No Pot, But goPuff Will Deliver Plenty of Other Items to Your Door in Denver

goPuff, a delivery company that launched in Denver in February, has expanded its line to include cannabis-related items and booze, just in time for the cold weather.

Federal law restricts the company from delivering marijuana, but it does have 3,000 items that can be delivered to your door in thirty minutes, including stock vapes, grinders, rolling papers and other cannabis-related items. It's also launching goBooze, an alcohol-delivery service.

Rafael Ilishayev and Yakir Gola met during their first week of business school and launched their Philadelphia-based enterprise while still in college.

"I had my car, and everyone kept asking me for favors," Gola says. "I was nice for a few months, and then we saw this problem and thought we had to solve it. We wanted to create a business that would help pretty much anyone get things delivered very, very quickly."

For the first six months, 23-year-olds Ilishayev and Gola did all the deliveries themselves, sometimes ducking out of class early to make sure deliveries were made on time.  "It was really a 'whatever it takes' environment: Either we do this, or we fail," Ilishayev says.

After spreading around Philly, the partners opened up shop in Boston, and now the company is in twelve cities including Denver, where it landed last February. According to Gola, Denver is in the company's upper tier.

"You gotta love it. We have a really cool cult following in Denver, and it's really becoming mainstream now, getting hundreds and thousands of deliveries coming in," he says. "When you get a delivery in fifteen to twenty minutes, you're telling all your friends.... Our customers have always been our best sales team."

In Denver, the company gets orders it does't see anywhere else. "For a while there, the number-one requested item in Denver was bath bombs," Gola says. "So we introduced seven different kinds of bath bombs."

Another item unique to Colorado? Marijuana paraphernalia.

"Unfortunately, the way the lay of the land is right now, marijuana delivery is not a possibility, and that's not because of us, it's because of regulations," Gola says. "The regulations go deep. It is difficult, but we do have items like vaporizers, rolling papers and grinders."