We were lucky to catch up with Payman Cash Moughaddas recently and have shared our conversation below.
Payman cash, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What was it like going from idea to execution? Can you share some of the backstory and some of the major steps or milestones?
I was a buyer of bitcoin when it was $800 and saw the opportunity in the crypto industry. That led me to NFT’s. After diving into the digital art, I became a full time community member of Killabears NFT (killabears.com). I became the space host on twitter for the project and also ran a meditation space for a while 1-2x a week. The killabears team released 4 bear heads with a name KillaKush. That brand name hit me. I felt that there was a huge space for cannabis branding with that name and logo. After trying to help the KB team for over an year trying to use my connections with the major brands in the US, the KB team decided that this is not their main objective and the CEO asked me to take the name and run with it. He said he did not trust anyone but me. I accepted the challenge. Me having no knowledge about anything in this industry as I am not even a heavy pot head per say, did not where to begin tbh. Slowly day by day I made calls and made as many mistakes as possible till we finally after 8 months or so started to have some attraction and sales to local smoke shops came about. Now we are in over 100 stores nation wide in less than 18 months and have passed $600k in sales in our second year thus far. We still have 3 months left to improve on that number.
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?
To keep it short, I started dabbling with NFT/Crypto space in Feb of 2022 full time and used the time to build a network of friendships that led to me accepting an offer to run with an idea without having any clue where to start. I just felt something and said yes to launch “KillaKush”. We are a sister company of a bigger enterprise called KillaBears.com which was the NFT project that I was mostly interacting with at that time. They are working currently on a movie with Seth Green executive producing it that is called “KillaBears”.
Currently KillaKush is in approx. in 100 stores nationwide and growing at tremendous speed. Our focus is cannabis for now so we can slowly branch out to merch, apparels, misc markets. We have already launch our first rec side in west Seattle in a joint venture with “theBakeree”. Exciting times
Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?
Since I and the rest of our crew were mostly in the NFT space, we decided to run with it. A friend invested $20k in the beginning and we were hoping to recoup that after the launch but non of that occurred the way we thought it would. After several months, we had no cash to continue almost till I called a friend in Toronto and pitched him my vision. He decided to invest $50k for 12% Equity into the holding group. The rest is history writing itself as we speak. We are doing nearly 100k a month and looking to 5-7x that by end of 2026.
Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?
At some point in this process I realized that this endeavor is here to make me grow in all fronts specially psychology test me in every avenue. I recall our first big test of faith came when we were short on our rent and I did not how to come up with the cash. A friend tells a friend about us and gets me a meeting. When we presented our brand to them, they placed an $8k order that kick started everything. I learned about resilience by allowing the Divine Intervention to have a say and let that help me to allow things to unfold as they should in a perfect time frames. Letting go helped me tremendously.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://Killakush.com
- Instagram: killa.products
- Twitter: thekillakush
