BudsFeed is a Brooklyn-based discovery platform where cannabis brands and fans “seed” products, services, events and content for the community to upvote. Founder and CEO Justin Johnson calls it a discovery destination for the cannacurious, built because mainstream social platforms resist cannabis content.
In September 2026 it was publishing several times a week, pairing a weekly TL;DR news digest with founder and operator interviews in its How It Started series.
Seeds, upvotes and the weekly Top Seeds
Brands and fans can post a seed for free. The community upvotes submissions into a running feed sorted across more than 50 categories. Each week BudsFeed names its Top Seeds and shares them across the site, its newsletter and social channels, giving the winners a second wave of attention.
The homepage keeps a Last Week’s Top Seeds rail. In late September 2026 it featured a Prism x Milkyway collaboration, IC Glass and Yocan.
Puffco, Grasscity and brands that seed their own launches
The feed doubles as a launch pad for hardware and accessories. Puffco gear appears across the site, from The Proxy, which pairs Puffco’s portable heating with a glass sherlock pipe, to the Proxy Droplet, the Hot Knife and a Peak Pro Daybreak limited edition. The Proxy kit gets a closer look in a Puffco Proxy review.
Grasscity, the High Tide-owned headshop, seeded its Grasscity Seeds line on BudsFeed, with genetics from Green House Seeds and Barney’s Farm. BudsFeed also partners with cannabis brands on content collaborations, since paid ads on mainstream channels are largely closed to the category.
How It Started, from NatureMed to Surreal Yields
How It Started asks people across the industry how they got into cannabis. September 2026 guests included Sean Oganesyan, founder of Surreal Yields, on September 13, and Adolphus A. Busch V, CEO of Teal Industries and Current Cannabis, on September 15.
On September 20 the series featured Anhie Nguyen, purchasing manager for NatureMed in Arizona. The homepage carousel also carried a conversation with Nassir Silwany, partner at CalConnected.
A weekly news digest and the rest of the blog
TL;DR distills the week’s top cannabis stories into one post. The September 14, 2026 edition led with rescheduling surviving its first challenge, the Curaleaf and Aurora takeover fight, and the $3.5 billion the U.S. collected in excise tax in the last fiscal year.
The blog sorts its posts under TL;DR, Industry Perspective, FeedBuds, Top Seeds, Buds Unboxing, How It Started and Partner Post. Buds Unboxing is the video series, alongside animations and product videos.
From agency strategist to founder
Johnson studied at Washington State University and started at the Seattle agency WONGDOODY. He later led business development for agencies in Los Angeles and New York, working at Digitas, Deep Focus and Lunchbox on accounts including American Express, eBay and Walmart. He was a founding partner at Moment Studio before launching BudsFeed around late 2018.
BudsFeed was shortlisted at the Clio Cannabis Awards and featured in Forbes in 2020. Johnson later added BudsFeed.co, a curated online store, and in 2021 co-founded Chill Steel Pipes, which makes a stainless steel, double-wall smoking device.
Official channels
Find BudsFeed at budsfeed.com and on LinkedIn.