A short drive, a long-runningconversationwith the industry.
We were customers first.
The team that started Sticky weren't tech tourists - they were regulars at their local dispensaries who had spent years building loyalty programs in other industries. Every paper punch card and every generic blast email reinforced the same hunch: cannabis customers deserve better tools, and the category was new enough that someone could actually build them.
One dispensary. One prototype. One question.
The first version of Sticky was demoed in a downtown Toronto dispensary owner's back office, with one question on the table: what if your loyalty card actually lived on the customer's lock screen?No app to install, no plastic card to lose, no "scan this QR code" friction. A real Apple & Google Wallet pass, updating in real time off the POS. That dispensary became Sticky's first customer, and the playbook for everyone who came after.
"We didn't have a pitch deck. We had a working prototype, a friendly local operator, and the gut feeling that lock-screen loyalty was going to matter. We were right."
From a hunch to real infrastructure.
The first dozen dispensaries were hand-built - every POS connection was a custom project. We invested early in real infrastructure: a platform with proper integrations, true wallet-pass plumbing, and a journey engine that could ship to one store or a hundred without breaking a sweat. The hunch became a product. The product became a category.
A dozen locations turned into hundreds.
Word travels fast in cannabis retail. One operator told another. A few multi-location groups put Sticky on every store. Then a few more. Today we power loyalty, email, SMS, push, and wallet for hundreds of dispensaries across North America. The competition watched closely and started shipping things that looked an awful lot like the things we shipped first, which honestly we take as a compliment. Better tools for everyone is the goal. We just like getting there first.
Buying cannabis should be enjoyable. We make it more so.
The honest reason we're proud of what we built isn't the logo wall or the customer count. It's that we shipped a bunch of useful things our clients tell us they actually love, and we had a stupid amount of fun building them. The category is still young. There are still ten more wallet-pass ideas, journey ideas, AI ideas, and "wait, why doesn't this exist yet" ideas in our backlog. We're just getting started.