How I Legally Made 25 Million on Cannabis. The Story of Nizhny Novgorod's “Escobar”

My business is based on two pages from a Soviet encyclopedia. I became the first hemp producer in Russia, having developed my own engineering technology using a hair dryer and a basin. I also fought pests in production and proved to marketplaces that I was not a drug dealer.

Hi! I am Masha Larikova, a journalist at the Club.org business club. I share stories of entrepreneurs and managers from our club.

Today my hero is Andrey Kuzin, the founder of the company “Konopel”. Andrey created a business on hemp from scratch and in 10 years grew to 25 million ₽ in turnover. His path was truly thorny, and how he went through it – he told me in an interview.

Disclaimer: we will talk about industrial hemp with a content of “funny” substances of no more than 0.1%. And such a quantity is permitted by law for sale RF PP dated July 20, 2007 No. 460 ed. from 10/30/2010

How the idea of ​​selling cannabis came about

I always wanted to become an entrepreneur, so I entered the finance department of UNN. And in 2012, I took business courses, where I learned how search engines, Yandex.Direct, work and learned how to make landing pages, only this knowledge was useful to me later.

At the same time, I took tests to determine my purpose. In one of the tasks, I had to write down all my hobbies and interests in life. I was interested in many things, but then I thought about hemp. No, not in the sense that you might initially think. I was interested in what hemp is, what the plant is and why it is prohibited.

I started digging deeper and came across an article that changed my whole life: «The Global Conspiracy Against Cannabis“After reading it, I firmly decided – it's time to do business.

In Moscow, at VDNKh, there is a monument to the friendship of peoples. It immortalizes the workers of the Soviet Union, personifying each people's republic. The figures of the girls are dressed in national costumes, surrounded by the main achievements of agriculture, among which, along with wheat and sunflowers, huge hemp leaves are woven in the very center of the monument.

The plant grows up to 4 meters. Its trunk is so big that you can't wrap your hand around it, and there is a whole sea of ​​cellulose and seeds from one flower. I was amazed at how many wonderful properties this miracle of nature has. By right, the queen of the fields should not be corn, but hemp

Launch of “Konopel”

In 2013, nobody really grew hemp in Russia, but I wanted to see how products were made from it. So I went to Mordovia to the Mordovskiye Penkozavody LLC plant.

I arrived and my jaw dropped when I saw the hemp fields and how the machines and combines were working on them, harvesting the crop.

I found the chief agronomist and through him I got in touch with the director. I came to him with a proposal – I want to trade hemp, and we agreed that I would buy hemp seeds from them via dropshipping. That's how I became a distributor.

There was no money to buy raw materials right away. I even hitchhiked to Mordovia. And back too.

Returning to Nizhny Novgorod, I sat down to make a landing page. I know how to make landing pages! I decided to call myself “Konopel” – this is the pre-revolutionary name for hemp, which I saw in Dahl’s dictionary. In the header of the one-pager I wrote: “Large wholesale supplies of hemp throughout Russia and the CIS”.

Then he started calling companies that might be interested in hemp products. He sold everything: seeds, cake, oil, fiber, inter-crown insulation, ropes. He published on Avito, Agroserver, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki.

The first clients were seed processors and household owners. The goods were sold in transit, I did not touch them with my hands and did not even see them. I negotiated with buyers and suppliers, prepared documents and resolved logistics issues.

At one time I worked with the company “Oil King”. I bought oil from them in large canisters and then poured it into small 1-5 liter canisters and sold it

First partner

The oil was sold for about 100,000 ₽ per month with a cost price of about 50,000 ₽. And then the idea came to mind – if the margin is 50%, you can rent a room and produce the oil yourself, and for the first time, the money from the profit will be enough for the rent.

I got inspired by the idea and ran to tell my friend. He liked the idea too and became my partner, investing 250,000 ₽, I added 50,000 ₽ and that's how we got started. We decided to find a place and buy equipment on which we could do seed kernels and oil.

We just didn't know how it all should work and thought – we'll figure it out on the spot

When we were looking for a place, we came across a half-abandoned hostel – it was ideal for us and we immediately settled there.

We were so enthusiastic that we bought materials for 50,000 ₽ and did the renovation ourselves. It became cozy, and most importantly – soulful. We were as happy as children, so fired up by the idea that our workplace had become a home.

They paid 30,000 ₽ for rent, fortunately there were sales, but the profit from them was about 15,000 ₽ per month, and that was how they lived. Literally enough for instant noodles and water. There was no money at all.

First fuckup

Having started searching for equipment, we realized that it is impossible to buy good equipment for 300,000 ₽. And since there is not much money, we had to look for suppliers in a roundabout way and found them 4 times cheaper outside the Russian Federation, semi-artisanal production.

At my own risk I sent cash to suppliers, in fact it is not clear where. The same story with carriers – I gave the money to some acquaintance of the supplier. After that they could all disappear and not pick up the phone, but everything worked out.

The sunflower seed peeling machine arrived on time for 150,000 ₽, the oil press and filter – I paid 135,000 ₽ for them. We were happy and immediately got to work.

We pressed the oil using a hot-press screw press: we poured the seeds into a hopper, the machine heated up, the screw rotated and squeezed out the oil, separating the cake into a separate container.

To our chagrin, the oil turned out to be, to put it mildly, below the expected quality – dark green, dense and bitter. Such oil needs to be carefully filtered. And this is long and difficult, and it is not a fact that we will get the desired product

I started looking for information on how hemp was processed in the last century and I came across pages from an old Soviet encyclopedia..

Now we had to peel the seeds. We have a sheller, but no one knew how to use it.

We turned on the sheller, poured in the seeds, but it turned them into mush together with the husk. We look at this and think – how can we now separate the shell to get clean kernels.

We thought of taking two plastic cups – pouring this “porridge” from one to the other and saw that the shell is lighter than the kernel and can be blown out with air. Eureka! – I shouted and ran for fans and a hair dryer.

But even this was not enough, the shell was blown out, but not all of it. I had to make a sieve for sifting.

My companion Vitalik sowed, and I blew out the shells with a hair dryer..

I had an enamel basin – it was a real know-how. The seeds swirled around the enamel perfectly. I sat on a chair, holding the basin between my legs at a certain angle and blew on this hemp mixture with a hair dryer. And to keep the seeds from flying around, I scooped them up with my hands.

Our engineering technology consisted of a sheller that ground the seeds into a mush, which was then passed through a sieve and blown out with a hair dryer into a basin.

So we were able to make 10 kg of clean kernels in one day. – it was a breakthrough! And we were the only ones in the country who launched hemp production in manual mode.

We packaged the hemp kernel ourselves. We also came up with the logo ourselves. We offered the hemp to eco-markets, healthy food cafes and yoga studios. As a result, our first product became a flagship.

Second fuckup

We made 10 kg of hemp kernels per day, which is 300 kg per month. The price was set taking into account the raw material cost price — 300-350 rubles/kg. To get 1 kg of kernel, you need about 3 kg of seeds. We set the price within 600-700 rubles per kg, which brought us about 200,000 rubles per month.

When they started pressing oil in oak barrels, it was tasty and beautiful. Oil was sold for 600 rubles/l. And sunflower seed husks were sold for 40 rubles/kg, fishermen bought it well.

The business is moving forward, sales are going well, and then my partner leaves the business due to family circumstances.

I was left alone, and you can't blow up much with a hair dryer alone… And you still need to order raw materials, unload the goods, sort out the accounting, call clients, etc. I literally lived at work, and in order to unload, I began to look for equipment that would replace Vitalik for me

I googled whether there was such a device capable of blowing seeds, and I found it, it’s called a seed blower.

In a village not far from Kstovo I found an agricultural enterprise that works with such a seed harvester, and went to them to see if it was what I was looking for and how it worked. Only to get there, I had to sacrifice the levers and ball joints of my “fifteen” – and I went anyway, taking a bag of hemp.

I arrived, the agronomist and I were standing in a huge hangar, I poured seeds into this device, turned it on and I couldn’t believe my eyes – it blew everything out itself and the kernels came out clean.

I'm running through the performance in my head – it's 10 times more than what we did together. I was so happy coming back over those bumps that I forgot about the suspension.

Why didn't Vitalik and I think of a seed maker earlier?? At that time, such a machine did not even occur to us, because we had never come across one. And at the very beginning of my journey, I did not understand anything about equipment. We worked by trial and error

When I got back I started looking for a seed rake, but a new one was expensive and I didn't have any extra money. I found a used one for 120,000 ₽ in Voronezh and drove there in my “Tazik”, which was already on its last legs, but I got there and bought it. I brought it home, washed it from cobwebs and dirt, started it up and it worked!

And that's how I started processing about 30 kg of seeds per day..

The appearance of a new partner and again a fuckup

My main assistant was the son of the driver of the owner of the base where we were located. Sergey helped unload raw materials, processed seeds, packaged and delivered the goods. I continued to look for clients who were interested in the new Russian superfood. I called, offered them my products and concluded contracts.

And then a new partner found me, he was an acquaintance of the owner of the base and he recommended me to him. We met, got acquainted, drew up a business plan on a napkin and shook hands.

My partner invests 1 million ₽ in the business. We additionally took the neighboring premises and did repairs there for 100,000 ₽. And we also bought new seed cleaning equipment and a steel press for 500,000 ₽, because the wooden barrels malfunctioned and began to burst during operation.

I remember Sergey calling and telling me in a frightened voice that the barrel had burst during the oil extraction. I laughed it off, not attaching much importance to it. I didn't see how it happened. And we have three more barrels. I came, looked, they smiled and installed a new barrel. But the next day, right before my eyes, the second one burst. The bolt that held the rim of the barrel flew into the wall, making a 1 cm depression in it. It's good that it didn't hit my forehead.

This happened because during the wringing process the barrel expands and contracts, which leads to wear of the fastening. The resource is small, so the barrel breaks.

For safety and reliability reasons, we decided to buy a hydraulic steel press, similar to oak barrels.

For the remaining 300,000 ₽ we bought raw materials. At that time I didn’t really understand seeds and chased the price.

We bought hemp seeds infected with some kind of grain pest. The insects were swarming, they were so small, they crawled everywhere and on me too. I put on a special “spacesuit” for protection.

There were no losses, except perhaps in time. We spent five days dealing with the beetles. We also had to sift the seeds for several hours at night, saving them from the insects. They multiplied before our eyes and devoured the provisions.

In the end, I sold all the raw materials to fishermen for the same money I bought them for. Fish bite well on hemp, and the fish could see it without any difference in quality.

I didn't have any conflicts with my partner because we saved our investments and got out of the situation “dry”. But I still felt awkward. The first deal in the partnership, and we got into trouble right away

With the money I got back I bought high-quality raw materials and the work continued to move forward, albeit slowly.

How protein began to be made

You can't go far on oil alone, and you have to increase your income somehow. Another thing that bothered us was that when we pressed the hemp kernels, we got 30% oil, the rest was cake, but it remained fatty and did not grind. We tried to squeeze it in a press with a load of 50 tons, but the cake still remained sticky. We threw out more than one ton of it.

Then I ground the cake with a hammer and put it under the press again, and did this several times. Voila! — little by little the oil was squeezed out. And they pressed until the cake was completely dry. Then they ground it into powder and got a new product — protein. And its price on the market was about 800 rubles/kg.

And six months later there was a change of partner and at that moment there was a fuck-up because of protein

New investor

We worked with the second partner for 2 years. He left the business because he was busy with other projects. And the company did not have much profit, so even protein did not save the situation. And to develop a business, you need to invest and be involved in it, really burn with it.

The new investor found me himself, called me and offered cooperation. I went to him in Moscow with samples of goods and a ready business plan. The investor liked everything and he bought out the previous share, investing 4.5 million ₽ in the business.

And then our business suddenly began to boil..

We moved to another 300 square meter premises, did 500,000 ₽ worth of renovations there and purchased new equipment for 2.5 million ₽. The remaining funds were invested in turnover.

And when we moved, that same fuck-up with protein sales happened..

Irena Ponaroshku advertised our protein in Nezabotygramma. For which I am very grateful to her, although we did not agree on anything.

Her husband was into superfoods and bought our protein in one of the health food stores in Moscow. Irena just filmed a story about her purchases and at the very end she says – I bought soap, toothpaste, and my husband really likes Konoplin protein.

Sales didn't just skyrocket, we couldn't process them, we were sorting them out for three months. People waited for weeks for us to send them goods. We were doing repairs, buying equipment, and then there was such a rush.

We recruited up to 15 employees: sales managers, an accountant, an office manager, and production workers. The salary was paid around 50-70 thousand rubles.

And our team successfully sorted out the protein sales.

Coming out

When the staff was formed, I was released from my current job and went into media. I developed accounts in VK and Nenetogram, went to exhibitions to promote products, found new clients there and met partners.

We appeared on TV, radio, the media wrote about us, healthy lifestyle bloggers promoted our products well. We fed them hemp for free – and they advertised us in return.

Our brand has become recognizable, including me. Partners with their own production have approached me with the aim of buying our hemp to add to their product.

So we started working with HoReCa – they add our hemp to porridges and cocktails. We had experience with manufacturers of halva, candies and other sweets. One company makes mayonnaise with our oil.

We were developing quickly and decided to enter marketplaces. But there were some screw-ups there too

Fakap on Wildberries

As soon as we entered the marketplaces, sales went up. But two months later, guys came in with hemp tea, with such provocative names – “Dr. Jah”, “buds”, “heads”. Then they were blocked and we along with them.

They took away all our goods and said – you have drugs. We gave them documents, we gave them arguments – they wouldn't do anything.

Negotiations with the WB got to the point where we had to change the logo so that it didn't look so much like cannabis. We spent half a million on developing a new logo, reworking all the documents and labels – and they still wouldn't let us in.

We redesigned the infographics, worked on the description and were able to sell there, but not with all of our products.

On VB you can sell oil, protein, but not hemp kernels. On Ozone you can sell protein, but not oil.

We have reached a plateau. Our company has a turnover of 25 million rubles per year. We work with farmers from nearby regions and process about 6 tons of seeds per month. In addition to retail, we continue to cooperate with 4fresh, Konoplya dlya zhizni, Dom Koppi and other eco-shops, restaurants and food manufacturers.

I plan to produce cosmetics from hemp, but I don’t want to disclose the whole concept. And it would be great if partners who are just as passionate and actively involved in the business join me.

We are what we eat – and I eat what I make myselfTherefore, you can eat products from “Konopel” calmly and with pleasure.

Hemp is green oil, and Russia is the best place for its growth. What to invest in – I made my choice, and you?