Growing a Brand Meta Won't Advertise: SEO, AI Search & Influencer Mentorship with Chase Werner

Thanks for having me, Marc. We sell seeds, specifically cannabis seeds, and we mainly sell to home growers. Currently there are 25 states plus DC where people can legally grow cannabis at home, and we ship seed to all fifty states.
Some of our seed is legal to germinate in certain states and some isn’t, but because there’s no THC in the seed, it’s legal for anyone to hold on to it. So in some states people are collecting for when their state ultimately allows home grow, while in over half the country people are buying to grow in their home gardens, or in closets and tents indoors.

It’s easier and cheaper to grow outside, but a lot of states require you to grow indoors. In a perfect world, we’d love every adult in all 50 states to be able to grow a few plants in their backyard or on their deck. Going indoors is much more equipment-intensive, and you’re responsible for maintaining the perfect environment, whereas outdoors nature does a lot of the work and you just react to it.
On quality, if you have a good system and you’re knowledgeable, you can generally grow better plants indoors because you have tighter control. But for beginners, an outdoor grow can sometimes produce a better plant because nature handles the light, the airflow and the natural environment.

There are two types of cannabis seed. Photoperiodic plants react to the shortening days of fall and flower based on day length. Autoflowers just germinate, grow up and flower automatically regardless of day length, so a lot of beginners like them because you don’t have to monitor your light levels. We sell both.
And the plant is an annual. It’s basically like a tomato plant: you plant it, it grows up, it produces flowers, and then you harvest the plant.

If you’re in a state where home grow is legal, you still have to abide by your plant-count limits even if you’re growing CBD. But there are hemp programs where you can apply for a permit, in I think 49 states, and those are generally not regulated by plant count. It really is state by state. If anyone’s interested, we have a state-by-state law blog at triangleseeds.com with posts on every state: what’s allowed, what’s not, and your best opportunity to grow legally.
One point of clarification: botanically, hemp and marijuana are both Cannabis sativa. Because of the way the laws are written right now, no cannabis seed has any THC in it, whether it’s a THC plant or a CBD plant, so it’s all classified as hemp seed from a legal perspective. We’re operating in an area that hopefully will remain open to us.

Two different things. Sinsemilla is Spanish for “without seed,” and it refers to a female plant that hasn’t been pollinated by a male. When you’re growing for flower, you isolate the females from the males because no one wants seeds in their flower. A decent number of our customers also like to make their own seed, and we support home breeding.
Sativa, indica and hybrid are a classification system. It’s generally thought that sativas are more energetic and indicas more sedative, but there’s nuance, because terpenes play a role and so does your own body chemistry. More concretely, sativas come from tropical environments and have thin leaves and fluffy buds to combat humidity, while indicas are shorter and squatter, from colder, mountainous regions, with thicker leaflets.
What I find personally is that you can use different cannabinoids to drive the experience. THC is the gas pedal and CBD is the brake, and CBG adds a social, chatty effect. That’s why we sell type one, two, three and four seeds: THC, a THC/CBD blend, CBD, and CBG. A lot of seed sites and dispensaries only sell high-THC strains. We like to showcase the other three types because you can really tailor the experience to what you’re looking for.

Exactly right. The botanical term is trichomes, which are resin glands. When the female plant is trying to get pollinated, it puts out those sticky resin glands to catch pollen. That’s where the cannabinoids are produced. It’s really interesting science.

You’re probably thinking of the Senior Savvy series. It’s a unique opportunity that we’d like to do more of. That channel helps seniors use cannabis effectively and coaches them through legal cannabis in their states. The host was interested in growing, and a grow equipment supplier had offered her free equipment. I told her, we’re looking for more visibility online, so why don’t I coach you through your first grow, and your followers can follow along?
It’s been a really good format. We’ve gotten a lot of business from it, and new fans. A lot of grow content is aimed at the aspirational professional grower or the super-nerd gearhead, but we want to see cannabis grown next to your tomatoes in your garden. Because it was her first time, she brought all the beginner questions. I started growing in 2006, so I can’t even formulate a beginner question anymore, and it’s so valuable to hear them.
We’re looking for more influencers, whether they’re interested in growing for the first time or are grow-specific but newer than Matt and me, so we can provide coaching. Every seed company under the sun sends free seed packs to people. I’m not aware of anyone making a campaign to actually hold their hand and provide mentorship. That’s what we’re trying to do with more people.

For sure. Matt and I have always tried to demystify growing. We were trained professionally in horticulture, more greenhouse than farm, and we’ve always tried to distill those academic, professional best practices down for home growers.

We have a lot of educational material on the website, including a really in-depth germination guide, because we don’t want anyone to be intimidated. We also offer a germination guarantee. We test all of our seed in-house, so we know the germination rate is good. If it doesn’t germinate, it’s frankly user error, but it’s worth it to us to eat the cost and send replacement seed. We build it into our acquisition cost, and germination complaints are less than one percent of orders.

You’re exactly right. We decided we want to turn those germination complaints into opportunities to create Triangle Seeds fans. We’re a small business, so Matt and I personally handle them. We’ll text back and say, can we get on the phone and talk about what happened, so that when I send you new seeds you have success? It’s not super common for the owner of a business to call and help you through an issue on a thirty-dollar seed pack, but we’ve got the time and the passion. We both prefer phone calls. Talking through grow problems over text can be maddening.

It skews a little older, I’d say 35 to 70. We have a lot of retirees who have the time for hobbies and maybe used to partake back in the day and are getting back into it. We also have people in their thirties who want to produce their own flower, people growing to save money over buying from a dispensary, and people who don’t really trust the corporate cannabis world and aren’t sure what pesticides are on the product or whether the test reports are accurate. There are also back-to-the-land people who grow their own veggies and want to grow their own cannabis too.
When we were pivoting from the live plant business to the seed business, we modeled it against homebrewing. A very small share of beer drinkers ever try homebrewing, a fraction of a percent. What we found is that a much larger percentage of cannabis users want to try, or have wanted to try, growing their own. And after generations of stigma, people can now grow legally, loud and proud.

We’re prevented from using a lot of standard tools and services because of the cannabis association. We tried a paid Meta ad campaign, and Meta hates cannabis, so we were basically invisible and abandoned the campaign. We’ve had to resort to generating content on our website: SEO blog posts and email marketing.
We use Omnisend for email, and we have a good number of subscribers. We send a weekly newsletter that’s really not salesy. It’s an educational resource, and sometimes a fun cannabis history lesson. Omnisend has been huge for us.
The other piece is the SEO and AIO work that Matt has mainly done on the website, optimizing it and publishing blogs. We’re also reaching out for backlinks now, and trying to build more relationships with influencers. If I could sum it up: SEO, AIO, email marketing and collaborations with influencers.
We don’t really generate our own content, because neither of us has a passion for it. So our strategy is to be guests on other shows. That’s why the mentorship strategy came about: we have our audience, but we need other people’s audiences to see us.

Yes. Matt and I really like putting a face to the business. Earlier on, because of the legal gray area, a lot of seed banks were unidentifiable websites with seed on them: who are these people, where are they from, what’s their story? I like to know who I’m buying from, especially when it’s something I’m going to grow. So we say, here’s my story: I’m a grower, I used to do hydroponic veggies, I love cannabis, and I am Triangle Seeds along with Matt. I think it creates trust.

I’m a one-issue voter: legalization. We support legal home growing in all fifty states, and right now it’s 25 plus DC, so we’ve got 24 more to go. We support home grow legislation in any way we can, and we let customers in certain states know when a bill is coming up so they can help get the word out.

I’m a grower by trade and an offline entrepreneur who managed greenhouses. Because of the ebbs and flows of the industry, we transitioned into a purely e-commerce business about a year and a half ago. We don’t produce our own seed anymore; we buy from partner breeders. Matt and I dove in headfirst with a learning mindset, and in a year and a half I have so much more understanding of the strategies, the tools and the lingo.
If you’re moving into e-commerce for the first time, it’s going to feel overwhelming. You’ve got to structure your learning plan, prioritize it, and treat every day like back to school. Doing it in the cannabis industry adds a whole other roller coaster of things outside your control. There’s legislation scheduled to take effect on December 11 of this year, and it’s not clear we’ll be able to continue our business after that. We’re in a gray area, and after December 11 it’s only going to get grayer.
It’s incredibly frustrating. You feel like you need to temper your investment and your outreach for partnerships, because we might all have to shut the doors in two months. Every year for the last six years, especially on the hemp side, it’s been a potential extinction event. So we try to act as if it’s all going to be okay while minimizing the downside risk. It’s a wild industry, but my long-term belief is that it’s going to be a monster, right up there with alcohol.

Thanks, Marc. You can find us at triangleseeds.com, and we can do a part two sometime if you want. It was great.

You’re welcome, Marc. Thanks for having me.