a canadian startup

From the Well.ca Developer Mailbox

From: Ali Asaria
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: all-developers@well.ca
Subject: Shift to Agile-ish Development

Hello Well.ca Development Team,

As you know, management has been concerned about our as-needed software development processes. As a small team, shouting at each other and making hard-to-find changes to other people’s code while they were away from their desk to avoid arguments worked fine.

As we grow, we feel we need to adopt more formal and serious development processes.

As you know, I have trouble reading books. But I have heard at many conferences that Agile is a great way to develop. I am not 100% sure what Agile is, but from what I’ve gathered, this is what we all must do starting today.

1. Stop Testing

Testing causes bugs and delays releases. The best way to test software is to put it into wild and wait for its little baby cubs to be eaten by other predators.

However, Test Driven Design (TDD) is a good thing, so we should always drive design with tests. Every time you write a line of code, try to make it into a mini-multiple choice exam.

2. The Customer is Seldom Really, Actualy, Truly Right

Customers usually want features and things to work 100% of the time. This kind of philosophy is what made Microsoft the failure that it is. This is contrary to the Agile philosophy of making things simple and slightly buggy. Bugs allow for improvement. Simplicity allows for us to be arrogant.

3. Less Privacy is Good for Everybody

We should all sit in a circle, looking at each other. If you see something funny on someone’s monitor — say, a funny email or something — you should point it out. This creates a team-focussed, we’re all family philosophy that makes good product. Share your food, or take other people’s food without asking. We’re family.

4. Scrum-A-Lot

Every day, at precisely 9:04, we all meet in the center of the office and list off the stuff we’re working on. If you miss this meeting, you have to do push ups or make everyone little pizza bagels with oregano and mozzarella cheese. Does anyone know where to buy mini-pepperoni?

5. Wearing the same shirt

We need to all wear the same, brightly coloured shirt with our company logo on it. Everyone gets one but you have to wear it all week. Wearing the same, poorly-fitting clothes promotes technical excellence and effective team behaviour.

That’s all for now, team. I am really excited about this new shift in development and I hope you are too.

First Demo of imWell — Well.ca’s LiveChat Program and Launch of labs.well.ca

Last night, to a packed audience of Toronto’s Geek community at DemoCamp Toronto 18, Well.ca demoed the very first look at imWell — our very own, homemade LiveChat program. At the same time, we publicly announced our Labs (aka R&D) site called Well.ca Labs — the website is at http://labs.well.ca

(images from tpurves)

imWell was developed by William O’Connor, our newest software developer, based on an initial (and bad) prototype that I made some months ago. William chucked my prototype in the garbage, rewriting the backend server using Comet technology. Though our whole team contributed feedback, almost all the code is by one student and who continues to impress me — Great job, William

I want to tell you why I am excited about imWell — Well.ca’s LiveChat.

There are a lot of LiveChat programs out there, and we’re aware of that. None of them were good enough for what we wanted, and I have a feeling others are having the same problem. The keys to imWell’s awesomeness, in my opinion are the following points:

• it does all the cool stuff that good LiveChat would: dispatching to an available agent, etc. It does this simply, in an intuitive way.
• it’ll work with any Jabber client, and any Jabber server. (We’re hosting the server for people that don’t want to set one up.) This means it’ll work on any platform, and right along your favourite chat program. We only use XMPP standards.
• the client persists across pages, maintaining the history, embedded in your site (no popups, no flash). And you can style it however you want
• it’s looks nice and works well. when you connect, it shows a pic of the person you’re chatting with, and when you transfer to another agent, it will show that agent’s vCard
• it can be embedded into any site with a single line of HTML — no PHP or dynamic code required
• it’s free: we’re  releasing a version that anyone can put on their site and we’ll host it

You can learn more about it, and see screenshots at the labs.well.ca site.

The beauty to imWell is not in what it does: this is not a new problem. No, the beauty to imWell is that we solve the problem in an elegant, simple way. Almost too elegant. And the best way to show that to you is by getting it in your hands. Soon. Register for our beta here.

Thank you to the DemoCamp organizers.

Well.ca Demo-ing at DemoCampToronto18

We were chosen from among millions of applications to demo our new, secret development product that we’re opening to the world on July 15th at DemoCamp Toronto 18. (Okay not millions, but lots)

I can’t say much, because we’re launching it simultaneously, but here’s a cropped preview shot just to get you a taste:

Come to DemoCamp Toronto on July 15th to see me and our co-op student present. I promise you we’ll make our demo entertaining, but it will also be something that you’ll want — I am excited!

More info on the upcoming DemoCamp is available here.

Free Shipping and Drawbacks to the Web 2.0 Pricing Strategy of Lowering Entry Costs

We’ve had an overwhelmingly positive response to our movement to free shipping. I like one blogger who wrote:

“Well.ca goes Free Shipping. Holy S[**]t.”

Thank you blogosphere, for all the positive feedback!

This post, however, is about the negative feedback.

I believe that our launch of free shipping leads to some lessons to learn for all Web 2.0 companies — not just e-commerce companies like ours.

One of the key elements of Web 2.0 pricing strategies is about lowering entry costs. Much of the new Web software out there is free to use, and you only pay when you want advanced features.

The idea behind free shipping and the Web 2.0 freemium pricing model are related: both are attempts at giving something for free to lower entry barriers, appeal to a larger audience, and generate word-of-mouth marketing.

Here are some notes on some possibly unintended drawbacks to doing this…

Surprising Pricing Strategies Make People Wonder

The first of two negative reactions we received was through a post on RedFlagDeals.com. One of the readers of RedFlagDeals.com (as well as a commenter on my blog) assumed that since we were making shipping free, there must be some other hidden cost — our pricing must have gone up to make up the difference. This is a valid assumption — I would assume the same thing. The truth is, in fact, that Well.ca has been consistently lowering our prices in the last while — but how would people know that?

This is a problem any time you lower prices — people will distrust the inherent value of what you are selling as they see prices go up and down. This is a problem with the airline industry — since prices vary so much, I have no idea how much a flight is really worth. (Joel Spolsky speaks about this in a post here — search for the word “airline”)

Two suggestions to avoid this problem that I can think of are 1) be consistent about prices and 2) create more transparency on how you make money. I think Well.ca could do a better job of showing where we make our money and how our prices compare to the competitors. Instead of leaving people guessing, we could show how much we normally make on an order and how much of that goes to paying for the free shipping.

If you have questions in the meantime — feel free to give me a call or send me an email.

In general in a startup, if you try to be secretive, people will assume the worst.

Lowering Entry Barriers Implicitly Punishes the Best Customers

The only other negative feedback I received was from a customer who wanted to tell me about how she wasn’t pleased with our new offer. She orders from us every month and she explained that she always ordered more than $99 worth of products (at which point we always used to give free shipping). By giving free shipping to everyone, she was no longer being rewarded for being a good, repeat customer.

This is always a problem that has annoyed me about freemium pricing models. The 1% of users that have to pay for your service have to pay an extra amount to cover the other 99% of users who don’t. Freemium models punish customers that were willing to pay in the first place. Our situation at Well.ca is not the same, but it’s related: in our case, those customers that order the largest amount receive the least net percentage benefit from free shipping.

Here at Well.ca, we’re looking at ways to give free gifts or perhaps free upgrades to express post to our best customers. We’re good at that already, but let’s see what we can do better

I thought you’d be interested in these two examples because you might not think of them when launching a new pricing strategy.

Well.ca goes Free Shipping

Yeah, we did it:

Well.ca is doing a bunch of things differently starting today.

SHIFT IN PHILOSOPHY

When we started this company, we sat together to develop a customer service philosophy. This is what we came up with:

“Let’s surpass our customers’ expectations”

Just beating our customers’ expectations is no longer our goal.

Our goal, now, is to WOW them.

Things change when you stop saying “let’s surpass their expectations” and start saying “let’s blow their minds!”

And with that comes some of our new announcements.

1. FREE SHIPPING

Firstly, starting today, Well.ca will be shipping all Canadian orders for free. We used to charge $3 to ship anywhere in Canada. Now we charge $0. With prices that are priced below the leading national chain, shopping at Well.ca is more compelling than ever. (We’re testing this new policy out with no minimum order right now, in August I’ll let you know how it’s going)

2. NO HASSLE RETURNS

In addition, we are launching our no-hassle return policy. That is what it sounds like: our customers can now return products to Well.ca without hassle and we will pay shipping both ways.

3. COMPETITIVE PRICING

In terms of pricing, we’ve now launched a program to regularly price our products against the national chains. For the first time ever, we are dedicated to beating or matching EVERY price on every product we can find in our constant and regular trips to the national chains.

SUMMARY

As you can imagine, I am extremely excited about these new developments. We’ve grown a lot over the last months, and we’re dedicated to growing our value:

• Well.ca is now Canada’s most-trafficked online drugstore focused on Canadians.
• We have more variety than most brick-and-mortar pharmacies.
• We ship anywhere in Canada for free.
• Our prices are better than the leading national chain
• We pay both ways for returns.
• We’re super nice.

You should tell your friends!(and there will be some more announcements soon)

COMMENTS

Think free shipping is exciting? Or do you think we’re crazy? I’d love to hear your comments below…

40 under 40

On being awarded local Top 40 under 40 award:

• Investor: Good press here
• Me: I am a bit embarrassed
  but honoured. :)
• Investor: I would be honoured because I would like to be under 40.

Congrats email from a CEO friend:

Congratulations. This is great honor, and (future) responsibility.

Thanks everyone!

Office Ideas Board

I am thinking of buying robots, a trampoline, and monkeys just to teach the office an important lesson about taking work things seriously.

via Alex