Building A Rosin Press Company: An Interview With The Team From ROSINBOMB
We sat down with the team behind ROSINBOMB to talk extraction
Starting a company in the cannabis space is no easy feat, and Fred Angelopoulos and Ryan Mayer of ROSINBOMB are no strangers to starting companies. Having completed their reverse merger with Maverick last year, ROSINBOMB hopes to capitalize on an already ever expanding popularity of their press products.
We recently sat down with Fred and Ryan to talk about ROSINBOMB, concentrates, and what it takes to make it as a startup in the cannabis space.
CHAMPS Smoke Shops: So tell us a little bit about ROSINBOMB.
Fred Angelopoulos: Ryan is the founder and the inventor of the technology and the president, and I’m CEO. I was a founder in Macromedia, which became Adobe software. I was also a founder at Symantec. I had done a lot of software, and then I ran sales and marketing for Hitachi US, and then I had a company that did 3D hardware in which we did a reverse merger and took it public and it was very successful. After that I started doing consulting and helping emerging companies in technology and about three years ago I really started focusing on the cannabis market, for a number of reasons. Obviously there’s a high growth area, an area that I have connections to, certainly on the CBD side especially. I started, really wanted to look at something in that space but in technology because that was kind of my strength. I met Ryan at the Champs show and I looked at a number of companies and I saw his press. At the time he had just launched a kind of higher volume press and I thought it was the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. Just the fact that it was elegant and simple and plug and play and it was silent compared to anything I had seen in any extraction technology. So I got to know Ryan a little bit. I offered to help him and kind of joined, became part of the company. He was gracious enough to allow me to join him.
CHAMPS Smoke Shops : That’s pretty special that you met at an industry show. Now Ryan, what brought you into the cannabis space and what made you want to take that leap?
Ryan Mayer: So I started with the juice presses of course and I’d been approached by several people, one more notably the one that I ended up kind of getting together with on design ideas and what works, what doesn’t. His name is Sarang Ngam and he’s in Washington still. He produces a lot of the stuff for gold leaf extract which is a very well known, high end, concentrate company. So, the juice press was perfect for what we needed in the way that it was, we needed something that was gonna go in the kitchen, it was a home appliance, and so we were kind of ahead of the game there where we had a technology where we could be in the kitchen. You don’t have air pressure in the kitchen, you don’t have big hydraulic pumps in the kitchen so it kind of put us in a good place for that and it was just sort of adding heat to our element and making a nice good controlled heat with the correct size plates for what you’re gonna put in there.
The way we went, it was a pretty easy transition considering we basically already had the press. So we just needed to add heat to it and change its structure a little bit. We added a little bit more force and we were off and running. It was really also just kind of like responding to everybody needing something, I mean the consumer is the market. The process is, of course there’s many of them, but the consumer is everybody, including those processes when they go home. So we had something that was cost wise and function wise available for everyone to be able to use and so kind of taking a little bit of that power from processors and giving it to everybody which is kind of why, every so often I’ll say, “Finally a press for everybody,” because it’s everybody’s press which is another major point of it. Everybody has a need for the medical use one way or another and it’s kind of nice cause it puts it in the hands. Everybody can financially afford at least one of the models and they can get fresh pressed product that they made.
Fred Angelopoulos: That was where one of the things because we had the M50 out there which is five thousand pounds of power and still on the very kind of slim form factor. But we started talking about delivering something really targeted for the consumer in a consumer price point and we started looking and saying, “Okay somewhere between a toaster and a Keurig machine type product”, and we developed, actually Ryan, yeah I gotta give him all the credit and I’ve been in awe of how smart he is. I’ve worked with a number of people who are very very brilliant but Ryan is a genius. We started talking late summer last year about it and we knew we wanted something portable, you carry it, it’s simple to use, and quality technology but affordable and elegant. Literally a few weeks after our conversation we were kind of sitting down in a restaurant talking about it and Ryan’s like, “Hey I’ve got a press prototype” and I was like, I mean I was with some big tech companies. I worked with Hitachi and we had thousands of engineers and it would be six months before a rough prototype would be seen and he showed me this thing and was like “yeah we’d get like 1500 pounds of power out of this” and I was just blown away and three months later the rocket was born which is really revolutionary. $599 and plug and play right out of the box with literally almost one touch operation.
CHAMPS Smoke Shops : Do you see concentrates as being a growing trend as more and more markets come online?
Fred Angelopoulos: Absolutely, I mean I think there’s so many variables that make the concentrate market such a high gross market. The fact that you’re packaging something in a very small little container that you’re making one hundred dollars on that little container.
Ryan Mayer: You’re selling it for a hundred versus $20 or $50 bucks because the potency of it is a factor. Different ways to consume it is a big factor. You know, making butters and oils and edibles and things like that and I think CBD is a key factor. CBD oil factors is huge we have a lot of people who press hemp and are making super high quality CBD.
Fred Angelopoulos: We hear from those people and how that’s helping. And we’ve even seen the cultivators the profit margins are there. The data I saw was customers spend about fifty five hundred more per year than people who use flower. Then every part of what we do is like we’ve done is stuff on our website and things that we’ve put out to have stuff that we’ve done economics of pressing your own and the economics of pressing your own you can really get it down about twenty five dollars again. So solventless, high quality concentrates that’s going for fifty to a hundred dollars a gram in dispensaries. It’s the whole economics of it. You buy the flower, you press it, you know exactly how organic it is because you know the process and you are saving your money.
CHAMPS Smoke Shops : Touching back to come full circle you guys obviously competed your reverse merger with Maverick last month. Can you tell me a little bit about kind of what was the thought process behind that? What drove that decision?
Fred Angelopoulos: Sure yeah that’s a good question. Well kind of in my history, my background has been kind of successful in some successful mergers that went publicly, reverse mergers, I talked about my 3D company, that was a reverse merger and it was very successful and we ended up selling the company. We are looking for ways away to get the company to an accelerated growth by getting it an instrument. I’ve been a part of a number of tech companies that moved out in public and I just feel like the fact that this is an exciting technology in an emerging market, there’s a window in this market for emerging companies and for entrepreneurs and I believe it’s now and probably the next few years but we don’t wanna be naive about big pharma and big tobacco and big alcohol. So I think it’s great to get in, establish your brand. the market value now will create opportunities and they come about because you drove market value then who knows what the future brings. We’re in an acquisition target we just thought we got the technology in place, we’ve got the product out there in market, we have incredible things to come in the future and just start when this opportunity came about we wanted to take advantage of it.
CHAMPS Smoke Shops: What are some of the things that you have coming down in the future for ROSINBOMB?
Ryan Mayer: Well some of the things we talked about. Being public we’re a little bit limited but we are looking at ways to, we’ve got some ideas on how to do large volume production without much increase of a footprint of the kind of the professional M50. We’re competing with these solvent driven extraction devices that are developing in technology and it’s gonna be something I think pretty impactful when we finally deliver that. And we plan on delivering that this year and we’ve got other ideas, a collection of the material that we’ll be implementing I think is gonna really revolutionize the collection card of this process.
To check out ROSINBOMB and order for your Smoke Shop, visit www.ROSINBOMB.com
