Without going into too much detail, I did found a MJ based startup, however I ran into 3 big problems:
1. My startup focused on fostering relationships with producers and distributors, both of whom are hesitant to openly discuss or display their business, location etc in a way that can be easily accessed publicly.
2. Legal fees. I tried to set up everything as legitimately as possible through a lawyer as well as keep him on retainer in case I ended up in any trouble with the law. Massive overhead.
3. Saturation and fear. At the time of my efforts there were two major shifts in the West Coast market. The first was a flood of growers both indoor and out that greatly reduced the value of anything that was not of the absolute highest quality. The second was the crackdown on many major players in the game; people saw that old names in the MJ industry were getting raided and prosecuted and started to either withdraw or severely limit their business relationships.
Basically until everything is legalized at both the state and federal levels it will continue to be very difficult and expensive to try to revolutionize this industry.
TL:DR
The media is a bunch of haters, our wedding wasn't as ecologically devastating as it was played out to be. Why'd you people use so many expletives about us?
I think that is perfectly logical, the project was basically a series of command line tools. I tried to swap out excel for CSV or at least TSV, the client demanded .xls in .xls out. Believe me we tried every suggestion and that was as far as the client would negotiate. We got it to work and I died a little inside.
I agree with you, I actually had a client who demanded that the data in their project be done in excel (with multiple files ranging from 1-3 gb in size!). Both myself and my partner tried exhaustively to use a database or even JSON/XML solutions but the client kept repeating "in the real world business is done in excel!" Needless to say it was a nightmare.