CANNAINVESTOR Magazine May / June 2017 | Page 92

Q&A with the Founder

Q: Can you give us an idea of your business model?

HelloMD: For the last 22 months, it’s been 1 line item of revenue; connecting patients with doctors over a live stream. Patient pays $49 and meets with a doctor and they have a consultation. It’s all been derived in California. Moving forward, we are in the process of a pivot – the most ambitious of whch is to be a marketplace with hundreds of sellers selling cannabis products to our large number of patients – that’s the primary focus for the pivot for this year.

Q: How do you plan to scale?

HelloMD: We’ve been very geographically focused on California – we’ve become the leader in the space in California. We’ve developed two aspects of how this plans to scale: 1) Platform for user generated content which creates a huge amount of inbound organic search traffic (we now have 2k pages of unique Q&A between doctors and patients); 2) We’re moving beyond California into all of the other medical cannabis legal states and we’ll also be opening up in Canada. Doctors from all other states will be joining our platform and we’ll have business joining as well. We also have a very strong partner ecosystem – we currently have 300 partners.

Q: How are you tackling the regulatory side of things?

HelloMD: It’s a highly-regulated market and its regulated based on geography and it’s also evolving quickly. We are fortunate that we do no touch the plant – while we have to be cognizant of the regulations – we are not hampered like other cannabis companies are. Because we are a technical platform, we have to be cognizant and remain complaint on state lines. There are some subtle diff between states but not massive.

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