962 karma · joined September 22, 2012
Company: trackandtrace.tools
Sideloading eliminates this risk completely.
I wrote a ~50 LOC browser extension that always redirects away from the feed to your profile. Works great, sideload and forget.
Since it's targeted at businesses and not consumers, word of mouth has been powerful for me. I've rapidly grown in the state of Michigan thanks to a few very enthusiastic operators.
I also went on a slate of podcasts last year to talk about (read: promote) my product. Podcast hosts are always looking for guests, and most of them didn't cost me a thing.
It's also been helpful to be a Google Developer Expert for web extensions, the Chrome team interviewed me and that gave me a platform to talk about what I was working on[2].
2/3 of my time is spent on consulting projects, which pay better, and the rest is spent maintaining the platform. At the moment, the platform is self-sustaining and the revenue from it is growing fast. I work some of the largest companies in the industry, which is great for network building. The flexibility in schedule it offers is terrific, and I have no need to fundraise or hire.
If there's even slight damage to the barcode, forget the browser scanners, you can scan that thing until the next Olympics and not get a read. HID scanners don't skip a beat.
Turns out that workers would rather manually key in the last 5 numbers of a barcode to look it up than screw around with a poorly behaved camera. For the current version of the platform, it's either dedicated hardware scanning or manual ID search, the phone scanning wastes everybody's time.
Ultimately, after much experimentation, the unavoidable conclusion is that the optical scanning solutions are junk. Connecting a crappy $20 HID bluetooth barcode scanner to a phone is so crazily better at scanning a 1D barcode than even the most massaged optical barcode scanning libraries. Industry workers that deal with these barcodes don't even bother with phone camera scanning, it's way too slow and temperamental.
I had a small side project extension, ~25,000 installs & free to use. I got enough inbound interest trying to "help me monetize" that I thought it would be worth cataloguing all the different unsavory avenues: https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/the-ugly-business-of-mone...
If states are going to legalize and tax, then they're obligated to treat these businesses as legitimate - especially with respect to social equity programs that give priority to minority license applicants. If you're sending these licensees into a meat grinder, that's not social equity.
It is not hyperbolic to say that in many states, the cannabis industry is drowning. Far too much regulation, far too many taxes, and no access to capital yields an environment for cannabis SMBs that is effectively impossible to thrive in. The largest multi-state operators are the only businesses that are positioned to survive this downturn.
Contrast this with federal agricultural policy for the past 100 years, in which entire agencies are dedicated to ensuring the health of American agriculture through loans, subsidies, and economic policy. Even though cannabis is the 6th largest cash crop in the US - roughly the same size as cotton, and larger than rice or potatoes, it is being actively crushed underfoot.
Federal legalization is not close, and SAFE banking is not close. The industry as a whole is sliding into an enduring period of stagnation, and legislators are far too slow to act. For people who have been closely following the industry, all of this is completely unsurprising.
My idea was that separate inputs should have separate debounced handlers, but it's likely you could do away with that and just listen for input events globally with no adverse effect on data collection.
Open source Chrome extension for Metrc, the primary cannabis track and trace platform in the US.
It's free to use, but I'm proud to say that a significant slice of the cannabis industry uses this tool daily when reporting their business's cannabis activity.
Browser extensions are severely underrated as a platform because they aren't sexy. For all that mobile devices have given us, so much of our work continues to be done using a desktop browser. Enhancements such as augmenting websites with widgets, supplying contextual information, and automating repetitive tasks using the authenticated session - when applied appropriately - can save someone hours every day.