Two days is barely enough time to cancel the subscriptions of a dead startup. John Manlove used it to begin another one. In December 2017, Tradiv, an early wholesale cannabis marketplace, shut its doors. Manlove and two colleagues, Rob Fess and Willy Wheeler, started working on Apex Trading two days later. The old company had run out of road. The problem it had tried to solve was still sitting in every grow, shop and distributor's office, looking untidy and asking to be invoiced.
Apex did not begin with a polished dashboard or a tasteful launch video. It began with Manlove's customer relationships, a telephone and a shared Google document. Sellers put their menus into the document. Buyers sent an order through Manlove or another salesperson. By April 2018, this conspicuously manual operation had brokered 191 deals between 52 buyers and 50 sellers, passing $1 million in merchandise volume. It was software entrepreneurship with the software temporarily absent.
From collapse to operating system
The haste was not theater. Wholesale customers still had inventory to move, and competitors were a click away. “We had to do it quickly - if you're not there one week, your clients will have to find another service provider,” Manlove said at the time. He had reportedly sold more than $10 million in cannabis product as Tradiv's lead salesman. When the company disappeared, those relationships did not become assets on a balance sheet. They became conversations he had to earn again.
“We had to do it quickly - if you're not there one week, your clients will have to find another service provider.”John Manlove, 2018
Chapter oneThe useful idea inside the wreckage
Manlove entered legal cannabis in 2014 as Tradiv's first employee. Two college friends had approached him with a proposal to build an “Amazon of cannabis.” He left an environmental-services firm and took responsibility for operations and sales. Over the following years, he moved through client engagement, sales leadership and the chief operating role. Tradiv was a first mover with venture backing, but it collapsed after executive turmoil and strategic drift.
The three Apex founders did something emotionally difficult and strategically precise: they separated a broken company from a useful customer problem. Cannabis wholesalers still needed to show products, manage inventory, receive orders, maintain compliance records and preserve relationships with retailers. An open marketplace could connect supply and demand, but Manlove believed the operator also needed a business-management system. Apex would combine the storefront with the plumbing.
This distinction matters. A marketplace asks, “Who can buy this?” An operating tool asks a dozen less glamorous questions. Is the inventory current? Who approved the discount? Did the laboratory result travel with the order? Does the invoice agree with the fulfillment record? What should the sales representative do next? The second list has fewer dinner-party stories and more durable software.
Chapter twoA career in complicated handoffs
Seen from a distance, Manlove's path to cannabis software looks eccentric. Seen from inside the work, it is almost orderly. At Drury University, he studied environmental studies and business management, with a minor in global studies. He served on the business school's student advisory board and was president of its student body in 2010. He also helped introduce a zero-waste program at a new events center, working with concessions on compostable serviceware and separate bins for trash, recycling and compost.
His early jobs included legal support at a law firm and a county prosecutor's office. After college, WasteXpress Environmental put him into client acquisition, regulatory guidance and environmental remediation work. Those roles share a family resemblance: rules, records, physical goods and multiple parties who suffer when the handoff is careless. Cannabis added a young market and a particularly baroque set of state boundaries.
Manlove has made fieldwork part of his product vocabulary. He has said that everyone at Apex, including him, visits grows, extraction facilities and edible manufacturers to understand what operators need. The practice helps explain why Apex sells branded storefronts as well as inventory, order and customer-management tools. A cannabis producer is not merely shifting units. It is trying to preserve a brand while satisfying buyers, regulators and an accounting system that may have opinions of its own.
Chapter threeThe spreadsheet is trying to tell you something
Founders enjoy describing behavior they intend to change. Manlove is increasingly interested in behavior customers have no intention of changing. In 2026, after asking how wholesale buyers outside Apex placed orders, he kept hearing Google Sheets and Excel. Multi-store buyers found them faster. So Apex added integrated spreadsheet menus and order imports, then expanded its API so purchasing and inventory systems could exchange data with the platform.
There is a pleasing loop in this. The company that started on a Google Doc returned to the spreadsheet eight years later, this time as an integration rather than an emergency. The lesson was not that spreadsheets are wonderful. It was that a customer's imperfect habit may contain a perfectly sensible preference. Buyers wanted density, speed and control. Good product work begins after the eye-rolling stops.
Manlove frames automation around releasing salespeople from clerical work. In one recent company update, he argued that a buyer-created order lets a representative stop acting like a human order form and return to finding accounts, growing existing ones and closing revenue. Apex says buyer-created orders average above 70 percent in its top 10 states. That metric is both adoption number and job description: the buyer orders; the seller sells.
Who presses “place order”?
Apex's reported average across its top 10 states, shown against reference levels.
Chapter fourPlant first, finance close behind
Apex's declared ethic is “Plant First.” Manlove describes it as respect for the people who built the cannabis industry before software vendors arrived. In practice, he has pointed to hiring people with industry experience, visiting production sites, participating in trade organizations, supporting community efforts and helping clients with deferred or discounted payments during the pandemic and western wildfires. It is a moral phrase attached to operational choices, which is where moral phrases either become useful or expire.
His recent commentary has grown increasingly financial. In mature state markets, supply can outrun demand. Buyers gain leverage, payment terms stretch and accounts receivable piles up. Manlove's prescription is notably unromantic: begin with cash on delivery, extend terms gradually, watch sell-through and put a competent finance leader close to the decisions. “Behind every good business that's operationally excellent and profitable is a really good finance person,” he has said.
He is equally careful about what software can claim. “Apex isn't going to solve the AR problem,” he said in a conversation about cannabis credit and collections. The platform can add holds, tasks, payment connections and visibility. A wider network of purchasing, finance and credit partners can improve the odds. But software cannot turn an unreliable payer into a reliable one by rearranging the dashboard.
“Our product is designed to help cannabis producers focus more on what they love - crafting cannabis - and less on the trappings of mainstream business operations.”John Manlove
Chapter fiveThe virtue of refusing the grand pivot
By August 2025, Apex had expanded into 28 states and Puerto Rico. A year later, the company said the count had reached 30 states and Puerto Rico. Each state is its own peculiar economic climate, with different licensing patterns, product preferences and stages of oversupply. Manlove has argued for customizing the technology to the market while keeping the company trained on wholesale.
That focus is a form of ambition without theatrical enlargement. Apex has accumulated adjacent capabilities - analytics, branded menus, compliance connections, payments, credit tools and APIs - while preserving the same central transaction. The grower or manufacturer has something to sell. The retailer needs to buy it. Both would prefer the inventory and paperwork to remain on speaking terms.
The company has also survived the legal afterlife of Tradiv. In May 2026, after three days of trial, a Colorado judge granted a directed verdict on all counts to Apex Trading, Manlove and their co-defendants in a fraudulent-transfer case seeking more than $20 million. The result closed a high-stakes chapter tied to allegations about Tradiv's goodwill. For a business born from another company's wreckage, institutional memory proved unusually literal.
Manlove's public manner is animated but his operating argument is sober: listen to the problem customers have today. He calls the team agile and talks openly about pivots and refinements. He is also a husband, father and avid outdoorsman, details that sit far from the dashboards but help complete the portrait. His college waste stations, environmental compliance work and visits to grow rooms all suggest a durable interest in what happens between a good intention and the bin, form or order that makes it real.
Apex Trading's origin has the neatness of a parable only in retrospect. At the time, it was three people moving quickly because customers could not wait. The phone call preserved the relationship. The Google Doc exposed the workflow. The failed company supplied both warning and education. Then the founders kept showing up long enough for the workaround to become a platform.
The usual startup story worships invention. Manlove's is more useful on a difficult Tuesday. Pay attention to the unlovely process. Keep the customer close. Make the boring handoff work. And if the first interface is your own telephone, answer it.