Although the cannabis industry’s pace can cause time to fly by in dog years, Kyla Sirni, the co-founder and CEO of Dispense, a cannabis eCommerce platform launched in 2020, is used to the bustle. She and her co-founder had worked in hospitality for seven years operating Tablelist, a ticketing, reservations, and guest management software company. That is, until the COVID-19 pandemic leveled the industry.

“We were operating in 50 cities worldwide,” Sirni tells Cannabis Business Executive. “We had actually just launched a brand new version of our software in January of 2020. And then Covid hit and shut down hospitality.

“So like many other companies, especially in the hospitality space, we were scrambling to figure out ‘how do we stay afloat? How do we generate revenue?’”

A phone call from Ascend Wellness’s founder and executive chairman Abner Kurtin, at the time the company’s CEO, offered a path forward for Tablelist’s team. Kurtin was familiar with its technology and thought it could solve a problem Ascend was experiencing at one of its busier dispensaries.

Ascend “had a really busy location in Collinsville, Illinois that was doing about 1,500 orders a day,” Sirni remembers. “They needed some type of ticketing or reservation software to help them manage the flow of customers coming in and out of the store so that they could remain compliant with social distancing,” and Tablelist’s tools fit the bill. In working with the multi-state operator (MSO), Sirni and her team started learning of the tech frustrations Ascend was experiencing, especially with its digital menu service, before the question came: 

“Do you think you could build more stuff for us?”

One $2 million seed round later, Dispense was off to the races.

Retailer-Owned Data

Sirni regards Dispense’s first year working with a large MSO as a “baptism by fire.” Learning the cannabis industry (and all its state-by-state complexities) while not-so-slowly building an eCommerce tool for a company with more than 20 active dispensary locations. The first task was building a digital menu that would enable onsite SEO.

“Where we saw the biggest opportunity … was giving the retailers the power to be able to use all of their menu data to drive organic search results,” Sirni explains, “because the biggest marketplace right now in cannabis is Google.”

As opposed to a centralized marketplace offering a digital menu integration for a dispensary’s website, Dispense presents retailers with the ability to sell directly from their own websites “and control and drive SEO traffic,” Sirni says. In other words, SEO traffic is delivered to the retailer, not the 3rd-party digital marketplace partner. “We’ve created a native menu structure where we will automatically serve all of that data up to Google so that you start ranking,” she adds.

That said, Dispense does offer integrations with Weedmaps and Leafly, “as there’s definitely a place and a value that marketplaces add,” Sirni says. 

In addition to some key Tablelist features such as ticketed ordering and pickup and customer relationship management (CRM) tools, Dispense also offers a “kiosk mode” for its software. Kiosk mode enables retailers to process in-store transactions without a budtender having to take payments. This is especially useful for high-volume locations, Sirni says, citing a New Jersey retailer that processes 2,500 transactions per day where “nobody waits for more than 5 minutes whether you’ve pre-ordered or you order through a kiosk that’s powered by Dispense.”

Open-Partner Model

The main benefit to a retailer owning their SEO and digital menu is they are directly interacting with consumers and patients–Dispense doesn’t stand in the middle of that relationship, but rather it offers the tools that enable it in 12 (soon to be 14) states.

Dispense’s digital menu platform costs a flat $500 per month fee per location. The company also offers custom enterprise pricing for larger operations that need a greater number of features. Dispense also offers a 50% social equity discount for qualifying licensees.

Dispense will function on any desktop or mobile operating system, allowing retailers to choose their preferred (or existing) hardware to pair with the software. This also applies to the company’s kiosk mode. “We have some stores that use Wawa-type kiosks or McDonald’s-type kiosks,” Sirni says, “and then we have stores that just use iPads. Our kiosk mode can operate on any of those.”

As with any tech stack, integrations are key. Despite being a startup, Dispense has already developed integrations with most major cannabis software providers, including Alpine IQ, FlowHub, Blaze, Dutchie POS, and SpringBig. The integration model is what Dispense intends to pursue rather than trying to build out its own full-suite software, Sirni says, noting how the cannabis industry’s complex nature makes it challenging to do everything that a retailer might need in a single platform.

Start Small, Build Slowly

Sirni’s experience in hospitality prepared her for her start in the cannabis industry, allowing her to avoid common startup mistakes such as growing too rapidly. “One of the things I learned the hard way in my first startup is you don’t actually need a huge team to be able to build good tech and solve problems, or to scale.

“Think about solving problems with tech as opposed to solving problems with people.”

Dispense started with two co-founders in 2020, and only this past summer did the company add a sales team–most of the company’s clients have been garnered through referrals.

While Sirni is proud of the work that her company has done so far, she is also quick to acknowledge there is much left to build and much room into which to grow. Currently, 15 people make up the Dispense team, and Sirni has made an effort to bring in individuals with cannabis-specific knowledge. For example, she highlights the hiring of Jeremy Johnson, the company’s business development manager, as a keystone moment for the company. Prior to joining Dispense, Johnson worked in similar roles in cannabis dispensaries in Michigan, bringing with him extensive market (and customer) knowledge.

And while Dispense is not necessarily in a position to make any acquisitions in the turbulent months ahead, Sirni believes the company’s digital menu solution will allow it to stand out with a signal amongst the noise, especially as retailers “understand the value of data and owning data and owning customer relationships.”