Award Winning App Development

Happy Valley is a cannabis brand that does far more than retail. Beyond its stores, it runs live event activations at Boston music festivals, including Boston Calling at Harvard, and operates its own breeding program, Happy Valley Genetics, where teams evaluate seedlings to decide which strains make it to market.

That footprint meant Happy Valley didn't need one app — it needed a connected set of them: loyalty, personalization, live events, and internal breeding tools. And the software had to perform in three unforgiving places at once: a customer's pocket, a festival crowd, and a grow room where the wrong call costs a season.

Before Nullwest existed, Scott built Happy Valley's consumer and internal software end to end:

- A mobile rewards app where customers earned points and discounts on purchases — designed to make the brand the default choice, not an occasional one - An AI-powered cannabis journal inside the app that asked users why they were reaching for a strain and how it made them feel — anxious, sleepy, relaxed, relieved — and built a personal profile from those answers to recommend strains each user would actually like, and steer them away from ones they wouldn't (no more accidentally picking the sleepy strain on a Saturday afternoon) - Geo-gated scavenger hunts for two live Boston music festivals: open the app on the festival grounds and it unlocked photo challenges — a dog in costume, a Happy Valley cast member in the crowd — with a live leaderboard and prizes redeemable at the Happy Valley booth - *Phenotype, a breeding app for Happy Valley Genetics that replaced sticky-note tracking of seedlings with photo-based strain evaluation — and went on to win a [verify: "Katych" Award — see reasoning]*

One client, four very different problems: consumer loyalty, applied AI, live-event software, and internal tooling for a scientific workflow. That range is the experience Nullwest was founded on.

A loyalty app nobody opens is just a line item Most rewards apps are punch cards with a splash screen — opened at checkout, forgotten otherwise. The journaling feature gave users a reason to open the app between purchases: it tracked which strains they liked and how each one made them feel, then used that history to recommend the next one. The rewards drove the download; the AI profile made the app genuinely useful. Utility, not discounts, is what made the brand sticky.

You get one weekend with a festival crowd — no patches, no retries A live activation at an event like Boston Calling has to work the moment someone opens the app standing in a field, or the moment is gone. The scavenger hunt was geo-gated — the app detected when a user was physically on the grounds and unlocked the experience automatically, no codes or sign-ups in the way. The challenges were built around things festival-goers already wanted to do (take photos), and the leaderboard and booth-redeemed prizes turned engagement into foot traffic at the Happy Valley tent.

Breeding decisions were living on sticky notes Selecting genetics is like selecting produce: visual cues decide everything. Breeders need plants whose buds look potent — dark green, dense, covered in crystals — because that "jar appeal" is what sells. Happy Valley's teams were tracking those judgments on sticky notes across plant growth cycles. Phenotype let them photograph and rate seedlings strain by strain, turning institutional eyeballing into comparable records the whole team could use to decide which genetics were strongest for breeding.

Phenotype won a [verify: "Katych" Award], and the festival scavenger hunt ran for multiple years as a returning activation. [Optional: adoption, retention, or redemption metrics here] [Optional: client quote here]

Building a consumer app that has to earn its place on someone's home screen — or putting AI to work on a problem that's still living on sticky notes? Scott has shipped both, alongside work for Spotify, Vice, Intel, and Xembly. Let's talk about yours.