Business Ventures on the Horizon with Mieko Perez ft. Tetragram App

Tetragram is a trailblazing digital platform that helps you get the most out of being a medical cannabis patient. Finally, a platform that empowers the new faces of cannabis and highlights CBD consumer trends.

As more cannabis & CBD products are redefining their social responsibility in communities across the world, the science of cannabis and CBD therapeutics now has a new ally and that’s Tetragram.

Tetragram has been featured in Green Market Reports, Maryland’s Capitol Gazette , Washington Post and The Cannabis Diversity Report and now with us.

Hopegrown proudly welcome, Otha Smith the creative force behind Tetragram.

I’m originally from Southern Anne Arundel County, MD., located twenty minutes south of Annapolis, Md. I first started smoking cannabis at the age of 17 with a friend of mine that lived in my neighborhood.

Most of the people I grew up with in my neighborhood were smokers, but at the time I was heavily involved in sports, so I didn’t give it a try until later in high school.

In 2003, I was involved in a serious car accident that nearly took my life. I fell asleep at the wheel and was ejected from the car landing on my head and upper back. It resulted in a six inch and thirty-four plus staple scar on the top of my head.

After being released from the hospital I was prescribed several different opioids to address my neck and back pain. After three years of using prescription pills, I decided I didn't want to continue to take pills daily for the rest of my life. So, one day I completely stopped taking them.

I started buying cannabis from a friend of mine who had been selling cannabis since high school and lived relatively close by. Fast forward and years later cannabis started to become legal for medical and recreational use across the country.

Once Maryland legalized cannabis for medical use in 2014 I jumped at the opportunity to get my medical cannabis card. After getting my medical cannabis card I will never forget the feeling of entering a dispensary for the very first time.

I was completely overwhelmed by all the different strains and packaged products to choose from. It felt like I was drinking from a firehose! In the legacy market you never hear your supplier mention terpenes or cannabinoids. It was more like, “I got some fire and some mid-grade” and those were your only two options.

After talking to other patients, dispensary staff and doctors the one thing that everyone recommended was keeping a personal journal to keep track of products you tried and how they made you feel.

Since cannabis effects everyone differently I realized I couldn't rely on someone else’s recommendation and understood the importance of journaling my experience. That’s when I had the “light bulb” idea of instead of using a paper journal to document your process, why not create an app to do the same thing. And that is how Tetragram was born!

We look at Tetragram as a tool that will not only help consumers understand the effects of products purchased, but the industry will have a clear understanding of which products work best to address a particular medical condition.

Today, dispensary staffs are making product recommendations based mostly on their personal experience but rarely do they have any substantial data to rely on to truly make an accurate product recommendation.

At Tetragram, we have thousands of people who have shared their personal reviews associated with various cannabis and CBD products on the market.

Our crowdsourced approach to data collection is utilized to educate and train dispensary staff on the possible effects and benefits associated with the products they sell every day.

The more information we can provide to dispensary staff to educate them on products, the more confident the dispensary staff will be in making product recommendations that match the customers expectations.

Once a consumer goes home and has a positive experience based off a recommendation from a dispensary staff member, that increases the loyalty between the dispensary and the customer, and it all starts with providing the dispensary with data that we collected.

Myself, as well as my two business partners are each medical cannabis patients. That said, we take privacy extremely seriously. For starters, Tetragram is HIPPA compliant. We don’t and never will ask for a person’s first or last name when creating an account.

All data is encrypted on the back-end to protect consumers email addresses and passwords. During the process of creating an account, we require people to verify their email prior to logging into Tetragram the first time, which is another way we protect personal information.

In the next five years I expect Tetragram to be a dominate platform where cannabis and CBD consumers can connect and engage directly with others as well as with dispensaries, cultivators, and medical professionals.

We aim to provide an educational ecosystem where cannabis consumers, cultivators and brands can share personal experiences and content among each other.

I think cannabis will become federally legal in the next five years, at that point we would like to provide people with the ability to tie-in their medical records into Tetragram and have an open exchange of information with their doctor.

In addition, we hope to use our white-label solution as a research tool utilized by independent researchers, universities, and organizations such as the National Institute of Health (NIH).

Absolutely! Tetragram at its core, is a medically focused company as we aim to uncover the properties of cannabis that are responsible for addressing various medical conditions.

We work with medical professionals every day that believe in the healing power of cannabis. There’s so much more to uncover with cannabis and CBD and we hope to be the company steering the boat on cannabis research.

Telegram is available for download on Apple & Google Play.