now even in the limited-license markets that you can’t get away with not being mindful of the data whether it’s your own data or third-party data. So that’s great to hear.

“About other third-party data sources,” he added, “one thing with Bridge Signal that we’re really trying to do is incorporate other types of data assets. A lot of our customers are coming to us saying they really want to work with one data provider that’s able to answer everything, and for a company like an MSO, we’ve got Headset Retailer, which is business intelligence, and business intelligence is just basically analytics about your own business. It’s looking at what’s going on within your business, within the walls of your business, not necessarily the external data like market intelligence, but finding insights in your own data, whether that’s trending sales, how promotions are performing, if your inventory carry is optimized. We do a lot for retailers and MSOs, and then they can get the market data through Insight so they can understand how they fit in the market and how their brands fit in the market.

“With Signal and the online menu, this is a new data asset for us,” he continued. “Historically, and to this day, our primary source of data comes from the retailers themselves and their point-of-sale, but now with the web data, we’re able to get even more breadth of coverage. Right now, there are many more retailers that exist in the in the US than the 3000 we have, and we’re adding them at a good clip, but we have some retailers that don’t want to leverage that, so how do we get data from those sources? Well, they publish menus online, and so we thought, let’s see if we can source this information and bring it into Headset, and do it with the partners themselves, with companies like Leafly, Weedmaps, Jane, Dutchie, organizations that are publishing menus. This is all publicly available data they’re publishing on their websites, but we source the data from these third-parties and bring it into Headset, and it really does start to give our clients a new way of looking at the data.

“We put it in Bridge, which is our third pillar of products beyond Retailer and Insights,” he explained. “What Bridge does is, before Signal, it enables a retailer to share data with a vendor or a third party. And we are the conduit for that, so the scenario might be, you’re a brand and you’re in California, and you sell to ten retailers, and you want to know the inventory levels of your products on those retail shelves, so if the inventory is getting low, you can make sure you ship an order to them. Retailers like to share this information because it streamlines reordering, and they don’t run the risk of stock-outs, and brands like to get this information because they can better support their retailers. You can think about it as very symbiotic and almost a partnership between the vendor and the retailer; the retailer needs the vendor’s products to be able to sell things for their customers, and the vendor needs the retailer as a conduit to those customers, and so that’s what Bridge enabled.

“What we wanted to do is to expand that footprint,” he continued. “In a market like California, there’s a certain number of retailers that are willing to share that type of data with their vendors, but now with the menu data, we can say to a vendor, ‘We’re looking across all these menus, and we noticed that your brand fell off this menu, which most likely means they ran out of stock, and the vendor can then call the retailer and say, ‘We noticed it’s no longer on your published menus for Headset Signals, so we want to get in front of it.’ If the retailer is sharing that data through the point-of-sale connection with them via Bridge, they can drill even deeper. ‘Maybe I ran out of stock here, but let’s see my sales performance at that store. Did the promotion that I ran last week have an impact and accelerate the sales velocity?’

“The way to kind of think about it is if you’re a brand in California, now you can see from a 30,000-foot view,” said Scott. “With anyone who publishes a menu – and your brand may be on their menu – you can see stock status in the sense of in-stock or out-of-stock. You cannot see inventory levels because that’s not published on menu data, but you can at least know if it’s there or it’s not there. You can know things like pricing, things like promotions; sometimes retailers are running promotions in partnership with the brand, sometimes they’re running them on their own, and being able to see what’s going on with promotions for your brand is powerful. You can go to that retailer and say, ‘Let’s run a promotion together, and let’s measure the efficacy of that promotion by creating a connection through Bridge that’s a layer deeper via the point-of-sale. So, you kind of go from the 30,000-foot view and dive down to see the forest and the trees, so to speak. That’s really what we’re trying to do with Signal and the first of many kinds of new data sources as our customers are demanding to work with one data provider and want to get all these different kinds of questions answered.

“And to close that thought with your question about frequency and real-time, it is pretty powerful, and it’s a big differentiator for us,” he concluded. “I think not only in cannabis but in the world, people want information as fast as possible. We’re all on Twitter or whatever trying to get info as it happens, and I think if you can get in front of these things not only for your brands and products, but for competitive brands and products, it makes a big difference. The new competitors introducing a product that you know could be challenging for you, the sooner you’re aware of it sooner you can counter it – which may be by introducing new services or looking at promotions and pricing – and the better chance you have for success. So, staying on top of it as fast as possible does matter and I would add it is extra important in cannabis, especially today. The brands in a lot of markets have flattened as far as the revenue build. We saw a huge spike in sales with COVID, and it’s getting back to that pre-pandemic normal, but growth has been a big constraint. And then you have the capital markets challenges, so everyone needs every edge they can get to outperform everybody else in this market, and that’s what it’s about. It’s about outperformance in a market that is not growing and doesn’t have the natural tailwinds that it used to have and having access to data in a real-time fashion can only help.”

Expanding Your Headset

When I first saw that Signal was about menus,. I thought, ‘Are they gathering perusal data, what people are looking at. Is that even achievable, to track what people are looking at on menus? “Definitely,” said Scott, “and that’s a big reason why we went with this strategy for Signal, where we’re working with third-parties like Leafly and Weedmaps directly, so we can start to incorporate that. We don’t have that in Signal yet, but as you can imagine, we recognize the value in that type of information, and being a data company, we’re really good at distilling that down into actionable insights. Weedmaps and Leafly I think have some things, but they’ve also got a lot on their plate getting the customers to use the apps and getting them to the retailers. On the analytics side, we want to bring more of that in and they are able to track all those behaviors, just like Facebook or Google track clicks, it’s the same thing here. So, aggregating that information into cohorts is definitely something that’s on our roadmap so we can say,. For instance, that a 25-year-old in California prefers to purchase edibles and likes to browse these types of brands. It’s not any sort of personally identifiable information, but instead is a cohort or demographic analysis based on that behavior. It’s definitely something we want to get to and brands and everyone want to know that, too. We have the sales data, and here’s the purchase journey for you, too.”

Our time was almost up, and I wanted to end on the state of the industry, and the cannabis consumer. Most CEOs think there will be a recession, and so how will that impact retailers and brands and the consumer? Is cannabis recession proof or recession resistant?

“Well, certainly we’ve seen growth slow in a big way,” replied Scott. “The biggest impact has been to what we consider to be the most valuable segment of consumers – the top 10 percent of consumers, who account for an outsized number of sales. The real passionate cannabis consumer, the core consumer out there, and we’ve seen them contract quite a bit. We don’t know exactly why that is or what’s driving it, but that has had an impact and shrinking basket sizes is where we’re seeing it. The transaction is getting smaller. It varies from market to market, but they’ve all pretty much contracted. Price point is a big part of that. You probably hear a lot about pricing compression when you talk to people, and we also see that in the data quite a bit. It’s because of supply and demand problems. When there is a lot of supply, pricing comes down. There will be an equilibrium eventually, but the pricing is coming down, the basket sizes are coming down, and the total dollar amount, but more things are going into basket because the price has gotten cheaper.

“So those are kind of the big trends,” he continued. “I think what it’s going to take to get us out of this is access. Leafly recently published a report on what they call retailer deserts, areas in a state or a province that don’t have retailer dispensary coverage because of bans, whether it’s the county or city. I was just talking at Hall of Flowers with a retailer in Fresno, California, which just recently licensed stores. The Fresno population, which is upwards of half a million people, had no access to cannabis retail until relatively recently, and I think that is going to drive the numbers ahead as we see more access.”

When I drove through Fresno, you couldn’t find a store, but your phone would be inundated with delivery services. “And I think delivery is good, and delivery drives a fair number of sales, but the lack of brick-and-mortar and the numbers that this person told me that they do in Fresno. is off the charts,” he replied. “It’s like the unlimited license market, and this is recent. I think you’re going to see more of that, and it’ll pull people from the illicit market. Delivery certainly helps people, but I think as soon as there’s a store in your radius and you’re driving off of work, and you can pop in, I think that will help.

“And I think investment capital is going to come back in now with the news yesterday,” Scott reiterated. “All these businesses are capital constrained for a variety of reasons; banking is hard as it is, and it doesn’t make it any easier when you can’t get money to invest in your business. And then I think marketing limitations also really artificially depress our industry. Think about other industries, like beverage or alcohol, where you can market it. We really can’t, the channels are very limited. We’re talking to that core consumer already, but we need to bring more people in who don’t know what they don’t know. They don’t know what’s behind those doors in the store in Fresno because they haven’t walked in, but if they get marketed to effectively in mainstream channels, I think that’s going to grow the industry. Yes, it’s really a rough patch in a lot of ways, but we see growth in markets like Michigan, and even though you hear people talking about how we need caps on licenses in certain regions, there are still areas of Michigan that don’t have retailers. I can go on and on.”

So, no matter what happens next year, some businesses are not going to make it but others are going to thrive all because of the particular market they’re in? “In Santa Rosa, I heard complaints from people that there are too many stores in Santa Rosa, and that could very well be true,.” Said Scott. “There are a lot of advocates for caps on market, but sometimes the problem with caps is that the cap is too low. It’s great if you’re one of the license holders, but maybe there’s a little room for others. But to get that natural equilibrium takes time, and then in markets like Oregon, the equilibrium seems to be that everyone struggles, and so I see both sides. But you’re right, it depends on region and the legislation around that region. Santa Rosa maybe has too many stores, Fresno maybe has too few, and what is that balance? If you ask an operator in Fresno, they’ll probably tell you that business is booming. If you ask someone in Santa Rosa, they’ll tell you it’s really hard. And there are stories all in-between.”

You’ve talked about the Biden announcement and see it as a positive catalyst. Is it possible that everyone has been so starved for good news that this was really welcome, but that it also has to be followed up with something more concrete? “Absolutely,” said Scott. “The public markets responded well yesterday, and kind of pulled back a little bit today. I think that it’s going to be a long road, but the way I look at it is that the season has changed, and we just really haven’t felt it yet. It’s like riding into summer but the weather is just starting to warm up, and I think during this 180 days, whether it takes 180 days or something happens before that, there’s going to be a lot of people that are going to start to look at this category for the first time, and a lot of people that are going to be looking at it a second time a little more closely. I think that you’re going to start to see that happen, and then soon as this gets de-scheduled, or at the very least rescheduled, you’re going to really see the floodgates open.

“I think it will definitely start,” he repeated, “and all those conversations the public companies are having about trying to get up-listed with NASDAQ, it’s time for them to reintroduce that conversation with NASDAQ and the New York Stock exchanges. And maybe this guidance by the federal government will provide just enough air cover for them to make the jump ahead of the rescheduling or descheduling or maybe they wait until some news, but I think a lot of activity is going to start happening behind the scenes, and then the momentum will build and then, within 180 days, it’s going to really be moving at full speed.”

Scott has been at Headset for about seven years, two years longer than Leafly. Before we rang-off, I had to ask , is Headset a pinnacle, a culmination? “I think it’s a little bit of all of it,” he said. “I think it’s very much the early innings. Like we were talking about the sophistication of the operators, or that MSO CEO you mentioned, that’s just the beginning. The way I look at it is like we’re on the precipice of so much more, and when we see some federal change and get more people coming in, data will become an even bigger part of that narrative. Seven years ago, we were far too early. There was a lot of education and a lot of evangelism around data. Now I think people are starting to get it and understand it, and in another handful of years the expectations and demand will grow, and I definitely want to see that through and capture the opportunity to the end.

“I’m also really enjoying what we do here,” he continued, “not only how we help our clients – and it’s great to see these brands grow and these retailers succeed – but beyond that, selfishly, it’s a nice seat because I get to see it all. I see all of these numbers, I see all of these brands, all these winners and how they’re getting built up. It’s as if I was in alcohol and I got to see Anheuser Busch establish themselves 100 years ago.

“Leafly was a different time,” he added. “It was very early days, and the challenge was we couldn’t raise any venture funding. We were a consumer internet play, and you need venture capital to grow that, and back in 2010 no one would invest. There weren’t any venture firms focused on it like there are today, and everyone thought we were a little crazy. Maybe we were a little crazy with cannabis in 2010, but we were sure this was going to be a mainstream thing, and something big, and everyone said, ‘Well, we loved the numbers that we had at Leafly from a consumer adoption,’ but they were really worried it wasn’t going to go anywhere, that it might have just been a California medical or Colorado medical-type thing, and so we found Privateer, a group that eventually became Tilray.

“Privateer started as a private equity model trying to build, buy, and invest in mainstream cannabis companies, but they couldn’t find any money either,” he recalled. “They couldn’t get any investors because there were no mainstream cannabis companies back then. Leafly was one of the only ones. That sounds so crazy to think about, but in 2010 it was still very much the High Times kind of stoner stereotype when you talked about cannabis. And so, we were one of the only ones, and they said, ‘There’s no one out there you can raise money from and we’re having trouble raising money, so why don’t we just come together and do this together, and that’s what we did. And so, we were a Privateer company, they had financing, and once they had Leafly on the books, they could go to investors and say, ‘We have Leafly.’ They extracted a lot of investment, they were able to spin up Tilray, and we were able to build Leafly into a pretty big platform.

“But we hit a ceiling as far as my engagement,” he said of his decision to leave Leafly so long ago. “The problem we solved with Leafly was to demystify cannabis for mainstream consumers, and we felt like we built a service that did that effectively. Then the problem that we were trying to solve was how do we get more ad revenue out of our customers, and that, to me personally, is just not as exciting a problem. It’s not something I want to work on, trying to weed more dollars out of people. So, it was just time to move on, and the data side was really attractive, because the demand for data was growing, brands were starting to build out, and that was really the impetus to jump. And now I think we’re kind of in those golden years hitting our stride, and I think the next three to five years are really where everything’s going to come together. So, it’s too early to leave, I’m enjoying it too much, and we can talk again in three years.”

He was certainly in early, but now more competition is coming on as well. “There are other data companies, but we’ve got some advantages with our retailer footprint and our data cooperates,” said Scott. “It takes a lot of time to get 3000 stores sharing their data: getting them comfortable with it and creating those relationships. If someone want to go do that tomorrow, it will take them a long time. There are opportunities to source data from point-of-sale partners directly, and sometimes point-of-sale providers will offer that up, but we prefer to work directly with retailers for that relationship, because we can get them more services, and because we can guarantee we always get that data and we’re not at the mercy of one provider.

“The short of it is,” he added, “we do what we do from the data that we have, and it’s very hard at the level of the comprehensive nature that we get the data from. It has to be representative samples and many point-of-sale providers, because different point-of-sale providers cater to different audiences. Treez in California will target higher volume stores, and a Blaze might focus more on delivery and smaller businesses. With the menu data, there are companies out there that are sourcing from screen-scraping Leafly, screen-scraping Weedmaps, which means they’re building web crawlers to pull down the data without the permission of these providers. They provide some semblance of what we’re doing with Signal, but our approach working with the data cooperatives directly is a big advantage for us, because we have that conduit, we’re always going to be guaranteed to get access to data, it’s never going to turn off, and we’re not going to get angry letters from data providers complaining that we’re scraping their site. I think we’re competitive there.

“And then the final point is that a lot of our customers only want one data provider, and we’re getting that scale,” he added. “As long as we can innovate and meet their needs, I think we’re well-positioned because you don’t want staff to have to jump between five or six systems to get the data. They want one, and we’re trying to be that one. Yes, data is a very attractive business, but it’s a complex business, and I think we’re well-positioned and we’ve got a good head start.”