Budist

The brief

Budist's founders wanted to do for cannabis what critics and review sites did for wine: give consumers a trusted way to judge aroma, flavor, potency, and effects before they buy. They came to First Factory needing a full product team, one that could turn the concept into a clickable prototype for seed-round investor meetings, then build and launch the app.

The first release targeted California, the largest legal cannabis market in the United States, and organized everything around three experiences: critic reviews, community reviews, and brand and product pages.

Designing for credibility

First Factory UX/UI designer Daniela Cortes joined at the start of the engagement and owned the experience from ideation through hand-off. Her work covered competitor analysis, low- and high-fidelity wireframes, the design style guide, and accessibility, using Adobe XD, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Miro.

The team worked in a four-stage loop. Plan defined user requirements and analyzed competitors. Design produced wireframes, sequences, and navigation. Prototype put dynamic prototypes in front of users to test usability. Review walked each round of designs through with the client.

Research surfaced five problems the app had to solve:

• Stigma. Consumers hesitate to share cannabis experiences publicly, so genuine reviews are scarce.
• Inconsistent products. Potency, quality, and effects vary with cultivation methods, which makes fair comparison hard.
• Limited information. Thin research makes safety, efficacy, and quality difficult to judge.
• No standard. A fragmented market of producers and retailers leaves shoppers unsure which products to trust.
• Few places to talk about it. Mainstream review and social platforms restrict cannabis content.

Three personas shaped the feature set: the enthusiast who relies on reviews to buy with confidence, the influencer who wants to build a community and work with brands, and the producer who wants customer feedback to improve products. Empathy maps for each, plus a review of existing platforms, set the priorities: profiles, detailed product listings, ratings and reviews, search and filters, user-generated content, community features, notifications, bookmarks, and location-based services.

Credibility came first. Products are rated on a 100-point scale, and reviews are labeled gold or green to separate professional critics from community members. Reviewer profiles, product categories, ratings, and featured products were designed and tested before anything else, and the app opened by invitation only until a standardized review format took hold.

Built to get to market fast

Every technology choice favored speed. React Native gave Budist one codebase for iOS and Android. NestJS and GraphQL power the backend, with PostgreSQL and OpenSearch for data and search. AWS and Codemagic handle hosting and automate build, test, and deploy for the mobile app, and WordPress runs the marketing site so the client team can publish without a developer.

Sharing was the hardest problem. Off-the-shelf deep-link services like Branch and AppsFlyer could not track who shared a link, who opened it, and how many points each interaction earned. First Factory built a custom deep-linking system instead, with every link carrying an encrypted identifier tied to the person who shared it. Points are awarded once per unique viewer, so the rewards can't be gamed.

The Oscars of Cannabis

Midway through the roadmap, Budist was named the official judging platform for the California State Fair's 2024 Golden Bear awards for cannabis. The team repurposed the app's core rating features so judges could score entries across flower, concentrates, cartridges, pre-rolls, edibles, beverages, and wellness.

Budist is live on the App Store and Google Play, accepting reviews for products sold through licensed California retailers.