- Tech stack connections - How each technology/library is integrated and organized into the whole project and the pros and cons of choosing certain technologies.
- AWS tools - How to integrate and manage AWS tools.
- Mobile backend - How data is stored locally versus on the cloud. How to maintain user storage and querying external APIs.
- Data visualization - How to utilize different data visualization libraries. How to store data for easy visualization.
In 2017, the i-502 cannabis industry sold over $1.37 billion in cannabis products from 1278 producer/processors through 435 retailer shops. With the infancy of the legal cannabis market, there is a lack of information and tools about finding your perfect high. Additionally, a user has to sort through a thousand brands and hundreds of strains in multiple different types of product. Buddy is the solution to finding and tracking products, which can be used by all three distinct user populations: the new user, the regular user, and the medical patient. Tracking cannabis usage will allow users to find their perfect high through being better educated about products and being more comfortable purchasing cannabis products.
When it comes to consuming cannabis, finding your sweet spot isn’t always a simple process, especially with the countless forms and origins of cannabis on the market today. Cannabis tracking is an age-old concept and has materialized over the years in the form of journaling. Medical patients have especially used journaling for years in order to overcome a lack of professional guidance.
There are multiple different cannabis tracking journals on the market; however, users do not want to rely on carrying a journal around along with searching pages to remember thoughts on certain products. Apps have been built to overcome these issues, but they are focused on the medical patient and heavily based on symptom relief. These solutions are also time consuming to use.
Other apps on the market are focused on displaying strain information, news, and dispensary maps. These solutions are aimed to give users more information on strains, where to find them, and creating a forum to review products. This is an amazing start to connecting tech with cannabis, but lacks the ability to organize and curate a user's preferences. Buddy aims to reduce the load of looking individual items up by integrating text extraction to make logging and researching easy and efficient. From the app, users will learn how to re-think how they choose cannabis by how the app guides them through learning and evaluating products. Society still looks negatively on cannabis use while others that consume beer, coffee, and wine are not. Lastly, this app wants to address the stigma around cannabis by moving the focus from "getting high" to enjoying the experience.
Like other vices such as coffee, beer and wine, users want to curate and evaluate their cannabis products. There are three user populations that Buddy is targeting: bud-tenders (industry), the regular user, and the new user. The main characteristic that runs through these user groups are their curiosity and motivation to learn more and invest in the products they use. Even though these populations can range in age from the young professional to the retiree, they want to an easy to use and access product to turn themselves from an average joe to educated connoisseur.
The new user does not know how to ask the right questions to get to their end goal, while the regular user and industry professional are flawed by either smoking the same products repeatedly or not remembering the vast amounts of products on the market. These are the two end of the spectrum that Buddy will address by creating a fun, quick and easy to use app to categorize and rank cannabis products. Buddy will educate it's users by showing trends in flavors and types to brands and products, in order to learn to pair specific cannabis products with specific situations to customize to your desired effects. Along with being able to avoid buying cannabis products and strains that won’t work for you or have unwanted side-effects. The goal of the product is to be quick and simple to use, so it can be easily incorporate into anyone's using habits, along with being fun and informative, so users will continue to use the app.
- Front-end
- React Native
- Redux
- Victory Charts
- AWS Mobile Hub (authentication)
- Back-end
- Express.js
- Node.js
- MongoDB
- The Strain API
- Infrastructure
- AWS