1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?

Brandi Dunham: What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?
Answer: The Spot NV grew out of Exhale Brands in 2025, built around one simple idea, Las Vegas cannabis retail was full of shops competing on the same $49 ounce style deals but almost nobody was building for a city that genuinely operates around the clock. So instead of trying to out-discount everyone else, we positioned ourselves as the dispensary that’s actually accessible whenever life calls for it, which became our true 24/7 drive-thru model backed by app ordering and live chat support.

What makes us genuinely different isn’t a single product line, it’s that reliability at every hour, including 3am, when most dispensaries in the city are closed or running a reduced skeleton crew. Our budtenders are trained to deliver the same quality and product knowledge overnight as they do at 2pm, which sounds simple, but almost nobody else in this market has actually built their operations around that as a core identity rather than an afterthought.

2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?

Brandi Dunham: The clearest turning point was shifting our marketing and operational focus away from price-led promotions and toward convenience and community, once we noticed our small existing base of overnight and app customers were far more loyal and less price sensitive than customers who came in chasing daytime deals. That single shift in what we chose to build around, accessibility over discounting, reshaped both our brand identity and our margins, because retained customers cost far less to serve than the constant cycle of chasing new ones through deeper discounts.

The second turning was investing seriously in overnight staffing as its own specialty rather than a stretched version of daytime scheduling, complete with dedicated training, incentives, and clear escalation processes for compliance and customer issues. What we learned from both moves is that a pivot only works if you fix the operational foundation before you market the promise, because customers can tell almost immediately when a brand claim, like being genuinely 24/7, isn’t backed by consistent execution behind it.

3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?

Brandi Dunham: Local SEO and Google visibility are probably our single biggest driver, since most cannabis searches in Las Vegas are someone typing dispensary near me or dispensary open now at an hour when a lot of competitors are closed, and that’s exactly the moment our 24/7 positioning wins the click. Social media, particularly Instagram and TikTok, is our second major channel, not so much for direct sales but for building the brand personality around being the late night, always open spot, which then drives people to search us out or use the app.

Our loyalty program and app notifications function almost like a third channel on their own, since a huge share of repeat revenue comes from customers we’ve already earned rather than new discovery every time. What we’ve learned across all three is that cannabis marketing has real restrictions on paid social and traditional advertising, so organic presence, being visible in search at the right moment and building a following that talks about us unprompted, matters more in this category than it would in a less regulated industry.

4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?

Brandi Dunham: We’ve had to get a lot more deliberate about writing content that directly answers specific questions, things like is there a 24 hour dispensary in Las Vegas or dispensary drive thru near me, because that’s the phrasing that shows up whether someone’s typing into Google or asking an AI assistant the same question conversationally. It’s pushed us toward clearer, more direct information on our site about our hours, drive-thru service, and product categories, rather than writing purely for search engine keyword patterns the way we might have a couple years ago.

We’ve also paid more attention to making sure our basic business information, hours, location, product menu, is consistent and easy to pull cleanly across our website, app, and listings, since AI assistants tend to surface whatever source looks most authoritative and complete rather than favoring one platform. It’s less about gaming a specific algorithm at this point and more about making sure the facts about us, being genuinely open 24/7 with a real drive-thru, are easy for any of these systems to find and represent accurately.

5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?

Brandi Dunham: Our loyalty rewards program does a lot of the heavy lifting here, since it gives first time buyers a clear reason to come back rather than just hoping they remember us fondly. But honestly what converts people into advocates more than the rewards themselves is the consistency of experience, someone who rolls through our drive-thru at 3am getting the same knowledgeable service and product quality as someone who walks in at 2pm tends to talk about that specifically, because it’s genuinely unusual in this market.

6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?

Brandi Dunham: I’d double down hard on owning one genuine differentiator all the way through operations, not just marketing, the same way we did with 24/7 drive-thru access instead of trying to be everything to everyone. That means investing in whatever makes you actually different being airtight before you spend another dollar promoting it, because customers notice fast when a brand promise and the real experience don’t match, and that gap is expensive to repair once trust is broken.

What I’d stop doing entirely is leading with discount driven promotions as the core growth strategy, because that approach mostly attracts customers who leave the moment a competitor undercuts you by a few dollars. It’s fine as a supporting tactic, we still run deals like our $49 ounces, but it can’t be the reason someone chooses you, otherwise you’re building a customer base with zero loyalty and margins that keep shrinking every time someone else drops their price.