Home » Building a Smoking Accessories E-commerce Business – Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected

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Building a Smoking Accessories E-commerce Business – Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected

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  • Financials
  • Sales and Marketing
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Founder

Nassir Silwany

United States

Info@CaliConnected.com

Full-time

Open to opportunities: Yes

Founder Socials

Business

CaliConnected

Physical Location - Country: United States

1-10 (Small Business)

https://caliconnected.com/

Established: January 2018

Business Type: Product

Category: Retail and Consumer Goods

Segments: B2C (Business-to-Consumer)

Structure: Private

Business Socials

$1M - $5M

Annual Revenue (USD)

Sales
Marketing

Business Book

  1. Profit First by Mike Michalowicz

Productivity Tool or Tip

  1. Duoplane

Inspirational Peers or Entrepreneurs

  1. Gary Vaynerchuk

Innovative Product or Idea

  1. AR/VR in e-commerce—how it's reshaping retail experiences across categories, from furniture to accessories.

Startup or Business

  1. Shopify

Best business advice

“Don’t give up.” – Even when facing rejection from banks or being dropped by payment processors, persistence and belief in your vision will eventually pay off.

INTERVIEW VIDEO (Length – 46:00)

PODCAST AUDIO

Intro

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected shares how he, along with his partner, created an online marketplace for high-quality smoking accessories.

Innovation Journey

I have a business degree and started my career in management and retail, always with the mindset that I wanted to run my own business. Even back in college, I was already thinking about entrepreneurship, possibly in real estate. That’s how it began — my college friend and I, who later became my business partner at Cali Connected, decided to try real estate. We chose an affordable city, pooled together around $20,000, and started bidding on foreclosed properties at government auctions. After spending a lot of time at courthouses, we realized that real estate wasn’t the right fit for us.

Next, we explored vending machines. We saw a lot of potential in automation and innovations happening in the vending space, especially in sectors like food. My partner, who was working as an EMT and beach lifeguard in Florida, noticed the recurring need for sunscreen among beachgoers. That sparked an idea: what if we created vending machines that dispensed sunscreen? It could reduce waste, create public sector investment opportunities, and provide convenience. We even connected with someone who held a patent for sunscreen dispensers. But after digging deeper, we found it wasn’t viable due to legal and investment issues tied to the patent.

So, we went back to the drawing board. That’s when we discovered Shopify Exchange — a marketplace where you can buy existing online stores. We spent weeks browsing and eventually found a listing for a UK-based smoke shop called Cali Connected. It only had five products and minimal branding, but the domain name caught our eye. Before reaching out, we researched the space, looked into distributors, and ran the numbers. Everything pointed to a solid opportunity.

We purchased the domain for a relatively low investment and began the long process of building the business. That involved rebranding the store, forming relationships with distributors, and rebuilding the website from the ground up. It was months of intense work, but we saw the potential and committed fully to growing Cali Connected into a real online business.

Venturing into E-Commerce

After the vending idea fell through, we shifted our focus toward e-commerce. I had some prior experience with e-commerce channels from my previous job, so it felt like a logical next step. While we knew we had a lot to learn, we also felt confident that we had a strong starting point and the drive to make it work.

At that stage, we weren’t committed to any specific industry — it was more about exploring what opportunities existed in the e-commerce space. We were open to discovering something that sparked our interest and seemed viable to pursue.

Once we came across the opportunity with Cali Connected, we took a deeper look and realized there was real potential. That’s when we decided to fully commit and go all in. It wasn’t about chasing the cannabis space from the start — it was about recognizing a solid opportunity within e-commerce and running with it.

URL Longevity Wins

We were initially hopeful that the store we bought would already have some SEO traction, even if it had limited products. We had a basic understanding of how SEO worked, so we thought maybe there’d be a foundation we could build on. But that turned out not to be the case — the site was barely functional from an SEO perspective. The sitemap wasn’t set up, nothing was crawling properly, and with only a handful of products, there was no real chance of competing with other stores that had thousands.

In the end, what we really bought was just the URL. But even that had some value — the domain had been around for a while, and that longevity gave us a slight SEO advantage. It wasn’t much, but it gave us a starting point we could work from.

Deeper Analytics Dive

One thing I appreciated about Shopify Exchange is that it verifies the analytics presented during a sale. When you’re browsing listings, the traffic and revenue data shown is pulled directly from Shopify, not just uploaded by the seller, so you can trust it’s accurate to a degree. That said, it’s still important to do your own due diligence.

Just because the numbers look good doesn’t mean they’re sustainable — a seller could easily inflate performance with a short marketing push. That’s why we always dive deeper. We look at SEO performance using tools like Google Analytics, domain authority checkers, or platforms like Moz or Ahrefs to evaluate keyword rankings and overall search visibility.

If the business is tied to a physical location, we check how it performs locally too. This extra layer of research not only gives you a clearer picture of the site’s actual performance but also gives you leverage to negotiate the price if the data doesn’t hold up. There are plenty of free tools out there — it’s just about knowing where to look and not relying solely on the headline numbers.

Innovative Marketplace Growth

When we first started, our goal was to bootstrap the business, grow it organically, and eventually secure investors so we could scale into a large warehouse operation. But we quickly realized that wouldn’t be feasible, especially in our industry — banks didn’t want anything to do with us. While there are some alternative banks and private investors willing to work with businesses like ours, it was clear we had to find a different path forward.

That turning point pushed us toward building a marketplace model. About two or three years ago, we began reaching out to distributors we were already buying from and asked if they’d be open to dropshipping. Since we had strong relationships with them, many agreed. We’d list their products on our site, process the orders, and they’d ship directly to the customer. This allowed us to expand our product range without holding massive inventory, significantly reducing our financial risk.

We discovered that many distributors — both large and small — were open to this kind of arrangement. But we wanted to do it better than anyone else. A lot of competitors use generic dropship platforms or create their own, but we spent months developing something more robust and seamless. In mid-last year, we partnered with a platform called Duoplane, which helped us fully automate the process and scale.

Now, we work with over 24 distributors and manufacturers in addition to managing our own inventory. Everything is integrated and automated, which has streamlined customer service and order fulfillment. While we didn’t plan to build a marketplace from the start, it became clear that it was the smartest and most scalable route — especially since traditional financial institutions won’t support companies in our space, regardless of how strong the business case is.

Tailored E-commerce Solutions

Exactly — you hit the nail on the head. It gets pretty technical since every distributor we work with has different backend ERP systems and frontend shopping carts. That’s why we chose to partner with Duoplane. It offered the most cost-effective solution with the flexibility to handle all the custom integrations we needed. We work with a wide range of partners — from small companies using basic Shopify inventory to larger distributors with fully custom NetSuite systems — and Duoplane adapts to all of it.

We didn’t want to bring on a developer team to build something from scratch just yet. Duoplane gave us a solid foundation, and we knew we could scale from there. Now, we’re taking things a step further. We’ve just signed contracts to launch a public Shopify sourcing app, specifically for businesses in our niche. There are only a couple of public apps out there right now, and they don’t function well. We saw an opportunity to fill that gap and do it better.

Our goal is to dominate that public app space by offering a high-quality, reliable solution for other stores to access our inventory. While Duoplane currently powers the backend of our operations, we’re now working on building a proprietary frontend system that’s fully ours. It’s the next phase in evolving from a simple marketplace to a fully integrated platform.

Marketplace Expansion Vision

Once we shifted our business model toward a marketplace, our brand vision became crystal clear: we wanted to bring every possible product in our industry to customers in one place. Whether it’s CBD, home accessories, glass pipes, vaporizers, or any other emerging category, our goal is to continuously expand and showcase the full spectrum of products as the industry grows.

To support that, we actively seek out new vendors, but we’re also very selective and strict with our supplier relationships. We want to ensure that the shopping experience stays smooth and consistent for our customers, no matter how many partners we onboard. That means setting up clear supplier restrictions, contracts, and quality control systems to avoid issues that can come with scaling too fast.

Ultimately, we believe customers want convenience — access to as many high-quality products as possible, all in one trusted site. That’s the direction we’re committed to growing toward.

Transparent Shipping Solutions

Absolutely — it all starts with clear, upfront contractor agreements. We set strict preliminary standards for every vendor we work with. On our site, we’re completely transparent about where a product is shipping from. If it’s coming from us directly, it’s tagged as “Ships from Cali Connected.” If it’s coming from a distributor like Prism Pipes, it will clearly say “Ships from Prism Pipes,” along with their average fulfillment time, which is pulled directly from Duoplane.

That fulfillment data is visible to the customer. So if a vendor averages 3–5 days to ship, customers are informed before they buy. Still, we know slow shipping can negatively impact the experience. That’s why we’ve built in performance thresholds. If a supplier’s fulfillment time consistently goes over our limits, we get flagged internally — and from there, we start asking tough questions. Do we drop them? Reduce their order volume? Disable express shipping for their items?

There are many ways we manage quality control while still giving up some logistical power. It’s similar to why Amazon built its own fulfillment centers — to fix that gap in consistency. While we don’t have Amazon’s infrastructure, we believe strict standards and transparency can go a long way. As long as we stay direct with suppliers and enforce the rules, we’re confident we can scale this marketplace model without compromising the customer experience.

Building Brand Strength

When it comes to actual manufacturing, we haven’t gone too deep yet. We’ve created a few cleaning products and introduced some unbranded, entry-level glass pieces — similar to how Target offers their own budget versions of everyday items. It’s not about high-end branding, but these products help stabilize our margins and support our private-label presence within the marketplace.

That said, our real focus has always been on how we perform as a retailer — specifically, how we differentiate ourselves from competitors, gain market share, and keep it. While this market is tough to enter due to the risks and regulatory hurdles, it’s not impossible, and we knew from day one that our edge would be customer service.

It sounds cliché, but being truly customer-centric works across any industry. Whether it’s Chewy in pet food, Zappos in shoes, or Amazon itself — the common thread is obsessive focus on the customer. When we started looking into this space, we saw a huge gap: competitors lacked basic customer service infrastructure. Some didn’t even have working phone numbers, and live chats would lead to delayed email responses. That’s where we saw our opportunity.

We knew if we could do customer service right — real people, real responsiveness — we could carve out a strong position. And while someone else could try to do it better, we believe we were the first to scale in this middle tier of growth while staying deeply customer-focused. As long as we keep that as our north star, I’m confident we’ll continue to grow.

Cannabis Banking Challenges

This industry operates in a massive gray area, top to bottom. Even though we don’t deal directly with the cannabis plant, we still face the same financial hurdles. It’s strange — you can process debit card payments and even get a business credit card from major banks, but good luck securing a loan. Banks are always halfway in, halfway out when it comes to our space.

Legally, we position our business as a tobacco-related operation. We have the appropriate licenses, pay the required taxes, and follow state regulations. Our lawyers can clearly frame our business that way. But the problem is, depending on who’s reviewing it — another attorney, regulator, or bank — the interpretation can change. Some argue we’re selling cannabis-related products, and that ambiguity creates friction everywhere.

This legal and regulatory inconsistency, especially the disconnect between state and federal laws, makes banks extremely cautious. That’s why even as we grow and become more legitimate, access to funding remains limited. Sure, some larger, publicly traded companies like Greenlane or High Tide may have navigated these waters with smaller banks or long-term financial proof, but for businesses our size — and even those slightly bigger — traditional lending just isn’t realistically available right now.

CBD and Payment Hurdles

You really don’t see many big-name payment processors in our space. Even local banks — like if you have a business account with TD, for example — they might let you hold a checking account, but they won’t process your payments. That’s just the reality when you’re operating in a “high-risk” industry like ours.

There are smaller domestic processors that will work with us, and even some international ones, but the overseas options usually require much higher volume and come with risks, like uncertainty around where your money actually is. Domestically, the options are safer, but the fees are significantly higher than in standard industries. And even as our transaction volume grows, we still get hit with steep processing rates.

To make things more complex, once we added CBD — like many of the larger accessory vendors in our space — our rates went up again. Even though the national hemp bill legalized CBD federally and across state lines, processors still treat it as a justification to charge us more. So, unfortunately, the nature of our products comes with a financial penalty, no matter how compliant or legitimate we are.

Beyond Traditional Ads

Absolutely — marketing is everything for us. Our main sales channel is caliconnected.com, and without traffic, there’s no revenue. We’re slowly building out other channels, but our website remains the core of our business. The challenge is, unlike other industries, we can’t rely on traditional paid advertising. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google don’t allow us to run ads due to the nature of our products, which puts us in a tough spot.

Because of that, we had to get creative and build our own marketing ecosystem. We realized early on that SEO was the key. In our industry, paid ads account for less than 1% of traffic to top competitors. That means if you don’t dominate in organic search, you’re not going to succeed. So we’ve gone all in on SEO, making it our primary growth engine by optimizing content, keywords, and technical infrastructure.

In addition to SEO, we’ve launched our own affiliate marketing program. We work with over 50 affiliates — ranging from industry coupon sites to influencers — and pay them a percentage of each sale. It’s a performance-based model that allows us to expand our reach without relying on platforms that ban us. We’ve had to build all of this ourselves, but it’s what keeps us competitive and growing despite the advertising roadblocks.

Social Media Battle

No, social media hasn’t worked for us at all. We’ve been kicked off Instagram twice — even after taking every precaution to follow their guidelines. We avoided using any cannabis-related words, images, or hashtags. Our posts were strictly product-focused, with nothing showing or referencing the plant, and we even age-restricted our page to 21+. Still, they removed us. The second time it happened, we had over 11,000 followers.

We also joined a major petition on TheWeedTube, which now has over 80,000 signatures, calling for more transparency and consistency in how these platforms moderate cannabis-adjacent accounts. One of the largest players in our space, DankStop, had over 300,000 followers and was finally kicked off recently too — even though they posted the same kind of content we did. For some reason, the platforms just aren’t willing to distinguish between accessory retailers like us and plant-touching businesses.

It’s frustrating, especially when we’ve done everything possible to play by the rules. But the reality is, right now, platforms like Instagram are simply anti-our industry. Hopefully, that changes in the future — but for now, social just isn’t a reliable channel for us.

Absolutely — if you ask my business partner what the biggest opportunity is right now, it’s community building. We’ve seen other brands do it well — from small Discord communities tied to gaming or lifestyle niches, to major players like Puffco, who host huge events like PuffCon to bring their users together in real life. That’s definitely the direction we need to head in. We haven’t built that out yet, but it’s high on our list of priorities.

And you’re right: with limited access to social media and paid search, community becomes the best way to create brand stickiness and long-term engagement. It’s something we’re actively planning to invest more time and resources into.

To circle back to your earlier question — no, we don’t really have a high rate of repeat purchases. On average, we see about 1.5 orders per customer every two years. We’re more of a “want-based” brand than a “need-based” one. During the COVID era, we saw a big spike because people had extra disposable income and were stuck at home. But when the economy tightens, customers think twice — why spend $100 on a fancy glass piece when you can roll up for a dollar?

That said, our customer base is still highly engaged. People keep coming back to browse, open our emails, and stay connected with us — even if they aren’t buying regularly. That’s exactly why building a true community is so important. It’s how we can retain attention and build deeper relationships beyond just transactions.

Absolutely. We haven’t narrowed our focus to a specific collection or product category yet, but we’re definitely seeing clear trends — especially in what I’d broadly call the urban lifestyle space. Think of retailers like Urban Outfitters — they’re very trend-driven, with a skate and streetwear vibe. Lately, they’ve started offering products like the Puffco Peak and automatic grinders, which shows they recognize their audience overlaps with ours.

Those are the kinds of signals we’re paying attention to. We haven’t fully tapped into that crossover space yet, but it’s becoming clearer that there’s an opportunity to reach adjacent customer bases by aligning with these lifestyle trends. It’s something we’re actively exploring as we grow.

Our Crew & Logistics

Right now, we have two full-time employees on our internal team. Our main warehouse is located in California, but it’s managed by a third-party logistics (3PL) provider, so we don’t have any in-house warehouse staff. That location does include a small return center, so our team there does handle incoming returns occasionally.

Beyond that, we work with about five contractors for specialized roles — including legal, graphic design, bookkeeping, accounting, and web development. They support us on an as-needed basis. So overall, aside from my business partner and me, it’s a small but efficient team: two full-time employees and a solid group of contractors to fill in the rest.

Strategic Investment Mindset

I’d say yes and no when it comes to hesitation. From the start, I’ve always had an entrepreneurial mindset — even when I was more focused on real estate. One thing I’ve always believed is that you shouldn’t fall in love with any investment. Whether I was discussing it with my business partner or my wife, the goal has always been to build, scale, and eventually exit if the opportunity is right.

That said, there were definitely some initial hesitations. When we launched this business, it was just a side hustle — we both had full-time jobs. I didn’t even post about it on LinkedIn because I worried what my employer might think if they saw I was selling “random stuff” online. But as the business evolved and we saw what we were building, I became more confident and proud of what we do.

We’ve built an ethical, responsible brand that follows all regulations — age restrictions, compliance, and more — and I fully stand behind it. I love what we’ve created. But yes, from day one, the long-term vision was to build something valuable enough to exit. Whether we stay in this industry or pivot to something else later, I’m open to it. I’ve never been emotionally tied to one space — it’s always been about building something great and moving forward.

Mistakes Made and Lessons Learned

I know it sounds cliché, but the biggest lesson I’ve learned is: don’t ever give up — especially in this industry. In the beginning, we ran into obstacle after obstacle. We built the site on Shopify, only to realize they wouldn’t process payments for our type of business. The site was live, but customers couldn’t check out. We had to scramble for a third-party payment processor and were down for weeks.

Then came a flood of new challenges — age verification laws, vape shipping restrictions, evolving tobacco regulations. We found ourselves constantly asking, Is this worth it? Should we just shut it all down? But we kept pushing. We consulted lawyers, adjusted our processes, and found workarounds — sometimes that meant scaling back temporarily, but we never quit.

The truth is, if you stick with it and find a way through, there’s always growth on the other side. Every barrier we faced was just another step in building something stronger. So yes, it may be a bit of a tired phrase, but for us, it’s been 100% true: don’t give up.

Rapid Fire Segment

One of the biggest challenges we faced was early on, when we were working with a public-facing marketplace app as a supplier. We assumed they had done their due diligence, but a number of orders—worth a few thousand dollars—went out without ever being paid for. We had to make a tough decision: stay on the platform and hope things improved, or cut ties and walk away from the revenue. Ultimately, we chose to walk away. While it was a painful loss at the time and left us without a strong sales channel for several months, it turned out to be the right decision. That move allowed us to build and focus on our own marketplace, which has been incredibly rewarding.

We do accept cryptocurrency as a payment method, though uptake has been pretty low. Most of our customers still prefer using credit cards, and a small percentage—under 10%—use our buy now, pay later vendor. Interestingly, we tend to see spikes in crypto payments when there’s a significant swing in the market, whether up or down, as customers react emotionally to their portfolios. But overall, it’s not a major part of our payment processing at this point.

When it comes to tools and recommendations, I always suggest the book Profit First by Mike Michalowicz—it’s been key to helping us run lean from the start. I’m also excited about how AR and VR are transforming the retail experience, especially when it comes to helping customers visualize physical products in their space. For those building out marketplace capabilities, Dual Plane has been a huge help on our backend. And of course, Shopify has played a huge role in our growth. It’s more than just a website builder—it’s become a real competitor to Amazon, and I’m eager to see how far they’ll take it.

One entrepreneur I look up to is Gary Vee. Whether or not you agree with his style, his work ethic and belief in hustle really resonate with me. The best business advice I’ve ever received is simple but powerful: don’t give up. We’ve hit so many roadblocks—from banks saying no to payment processors shutting us down—but staying the course and pushing through has always led us somewhere better. If anyone wants to check out our products, they can visit callconnected.com, or contact me via the site or LinkedIn.

Best Business Advice

The best advice I can give is really simple: don’t give up. There were so many moments where we could have walked away—whether it was being told “no” by banks, having payment processors shut us down, or just dealing with the risks of operating in a high-risk industry. But we kept going. If you’re passionate about what you’re doing and truly believe in it, persistence will take you far. Hard work may not guarantee instant results, but it will always move you forward.

Episode Overview

  • Host: Sushant Misra, entrepreneur and host of TrepTalks
  • Guest: Nassir Silwany, Co-founder of CaliConnected
  • Platform: TrepTalks, a show focused on interviewing successful e-commerce entrepreneurs, business executives, and thought leaders to uncover strategies and tactics for starting and growing businesses
  • Date: June 15, 2025
  • Duration: Approximately 45 minutes (estimated based on typical TrepTalks episodes)
  • Focus: Nassir’s entrepreneurial journey, the founding and scaling of CaliConnected, an online marketplace for smoking accessories, and navigating challenges in the cannabis accessories industry
  • Key Themes: Entrepreneurship, e-commerce marketplace development, customer acquisition, SEO strategies, regulatory hurdles, and persistence in a high-risk industry

Guest Background

  • Education: Bachelor’s degree in business administration
  • Professional Experience:
    • Worked in management and retail roles post-college, gaining business operations and customer service experience
    • Held positions that exposed him to e-commerce channels, providing a foundation for his later venture
  • Entrepreneurial Motivation:
    • Driven by a long-standing desire to own and operate his own business
    • Inspired by the idea of creating something independent, whether in real estate, vending, or e-commerce
  • Business Partner: College friend, a full-time EMT and lifeguard in Florida at the time, who became the co-founder of CaliConnected
  • Entrepreneurial Journey:
    • Real Estate Venture (2016-2017, Failed):
      • Planned to flip foreclosed properties in a low-cost U.S. city with a $20,000 investment
      • Researched government auctions and attended courthouse proceedings
      • Abandoned due to high competition, market complexity, and insufficient capital
    • Vending Machine Venture (2017, Failed):
      • Explored vending machine opportunities, noting growth in automated food and product dispensing
      • Developed a concept for sunscreen-dispensing machines on Florida beaches, inspired by his partner’s lifeguard experience
      • Aimed to reduce plastic bottle waste and reinvest profits into public beaches
      • Discovered a patent holder blocking the idea, with legal disputes making it uninvestable
    • Pivot to E-commerce (2018):
      • Decided to pursue e-commerce after vending failure, leveraging Nassir’s prior exposure to online retail
      • Browsed Shopify Exchange for weeks, seeking a starter store with potential
      • Found CaliConnected, a UK-based online smoke shop with only five products, minimal branding, and no significant traffic
      • Purchased the URL for its longevity (SEO credit) at a low cost, seeing opportunity in the cannabis accessories market

CaliConnected Business Overview

  • Industry: Cannabis accessories (e.g., glass pipes, vaporizers, CBD products, cleaning solutions), not cannabis itself
  • Founding Year: 2018
  • Business Model: Online marketplace connecting distributors and manufacturers with consumers
    • Initial Plan: Bootstrap a traditional e-commerce store with owned inventory and a large warehouse
    • Pivot to Marketplace: Shifted to dropshipping due to funding constraints and industry barriers
    • Partners with 24+ distributors and manufacturers, listing thousands of products
    • Uses DudaPlane, an automated system integrating diverse backend platforms (e.g., NetSuite, Shopify) for inventory and order management
    • Displays supplier fulfillment times transparently (e.g., “Ships from Prism Pipes, fulfilled in 5 days”)
  • Website: caliconnected.com
  • Value Proposition:
    • Extensive product selection across categories (CBD, glass pipes, vaporizers, etc.)
    • Transparent fulfillment process with supplier performance metrics
    • Strong customer service, addressing a gap in the industry
  • Revenue Model:
    • Earns margins on dropshipped products
    • Offers unbranded, low-cost products to stabilize margins and branded items for premium customers
  • Team:
    • Co-founders: Nassir Silwany and his business partner
    • Employees: 2 full-time staff managing operations
    • Contractors: 5, including lawyers, graphic designers, bookkeeper, accountant, and web developer
    • Logistics: Third-party logistics (3PL) company in California handles warehousing and returns
  • Technology:
    • DudaPlane: Core platform for marketplace automation, syncing inventory and orders across supplier systems
    • Shopify: Powers the front-end website and checkout process
    • Future Plans: Developing a public Shopify sourcing app to allow other stores to list CaliConnected’s inventory, competing with apps like Smoke Drop

Key Strategies and Tactics

  • Customer Acquisition:
    • SEO (Primary Channel):
      • Focuses heavily on search engine optimization due to bans on paid ads
      • Analyzed competitors, finding <1% of their traffic comes from paid ads
      • Invests in keyword ranking, site map optimization, and content to capture organic search traffic
    • Affiliate Marketing:
      • Runs a proprietary platform with 50+ affiliates
      • Includes coupon sites (e.g., Groupon-like platforms) and social media influencers
      • Pays commissions for referred sales
    • Email Marketing:
      • High click-through rates on email campaigns, engaging an active subscriber base
      • Challenges with low purchase frequency (see below)
    • Social Media (Limited):
      • Banned from paid ads on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok
      • Organic Instagram accounts removed twice (11,000+ followers lost), despite compliance efforts (e.g., age restrictions, no cannabis references)
      • Participated in a petition with 80,000+ signatures to challenge social media bans
      • Explores niche platforms like WeTube (a cannabis-focused video platform)
    • Community Building:
      • Recognized as a major opportunity but not yet implemented
      • Inspired by competitors like Puffco, which hosts festivals (PuffCon) and Discord communities
      • Plans to build a lifestyle-focused community to retain customers
  • Marketplace Operations:
    • Supplier Management:
      • Strict contracts enforce fulfillment standards (e.g., maximum fulfillment times)
      • Monitors supplier performance via DudaPlane data (e.g., average fulfillment days)
      • Drops vendors exceeding thresholds (e.g., 3-5 days) to maintain customer experience
      • Limits express shipping for slow suppliers
    • Transparency:
      • Displays supplier names and fulfillment times publicly (e.g., “Ships from Prism Pipes”)
      • Mimics Amazon’s model of clear sourcing information
    • Scalability:
      • Grew from 5 products to thousands by onboarding 24+ suppliers
      • Plans to launch a proprietary Shopify app to expand reach
  • Product Strategy:
    • Unbranded Products: Low-cost glass pipes and accessories to stabilize margins, similar to Target’s generic brands
    • Branded Products: Premium items from known manufacturers to attract higher-end customers
    • Own Products: Developed cleaning solutions to enhance branding
    • Cross-Industry Trends: Observing urban lifestyle brands (e.g., Urban Outfitters) selling similar products, planning to explore partnerships

Challenges in the Cannabis Accessories Industry

  • Funding:
    • Banks avoid cannabis-related businesses due to federal-state legal conflicts, despite CaliConnected selling accessories (classified as tobacco products)
    • Traditional loans unavailable; relies on private investors
    • Even larger competitors struggle, though some secure funding from niche banks
  • Payment Processing:
    • Classified as high-risk, leading to higher fees (e.g., 2-3% above standard rates)
    • Major processors (e.g., Stripe, PayPal) avoid the industry
    • Uses smaller domestic banks or overseas processors with higher volume requirements
    • Accepts cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin), but adoption is low (<10% of transactions)
    • Buy-now-pay-later (via Bill) accounts for <10% of payments; most are credit cards
    • CBD products trigger additional fees, despite the 2018 Hemp Bill legalizing interstate trade
  • Marketing Restrictions:
    • Banned from paid ads on major platforms due to cannabis association
    • Organic social media accounts face suspensions, even with strict compliance
    • Limited to niche platforms and SEO, reducing reach
  • Customer Behavior:
    • Low Repeat Purchases: Average 1.5 purchases per customer every 2 years
    • Want-Based Industry: Demand fluctuates with economic conditions
      • Surged during COVID (2020-2021) due to extra disposable income
      • Slowed in tighter economies (2022-2025), as customers opt for cheaper alternatives (e.g., $1 rolling papers vs. $100 glass bongs)
    • Active Engagement: High email click-through rates indicate interest, but purchases are infrequent
  • Regulatory Hurdles:
    • Complex laws on age verification, vape restrictions, and tobacco licensing
    • Requires legal support to navigate state-specific regulations
    • Faces scrutiny from banks and processors questioning product legality
  • Competition:
    • Growing due to cannabis legalization, with low barriers to entry for resellers
    • Many products sourced from Chinese manufacturers, increasing price competition
    • Differentiates through customer service, selection, and marketplace efficiency

Major Lessons and Mistakes

  • Biggest Lesson: Persistence is critical in a high-risk industry
    • Faced repeated setbacks (e.g., payment processor shutdowns, regulatory changes)
    • Found workarounds through research, legal support, and alternative solutions
    • Example: When Shopify refused to process payments, sourced a third-party processor despite weeks of downtime
  • Biggest Mistake:
    • Smoke Drop Incident (2020):
      • Listed products on Smoke Drop, a public Shopify marketplace app, as a supplier
      • A retailer ordered $3,000+ in products without paying, and the app failed to enforce payment
      • Exited the platform, losing a sales channel for 6-12 months
      • Decision proved beneficial, as it pushed CaliConnected to build its own marketplace, now a core strength
    • Lesson Learned: Cut ties with unreliable partners early, even if it means short-term losses
  • Advice to Entrepreneurs:
    • Don’t Give Up: Push through barriers if passionate about the venture
    • Stay Flexible: Be willing to exit investments for long-term gains
    • Customer Focus: Prioritize service to stand out, as seen in success stories like Zappos and Chewy
    • Due Diligence on Shopify Exchange:
      • Verify analytics (Shopify provides accurate traffic/revenue data)
      • Use tools like Google Analytics, Moz, or Ahrefs for SEO insights (e.g., domain authority, keyword rankings)
      • Check local traffic for brick-and-mortar ties
      • Negotiate based on findings (e.g., weak SEO or inflated traffic)

Rapid Fire Segment

  1. Book Recommendation:
    • Profit First by Mike Michalowicz
    • Reason: Teaches lean financial management, crucial for CaliConnected’s bootstrapped start
  2. Innovative Idea:
    • VR/AR in retail
    • Reason: Excited about visualizing products (e.g., pipes, furniture) in real-world settings, enhancing customer experience
  3. Productivity Tool:
    • DudaPlane
    • Reason: Streamlined marketplace operations, saving time and reducing errors
  4. Startup Doing Great Things:
    • Shopify
    • Reason: Empowers small sellers, competes with Amazon, and innovates with apps (e.g., Shop) and fulfillment services
  5. Inspiring Entrepreneur:
    • Gary Vaynerchuk
    • Reason: Embodies relentless hustle, proving hard work drives results
  6. Best Business Advice:
    • “Don’t give up if you’re passionate and confident; hard work will get you somewhere.”

Future Vision and Reflections

  • Current Status:
    • Started as a side hustle in 2018 with full-time jobs
    • Grown into a middle-tier player in the cannabis accessories market by 2025
    • Overcome initial stigma (e.g., hesitated to share on LinkedIn due to industry perception)
  • Exit Strategy:
    • Plans to scale CaliConnected into a leading marketplace and sell it
    • Open to new ventures in or outside the cannabis industry
    • Maintains a mindset of not falling in love with any investment, as advised early on
  • Reflections:
    • Fulfillment: Proud of building an ethical brand with proper age verification and compliance
    • No Regrets: Views the journey as a valuable learning experience, despite challenges
    • Hesitations: Initially cautious due to industry risks and stigma, but now confident
    • Opportunities: Sees untapped potential in:
      • Community building (e.g., Discord, lifestyle events)
      • Cross-industry partnerships with urban lifestyle brands (e.g., Urban Outfitters, which sells similar products)
      • Proprietary technology (e.g., Shopify app)
  • Industry Outlook:
    • Expects growth as cannabis legalization expands
    • Anticipates continued banking and marketing challenges until federal laws clarify

Contact Information

  • Website: caliconnected.com
  • Email:
    • General: info@caliconnected.com
    • Nassir: Listed on the website
  • LinkedIn: Nassir Silwany (searchable for direct contact)

Notable Quotes

  • “If you’re so customer-focused, I don’t care what industry you’re in, it’s going to work.” – Nassir on differentiation
  • “We hit wall after wall, but if you think it’s going to succeed, there’s a way around any issue.” – Nassir on persistence
  • “We’re not in love with any investment; we always planned to build and exit.” – Nassir on entrepreneurial mindset

Additional Insights

  • Industry Gray Area:
    • Cannabis accessories are legally classified as tobacco products, but banks and processors treat them as cannabis-related
    • Federal-state law conflicts create uncertainty, with banks “one step in, one step out” (e.g., issuing credit cards but not loans)
  • Competitor Analysis:
    • Noticed competitors lacked customer service (e.g., no phone numbers, automated chats)
    • Positioned CaliConnected to fill this gap, inspired by customer-centric brands like Zappos and Chewy
  • Economic Impact:
    • COVID (2020-2021) boosted sales due to disposable income and home confinement
    • Tighter economies (2022-2025) reduced demand for non-essential products
  • Shopify Exchange Tips:
    • Shopify guarantees accurate analytics, but buyers must dig deeper
    • Use free tools (e.g., domain authority checkers) to assess SEO and traffic quality
    • Negotiate based on discrepancies (e.g., poor keyword rankings)

People & Resources Mentioned in the Episode

Book: Profit First by Mike Michalowicz

What You’ll Learn

Interview with Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected

00:00Introduction
00:50Backstory
04:28The business idea
06:53Shopify Exchange
08:43The business model
15:00Fulfillment and shipping
17:20Competition
20:05Problems with funding
22:35Payment processes
24:46Customer acquisition channels
28:08Target buyers
32:32The team
33:23The journey looking back
35:49Mistakes made, lessons learned
41:21Rapid fire round

Rapid Fire

In this segment, the guest will answer a few questions quickly in one or two sentences.

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected

  1. Book recommendation that you would make to entrepreneurs or business professionals (Response: Profit First)
  2. An innovative product or idea and the current eCommerce, retail, or tech landscape that you feel excited about (Response: VR and AR)
  3. A business or productivity tool or software that you would recommend (Response: Duoplane)
  4. A startup or business, uh, in e-commerce, retail, or tech that you think is currently doing great things (Response: Shopify)
  5. A peer entrepreneur or business person whom you look up to or someone who inspired you (Response: Gary Beats)
  6. Best business advice you ever received (Response: Don’t give up)

Interview Transcript

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Hey there, entrepreneurs. My name is Sushant and welcome to Trep Talks. This is the show where I interview successful e-commerce entrepreneurs, business executives, and thought leaders, and ask them questions about their business. And also dive deep into some of the strategies and tactics that they have used to start grow their businesses.

And today I’m really excited to welcome Na Sovan, the show. Na is the co-founder of Cali Connected. Cali Connected is an online marketplace for smoking excess. And today I’m going to ask Na, a few question about his entrepreneurial journey and some of the strategies and tactics that he has used to start and grow his

So thank you so much for joining me today. I tripped 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: off. Of course. Thank you. 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So very, very interested, uh, in learning more about your business. Um, I did, uh, read that you went through a little bit of a journey even before starting this. I mean, would you, I think you were trying to figure out different business ideas along with your friend.

Can you share a little bit about, you know, your backstory? How did you want to get into entrepreneurship and some of the ideas that you explored before 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: starting? Absolutely. Um, so mainly my backstory, I have a business degree out of college, and then both my jobs before I. Ended up coming full time at C Connected.

Before this, were in management and retail, so very always business oriented. And I always had the mindset of running my own business and pursuing something like that, even if it was something like real estate. So that’s essentially where we started. My friend and I, we were friends in college. He ended up being my, my partner at Call Connect and the other co-founder here.

Um, we basically just decided we’re gonna pick a relatively cheap city, a poor city. Tried to put about $20,000 together and launch a real estate company flipping, basically foreclosures at auction from the government. Uh, we sat in constant courthouse and everything like that. Just decided that’s not the route we’re gonna go.

So we started to pursue other ideas, and this is, I guess more so the interesting part. Um, we really wanted to get into vending before, uh, getting into anything with e-commerce. Uh, vending was mainly we saw opportunities in of various sectors, various industries. There’s advancements in food. Um, wherever you saw there was vending was just growing automation.

So we started to a deep dive there. Um, my business partner is actually a full-time EMT lifeguard on the beach of Florida at the time, so, He came up with the idea with all like, Why don’t we pursue vending sunscreen? Like you go up and down the beaches and there’s just like, there’s shops that sell it, but at the end of the day, we’re just all constantly buying these bottles of sunscreen, taking it to the same exact place for use, and there’s not like one centralized place just to host it.

Also, you could bring public sector investments and have all the money go back to that public beach or anything like that, and you also end up with a cleaner environment with no bottles. So we started just to go down the rabbit hole with that. Ended up founding a gentleman who had a patent that Basical.

Protects anything that dispenses sunscreen jumped on a call with him and we went down the rabbit hole there founding out that like it’s not really investible because of basically him holding the patent and someone else trying to challenge him. So we thought what our great idea ended up once again, just going down the wayside, we decided go back to the drawing board and decide what to do.

And that’s what we came. Um, there’s a Shopify Exchange platform where you can buy starter stores or if someone just wants to get rid of an established store, you can sell it through them. We just started looking there weeks on end, and we came across Cali Connected. Cali Connected at the time was an online smoke shop like ours out of the uk, but only had five products.

Very minimal, very minimal. Branding was basically all we were buying. Buying was the url. Um, so once we saw that, we decided to explore this space before contacting him. Like what distributors are out? How much money do you think we’re gonna have to put into this to get it even started, et cetera. And we liked what we saw.

We saw the opportunity there and we basically reached out and we ended up purchasing it relatively cheap, um, investment that we got the URL for. And then from there it was just months on end of rebranding, linking with basically distributors doing what we can to get the website up. 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So a couple of follow up questions to that.

I guess my first question would be, So you were not, you were looking at different business idea. You were not really into the whole, you know, uh, marijuana or, you know, this, this industry. Uh, was there an education process for you or, or like you were already familiar with the industry and, you know, this was one of those ideas that you saw, okay, maybe there is a potential and or did the idea really come from the, you know, while browsing through the Shopify Exchange and you looking at the, the 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: URL and.

So I, I think in general, after the vending went down the wayside, we had a grasp and a, a field to go after e-commerce. Uh, I had done some basically work with e-commerce and different channels in my previous job, so I felt like this is something we could go after. And definitely we have a lot to learn, but it, we have a good starting point.

So it’s more so that we are going after what could we do in the e-commerce space? Let’s try to find something. Hey, maybe that industry catches our eye and then from there, if it does, like we are interested, go after it. So I wouldn’t say initially, yes, we were a hundred percent dead set on the cannabis industry.

It was more so on. Let’s see what we could do in the e-commerce space. Once we found this opportunity, we looked into it further and we said, Absolutely, this is something we wanna go after. 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: And the reason you went after a Shopify Exchange store, rather than just creating your own Shopify store is. This one had some already, some, some traffic related to the keywords, uh, in the cannabis industry.

Was that the main 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: reason? We were hoping that would be the case. Um, we had some idea of how SEO worked, but very minimal. And we figured like, alright, so he’s got very minimal products. Hopefully he’s got some traction going, anything like that. But it was not the case at the end of the day, essentially, we really bought the url.

I mean, the site map wasn’t set up, nothing was crawling properly. Um, like it was minimal products and it’s not gonna get too much traction to, like a different competitor’s got thousands of products or anything like that. So it wasn’t really that, that, that brought us, that. The one thing that we did get in, in a positive sense when looking at like, basically technical aspects of the website or what we bought, um, would be the longevity of the url.

That URL itself was around and got transferred to us. So you do get some SEO credit for. Okay. And, 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: uh, I mean, anyone else, any other entrepreneur who’s trying to go through this, right? You know, going to a Shopify exchange and looking for different businesses and things like that. Like what? What advice would you give them in terms of doing the due diligence so that, you know, maybe they’re thinking that they’re, they’re buying like a huge traffic or something, but, uh, is there, like, would you do, would you any due diligence that, uh, someone should do before purchasing through Shopify 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: Exchange?

Absolutely. And Shopify Exchange does a great job. Basically, if you’re gonna sell on Shopify Exchange, you allow Shopify Exchange themselves to display your analytics. So one, what they’re displaying to you, traffic wise, revenue wise, everything when you’re at that point of purchase is accurate. It’s not being posted by the seller.

So you do have a guarantee there from Shopify itself on the data that you’re seeing. But you do wanna do a deeper dive. I mean, if you do have, obviously marketing reach in an industry, someone could plum like skyrocket those numbers for a few months and make that what you’re seeing look amazing. But it’s really not.

So we always just like to say, The general stuff you could do looking at SEO wise, whether it’s Google Analytics or looking at the free like domain authority searches or going deeper dive onto like a MA or a DIB is always good just to see. Beyond the traffic, Where are they ranking for keywords? Are they even ranking well for the keywords they need to, If it’s something that’s tied to a brick and mortar location, how is it?

There’s local traffic looking for that so that you could essentially go back to ’em with rebuttals they probably don’t even know and even negotiate that further. So we always say just shut it, like go further than the traffic numbers and what’s presented to you. There’s a lot of free tools out there that you could get all this data.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: And, and the website, Your website call connected. Um, how do you describe it? Um, uh, I believe it’s, it’s not just an e-commerce store, it’s a marketplace. What is, what is your business model? Is it really that you’re inviting sellers to sell and then you what you’re bringing, the value that you’re adding is really your marketing and, and the traffic that you’ve, 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: uh, created.

Absolutely. So when we started, we thought we were gonna be able to basically, Bootstrap this whole thing. Get to a point where we could get some investors and have our giant, massive warehouse and we’re shipping everything. We quickly found out that was not gonna be the case. Um, banks want nothing to do with our industry.

You have to find other type of investors. There are, you can find investors for sure, and there’s even some banks outside of like a typical bank that would deal with you, but the main way people go is just to find private investors. If they have interest in the company, you could get 

some sort of money that way, but it basical.

Gave us the green light to say, if you wanna advance this to one of the top three, where they have thousands of products and everything like that, you have to create some sort of marketplace aspect of it. So we reached out to basically distributors at this point. We were, this is probably like two, three years ago.

Um, basically that we are already buying wholesale from. And ask them in a manual aspect, Would you be willing, since we have a great relationship to start allowing us to drop ship some of your products. So we would list it on our site. We’ll push through an order as if it’s coming through one of your retail channels and you guys just push it out as if it’s coming from there.

Those relationships flourished and what ended up happening is we realized that we can grow this even. And you’re really not taking a risk on your bottom line inventory wise if you are able to do this successfully. So what we started to do is we found in our space that many people were willing to do this for many reasons.

Uh, whether it’s a smaller company, a larger distributor, uh, whatever it was. But we wanted to present it in a way that was better than our competitors. There’s a lot of drop ship platforms out there that you could pay into, or there’s some that have been built by our competitors, and that’s how they approach these distributors to get their inventory for drop shipping, to get it on their site.

And we spent months, this was in the middle of last year, getting this all built up, and we ended up partnering with a da, a system called dual. And what that allowed us to do is to approach many more manufacturers, many more distributors. We’re now at over 24 distributors and manufacturers on our site be on our own inventory.

To allow them to list on our site. And everything’s fully automated. It removes customer service issues. It’s been a great and nice clean process. So yes, it’s turned into a marketplace. Was that the initial plan? No, um, but that’s where we saw we needed to go if we were gonna accelerate growth in any way.

Because unfortunately you can’t approach a bank with a great idea in our industry and get. 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So, uh, in terms of the, the, the technology that you mentioned, is it, can you share a little bit more about how that works? Does it connect with your distributor manufacturer and pulls in the inventory directly from there so that you know, you’re not worried about if somebody buys from you and they may not have the inventory.

And then vice versa, site someone makes a purchase, it automatically transfer. Uh, the order to them or what, what exactly, how exactly does the mechanical 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: you’re ordering and Yeah, so you, you hit the nail on the head. Obviously it gets far more technical with everyone having different backend ERP systems having different front end shopping carts.

But the main partner, the main reason why we wanted to partner with Du Plain is that we saw it being cost effective to be able to meet as many customization aspects as possible. We’ve linked with distributors who have a full customized backend system built on NetSuite from. We are linked to other small companies that just use Shopify and the Shopify inventory aspect of that.

So it literally can be customized in any way possible. And what we’re doing is we’re not just staying there. So that was like the where we wanted to start. We didn’t wanna bring a developer on and customize it. We saw this as a great product and we thought we knew we can build off of it. So going forward, we just signed contracts to basically.

A public Shopify sourcing app for other stores. So if you own a startup in our space and you wanna list our inventory, there’s only two public Shopify apps currently. They’re no function too well, Um, you can go search ’em yourself. There’s a bunch of private apps through the bigger retailers, but we really wanna try to go into that public space, dominate it, and do it right.

And that’s where we’re. So, yeah, dual plane is what’s running us right now. And it works exactly as you described it without getting too technical into like what exactly it can do, which, which connectors. Um, but what we’re gonna do is build off of it and the front end system that we’re building now is gonna be fully proprietary to us and, and the value 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: proposition.

For your store really is the selection, right? So what you’re bringing to the consumer of this, uh, product is really the wide selection and, and, um, um, and choice and, and design and things. Is that, that, um, statement? 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: Absolutely. As soon as we switched the whole vision of going towards the marketplace, that’s exactly where the brand vision went, is bring every possible product.

In this industry to the customer’s eyes in one place, whether it’s cbd, whether it’s uh, uh, housing stuff, whether it’s actual glass pipes or vaporizer. Any other collection that ends up growing as the industry’s growing, we’re definitely gonna do whatever we can to get it on the website and find whatever vendors we can.

Um, so we’re also like super strict with how we are with our suppliers and everything. So like we wanna keep the shopping experience nice and basically what they’ve experienced with shopping with us. So there are a lot of supplier restrictions. Supplier contracts and everything that go into place to like prevent issues from happening with us getting too big with too many vendors.

At the end of the day, that’s where we see the growth in what the customer wants, as much products as possible in this space, in one site. And I, and I 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: feel your website definitely has some, you know, great reviews, but I would’ve thought that with this business model, there’s a bit of a, Because at the end of the day, fulfillment is dependent on the supply.

Your manufacturer dis. And if they don’t do it properly, basically the customer is at the end of the day, gonna come to your store and leave a negative. Uh, how do you, how do you, in this kind a business model, how do you manage that? How do you make sure that the supplier is actually fulfilling on time and, and, um, and, and doing their 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: part of the.

Absolutely. So the main thing starts with, like I said, the preliminary stuff that’s always cut and dry is just the, the contractor agreements. They, we set preliminary standards on what they need to do. So if you’re on our site, we’re fully transparent to where it’s shipping from. It’s shipping from call connected.

It has tagged just like Amazon ships from Call connected. Shipping from a manufacturer distributor like prism Pipes, Let’s say their pieces are on our site, it’ll say it ships from prism pipes. And when you’re, What that also shows below it is their average fulfillment time. That data is coming directly from dual plane.

If they’re now taking 3, 4, 5 days, that’s publicly facing to the customer. So if a customer goes in to purchase that they know fulfilled on average within five. We’ve given ’em fair warning. Obviously it’s gonna be a, a, a not so great experience if they haven’t caught that. Or even if they did catch it, no one wants to wait that long.

So what we do is we set thresholds, if it goes to three, Not only getting warning messages all the time as it goes past the promise fulfillment times, but like that’s when we start saying like, Should we drop this vendor? Should we consider something else? How much volume can we actually send them? Should we remove express shipping options from those products?

There’s a lot of different ways where we can create a great shopping experience, keep our suppliers on board and on brand, and still produce what we’re trying to do with not having that control that is necessary. Like you said, it’s why Amazon created their. You bring your products to us and we’ll ship ’em for you because they knew that this was gonna become a problem.

Well, we feel like there’s a way to go after it as long as you’re like blunt and cut and dry from the beginning and you stick to these restrictions and these rules that they have to follow. It’s been working so far and we think we can grow it. What kind 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: of, uh, competition exists in the market, uh, for these, these kinda products?

Um, I’m assuming I. Because cannabis is becoming more and more legal in more places. 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: Um, 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: I’m, I’m assuming there’s a lot, lot of competition because a lot of these products are probably manufactured in, you know, Chinese, uh, companies, you know, factories and so forth, and, you know, anybody can really go out, you know,

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: what is the. 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: How do you, how do you make sure that, um, you have your share wallet? 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: Yeah. No, so I think the main thing when it comes to like actual manufacturing and not just reselling. We haven’t dove too much into it. We’ve created a few cleaning products and then we’ve done the typical unbranded, like cheaper entry level products that you would find at any basically retailer.

If you go into a target, you find target branded napkins at the cheapest price point. That’s what we did. We brought in unbranded glass, and it’s, that’s what you’re shopping for. It’s available on the marketplace. If you wanna go to a branded item, you’re, it’s a little more costly. So we’ve done that aspect when it comes to manufacturing.

And that just like, basically just like stabilizes us our bottom line and just like increases our branding in a sense. So we can say, but when it comes to like the brand itself call connected as a retailer, how we’re doing against competitors, how we can continue to gain market share and basically also retain market share.

Cause it is, it can be easy to get into this market if you’re willing to fight the risks and barriers that are in there. Um, I think the main thing, it’s been what we’ve said from the. It’s so cliche, but if you’re so customer focused, I don’t care what industry you’re in, it’s going to work. You see success stories in dog food, you go read the chewy story, you see it in shoes.

Go read about Zappos, you see it everywhere. Amazon itself, all his preliminary thoughts are all about being so customer focused that we, that was the main reason why we said, let’s go for this industry. Cuz when we found this website, we started Googling all our competi. A lot of them didn’t even have a phone number up.

If you have a, If they had a phone number up, it would go to voicemail. If you try to chat, it was an automated chat that you’d get an email later. We saw customer service as a huge opportunity as being so simple that we could just come in and spearhead this and yeah, someone else could come in and try to.

Compete and do it better than us, but I think that we are the like first that are getting to that middle grade area of growth that has been so focused on that. And I think if we retain that, which my business partner and I are focused on, it should just keep growing from here. 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Now I know, I know you were mentioning before that, you know, initially when you were trying to get funding for the business, the banks were hesitant on working on, you know, this, this, the idea with you.

Can you share a little bit about, you know, is, is it really, is cannabis industry still? Because I mean, at the end of the day, to me it seems like your business is really a product that that’s not necessarily a cannabis business. It’s, it’s really a. You know, accessories business. Um, what is the hesitancy from, from, you know, uh, these banks or financial institutions even I, I’m assuming payment.

Uh, providers and so forth. Um, why are, has, why are they hesitant on working and, you know, with cannabis industry products, Uh, is that still the case and, you know, what are, what are some of the, the challenges, uh, of 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: Sure. I mean, You hit the deal on the head. It’s such a gray area from top to bottom. I mean, outside of my industry, we, we don’t deal with the plant at all.

So if you go into cannabis itself, it’s weird how you can process debit card payments through all these banks and everything like that, but they won’t allow the credit card processing come down into our space. All of us, including ourselves, you could get a business credit card from any of these banks.

They’re willing to issue out credit cards, start to build your credit. But good luck getting a loan from any of them. So it’s just like they’re sort of one step in, one step out in every aspect themselves, because like you. We can present it and our lawyers can present it into a way where it’s like, these are tobacco products only.

We abide buy other tobacco product laws. We have other tobacco product licenses in all these states. That’s how the states wanna tax us. That’s what we do. That’s what we pay. So that, that means that’s what we sell. You go into another lawyer’s office and then they start arguing that we’re selling direct cannabis vapes and all this stuff, and it, it’s a whole different terminology.

So I think it’s the sense. Since there’s so much gray area, since there’s in our country overlap between federal and state laws, that the banks are just themselves. Like I keep saying one step in, one step out, that that’s why you run into the hesitations. Do I think maybe a bigger, like a green lane or a high tight ink to two publicly traded?

Have been able to maybe get some funding. I’m sure they probably have a smaller bank that they’ve succeeded with and shown the longevity of proof of all their revenue. But at the end of the day, it’s at our size, smaller, even bigger than us. It’s just not really possible right now in 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: terms of working with payment processes, what has been your experience, um, which.

For, for a more, I guess, you know, this gray area or more for risky business, which payments payment providers have been more willing to work with you and is there an additional cost for, you know, products and business? 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: Yeah, so you really don’t find too many big name payment processors. Even, like I said, the local banks, like if you happen to have a bank, a td, let’s say a business, If they won’t process your payments, they’ll hold a checking account for you.

It’s like stuff like that that you run into when the bigger names. So you do find a lot of people are willing to process. Um, there’s some even domestic options at smaller banks. Basically the processor uses smaller domestic banks. There are oversee options, which are lesser rates, but you need much, much higher volume.

And then you also run into the risk of where’s that money? But the domestic options, I mean, you said it accurately, you definitely run into a way higher fee than other industries. Any high risk industry, they, they ding us on processing. Even as your volume is growing and you’re getting to a point where it’s like you’re giving them significant volume each month, they’re still, the processing fees are hefty, especially for us in our, basically the, the bigger accessory vendors in our space.

What they’ve done is added CBD like we did. Um, as soon as we did. Even though there was a, a, a national hemp bill that was passed into law that allowed the CBD to be traded across all state lines, federally, everything like that, they still use that as a reason to charge us more. Or you wanna be processing cbd, it’s this much percentage higher.

So yeah, you do get dinged a bit unfortunately with dealing with our products and, um, 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So your business is really about marketing, right? The way you are driving revenues is kinda in control, in, in your control, but it really depends on how much traffic and how much, um, how many people you can drive to your site.

Can you share a little bit about, you know, what are some of your main customer acquisition channels and. And is this, I’m assuming that this business is more of a repeat for this kinda business where, you know, once you’ve acquired the customer, you can bring them back again and again and have them purchase 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: multiple times.

Absolutely. So I think to start off with the first part in the sense of. Basically how we’re marketing and everything. Yes, it’s a hundred. I mean, marketing is a hundred percent because like you said, we have no traffic. There’s nothing. It’s our number one sales channel. Call connected.com. We are growing other channels, which we can dive into, but at the end of the day, that’s our bread and butter.

If there’s no traffic there, there’s no revenue. So when it comes to marketing though, it gets a little bit misconstrued. Our industry. We can’t go to Facebook and run $10,000 worth of ads. We can’t go to Instagram and say, Here’s a hundred grand for this quarter. Go do what we can. No, social media will take us no paid ads on search.

You can’t do search either Google ads, anything like that. So it mainly comes down to what you can do yourself and what you can do in these like ancillary, smaller channels. So there are like, obviously, like there’s a, the We Tube, which is like a YouTube of cannabis videos out there. You can do stuff like that.

But mainly what we do is. We’ve be, When we realized this, we became so SEO focused that we realized you have to just gain as much share as you can in the search space, because if you do the analytical work and see where the top three, less than 1% of their traffic’s coming from paid ads. So it’s all a search.

You gotta win here or you’re not gonna win at all in MySpace. So we started to become so SEO focused and do what we can there, and that’s our main marketing initiative. Beyond that, we run our own affiliate marketing platform. So we have over 50 affiliates. This can be from websites that look like Groupon in our industry, we’re just offering coupons, and then we issue ’em now with percentage to influencers on social.

Getting paid out a percentage. So that’s how we go beyond SEO and do what we can to grow ourselves. That’s very 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: interesting. So, So you can’t even make organic poster on Instagram or any other social channels like TikTok. No, 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: not at all. They’ve kicked us almost all. We’ve been kicked off of Instagram twice.

Uh, we’ve been out of huge petition. We were a part of a huge petition with the YouTube with over, uh, sorry. With the We YouTube, it has now over like 80,000 signatures to just try to get a conversation around parameters as to why these accounts are getting kicked off. And even one of the biggest in this Space Bank Stop had over 300,000 followers.

That was one of our biggest appeals every time they kicked us off, is that you’re keeping the Biggers guys in our space who are posting the same exact. They finally got kicked off this month, so it’s like it’s, they just, right now they’re very antiar industry. They tie us directly to cannabis. We did everything possible.

Did not include a word or a reference that looks like the plant. Everything was pieces without any plants, descriptions, captions, hashtags, None of that had it. We age restricted our Instagram page to do it. 21. Still got taken off. The second time was over 11,000 followers. So it’s just like, it hap we just can’t unfortunately go there.

I don’t know why. Maybe one day in the future, but that’s just the way they’re treating us right now. Do 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: you, do you know who your target buyer is? Like, do you know, uh, is this, is this. Mostly a certain age range, you know, male, female. Um, my assumption is that, I mean this industry probably like whoever uses these products, cannabis related products are probably quite passionate about it.

So, I mean, one way if no social media platforms allows you to market could be probably be to build a community, I suppose. Not necessarily. To sell the product, but building a community around just the, the lifestyle, I guess. And, and have you ever thought of something like that? 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: Oh, for sure. And if, if you talk to my business partner about the biggest opportunity here, it’s that Exactly.

Uh, we’ve seen other brands, even small things like created discord around a gaming community, a virtual community just to meet. There you go, As to a puff go. Who makes the biggest e rigs or, or vapes on the, on the market, right. They run like Puff Con and have like a festival where they get the community together and everything like that.

That’s definitely the way to go. Um, have we done it yet and done it successfully? Absolutely not. We need to definitely start focusing on that and that’s like you hit the nail on the head of like things, opportunities that we’ve written down here. There are like a huge focus of ours and that’s something that we should and absolutely have to go to because like you said, there’s no way to go to the social sites.

There’s no way to go search, so, How you have to go and you wanna retain these customers. Going back, I forgot to answer that part of your last question about basically, is this a reoccurring customer base or anything like that? Surprisingly it’s not. So we see that our customers come back a lot to purchase.

It’s, you get about. One and a half purchases from a customer every two years. So what we find is we’re a very once bait industry. We’re not needs based. So if you hit a harder economy, we had a successful economy, let’s say, going through the rut of, of the covid spur because people had some extra money, they were stuck at home, couldn’t vacation, everything like that.

So it shot up because they had this ancillary money to spend. You bring down a tighter economy like we’re looking at now. At the end of the day, if you’re gonna consume cannabis, you can go down to a bodega, buy a packet of paper for a dollar, and you have 30 sessions right there. So why would I spend a hundred dollars on a glass bomb?

That’s what we started to realize. Our customers mindset is into seeing a great period and a slower period of turndown that you might see in an economy. And, but you still see them coming back to the site. They like to see the products, they like our emails. We have huge click through rates on our e on our, our email subscribers.

So like it’s an active customer base, but on the purchasing aspect, it’s not as many would proceed in terms 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: of like the, the buyer. Um, Could you think about like some other umif company or brand that is not, that’s kind like, uh, I don know what the right word is, but it’s not. Um, it’s.

Uh, you know, um, a different category, not, not necessarily cannabis, but you know, that any cannabis, most cannabis users would be using those products. So maybe utilize your, you know, customer base if they’re not buying it here, you know, this product to. To promote a different product or a different, 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: um, thing Category?

Absolutely. We haven’t been able to focus in sp like on a specific collection or product yet, but we can definitely tell the trends in basically to put it generically in the urban space. So if you go to, like out here, I don’t know if they have ’em, up in Canada, we have a retailer called Urban Outfitters.

It’s very like trendy, skateboardy. You can find a Puffco Peak or an auto grinder on their website, so they’re starting to like trickle in some of our products as they know our customer base is there. Those are the same trends that we’ve been seeing how we can pursue and enter that space. We haven’t gotten there yet, but we’re definitely starting to trend some of these basically, well, like you said, cross references of industry bases where you can possibly take some customer base easily.

If you can find these connect. What does 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: your team look like right now? I know you mentioned you have another co-founder, but, uh, uh, who else is in your 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: team? For sure. So we have two full-time employees, uh, below them. So we have our main warehouse out in California, which is run by a third party logistics company.

We don’t have a warehouse employee or like employee like that where the two employees work. There is a small return center there, so like they do see some products that come back and everything like. Beyond them. We have five contractors, so it’s like lawyers, graphic designers, bookkeeper, accounting, web developer, everything like that just goes into that bunch of contractors where we’re using ’em on a contractor basis.

Um, but yeah, besides myself and my business partner, there’s two full-time employees, like kinda like connected. So, so 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: you started this business, I believe in 2018, and you know, the goal was cause you were interested in entrepreneurship. Um, looking back, do you think that you entered the right business or the right category?

How do you see this business at this stage? Do you want to continue working on this because you’re kind of invested in it, or do you ever think that, you know, maybe this was not the right. Category to get into, you know, maybe I should have tried something else, or, you know, this is kinda like a learning experience and maybe there’s some sort of an exit strategy and you want something different.

Like, are you, um, you know, looking back, do you think that you are fulfilled as an entrepreneur doing what you’re 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: doing right now? I would say yes and no. I definitely, when I started with the mindset of entrepre, And even going back into like being focused on real estate, at first we always went with the mindset that we’re not gonna fall in love with any investment.

Whether it was me and my business partner talking, or myself talking with my wife, whatever it was, I’d never, if I wanted to be successful with, from what I was reading, is you gotta be willing to exit and continue on to the next project. So with that mindset, I, I was thrilled to take this on. Was there some hesitations with the.

Absolutely. I mean, when I, we first started this, it was just like a side hustle investment between my business partner and I. We both had si full-time jobs. I didn’t even post this on LinkedIn or anything yet because I thought if my boss sees I’m selling BS online, what’s he gonna think? Like there goes my full time job maybe.

I don’t know. I, that’s, that was just like my hesitations. So, yeah, there was some hesitations at first, but I love what we do. I think we’re doing ethically and appropriately. We write what we need to be doing when it comes to age ramifications and anything like that. So I feel like confident and love the brand that we built, that I don’t have any hesitations being in this space now.

Do I wanna exit and see Cali connected being sold at one day? For sure. That’s the plan from day one. We wanna build this to something where it’s hopefully a jug or not, and we get some big time offer and then onto the next one, whether it’s in this industry or not, that I don’t, I, I don’t think I’ve ever been so focused on that it really would bother me or say that I’m hesitant that we invested in this space.

Now, in 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: every entrepreneur’s journey, there’s always mistake made failure. Lessons learned, Lessons learned. Uh, can you maybe think about, you know, throughout your journey of building this business, what have been your, you know, one or two big mistakes or failures, and what have you learned from them? What, what advice can you give to an entrepreneur just starting out in their journey, 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: uh, as, as a lesson.

For sure. I, I mean the lesson itself might sign cliche when I say it’s really don’t ever give up, but I, I, I wanted to be more focused on my industry. What, what we really learned was in that sense that don’t ever give up because at the beginning we just were hitting wall after wall after wall. So we built Shopify.

Okay. We didn’t realize we needed a whole separate payment processor, cuz Shopify does not wanna process payments for our. So you go live the next second day you’re down, the website’s up, there’s no cart to check out on. So go after that. Try to be down for a few weeks, figure that out. Then going down the road, there’s age verification laws, vape restriction laws, tobacco laws that are unraveling on right in front of our eyes, and it’s like, should we give up?

Should we pay these lawyers thousands of dollars to tell us? Basically, you’re gonna have to shut down like all this. And we just kept figuring out different ways to figure it out and get the information we needed and work through it. Whether we have to cut back sometimes, whatever you have to do, you just have to get through it.

Cuz at the end of the day, if you do figure it out, it’s just gonna lead to more success. If you aren’t just to give up at that point, that’s where you end, you know? So I think it’s really, I hate to say it, but just truly don’t give up. If it’s something you think it’s gonna succeed, there’s a way around whatever issue you’re running into at that one.

Awesome. 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Um, so now I’m gonna to on to our next segment called Rapid Fire, by the way. I know, I know you gave a great, but, uh, could you maybe one big failure or big mistake that you, that was almost like, you know, Was almost like, you know, why did I make this mistake? Or, you know, even sometimes it’s not in your control with a big failure and you know, you had to, you know, redo something 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: in your For sure.

I think, I think it’s more so like a, I wouldn’t say a lesson learned, cause I feel like we would probably take this risk going back again, but it was just something to expect that could possibly happen. When we were a few years back before we started going after the marketplace aspect this way, um, there is a market, a public facing marketplace app, like I told you, I think it’s called Smoke Drop on the Shopify app store right now, that we’re basically trying to build their competitor.

Um, we were on there as a supplier, so another website could order products. It was actually US shipping. And what happened was we thought this like website had done their like dual or the app had to do their due diligence and everything. It was pretty early on for some reason, like a number of orders went out, a significant amount, like a few thousand dollars worth of orders went out and they were actually not paid for by that retailer.

And like however the app was, I forget what exactly happened, but we basically ended up being out that. and the, the issue at that point became is do you stay on the platform and basically just be out the money and continue to sell and like tell ’em to figure their stuff out and hope they do? Or do you get off and Yeah, we could have stayed on and brought on a lot of revenue.

We cut it out immediately. We just said this was like not the way to do business. Not people we wanna be dealing. And we lost all that revenue. We lost that channel of sales and we didn’t have anything close to that for like six months to a year before we started building our marketplace. But at the same talking, we just felt like if that’s how we were gonna be dealt with at that one point, like just cut it off now and try to do what you can and grow from there rather than trying to like deal with it and hopefully it gets fixed.

So there’s just points. You feel like you’re so invested that you can’t really back out or you shouldn’t back out. And sometimes it really is the best decision. And looking back, I think it really was cuz to see where our own marketplace is at now rather than being on someone else’s marketplace is incredible.

And if I would not have had that decision to make right there and us, my business partner, I backing out that this would probably not be where we. By the 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: way, what, what do you think about crypto? Have you, I’m assuming you’re not accepting cryptocurrencies on your We do accept 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: crypto. 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Oh, you do accept. Ok.

Cool. And do you see a lot of uptake on that? Like are there a lot of people using crypto as a payment method? 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: Surprisingly, no. Uh, to check out, there’s really not too much being used right now. In the like huge sways, we see people use it more. Like they’ll get frustrated that they’re now down XYZ amount across their portfolio.

So I feel like they’re just like, Screw it, let me get rid of some. And the other way too, when they see huge swings the other way, we in the news, we see people using it a bit more, but. For the most part, no. Most of our processing comes through credit card processing. And then the next big chunk, which really is not that much, it’s still under 10%, is the our buy now pay later vendor, uh, via Bill.

So yeah, crypto’s very small. 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: So now I’m gonna move on our rapid buy round. And in this round I’m gonna ask you a few quick questions and you have to answer them maybe in one or two words, or one sentence or so. Ok. So the first is, One book recommendation that you would make to entrepreneurs and business professionals and 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: why?

I always like to recommend Profit First by Mike Maha. Uh, mainly just how to run a lean company. It just applied to us very well from the beginning, so I, it’s always stuck with me. An innovative 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: product or idea in the current e-commerce retail or tech landscape that you feel excited. I think 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: like VR and ar, how that space is gonna enter basically any sort of physical aspect of the retail space.

Whether you’re selling ancillary vapes and glass pipes like us or a couch or anything like that. Like yeah, we’re seeing it fit into your room. Where’s that gonna go? I think that’s gonna be very interesting to see how much we can do with that beyond what’s capable, right. A 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: business or a productivity tool or software that you would recommend or a productivity tip?

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: Uh, I think I’d probably go back to dual plane just cause of how much it helped us right now just to establish the marketplace aspect. So if that’s something you’re trying to do, develop a marketplace aspect in your back end and you’re not gonna develop, customize it yourself. There are a few options out there, but I would probably recommend dual plane.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: A startup or business, uh, in e-commerce, retail or tech that you think is currently doing great things?

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: Uh, I would probably say Shopify just cause I, without that, I know there’s other big commerce or anything like that stuff that you could build websites on. But without them, I don’t think Call Connected would look or be at where we’re at right now. And also just in general, what it’s been able to do to bring competition to Amazon.

Amazon has crossed industry lines everywhere, so anybody that tries to compete with them or gives ’em a good stab at it, I’m always in. So for them to give small people like us an opportunity to be a seller, be a website, they’re now also like linking all of them to create a whole basic e-commerce of sellers on their shop app.

And they’re also getting to fulfillment. I just, I like what they’re doing and very just interested to see where it goes from here. 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: I always, I think you know this, Uh, just, just a quick comment. I think you know, all these companies that start as, start as like innovative startup start growing, but at a certain, they become so big and their different things.

I. You know, start becoming scary. . 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: Oh yeah. Antitrust has gone out the door. . Um, a peer 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: entrepreneur or business person whom you look up to or someone who inspires 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: you? Uh, I would probably say Gary Beat. I just, even if you don’t like his antics and how loud he is, I just love that you could never underestimate the hustle.

If you work hard, something good’s gonna come out of it, and that’s his main driver. So I, I always just like anything he has to. Cool. 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Final question, best business advice you ever received or you would give to other entrepreneurs? 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: I think that I would give is probably going back to like that last question with the whole thing about never giving up.

There were so many aspects where we could have said, Oh, this is a high risk industry. Oh, this bank said no. Um, this payment processor shut us down. This like, and it’s just, just keep going at it. If you think you’re passionate about it and you think you’re confident, it could go some. Working hard at it will get you somewhere.

So I just always say, don’t give up. 

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Well, thank you Naia tho. Those were all the questions that I had today. Thank you again for sharing your story, for joining me today, ATTs, for sharing you know, how you started your business or the challenges, how you grew your business, um, and your future vision. So if someone, somebody wants to purchase product from your business or get wants to get some touch with you, what 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: is the.

For our, our products, obviously directly through our website on call connected.com, and if you wanted to get in contact directly with me or my team, um, obviously there’s a generic email@infocallconnected.com or I myself can be reached through, uh, my email that it’s listed on the website or also through my LinkedIn.

Sushant Misra of TrepTalks: Awesome. Thank you again. I really, really appreciate your time today and thank you for joining me 

Nassir Silwany of CaliConnected: today at Trep Talks. Likewise. Thank you.

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