Coming up for air! What’s new @ POW?

I’m guilty. It’s been rather too quiet as of late to our supporters. We finally got the blog platform online to help socialize everything that’s happening and our learnings in our journey.

I admit the silence has been a bit by design, and the other frankly we’ve been locked in our innovation lab tackling all your feedback and ideas (both good and bad) to build and weave into the launch of POW.

It’s now time to come up for some air and share a little insight of what the team has been working on, which I expect will all be part of our first release to launched this quarter.

The ideas you’ve shared have been f.a.b.u.l.o.u.s. We’ve started with a paper napkin idea (literally), took in your feedback + ideas, pressure tested it here and there, made a few changes and pivots, and now we have the version 1.0 soon to be released.

What you will see is simply our first cut, and many of the ideas that made didn’t make the cut haven’t been forgotten, just simply backlogged for a future release.

To share a few key highlights, I hope you take the opportunity to test drive the site lie and share back the good and the ugly of your experience. We can only raise the bar to make POW’s services from your constructive criticism and sharing experiences. So what’s in store?

1. Cannabis Converter

Some call it the cannabis converter, others the marijuana calculator, but the function is all the same. We can now aggregate marijuana strain data from both commercial, private and public sources, combine the strains attributes across quality, weight, location, and others to serve up one of the most accurate and up-to-date pricing by city, province or state and country.

2. Local Deals

The name says it all. Now with tens of thousands of dispensary, retailer and marijuana data points swimming in our datalake, we can now transform this data into an easy-to-read way to surface quickly who has the best deal in town right now for your favourite strain.

3. Price Alerts

This is one of my favourites as its a pain point that has frustrated me since the WWW gave rise to the online shopping experience. A simple way for consumers to quickly monitor product pricing across multiple retailers and proactively get alerted if the price changes or a deal is to be had. So, we’re striving to do the same but for your favourite marijuana strains and cannabis brands.

To close off and before the next update, a few other new features, and services you can expect to find with POW in the first release. I’ll share more details in the coming posts.

• Add strains to a favourite list. Why? Quick access for future reference to your favourite strains, and for similar reasons why you bookmark your favourite websites. I don’t think this one needs much explanation.
• Custom Price Alerts. Define target price criteria versus general price changes. Ex. Just alert me if the price of OG Kush drops 20% nearby.
• Behavioural-based strain exploration. Call this “Explore Strains”, but it’s a foundational expectation to help you discover and learn about marijuana strains. But we’re upping this to help you filter strains based on how you want to feel (and not feel) to discover strains that can deliver the desired behaviour you seek. It’s fairly self-explanatory with an “I feel like…” navigation label.
• Medical marijuana. Similar to the above feature, the same will be offered to help users filter thru thousands of marijuana strains that may help with medical symptoms and conditions. View these strains as informative only, and always consult a doctor first. Why? Nothing too scientific about it other than the results are crowdsourced from cannabis users and other sources that felt the specific strains helped with unique medical conditions and symptoms, such as headaches, PMS, stay focused, etc.

I hope by sharing the above will whet your appetite of what’s to come, and gets you as excited as we are to offer something new and tailored to you. There are tons of sites online pushing marijuana this, and marijuana that. We strive to stand out to deliver a service or solution that you ask for…not what we think. Help us, help you. So I encourage you to continue the ongoing feedback and ideas, and we’ll do our best to help deliver them to you.