We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Stefan Frank a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Stefan thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

We have noticed a true absence of professional online services that provide a genuine connection with a Doctor who can answer all the customers questions

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

1. For readers who may not be familiar with you, can you introduce yourself and share how you found your way into this industry?

My name is Stefan Frank, and I’m the CEO and founder of Dr. Weedy, a digital health platform dedicated to making medical cannabis accessible, safe, and stigma-free. My path into this field started with a simple observation: people weren’t struggling to access cannabis — they were struggling to navigate the system around it.

Long wait times, confusing regulations, outdated clinics, and an overwhelming amount of misinformation created unnecessary barriers for patients who genuinely needed help. At the same time, I kept meeting people whose lives were transformed by medical cannabis, from chronic pain patients to individuals managing anxiety, stress, PTSD, and insomnia.

It became clear to me that access, not cannabis itself, was the real challenge. Dr. Weedy was founded to solve exactly that.

2. What does Dr. Weedy do, and what kinds of services do you provide?

Dr. Weedy is a telehealth and compliance platform that helps patients obtain medical cannabis recommendations quickly and confidently. Our services include:

Online medical evaluations with licensed physicians

Instant digital recommendations where legally allowed

State-compliant medical cannabis documentation

Patient education and support

Partnership programs that help dispensaries grow their medical customer base

We’ve built a platform that combines speed, affordability, privacy, and legal compliance, allowing patients to complete the entire process online in minutes.

3.What problems does your company solve, and for whom?

For patients, we remove the friction, confusion, and stigma traditionally associated with medical cannabis. We help them access:

Lower taxes

Higher purchase limits

Stronger formulations

A structured, protected medical pathway

For dispensaries, we provide tools and partnerships that:

Increase customer retention

Improve average basket size

Convert recreational shoppers into long-term medical patients

Offer data-driven insights that drive higher lifetime value

We’re one of the few companies that solve for both sides of the ecosystem.

4.What makes Dr. Weedy different from other services?

A few things truly set us apart:

A patient-first mindset — Our brand is built on empathy, safety, and trust.
A compliance-first operation — Every recommendation aligns with state rules; no shortcuts.
A blend of technology and human support — Automation does the heavy lifting, but real doctors and real people guide the experience.
Clarity and communication — Patients never feel lost; dispensaries never feel unsupported.
A focus on long-term industry growth — We help retailers and patients succeed together.

5.What are you most proud of?

I’m proud of the thousands of patient messages we receive — people telling us they’re finally sleeping better, living with less pain, or feeling more in control of their wellness.

We don’t just generate medical recommendations.
We create a bridge to relief, and that’s something I’ll never take lightly.

6.What do you want readers, potential clients, and fans to know about your brand?

That Dr. Weedy is built with purpose.
We believe medical cannabis is legitimate medicine, and we’re here to make access simple, supportive, and trustworthy.

I want people to know that:

We respect their privacy

We value their time

We support their journey

And we take the responsibility of medical access seriously

At its heart, Dr. Weedy isn’t just a service — it’s a mission to help people feel better, live better, and experience the full benefits of medical cannabis without the friction that used to hold them back.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

One story that really shaped me — and in many ways shaped Dr. Weedy — happened in our very early days, before we had any brand recognition, funding, or traction.

When we first launched, everything looked good on paper. We had a great product, a working telehealth model, and strong conviction that we were solving a real problem. But within the first month, we hit a crisis I’ll never forget.

Our payment processor unexpectedly shut us down.

No warning. No explanation.
Just an email saying they were freezing our account because we operated in the cannabis industry — even though we were fully compliant.

Overnight, our ability to accept payments vanished.
No payments meant no revenue. And no revenue meant the company was essentially dead unless I found a solution immediately.

I remember sitting there at 2 a.m., staring at that email, wondering if this was the moment everything collapsed.

But giving up wasn’t an option.

I spent the next three days calling every payment provider I could find — 37 of them, to be exact.
Most said no. Some laughed. A few lectured me about cannabis being too “risky.”

But I kept going.
Call after call. Email after email.
I refused to let a backend system dictate whether patients could get access to care.

On the fourth day, I finally got a yes — from a small, forward-thinking processor willing to work with regulated cannabis telehealth. I negotiated terms, implemented the integration myself, and within 24 hours we were back online.

That moment taught me something essential:

Resilience is not about being fearless — it’s about refusing to stop.

It taught me to adapt quickly, think creatively under pressure, and push forward even when every door seems to be closing. And honestly, it set the cultural tone for Dr. Weedy.

Today, whenever we face regulatory changes, platform obstacles, or industry roadblocks, I go back to that moment. Because I’ve already lived through the day the business almost died — and learned that persistence is more powerful than any obstacle.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

One of the biggest lessons I had to unlearn was this:

“Move fast, and do everything yourself.”

When I first started Dr. Weedy, I was still operating with the mindset of a scrappy founder:

If something broke, I fixed it.

If we needed a new process, I built it overnight.

If a partner needed talking to, I got on the phone myself.

If a marketing idea popped up at 11 p.m., I would stay awake until 3 a.m. executing it.

It worked… at first.
That energy helps you survive the early chaos.
But over time, it became clear that my strength was turning into a bottleneck.

The Backstory — The Week Everything Collapsed at Once

There was a week early on that forced this lesson into me like a brick wall.

Here’s what happened in just 72 hours:

Our doctor availability system went down.

A large marketing campaign launched early by mistake.

Our support inbox overflowed with hundreds of patient questions.

And a dispensary partner expected materials that hadn’t been finalized yet.

Instead of delegating, I tried to do all of it myself.
I barely slept.
I answered support tickets at 5 a.m., coded a fix for our scheduling bug at 7 a.m., drafted a new marketing workflow before noon, and spent the rest of the day trying to clean up the fallout.

By the end of the week, I was exhausted, behind, and overwhelmed — and the team felt disconnected because I wasn’t letting anyone help.

That’s when one of my team members told me something that stuck with me:

“You trust us with the mission, but not the work.”

It hit harder than I expected.

The Lesson I Unlearned

I had to unlearn the belief that I needed to carry everything myself for it to be done right.
Because in reality:

A company doesn’t grow if the founder is holding all the threads.

People can’t develop if there’s no space to own responsibilities.

And you can’t scale a vision on the back of one person’s bandwidth.

I realized that leadership isn’t about doing — it’s about uplifting, creating systems, and enabling great people to do their best work without you hovering over every detail.

What Changed

I shifted from doing everything to:

Hiring slowly but intentionally

Giving full ownership, not partial tasks

Prioritizing systems over heroic effort

Learning to step back so the team could step up

Trusting expertise rather than trying to replicate it myself

And the result?
Work got better.
Team morale increased.
And the company’s growth began to accelerate — not because I worked more, but because I finally stopped trying to do it all.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.dr-weedy.com