Running away with top votes in 4 out of 5 categories, Red Canary’s 2009 Hot Starts Survey showed that Well.ca (Canada’s Online DrugStore) is one of Southwestern Ontario’s most promising young tech companies.

Kristina McDougall: Why do you think the voters chose you as the one to watch? What sets you apart as an employer?

• Laura Northey: Part of it is the great, winning idea. But I think the team is a big draw. People want to work with this team.

• Sameera Banduk: We make an effort to get input and ideas from everyone. Everyone gets to see the big picture and get involved in the business, in areas that are not necessarily their primary job.

In our survey of top tech companies you ran away every category, except Best Tech Team. In this category, you didn’t crack the Top 5. Why do you think that is?

The reason that Well.ca does so well isn’t because we have beautiful lines of code. It is because we have wonderful smiling people that care about our customers.
- Well.ca Founder, Ali Asaria

• Sameera: We’re not seen as a technical company, because the technology is not the product. The technology is in the background, and it’s mind-blowing, but what you see from the website is the customer experience and the products.

• Ali Asaria: Wow that is just like my dad looking at an ‘A’ on the report card and wondering what happened to the other 10 percent (laughs).

  When we pitch Well.ca, we’re not talking about a neat algorithm that solves a problem, we’re talking about a business that leverages technology. Here technology serves the business, not the other way around.

  This is something that I am really proud of actually. We have really great technology and it would be really easy for us to brag about that, because we are technology people. We restrain ourselves though, because we don’t want to make ourselves famous for that.

  I am so impressed with the calibre of the people that we have building software.

  The reason that Well.ca does so well isn’t because we have beautiful lines of code, it is because we have wonderful smiling people that care about our customers. And when you build that kind of attitude into the software development group, where they know that they just can’t build technology for the sake of technology, that it has to serve some purpose – I’m proud of a business that does that.

  At the same time, maybe we need to build our ‘geek cred’.

So what is the tech team building?

• Sameera: We are careful not to intimidate our customers with technology that they would not be comfortable with. All of our development is centered around making the customer experience the best it can be.

  And there are new things coming that are very new and exciting, and a big improvement … stay tuned.

• Laura: One of the things that people may not know is that we’ve built all of the technology ourselves, including things like customer chat. While lots of e-commerce companies use templates and third parties to handle the technology, we’ve built everything from scratch.

  That gives us an advantage, because we have the power to change any part of the technology. We can make improvements and control exactly how things work.

Want to know more about the technology behind Well.ca? Check out: http://labs.well.ca

How much of the success has to do with the idea vs executing on the good idea?

• Laura: Sure the idea is great, but lots of people and companies have great ideas. It was hard work and talent that turned it into this business.

  Ali was undaunted by the size of the challenge. He started small and dealt with the limitations, challenges and growth as it happened.

  Shipping and customer care became a priority when we realized early on that customers were pleasantly surprised to have a live interaction when they called – and it was easy to wear a headset and answer calls while packing boxes. That has since become key to the business – friendly, friendly, friendly.

You’re growing a company centered around small town customer service, which sounds like it could be labour intensive and expensive. How do you scale this?

It is great to come into work in the morning and genuinely like everyone
you work with.
- Ali

• Ali: Partly because of the state of the economy and partly because of the way we wanted to build the business, I’m proud to say that whenever we’ve taken financing we’ve been profitable. Early on we learned how to run lean and agile and turn a profit, and then we built customer service around that. We aren’t building up customer service at a loss to get customers, we don’t believe in that.

  We decided that we don’t want to build the business if we can’t put customers first. That’s given us discipline. So we’re operationally profitable, and growing in a way to maintain that profitability, and I’m really proud of that.

What keeps you awake at night?

• Ali: As we scale the company we need to scale the team. We are so proud of the culture that we have here and the people here. It is great to come into work in the morning and genuinely like everyone you work with.

  But, how do we build a whole troupe of wonderful people? Recruiting them is difficult. Will we run out of wonderful? Scaling a team is a difficult problem. You become known for having these really smart, really wonderful people and you have to keep hiring that way. We keep upping the bar, and keeping it up is a challenge.

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