@aJwitaFrO on twitter posted about cool glass bottles available on our site (I’d never seen them before)

I was looking for a container to put water in for my desk at work. I don’t like using coffee thermoses for water. I read the reviews on the bottles and some people said that they sometimes break because it’s not made out of tempered glass — but I am okay with that.

Well, I took @aJwitaFrO ‘s advice (thanks!) and  got my own glass bottle and it looks great. Take a look:

Get your own Kerplunk Glass bottle here.

I feel much better hydrated now.

The most controversial part of my presentation was when I said that great companies don’t market. I was purposely trying to stir things up by saying that, but it really did seem to anger people more than I had expected. My statement was based on the fact that so many of great companies that I’ve met brag about how they do no marketing. This can’t really be true, though, can it? What’s your opinion?

Well.ca’s new blog design:

I am excited that Well.ca has its first designer and user experience master join our team. His first task was to make our blog look pretty. We’re now fast at work to make all of Well.ca look a lot nicer and usable.

(press release here, short globe and mail summary here)

Raising this new round was a journey. I was honoured to be able to meet some of the best VCs and investors in Canada in the US. In the end, we found a team of local Canadian investors that share the same vision and values as Well.ca.

A key investor in this round is Jordan Banks, whom I first learned about through this video on the Globe and Mail Business Incubator website. Jordan is past Managing Director of eBay Canada, and past CEO of JumpTV. Over the last months, Jordan has become not just a mentor and advisor, but also a friend. I am honoured to have him join our family. Immediately after his first visit to our offices, the entire team fell in love with him.

Why did we raise money from investors? With all the recent growth for Well.ca, we still feel like we’ve just started. There are so many requests from our customers, and so many new products to add, and so many new features to build. This investment will help us continue building a better, more friendly site.

We have a whole bunch of ideas to make Well.ca more valuable, more friendly, and more fun for our customers.

In addition, we’re bursting at the seams from all the recent growth in order volume — this investment will allow us to scale our warehouse, build our logistics software, and, ultimately, allow us to ship more and more orders to people all across Canada.

Thanks so much to everyone for supporting us over the past two years — our hearts are overflowing with the love we are constantly receiving from our customers, partners, and friends in the community.

Well.ca made the cover of Drugstore Canada Magazine. It’s a publication that goes to all the pharmacists and pharmacies across Canada. The tag line is hilarious.

You also want to hire technically talented people. Not just people that know the basics of electronics, but the kind of people that have, in the past, tried to harness said power to build a robot that can fight other robots. These people are geeks. You want them on your team.

This is part one of my advice based on my personal experience:

Geeks like to work with geeks

First a story.

When I was in my late teens, I went through a phase of being addicted to Pi. I couldn’t get enough. I would download megabytes and megabytes of it, clogging my dialup connection. Soon it was gigabytes. I would email my friends random parts of Pi with the email subject being “here’s a piece of Pi”. I had a plan to use the university’s printers to print out thousands of pages of Pi in a 9-point font so that I could wallpaper my room in a shade of grey that, only when you looked close, would you realize was actually made up of millions of digits of Pi.

My addiction reached it’s climax when I couldn’t get enough Pi through publicly available means. I wrote an email to a Japanese research institute (which at the time, had calculated the most digits of Pi). The Japanese institute would only share their Pi with other researchers, so I had to use university computers to lie and pose as a fellow researcher. I never really thought about the fact that I didn’t have enough hard drive space to store that much Pi (lesson: Pi doesn’t compress at all — it’s random). Lying and losing all my hard drive space to store text files containing random numbers was the limit. I had to quit cold turkey, and to this day, I have to turn away when I see a screen filled with Pi – my mind starts racing and I get foolish ideas.

Don’t let me start about root 2.

The point of this story? I am a geek.

I get two kinds of reactions when I tell this story to people:

Reaction 1) “I have to go to… umm.. this other place…”

Reaction 2) “Let’s work together somehow”

When we interview for technical jobs, we like to spend time chatting about geeky things we’ve done in the past, geeky stuff we’re interested in, referencing xkcd comics, making fun of people who don’t know how to use VIM, and arguing about which programming language is best.

It works.

“But I am a non-geek marketing/sales/executive-type person who is trying to hire geeks, what’s your advice then,” you ask?

My answer: “I… umm… have to go to… uhh.. this other place…”

reportonbusiness.com: Ali Asaria on standing out online
… most of the items we sell are not exclusive to our store. That’s why we had to rethink our definition of uniqueness. For Well.ca, that came with the realization that our product is not the items in the box, but the actual shopping experience. We aim to distinguish ourselves with extraordinary selection, ease of use, and customer service.

On Friday, I had a Q&A with the Globe and Mail on the theme of how to stand out online. Live chatting on a newspaper was a rush especially because I was answering questions on my Blackberry without proper spellcheck! Have a read.