Why We Built LapDrop | Our Story

When I started my career in HR, device management wasn't something I thought much about. We were in office. When someone left the company, you walked over to their desk, collected their laptop, and that was it. Simple.

Then remote work happened. And that simple task became something else entirely.

My operations coordinator and I developed what I can only describe as a recurring awkward moment. When someone left the company, we had two options. One of us would drive to the employee's house and physically pick up the equipment. Or we would send them a shipping label and ask them to find a box.

Neither option was good. The in-person pickup was exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds. The box situation was its own kind of frustrating - asking someone in the middle of a job transition to source appropriate packaging, figure out dimensions, send them back to us so we could generate a label, print it, and get themselves to a post office. We did it because there was nothing better. But it never felt like a real solution.

When I moved into consulting, I started working with other Canadian companies managing remote teams. The same problem kept coming up. Clients struggling to get devices back. Asking me - their HR consultant - to figure out how to retrieve a laptop from someone in another city. I found myself back in the same position I'd been in years earlier, except now it wasn't my own company's problem. It was everyone's problem.

At some point I stopped accepting that this was just how it worked and started looking for an actual solution.

The Demo That Changed Things

I did some research and found a few services in the US that looked promising. I got genuinely excited. I booked a demo, went through the whole thing, and came away impressed with the product.

Then I found out what it would cost for a Canadian team.

Canada was classified as an international shipping destination. There was a meaningful surcharge on top of a base price that was already in USD. For a Canadian company doing a fully domestic return (employee in Canada, office in Canada, laptop in Canada) the pricing structure treated the whole transaction as a foreign one.

That was the moment. Not frustration with the service itself, which was well-built. Frustration with the fact that Canada had been treated as an afterthought in a problem that Canadian companies deal with constantly.

I remember thinking: this is ridiculous. There has to be something that serves Canada as just Canada. Not as an international add-on to an American product.

There wasn't. So we built it.

Wes

I called Wes Goodhoofd, who I had worked with for years at my previous company. We had both spent a long time at a company where I was CPO and he was a developer, and we'd stayed close friends.

We're both logistics nerds. The kind of people who, when a package arrives, have already been tracking its route for days. We think shipping infrastructure is genuinely interesting. It probably says something about us.

I explained the problem, sent him links to the competitors, and asked him how difficult it would be to build this for Canadian teams using the Canada Post API. He ran with it. What he built became the LapDrop portal.

What's made Wes the right partner isn't just that he could build the thing. It's how he approaches it once it's built. Every time a customer asks for something (scheduled pickup was one of the earliest and most frequent requests!!) he's already thinking about how to add it. He cares about whether the product actually works for the people using it, which is exactly the orientation you want in someone building the customer-facing side of a logistics service.

What LapDrop Is

LapDrop is a device retrieval and deployment service for Canadian remote teams. We handle the logistics of getting laptops and other devices to new employees and back from departing ones.

The kit ships from within Canada. Pricing is in CAD. The process is designed so that the employee's job is as simple as possible: a padded, purpose-built box arrives at their door with a pre-applied label and clear instructions. They pack it and send it back. Everything else is handled.

It's not a complicated idea. It's the solution that should have existed already and didn't.

We built it because we couldn't find it. And because if you're a Canadian company dealing with this problem, you shouldn't have to do what I did for years - making do with workarounds that were never quite good enough.