Calvin Ho

At a certain point in every startup, the task list stops being a list and becomes a storm. Everything feels urgent, nothing feels clear, and decisions carry dire consequences.

This feeling usually stems from a lack of clarity. In my case, it showed up as stagnant sales and increased customer churn during Greenline’s growth years.

Early on, we prioritised running our technology on iPads and web browsers. iPads were chosen to give our consumers the best hardware experience possible by focusing on better battery life and user experience, while web was supported to serve the lowest end of the cost spectrum. We also wanted to offer a system that required only a laptop to access quality government-compliant cannabis inventory systems.

However, this choice came with serious drawbacks. As the industry matured, it became apparent that most of our largest competitors offered Android-based systems, and their customers were not willing to switch to ours. No retailer wanted to replace fully functional Android devices with new hardware that would cost thousands of dollars per store. This created a significant obstacle to our growth.

Our hardware limitations were just one part of a broader pattern. As a team of fewer than ten, we were constantly stretched thin. Our development and engineering teams were often pulled in different directions. The ticketing system was overloaded, and every week we faced the possibility of losing major clients if we did not deliver critical features. Dropping just one of these clients could have caused a double digit percentage drop in our monthly revenue.

Despite all of this, it became clear that building multi-platform support for Android was the right priority. We knew this because of a few key facts:

1. We held approximately 18 percent of the Canadian cannabis retail market at the time, while our two largest competitors controlled more than 50 percent combined.
2. The number of new stores being approved was slowing, as provinces began limiting new licences to curb oversaturation.

This meant we could no longer rely on acquiring brand new businesses as customers for much longer. We predicted that within two years, growth would depend entirely on converting existing retailers already accustomed to other platforms. We had to prepare for that shift.

We only recognized this trend early because we maintained a living document tracking our total addressable market. This document consisted of a series of spreadsheets populated by data from a custom web scraper. The scraper gathered licence and contact information from provincial websites, which we then manually filtered and categorized by business size, location, and existing point of sale provider (all done in compliance with Canadian legal guidelines, of course).

At first glance, this might seem like an enormous undertaking for a company of this size. The insights it provided made it much easier to prioritise, even in the most complex situations. When you have access to the right insights, the stress of decision making and strategic planning becomes far more manageable.

Being able to see this reality with undeniable data meant we could take action and properly plan for the future with little to no doubt about our decisions. Having that clarity and being prepared for the licencing faucet to abruptly turn off allowed us to grow Greenline even through the Covid years.