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

Lucas, appreciate you joining us today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?

I was working in corporate finance at JPMorgan, and on the consumer side I kept running into the same broken experience every time I tried to buy cannabis legally. It’s a fully regulated, multi-billion-dollar industry, and yet checkout felt a decade behind every other retail category I shopped: cash-only counters, sketchy lobby ATMs charging a few bucks just to pull your own money, no rewards, no purchase history, no real way to engage with the brands and stores I liked.

It wasn’t an idea I built from a deck. It was something I felt as a customer, week after week. And the more I dug in, the more I realized that retailers were just as frustrated — squeezed on cash handling and security, and getting almost no attribution or marketing tools to grow their business in a world where banks, card networks and modern loyalty platforms refuse to serve them.

So I left JPMorgan and started Spendr. The idea was simple to say and very hard to build: make paying for cannabis as easy and rewarding as paying for coffee, and give dispensaries the same payments-plus-marketing engine every modern retailer outside cannabis takes for granted. What got me most excited wasn’t the size of the market, though it’s enormous — it was that nobody else was trying to solve both sides at once.

Lucas, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I’m Lucas Gould, Founder & CEO of Spendr. I grew up in Cincinnati, OH and studied at Ohio Wesleyan, and started my career in corporate finance at JPMorgan. I left banking in 2021 to build Spendr, the company I wish had existed when I first started shopping at dispensaries as a consumer.

Spendr is a payments and engagement platform for the cannabis industry. For consumers, we’re the easiest and most affordable way to pay at participating dispensaries, pay directly from your bank, skip the ATM fees, and earn real rewards on purchases you’re already making. For dispensaries and brands, we’re the engine that ties payments, rewards, and marketing into a single measurable system. Most cannabis retailers operate without the basic infrastructure that the rest of retail takes for granted — no card-network rails, no integrated CRM, no clean attribution. We’re rebuilding that stack from scratch, purpose-built for this industry’s rules.

What I’m proudest of isn’t a stat, it’s that when a dispensary turns Spendr on, they don’t turn us off. We’re live across roughly 200 retail locations in fifteen states, with well over a hundred thousand consumers on the app. But what keeps retailers is the math: we’re one of the only line items in their P&L that pays for itself, every month. Our most recent impact study with a multi-store retail partner showed customers we engaged through Spendr spent 27% more than the control group, customers who shifted their spend from cash to Spendr grew their personal spend by 21%, and the retailer earned roughly four new dollars back for every one dollar they paid us. That’s the whole pitch in a sentence.

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

The hardest part of building in cannabis isn’t the product — it’s that the legal cannabis industry exists in a regulatory no-man’s-land where most of the financial infrastructure the rest of the economy uses simply isn’t available to you. Banks won’t bank you. Card networks won’t process for you. Vendors hear “cannabis” and ghost you. Investors who say they’re in still pass at the eleventh hour. In our first year I lost count of how many partners gave us a hard no — not because the product was weak, but because their compliance team flagged the word “cannabis” on our website

We had to choose every single week for a couple of years, to keep dialing the next bank, the next investor, the next retailer — knowing the conversation might end the same way. Every yes we now have was preceded by dozens of nos. The thing that kept me going was being annoyed enough as a customer myself to refuse to accept the status quo. We just had to outlast those people who said (& still say) that cannabis is not a normal business.

Alright – let’s talk about marketing or sales – do you have any fun stories about a risk you’ve taken or something else exciting on the sales and marketing side?

One of the moments that defined how we sell came with one of our earliest multi-store retail partners. They were skeptical since they’d been pitched by every loyalty and payments vendor on the planet, and most of those tools sit unused on the shelf inside the dispensary. So instead of a deck, we proposed a different deal: roll us out at one location for one month, and at the end of the month we’d hand them a report that broke out to the dollar how much incremental revenue Spendr drove. If the math didn’t work, they could part and get all their money back.

The risk on our side was real. We were a young company offering radical transparency before we had a long track record to point to. But the data came in stronger than we expected. Customers we engaged through Spendr spent meaningfully more than the control group, customers who shifted their spend to Spendr increased more than those that stayed cash, and the retailer ended the month with multiple dollars back for every dollar they paid us in fees. They expanded us to every store across multiple states.

That trial became our playbook. We give the retailer a chance to see Spendr in action, and let the data speak for itself. We have to deliver and as we do so, it makes the retailer much more invested in our partnership.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.spendr.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/getspendr