10 years of Weal
Weal turned 10 on 27 June 2021! The past decade has been quite the ride and we’re feeling so incredibly grateful to have made it this far. Here are a few of our favourite highlights, from our launch in 2011 through to now. We’ll add more as time goes on, too. Thank you to everyone who has supported us over the years. Here’s to many more! ❤️
A simple proposal
Liora (an Osteopath) was tired of the software she used at her clinic being so problematic. She couldn’t check her calendar from outside the clinic, and the notes function was unusable. She said to her partner Joel (a Software Developer) that he could probably build something better, and it wasn’t even such a big job. It just needed a calendar and the ability to handle treatment notes.
2010
Work begins
11 November 2010
Using a loan that had just been approved to renovate their house, Joel quit his job and, with Liora, started a company called Red Guava and began development on “Clinic thingy” (naming the software was not the first priority). They may have forgotten to let the bank know the change in plans for the funds.
2011
The Weal beta
4 April 2011
The first-ever users of Weal signed up to be beta testers. It could have been thanks to Joel’s sales skills (he walked door-to-door and clinic-to-clinic and asked people if they were interested, but none of those people were convinced). Instead, through Liora’s contacts, a couple of businesses agreed to try it out.
Launch day
27 June 2011
After seven months of long days, late nights, and lots of coffee, Weal was officially released.
People liked Weal!
31 July 2011
A month after launching, we’d had 37 businesses sign up to trial Weal, with 14 deciding to stick around.
2012
Bartosz joins the team
13 February 2012
As Weal grew, it became a lot for just two people to manage. The plan was to hire a local Melbourne developer, but fate intervened. Bartosz (software developer) applied even though he lived in Poland, and Liora and Joel knew he was The One—thus beginning Weal’s international (and remote) team.
In his talk for Real Big Things, Joel spoke about the experience of hiring remotely. Watch a snippet here:
Over 6 million dollars invoiced through Weal
April 2012
Less than a year after launch, over six million dollars had been invoiced by all the clinics who were using Weal to manage their practice!
Weal commits to donating 1% of all subscriptions to charity
1 June 2012
Making the world a better place might be a cliché phrase, but it’s one that means a lot to us. Joel and Liora decided to donate a portion of all revenue to charity. (This amount would later increase.) The first charities we donated to were Plan and WWF.
It was time to grow
12 July 2012
The need for dedicated customer support was growing and Liora’s mum was tired of managing the books! Jim and Melanie joined the team and worked out of the “office” (Liora and Joel’s living room). Rufus (resident CEO and Good Boy) supervised and encouraged extended lunch breaks.
Weal is used in over 55 countries
24 July 2012
There were people all over the world using Weal to manage their practices. We were truly astonished to see the widespread global use of what had been just a little idea less than two years ago!
2013
Weal gets its very own office
July 2013
The team had grown to eight, and the office migrated from Joel and Liora’s living room to an actual office in Glen Huntly (a suburb of Melbourne). It didn’t have many windows and the conference room was never used, but many critical conversations did happen over a game of table tennis.
Appointment confirmation emails are released
October 2013
A much-needed feature which had been lacking was the ability for patients to have a record of the appointment they booked! Customisable confirmation emails (complete with calendar attachments) made that a reality, and we were pretty excited about it.
Weal gets an updated logo
December 2013
Two and a half years in, it was high time for a little branding refresh. Kelly (our in-house designer and illustrator) reworked the existing logo into what you see today. T-shirts were made, too! You can take a peek at what we started with—and some of the various iterations along the way—before ending up with what we have now.
The first-ever team meetup
November 2013
We now had a total of 10 employees, and hosted our first-ever meetup in Australia. Everyone had a blast getting to know one another in person while enjoying good food and taking in some beautiful scenery in Apollo Bay, Victoria. Team members visited from the UK, USA, Brazil, and Poland.
2014
2,000 businesses now use Weal!
March 2014
It felt amazing to believe that 2,000 businesses were now using Weal every day!
The team was quite international!
July 2014
As Weal grew, so did our team (we were up to 14 employees across 6 countries). It became apparent how important it was for a remote team to spend some time together. Folks flew in from around the globe to hang out, work on Weal, and get to know each other.
We went to our first conference
October 2014
Jim, Joel, Liora, and a very young Mae (Joel and Liora’s daughter) headed to Noosa, Queensland for the Osteopathy Australia conference. Mae turned out to be a great marketer, but sadly decided it wasn’t for her, and did not attend future conferences.
2015
The team heads to Greece
June 2015
We’d outgrown our smaller meetups with a team size of 17. Nearly everyone (plus some family members) headed to Athens, Greece for two weeks where we found a big enough villa to house us. One of the highlights was watching the sunset from the Parthenon—while working on Weal, of course!
We move offices—again
September 2015
Our team had grown, and no longer was Glen Huntly central for those using it. It was time for an upgrade. Our new Richmond office had lots of natural light, a rooftop with a view, and of course table tennis, where Clint (customer support) rapidly gained mastery.
Half a million appointments made via online bookings in this year alone
31 December 2015
More than half a million appointments were booked from the online bookings page just in 2015 (502,760, to be exact!). Kind of mind-boggling—and this number would just increase in the following years!
2016
5,000 clinics are using Weal
March 2016
There were now 5,000 clinics throughout the world using Weal to manage their practice! The fact that we’d reached 1,000 had surpassed even the wildest of dreams, so this was a huge milestone.
A new meetup hub
May 2016
With the office becoming less important to our remote team, and meetups becoming essential, we set up for a regular meetup hub. We settled on the Yarra Valley in Victoria, Australia and folks made the trip out to enjoy the fresh air, taste some local wine, and meet some local celebrities—the friendly kangaroos at the local animal sanctuary.
2017
We hired our 20th employee
13 March 2017
Marcus (customer support) became our 20th employee, and the first Aussie “local” who didn’t live on the eastern side of the country (he was in Western Australia). Believe it or not, he had been a customer before working at Weal—as a physiotherapist, he had used the software to run his practice!
Chat support was launched
6 June 2017
From day one, we’d always wanted to provide the best possible support to every Weal user. For six years up until this point, we’d relied on email and phone calls as our primary methods of helping people, but this needed to change. We were only able to answer 25% of the phone calls we received, and email could be slow. We made a rather controversial decision to switch to chat- and email-based support only, and you can read about why we did this here.
$100,000 has been donated to charity
July 2017
Since 2012, at least 1% of total revenue had been donated to charity. This month marked a total of $100,000 in donations. We’d always wanted to make a difference through our work, and were astounded at how quickly it was adding up.
Oh, Canada
July 2017
Two years had passed since our last “big” team meetup in Greece, and this time—with 24 employees plus their families—we opted for mountains and glaciers instead of oceans and olive trees. Everyone met up in Alberta, Canada for a two-week stay in a beautiful part of the country. We hiked in Banff, swam in an ice-cold river, and toasted marshmallows by the campfire.
Weal becomes mobile-friendly
August 2017
Up until this point, Weal was best suited towards “computer” use—that is, it worked well when using a desktop or laptop computer, but didn’t look (or behave) the nicest if you were on a mobile phone or tablet. We made a ton of changes to get with the times (or a bit ahead) and implement “responsive design” (the fancy phrase for “works well on things besides computers”) throughout the whole application. This meant that Weal was now fully functional across all devices, which was exciting.
Rachel hosts the first-ever Weal This Week video
20 August 2017
Little did we know that when we hired Rachel (customer support), we would also be getting a video pro! Rachel’s bubbly personality and enthusiasm for Weal has been evident in each and every video she’s created. Watch the very first Weal This Week video:
A shared space for meetups
November 2017
Two years had passed since our last “big” team meetup in Greece, and this time—with 24 employees plus their families—we opted for mountains and glaciers instead of oceans and olive trees. Everyone met up in Alberta, Canada for a two-week stay in a beautiful part of the country. We hiked in Banff, swam in an ice-cold river, and toasted marshmallows by the campfire.
2018
48,000 people were using Weal
1 March 2018
At this point, 48,000 people (spread over thousands of clinics) were using Weal throughout the world! This gave us a lot of warm fuzzies.
Weal becomes GDPR compliant
May 2018
While we had always been compliant with Australian privacy requirements, we had to make sure that we stayed up to date with new rules coming out! When the EU introduced GDPR regulations, we added features to make sure that those using the software were empowered to be compliant with GDPR.
Body charts were released
September 2018
After many months (okay, years) of prepping for body charts, they were finally released. This was really exciting because we knew that in addition to typed notes, marking up diagrams was a much-needed feature!
Rachel heads to Nepal
October 2018
Rachel (customer support) flew to Nepal to work directly with one of the charities that we support, Beyond The Orphanage (BTO). For two weeks, she spent time building relationships with the BTO team and the children they support. Read her account of the trip here.
Weal became more inclusive
December 2018
We added fields for sex, gender identity, and preferred pronouns into Weal. You can read more about this here—long story short, it’s very important to us that you (and your patients) are empowered when it comes to handling sensitive details. We had wanted to add this to Weal for a long time, and were happy to finally have it available.
2019
Weal increases charitable donations to 2% of all subscriptions
January 2019
We increased donations from 1%, to 2% of all revenue. All donations are based purely on revenue, not profit, to ensure that the charities we donate to are not impacted by our running costs. You can read more about the charities we contribute to here.
The office closes down, The Barn becomes the official Weal HQ
14 March 2019
Most of our team was international at this point, and even those who lived local to Melbourne were spending more time working from home. We made the decision to formally close the Richmond office and embrace the fully-remote lifestyle (using The Barn as our official headquarters), but not before a few final rounds of table tennis were played.
We redesigned our website
April 2019
After eight years, it was time for a full branding refresh. Our main website had a glow up—which happened to be just in time for the introduction of The Fancy Conference Booth (more on that next!).
The introduction of The Fancy Conference Booth
May 2019
We attended the ESSA (Exercise & Sports Science Australia) conference in Melbourne, and were happy to have a fancy new booth! We had a great time chatting to people and meeting both current and future Weal users.
We hosted our first community meetup
June 2019
We had the opportunity to chat with a whole lot of Weal users at our first-ever Weal Community meetup in Melbourne! It was great to see some familiar faces, and meet new people.
2020
Weal becomes HIPAA compliant
March 2020
Up until now, folks in the United States who needed to be compliant with HIPAA regulations weren’t able to use Weal. As with other privacy requirements (such as GDPR), features were added to help make HIPAA compliance a reality for those who needed it!
COVID hits
March 2020
Remember that Fancy Conference Booth we mentioned… yeah that went into storage, community and team meetups were put on hold, and the Weal team started working on building features that would benefit clinics during lockdowns.
Secure patient forms are released
March 2020
Remember that Fancy Conference Booth we mentioned… yeah that went into storage, community and team meetups were put on hold, and the Weal team started working on building features that would benefit clinics during lockdowns.
Telehealth goes live
29 March 2020
Social distancing became the norm, but patients still needed treatment. Telehealth was added to Weal because we knew that practitioners would need to treat patients remotely—and as we’d find out later, it became one of the most-used features during the year.
The first-ever episode of Weal & Coffee
25 June 2020
We wanted to do something both fun and educational during lockdown, so we began an occasional live Q&A session in which Joel showcased his barista skills in front of an audience (remotely viewing from many countries!). Along with teaching everyone about coffee, Joel answered questions about Weal. You can watch the recording here!
The first virtual meetup takes place
15 November 2020
Sadly, the pandemic meant we couldn’t see one another in person, but that didn’t stop us from having our first-ever virtual event! Working out time zones was a little tricky, but most of the team was able to get together over video conference and chat, play some trivia, and generally enjoy one another’s company!
We hired our 40th employee
14 December 2020
To get to this point was humbling, to say the least—Weal had started in a living room, and now it was a 40-person company, something that exceeded Liora and Joel’s wildest dreams. Fede (customer support) was our 40th hire!
2021
$15 million collected by our customers online
11 February 2021
When the online payments feature launched in 2020, we had no idea that in under a year, patients would have paid over $15 million dollars to their clinics! This number continues to grow, and we’re excited that we get to help make your life easier by making payments easier.
30 million minutes of telehealth logged
30 April 2021
Telehealth exploded during 2020, and we knew it would be useful, but we were blown away when we saw that 30 million minutes of telehealth consults had taken place through Weal! Pictured above may or may not be a real telehealth consult.
Weal goes carbon neutral
11 June 2021
We’ve always cared greatly about the environment, and finding ways to offset our carbon emissions was really important to us. In June, we officially became a carbon neutral company, and as we move forward, we’ll continue to measure our own carbon footprint and ensure that we leave the world a little better than we found it.
201 years of work put into Weal
27 June 2021
Over the past decade, 201 years (you read that correctly) of work have been put into Weal! This includes hours spent by each and every employee, and covers everything from software development to supporting customers to keeping track of company finances.
$1 million donated to charity so far
27 June 2021
Cakes and balloons are one way to celebrate our 10th birthday, but even better is donating to those in need. To mark a decade of Weal, we’re happy to say that a million dollars have now been donated to charity, from your subscription payments. That makes this birthday so much sweeter.
Today (2021)
As of our 10th birthday, we have 42 employees spread around the world. Over 20,000 clinics use Weal to manage their practices, and we’re still not keen on outside investment. We all consider ourselves family, and without you—our customers—we wouldn’t be here today. So, thank you for coming along on this ride with us, and we can’t wait to see what the next ten years hold!
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