Online cannabis hub, RealGoodys, aims for seamless purchases

RealGoodys partners Valentina Rivera and Daniel Miller sit for an interview with Saipan Tribune last Friday in Garapan. (JOSHUA SANTOS)

The idea is to create a website that will showcase the CNMI’s growing cannabis industry and the CNMI’s strains and allows visitors to place online cannabis order reservations at CNMI dispensaries before even setting foot on the island—with their orders already waiting for pick up as soon as they get here.

That’s a need that realgoodys.com partners Daniel Miller and Valentina Rivera believe will be met by their website, which is now taking order reservations for products from CanaMarianas, Saipan Select, and The Health Co.

Rivera pointed out that popular online cannabis information hubs on the internet, such as leafly.com and weedmaps.com, are “so national” that the CNMI’s cannabis offerings are hard to find or nowhere to be found on the websites. As such, RealGoodys was created.

“Lightbulbs were [going off] in my head, ‘Wait, we can create something like [Leafly and Weedmaps] for Saipan and maybe Guam,’ something local-based for local dispensaries. …Our main goal was [that] we wanted people to know where to go and not waste time going to so many places,” said Rivera during an interview with Miller last Friday.

Miller, who is originally from Oregon, is a part-owner in CNMI cannabis retailer Saipan Select and had been growing cannabis stateside for the last 20 years. Miller has experience in the indoor and outdoor growing of hemp, CBD (cannabidiol) plants, and THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) plants. Miller said Friday that his fellow Saipan Select co-owners flew him out to Saipan in December last year to aid in operations, and since then has been Saipan Select’s main farmer.

Rivera said she originally was not familiar with the inner workings of the cannabis industry as her areas of expertise were in technology, website development, and video production.

Miller and Rivera got in touch sometime in February this year, and through months of back-and-forth with Miller, Rivera, and Saipan Select, realgoodys.com was launched. Miller clarified in a text last week that RealGoodys is independent of Saipan Select.

On Leafly, a main feature of the website is further information on cannabis strains, such as flavor profile, sensations, and THC percentages. For RealGoodys, Miller said that flavor profiles and sensations are information uploaded to the website by the dispensaries themselves. As for percentages, Miller noted that this is a challenge as there is no testing lab for cannabis products in the CNMI yet.

Some notable features of RealGoodys, Rivera said, is that the CNMI’s dispensaries can put up what cannabis strains they have in stock and daily store deals in real-time, with the daily deals going to an aggregated section of the website so that visitors know right away what deals are ongoing in CNMI dispensaries.

When asked how online cannabis order reservations will work, Rivera said that website visitors select the strains they want and the amount desired. Then dispensaries are notified of the reservation request and prepare the product. Finally, customers drive to the dispensary they purchased from and pay for their order there. For website upkeep and sustainability, Rivera added that there will roughly be a 7.5% transaction fee on online order reservations, a standard practice for online retailers such as Amazon and eBay.

Rivera added that, when developing realgoodys.com she implemented a review section to allow people with verified purchases to leave feedback on strains and other products purchased and a live chat for site visitors to inquire with dispensaries in real-time before making purchases.

Another significant feature on RealGoodys is that the website is not only an online a cannabis retailer platform, but a wholesaler platform as well. For licensed sellers, RealGoodys allows cannabis farmers to upload bulk product listings to RealGoodys, and retailers can place seamless orders through the website. Product review and live chat features will be available to farmers and retailers and will further streamline that sales process, Rivera said.

As of last Friday, Miller and Rivera said that they have already met with two cannabis farmers to discuss having their products put on RealGoodys, and projected that bulk listings for cannabis retailers will be up sometime this week.

Will debit and credit card payments and/or cannabis order deliveries be on RealGoodys?

Miller and Rivera said they hope so, but said that for now, discussions are ongoing. Miller said that having debit and credit card payments at dispensaries is still a challenge as Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.-backed banks remain hesitant to do business with dispensaries as cannabis is still classified as a Schedule 1 drug—the highest level restriction by the U.S. federal government. For cannabis order deliveries, Rivera said this requires further discussion by the CNMI Cannabis Commission.

When asked about some future plans for RealGoodys, Miller and Rivera said there might be educational videos on cannabis produced in-house that will be part of the website, and that the development of a RealGoodys app is in the works as well.

When asked why they went with the brand name “RealGoodys” and why its logo is a balloon, Rivera said she and Miller were bouncing names and logo ideas off each other and landed on a balloon for a logo and “RealGoodys” as a brand name.

“This [a balloon] would be a perfect logo because it’s not so ‘in your face’ like [Weedmaps]. But then balloons going high, it’s going up to the clouds, like Cloud Nine, right?” said Rivera. “Then it’s ‘Real’ because it’s the real deal, and [cannabis product packaging] look like goodie bags..so RealGoodys.”