When Alex Halperin launched WeedWeek in 2015, he was entering an industry that had nothing but growth ahead of it. But what he didn’t expect was that the fragmented legalization across states meant that it’d be difficult to build a national audience. So a few years ago he pivoted to just covering California’s weed industry, and WeedWeek has since built a robust business monetized through both sponsorships and subscriptions.

In our interview, Alex walked me through what got him interested in the topic, why he built a customer publishing platform, and how he recently decided to team up with the LA Times on an investigative series.

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Transcript

Hey Alex, thanks for joining us. 

Happy to be here. Thanks so much for having me.

So we're here to talk about a media company that you now run that you founded called WeedWeek. But before we jump into that, what was your entry into journalism? What were you doing prior to launching WeedWeek?

Sure. So I've pretty much always wanted to be a journalist. That has coincided with a time of depression and chaos for the industry. But I held reporting jobs at Dow Jones and Businessweek.com after graduating from Columbia Journalism School. I got a fellowship to spend a year traveling around Africa reporting on business development. And then I came back, I worked for a little while at a consulting firm, and then I was news editor at Salon where, I guess it's fair to say, I was justifiably fired for insubordination.

What year did you work at Salon? 

That ended at the end of 2013.

And that was kind of back when Salon was still kind of limping along. I think it's even less healthy than it was back then. So after Salon, you went and did like freelancing? 

So I was freelancing. And one of the main stories I was freelancing about was was fracking and sort of what happens when the frackers come to town and the economic boom that that comes, and how it causes pollution and some other kinds of disruption and stuff like that. And I reported on that from upstate New York. And I went to North Texas and North Dakota. And I was really fascinated with the idea of a boomtown. I'm a business reporter. And a few months after I left Salon, Fast Company sent me to MJBizCon, which then as now was the marijuana industry's largest trade show, which is every fall in Las Vegas. When I went in 2014, it was about 3,500 people. Last year it was probably about 10 times that.

So when you went in 2014, there was a weed industry, but I'm guessing it was mainly like medical marijuana. 

So Colorado and Washington had voted to legalize recreational and the only state where it was open was Colorado. But at the same time, the market had been open for almost a year and it seemed more or less to be working and the industry had a lot of momentum. And I thought it was just a great business story, the way that this fast growing illegal industry that operates essentially by rules that no other industry plays by was among the fastest growing industries in America. Marijuana wasn't a part of my life at the time, but I was instantly fascinated and pretty soon started making plans to move to Denver. So I moved to Denver in 2015 and started WeedWeek a few months after that. It was the early days of the newsletter revolution.

I think my first provider was Tiny Letter, which was a variation of MailChimp. It was two years before Substack.

Was your thinking like, okay, these states are starting to legalize, it's going to be a very rapid growth industry, there's probably not a lot of beat reporters that have been focused on this one beat and if I catch the wave early I can grow [a media outlet] in parallel to this rapid growth industry?

Yeah. And it had a lot of momentum. So in 2014, the sort of general prediction among people in the industry was that California would legalize in 2016 and then federal legalization would be inevitable. Now, that hasn't quite happened, but few predictions from 2014 have held up that well. So right now, recreational is legal in about half the states. Medical, which can mean very different things, is legal in 10 to 15 more states. In the time I've been covering weed, the market has grown from roughly – in the first year of Colorado sales, it was probably less than a billion dollars. Now it's about $30 billion..

You moved to Denver specifically because you thought you were moving into the epicenter of a burgeoning industry?

Yes. A company that I was pretty interested in invited me to embed with them. Initially, I planned to write a book about the industry, but I started WeedWeek as well. I now have a book proposal that I'm looking to sell. It'll be a much better book proposal than the one I pitched in 2014. But my plan was always to move to California after California legalized in 2016, which is what I did. And I've been in Southern California since 2016.

So with WeedWeek, from the very beginning, that wasn't like a side hustle? You thought of yourself as a startup entrepreneur who was starting a weed-focused media company?

I mean, I guess so. I was very naive and I made a lot of mistakes. And essentially I had inherited some money when my father died and I invested it in WeedWeek and I blew all of it. Because I knew so little about how to run a media company. But now eight years later, I have a functioning media company.

What did the early days of the website look like and what was it publishing?

One of the interesting things about the weed industry is that there's no no form of legal interstate trade. So the weed industry is effectively 30 or however many separate industries, each of which are sort of going through the same issues and addressing the same problems in their own way. It makes it incredibly unwieldy. And even though sales are huge, it's one of the reasons why it's very hard to turn a profit in this industry. So one of the main things I was doing at the beginning was sort of bringing in what was going on in all the different state markets, which at the time was maybe four or five relevant states. ...