Listening as a strategy: What a California edibles brand teaches founders about finding a niche
Every founder hears the same advice: find a gap and fill it. It sounds simple until you look at a crowded category, where dozens of well-funded brands already compete on price, packaging, and promotion. California’s regulated cannabis market is a vivid example. The state’s own market report describes 2024 as a challenging year for licensed businesses, with falling prices and heavy competition.
And yet new brands still break through, usually by serving someone the category overlooked. One example is Hamsa, a Los Angeles edibles brand launched in 2022 by two women co-founders, Shifra Klein and Janice Hardoon. Its story offers practical lessons for founders in any industry, whether the product is gummies, skincare, or software.
Start With the Customer Nobody Is Serving
Klein has said the idea began at home. Keeping a kosher household, she was surprised to find no kosher-certified cannabis edibles on the market. Rather than treating that as a personal inconvenience, she and Hardoon recognized a pattern: people who follow kosher, halal, vegan, or gluten-free diets were largely left out of the edibles aisle. Hamsa launched in summer 2022 as what the founders describe as the first kosher-certified cannabis-infused gummies in California, built for several dietary communities rather than just one.
The lesson is that the strongest niches often come from needs you understand firsthand. A trend can be copied by anyone, but a problem you have lived with gives you detail your competitors lack, from the ingredients customers ask about to the questions they hesitate to raise. That kind of insight is hard to buy: market research tells you who is purchasing, but only experience tells you who is quietly walking away. It’s the same pattern behind other women who’ve built successful cannabis businesses by starting from a gap they’d personally run into rather than a gap they’d read about.
Let a Third Party Vouch for You
Claims are cheap, and customers know it. Klein says Hamsa’s gummies are certified through Whole Kosher Services, with a rabbi who is an expert in dietary law inspecting the facility from production through packaging. She describes the certification as more than a stamp on the box, and that is the point: independent verification turns a promise into evidence. It’s the same principle behind the broader steps any business can take to build trust with customers, proof and consistency doing more work than a claim ever could on its own.
It also carries a cost. Certification demands disciplined ingredient sourcing and a manufacturing process that can survive inspection, so it works as a strategy only when the standard is one you can sustain.
Solve the Friction Customers Already Complain About
Every category has a complaint everyone shares. For edibles, it is timing. A CDC report examining a fatal edible-related incident notes that the onset of effects from edibles is significantly delayed compared with smoking, with peak plasma concentrations arriving one to two hours after ingestion rather than within minutes, which is why newcomers are urged to start low and go slow. A slow, unpredictable onset is also what tempts people to take a second dose too soon.
Hamsa built its product around that problem. Klein says the brand uses a water-soluble formulation designed to begin working around the ten-minute mark, and that the gummies are perforated so they can be split into smaller doses. Those are the founders’ claims, and individual responses vary, so the standard advice still applies. As a business decision, though, the logic is sound: pick a differentiator that answers a frustration your audience already has.
Know the Market You Are Entering
A good niche still has to survive its market. Industry coverage of the state’s wholesale pricing trends found that wholesale and retail prices kept falling and that taxes and compliance costs make licensed products expensive to produce. It also found that consumers are moving toward value-added products as the industry innovates. Between the second quarters of 2021 and 2024, packaged flower sales fell from $615 million to $391 million, while pre-roll sales rose from $171 million to $200 million.
In a market where prices keep compressing, competing on discounts is a losing game. Differentiation, whether through certification, format, or formulation, gives a brand something to stand on besides price. Klein’s own path shows the other half of the lesson: the collective she started in 2016 operated under a model California phased out in 2018, and she had to pivot. Regulation can change the ground under any business, so build a brand that can move with it.
Expand From a Position of Trust
Hamsa began with gummies, but its website now lists flower, infused pre-rolls, and tinctures alongside the edibles, with the same dietary callouts, including vegan, gluten-free, halal, and kosher options where noted. That is a textbook way to grow: earn credibility in one product, then extend it to adjacent ones. Each addition inherits the trust the first product earned, which lowers the cost of persuading customers to try something new.
Distribution matters just as much. Most California brands reach customers through licensed retailers and delivery services, so partners shape how a brand is perceived. Shoppers searching for Hamsa weed in California can find the line listed with licensed retailers, which suits a brand built on trust: these are businesses that verify age and display the product information shoppers need.
Takeaways for Founders
Start with a customer you genuinely understand. Back your claims with proof someone else can verify. Solve a frustration your category has accepted for too long. Read the market honestly, including the parts that are hard. And grow outward from the product people already trust.
Klein credits much of Hamsa’s progress to listening, and says she never leaves a customer email unanswered. It is an unglamorous strategy, but it is the one behind most good niches.
Product details in this article come from the founders and brand materials. Cannabis products are for adults 21 and over, and this article is general information, not medical advice.
