LEAFLY.COM CLASSES UP THE JOINT

A New Medical Cannabis Web Site Is Lightning Fast and Wicked
Smart.

One million medical marijuana patients now exist in America, activists
estimate, and another 15.7 million or so smoke pot recreationally,
federal health officials estimate.

While growing or selling pot can still land you in federal prison,
hosting a cannabis web site appears to be quite legal and lucrative.
Leading dispensary listing web site WeedMaps.com grossed $2.7 million
in the first three months of 2011, but there's at least a dozen
competitors hoping to grab market share.

The fastest, best-dressed among them is Leafly.com, a one-year-old
strain guide and review site with an app for the iPhone, and soon, for
the Android. In June, Leafly.com tallied about 180,000 visitors and is
growing at a clip of about 30 percent per month without a marketing
budget -- probably because it's the bomb.

Three professional Orange County, CA. coders created Leafly after
becoming dissatisfied with existing online strain resources, said site
co-founder Scott, who asked Legalization Nation to withhold his last
name.

"It's far exceeded what we expected," he said. "We're definitely very
happy with the response and traffic that we get."

A computer science major in college, Scott and friends are 30, 32, and
36, all with high-paying day jobs in web development. They code for
mainstream, branded sites that attract millions of users per month. In
addition to mainstream paychecks, they have wives, and kids, and
they're reluctant to come out of the closet professionally.

But Scott admits that Leafly has been their most successful
independent venture to date. "This has been the first one that's
really gotten traction," he said.

A cannabis user since 2005, Scott said Leafly began after a doctor
recommended cannabis to him in 2009. He visited local dispensaries and
found the variety of strains mind-boggling. A true geek, he started a
personal Excel spreadsheet to track what he was trying.

Scott also turned to the Internet for more weed information. He
discovered that the web sites he found were often slow, ugly, and broken.

"There's tons of them and new ones every day," he noted. "They all
have a certain look and feel."

That look can also get someone fired from their job. "We work in tech;
we do all sorts of web stuff," he said. "Everybody we know likes to
smoke, but they don't like that kind of 'stoner' look of all the sites
they go to."

Scott and crew decided to design something faster, more focused, and
mature. "We wanted it to be safe for work," he explained. "You can be
looking at it at work and it's not obvious to someone who walked by
what it is."

The three drove their wives crazy for a month as they developed the
web site on weekends in the garage, hand-rolling Leafly's code from
scratch. "It was a labor of love," Scott said.

It's also wicked fast. "Speed is one of the key factors that we look
at," Scott said. "We all work at top-tier web sites, so we really have
that ingrained."

The group seeded the site with profile pages for fifty top strains
like OG Kush, White Widow, and Trainwreck. Leafly displays strains in
a simple periodic table format, from Afghani Bullrider to Yumboldt.
Click on the any square -- for example, "Cd" for Chemdawg -- and
Leafly fetches the strain's profile.

"Chemdawg provides a very relaxing and cerebral high. A popular
medical strain that is usually available throughout California
collectives," the description reads. "Chemdawg is the rumored parent
of OG Kush and Sour Diesel."

Leafly lists Chemdawg as primarily "euphoric." It helps relieve
"stress" and can cause "dry mouth." Further down the profile, the site
lists nearby dispensaries carrying the strain, and their various
prices. It also publishes user comments.

Visitors don't need to log in or sign up to browse. And new users can
sign up without an e-mail address, and can review anonymously.

The privacy features could have led to spam and dick jokes, but, Scott
said, "We're actually super impressed with some of the reviews. Some
will just do one-liners and some stupid shit, but most of them are
really good. They say things about the taste and smell. People love
weed."

"I suffer from PTSD & a host of othorpediac [sic] injuries including a
spinal fusion and I have to say this is one of the best strains for
what ails me I have smoked in the last 2 years," said one reviewer of
Maui Waui.

The site now has 9,500 individual reviews. Five reviews qualify a new
strain profile for publication, and Leafly currently publishes
five-hundred-plus strains, sorted alphabetically by indica, sativa,
and hybrid. "It's a big set of data and there are patterns that start
to emerge," Scott said.

Indicas truly help with insomnia, the data shows. "It definitely does
start to match up, even though it could have been completely random,"
Scott said.

This summer, Leafly will update its mobile apps to accept reviews and
pictures. The company also works with testing labs Steep Hill of
Oakland and Full Spectrum of Denver, CO., to integrate analytical
testing results into Leafly.

Scott has also started what will be a long conversation with his
teenage daughter. "We told her what we were doing and why," he said.
"Basically, our approach is treating it essentially like a
conversation about alcohol, though [weed is] safer and legal in
certain cases. Basically, 'Try it when she's older, if that's what she
wants to do -- but not before then.'"