APP FOR POT USERS GAINING GROUND
BOCA RATON — Darren Roberts is a marijuana entrepreneur, but he’s not peddling pot. Instead, Roberts runs High There, an app that touts itself as a meeting place for cannabis connoisseurs.
Roberts’ Boca Raton-based company has 12 employees, and he boasts robust growth. High There is three years old and already has signed up 600,000 users.
“We’ve been called a lot of things,” Roberts says. “We’ve been called Facebook for cannabis. We’ve been called Tinder for tokers. We’re not a dating site. We’re more of a meetpeople-make-friends app.”
Roberts, 46, and co-founder Kenneth Frisman, 48, launched their company in Denver, the capital of marijuana legalization. But the pair live in mansions in Boca Raton, and they decided they could operate the company closer to home.
High There has attracted plenty of people willing to upload their profiles, but the app gets decidedly tepid reviews. Users on Apple’s App Store give it a rating of just 1.9 stars out of five. “Best to just avoid,” one user writes. Another unimpressed user calls High There “a mess.”
Reviewers on Google’s Play Store are only slightly more enthusiastic. They give High There a grade of 2.5 stars out of five. “Terrible!! Most are just there to sell weed,” one writes.
Roberts takes the haters in stride, and he says High There plans to unveil an updated version of the app in March.
“Our goal is to constantly improve,” Roberts said.
And he says there are plenty of success stories from High There, including at least one couple who got married after meeting on the app. And one of High There’s users was a terminal cancer patient who sought advice about using marijuana during her final months of life.
“As sad as it was, it was really cool to know that you had the power to connect people,” Roberts said.