Day 3: Building an App (and Wondering If Anyone Cares)
🌱 Weed Garden is a grow management tool for dispensaries and personal grows. Track crops, locations with ease and privacy. 🌿
Welcome! If you're just joining me, here's a little backstory: I'm documenting the process of building a cannabis ERP solution—something that's both thrilling and terrifying. This blog serves as a place for me to share my thoughts, challenges, and victories in real-time. I’m posting these updates across multiple platforms because I believe in the importance of transparency, especially when it comes to projects that might impact the cannabis industry in a big way.
Now, let's get into it...
Building an app is like riding a rollercoaster. One day, you’re filled with excitement, pushing out new features, tweaking the UI, and solving complex backend problems. The next day, you’re wondering if you’re just throwing money and time into a black hole that no one will ever appreciate.
I’ve spent countless hours and maybe a few hundred dollars (okay, not thousands), but I still have those days where I ask myself: “Does anyone even want this?” A quick Google search shows competitors like Canix, Distru, and CannabusinessERP – polished, established, and professionally marketed. But here's the catch: you can’t even try their product without scheduling a demo with their sales team. What’s behind the curtain? What do they charge? You won’t know unless you jump on a call and go through the dance.
And then there's me. I’m one person (okay, maybe a small team), working on building a cannabis ERP solution, pouring my energy into a free tier that doesn't even have a plan to make money yet. I’ve got no massive sales team, no bloated costs, and I certainly don’t plan on locking everything behind a demo wall. That’s the first thing that’ll set Weed-Garden apart: transparency. I want people to try the product without feeling like they’re stepping into a corporate sales funnel. It's not about making a quick buck—it’s about creating something useful.
Speaking of transparency, once the code is polished, I plan to go even further. My goal is to open-source both the client and server repositories. Not only will this make the project transparent, but it could also attract contributors—developers who care about what we're building. I think that’s a big win, not just for me but for anyone interested in the cannabis industry or ERP systems.
Right now, we don’t have a polished product, but the vision is there. It’s an ERP tailored for licensed dispensaries in Minnesota, focused on grow management, inventory, barcoding, and financial tracking—everything these businesses need to stay compliant while scaling their operations. Yeah, sure, it’s niche. But that’s kind of the point.
Here’s what I’ve been doing lately: I’ve started cross-posting my blog articles across Medium, Dev.to, and Twitter, documenting this wild journey of building a cannabis ERP system. I’m not writing this blog because I think it’s going to go viral or because I expect hundreds of likes. I’m doing it because it’s part of the process. Whether anyone follows along or not doesn’t matter to me. This is about the journey, documenting the highs and lows, and learning along the way.
Maybe, if nothing else, this blog will serve as a reminder of everything I’ve built. And if I ever need a job down the line, this blog and a polished product could be my golden ticket. Or maybe it’ll just sit on the internet gathering dust—but at least I’ll have put it out there.
So, here we are. Questioning everything, but continuing anyway. Because sometimes, you’ve just got to ride the rollercoaster and see where it takes you.
If you're curious about the journey, check out more on weed-garden.com or follow the blog at blog.weed-garden.com.