In the wake of Well.ca raising $1.1-million from a group of angel investors, I fired over a few questions – actually, five – to the company’s founder and CEO, Ali Asaria:
1. What’s your take on the financing landscape for Canadian start-ups?
There is a lack of good investment options in Canada. Any entrepreneur that’s tried to raise financing here knows that. But the solution to this problem isn’t so clear — it’s a complex problem that will require the slow organic development of a startup business ecosystem.
It doesn’t really matter for us entrepreneurs: all we should be focusing on is building long-term sustainable business models that scale. That’s our job.
2. How do you account for Well.ca’s strong growth?
Well.ca’s growth is entirely based on word-of-mouth marketing — we don’t spend a penny on traditional marketing. The strategy is simple: over deliver on value to the customer, treat them like family, and they will tell their friends.
Our approach to business is important part of what’s brought us here. We’ve always focused on building a culture of doing more with less, we’ve always made sure that we measure everything that we do, and we’ve always poured our hearts into showing our customers we care.
3. Have you made any strategic adjustments or changes that have really paid off recently?
One of the smartest things we’ve done recently is to publish statistics on every line of operational profit and expense to the entire company on a weekly basis. Every single person in our company knows where every dollar goes in our operations, marketing, and staff costs in order to fulfill orders.
At first, this move was a scary one. We worried what would happen if we were so transparent about our numbers. In the end, it was one of the smartest moves we made: financial transparency builds trust and accountability within our company. Everyone knows what they can do to help the bottom line. It makes absolute sense now.
4. In terms of growth, where do you see Well going? Do you have a focus on particular verticals?
One of the unique parts of our business is that there is nothing in our DNA that binds us to selling only health products — our style of being super-nice to customers, our unique software and our distribution model can work in many verticals. In that sense we have a lot of options.
Still, for the time being, we have a lot of health and beauty related verticals that we’re pursuing this very second. Stay tuned for more brands in more categories.
5. Any advice to entrepreneurs looking to grow an online business?
The thing we’ve learned the most is that integrity is the most important thing in building a business. When building an online store, it’s really easy to forget that each site-visitor is a real person. Large online businesses need to look towards small, friendly local businesses on how to establish relationships based on smiles, honesty, and kind words.
