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Deeper, Stronger Friendships – a conversation with Daniella Granzotto
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Friends are hard to find, but when life gets busy, friends are very easy to lose.
That is the reality for many people. Regardless of our age, life throws all sorts of demands on our time, it is often if not usually our friendships that get left on the sidelines.
That was the predicament that Daniella Granzotto was in until she discovered the Wednesday Waffles concept and decided to turn the weekly friendship ritual into an App.
In this episode of the Abeceder work life balance podcast Rest and Recreation, Daniella explains to host Michael Millward how Wednesday Waffles was created, and how the App works.
Michael and Daniella discuss what friendship is and why something that is so important can, without anyone being directly responsible, just fizzle out.
They also highlight that family relationships can also fizzle out in the same way when careers and marriages mean that people move away.
Daniella explains why the weekly friendship ritual that Wednesday Waffles curates works and the impact keeping up with the ritual has on maintaining friendships, at any age across any distance.
This is the podcast for people who find themselves separated from friends or family.
Discover more about Daniella and Michael at Abeceder.co.uk
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Transcript
Introduction to Zencastr and Host
00:00:05
Speaker
Made on Zencastr. Because Zencastr is the all-in-one podcasting platform that really does make making content so easy. If you would like to try podcasting using Zencastr, please use the link in the description to visit zencastr.com. It has an automatic discount.
00:00:23
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Rest and Recreation, the work-life balance podcast from Abusida. I'm your host, Abusida. Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abusida.
Guest Introduction: Daniela Grazzotto
00:00:36
Speaker
Today i am talking to Daniela Grazzotto about how to achieve deeper friendships. Daniela is the co-founder and chief growth officer of Wednesday Waffles.
00:00:50
Speaker
Wednesday's Waffles is nothing to do with waffles, but it is a friendship deepening tool that helps people escape the endless scroll and actually connect with their friends again. Previously, Daniela was the head of VIP at Shopify.
00:01:05
Speaker
Daniela is based in Vancouver in Canada. It's to great city.
Daniela's Career Journey
00:01:09
Speaker
I have visited, had a great time and if I get the chance to return I will make my travel arrangements with the Ultimate Travel Club because as a member of the Ultimate Travel Club I can access trade prices on flights, hotels, trains, holidays and all sorts of other travel related purchases.
00:01:27
Speaker
I have included in the description a link to the Ultimate Travel Club website which has a built-in discount on their membership fees. Now that I have paid some bills, it is time to make an episode of Rest and Recreation that will be well worth listening to, liking, downloading and subscribing to.
00:01:46
Speaker
And one that I hope you will also want to share with your family, your friends and your colleagues. As with every episode of Rest and Recreation, we will not be telling you what to think, but we are hoping to make you think.
00:01:59
Speaker
Hello, Danielle. hi there. Please could we start by just explaining a little bit about your history and how you came to be involved with Wednesday Waffles. Yeah, absolutely. My career history is a little bit unconventional, but I was a theatre school dropout, worked a mishmash of jobs until I landed in tech. worked my way up from an executive assistant to the final role that I held at Shopify, which was head of VIP, where my team oversaw all of the biggest brands that used the platform. So anyone doing 300 million in GMV and up. And we took care of them both from an experience standpoint, but also a technical standpoint.
00:02:41
Speaker
And although I loved my job there, That role was really built on, and the company of Shopify is building entrepreneurs and encouraging entrepreneurship. And I feel really strongly about that, that mission. So I knew deep inside myself that I also needed to at some point take the leap and try my hand at entrepreneurship. It's really a matter of trying to figure out what I could build that would cause me to be equally as passionate about the thing that I'm building as I was about entrepreneurship in general.
The Birth of Wednesday Waffles
00:03:13
Speaker
I stumbled on TikTok video of a guy named Zach in Australia who had shared um just casually that he had ah this concept he had created called Wednesday Waffles that he had been doing with his buddies for a couple years now and had seen tremendous benefits from it and recommended other people give it a try.
00:03:32
Speaker
at the time I was about to move across the country, I sent it to my girlfriends and I said, hey, we should try doing this. And we started just doing it in iMessage. And through that, I realized that there were some complications of just doing in iMessage that made it difficult to do. But also at the same time that there were so many benefits of doing the ritual.
00:03:51
Speaker
From there, we decided to turn it into an app. I quit my job and went dove headfirst into building it. right The concept is that it's good to keep in touch with your friends.
App Benefits and Loneliness Reduction
00:04:04
Speaker
that One of the best ways to keep in touch with your friends is to actually proactively, consciously, deliberately do something that maintains the contact. And that is to send people within Wednesday Waffles an update each week about what it is that you've been doing and asking them about what they've been doing as well.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Through our research, despite being more connected technically than ever, 36% of North Americans are lonelier than ever. We believe that although people are super connected through other means of social, we all see the evidence and reports show that nobody leaves those interactions feeling better than when they went in, right? yeah There's a lot of comparison, a lot of people feeling like they're not good enough, they're not doing enough when they're in those interactions. And so we really created a space where we wiped away all of the comparison and we allowed you to just be your true, genuine, authentic self and deepen the relationships that you already have that mean a lot to you.
00:05:04
Speaker
And so it's a really simple interface. Every Wednesday, you record a two to three minute video just letting people know what's going on in your life. from anything from, you know, the the highs and the wins to the lows to the mundane of just doing laundry and getting yourself ready for the day, however that might look for you.
00:05:23
Speaker
It allows people to stay connected in a more consistent way that allows, so the next time you see each other in person, you're able to deepen those relationships further and you're not just getting caught up on the mundane day-to-day stuff.
00:05:36
Speaker
We've seen, honestly, tremendous results, men. There's an element of the round robin type letter that we get with Christmas cards every so often, and you I've done this, this, this, and this. But the regularity of it and the frequency of it, I think, means that it's easier to not filter in some ways what it is that you share with people. You're more likely, as well as sharing the good things, you're also more likely to share some of the things that you're not happy with.
00:06:04
Speaker
Absolutely. And hopefully in a safe enough space when it's just the people that are close to you, you feel like you can share those things. I think the other thing that we've seen tremendous benefits from is oftentimes people aren't comfortable necessarily recording themselves on video. But as you get more comfortable through that, when we kind of encourage you to go through that model, you can also see on a week to week basis how your friends are doing
Communication Structure and Limitations
00:06:30
Speaker
physically. And, you know, they might be saying the right things. Life is great, whatever. um But to be able to pick up on those week to week social cues, we've we've had people say like, if this was around years ago, that their brother would still be alive today. So being able to create those opportunities where people can share what's really going on in their lives is really important to us and really special. There's an element of me that thinks that sometimes there are things that we would like to share with someone, but actually the being physically present with them, the prospect of telling them things about ourselves, things that we're worried about,
00:07:11
Speaker
that are concerns for us that are embarrassing even, we wouldn't necessarily do it face to face or on a telephone or through a um a video conference, but recording something and sharing it with them then means that you can have the conversation after you've already told them what you want them to know. And you can then have a conversation because they know about it. You can have, you can move on to a ah better type of conversation.
00:07:42
Speaker
It's so true. And I think we we've incorporated a notes section specifically in the app as well, because we only allow you to record on Wednesdays. There's a grace period for Thursday, which we call call a moldy waffle, because we know that you know sometimes Wednesdays gets the best of us. But we've incorporated a notes section in there so that if something happens to you on Monday, you can go in, jot some notes. You can also, two to three minutes can be a short period of time. So being able to really Write some notes down or even a little script for yourself of getting out off your chest what you really want to say to those people can be a really helpful way to just start a conversation or open up a door for a deeper conversation to be had. So people allow to send more than one video on a Wednesday?
00:08:27
Speaker
Not to the same group. So you can have as many groups as you'd like. I know i have one for my siblings. I have another one for my like close friends. I have some one-on-one groups of just one person that I'd like to stay close with. You can send different videos to each group, but you cannot send more than one video to a single group.
00:08:46
Speaker
And the reason we do that is by design. If there's If there's five people in your group, then you're consuming 30 minutes of content, right? To get through everyone's updates that week. And we don't want this to be an app that you stay sucked in and you're like endless doom scrolling in. We, by design, want you to be able to get in, get your updates and go. And so there is a chat mechanism, just like a group chat. You can definitely continue the conversation
Maintaining Adult Friendships
00:09:12
Speaker
in app.
00:09:12
Speaker
But the intention is that you're there on Wednesday, you can consume all through the week if you want to break up your videos that you watch all through the week, but that it's just very light lift, three to five minutes a day, nothing more than that. So it sounds very straightforward.
00:09:28
Speaker
There seems to be a lot of not rules or discipline. it is perhaps too strong a word to use. Structure is a good word to use. You're structuring, providing the structure for people to maintain relationships with people that they may not normally get the opportunity to see because they might be a long way away. And also to communicate, like you say, with siblings in a simple, straightforward way because it's a amazingly easy to somehow be distant from some of those people that we're actually most closely related to because we've all got lives we've got jobs we've got families we've got all sorts of things going on but it can as a result of that be very easy to to lose contact with those people
00:10:15
Speaker
Absolutely. We're, we're creating a friendship evening ritual. And the reason why we want to make it a week, the idea is to make it a week. And I think, especially as you get older, when you were young, Hanging out every day with your friends that lived across the street or down the block was a very common thing.
00:10:34
Speaker
And as you get older and you have jobs and you start to have young children, even people who live within a really your friends that live within a close radius to you, it still becomes a chore to actually get together with them. And what used to be maybe daily or weekly turns into monthly or quarterly ah of those times that you're physically getting together in person. And so to be able to remain connected and get those updates on what's going on in each other's lives, it reduces cortisol level. It fuels the same feelings within you as if you were to get together in person with them. Yes.
00:11:05
Speaker
You raise, I think, there the point that friendship changes as we age. We can be at school, high school, college, and there is a group of people around us and we have... Many more friends because we're surrounded by people who've got a shared interest. We're all studying the same subject. or We go to the same school. We're following the same team.
00:11:26
Speaker
All sorts of things that we can connect with people on it and we're seeing them every day because they're coming to the same place that we're coming to. They're going to the same parties that we're going to. As you get older and you move into the workforce and work type friendships are never quite the same as that. you With my HR hat on, I'm thinking there's always that element of how much is that person being paid? Why are they getting promoted and I'm not? There's an element of competition in that. and work-based friends aren't necessarily um long-term friendships. You only have to look at, okay, you've been let go, your job was made redundant and you've left and how many people you might know six months later.
00:12:11
Speaker
It's the changing nature of friendship, which with something like Wednesday Waffles seems to be eased somewhat. It's easier to maintain a friendship when you've got something that is ah is a habit about maintaining that friendship, but it also recognizes that friendship changes as as we get older.
00:12:31
Speaker
Yeah, friendship does change as you get older, but it also doesn't have to. And I do, i totally agree that college and high school are probably the, they're the first times in your life where your friends aren't all placed there for you. Right. And then you start to move off and call it graduating college. People go off their different ways to go back home and those are the first times where your friendships actually kind of get separated. And so you have to be intentional in order to maintain them or else they will fall by the wayside. And so I think that there is an element in
00:13:06
Speaker
in terms of our, just how society has changed in this fast paced world where people are less motivated to maintain these relationships or less motivated to put the work in and the work that's necessary to maintain and deepen relationships.
00:13:22
Speaker
But we have so much science-based evidence that shows that people are happier, healthier, live longer when they have deep relationships and friendships. And so if we can even just give you a tool that delivers a small mechanism of building that those relationships, then we feel like we've done a good job.
Casual Sharing with Wednesday Waffles
00:13:40
Speaker
Yes, I agree with you. When I was at school, we had um a school assembly where the head teacher was saying, someone, please put your hand up and tell me what a friend is.
00:13:52
Speaker
Everybody's sitting on their hands. No one really knew what the answer was. And then the head teacher so said, all you need to think about in terms of your friends is that your friends are the people who care about you.
00:14:08
Speaker
And if you can demonstrate that you care about your friends, then you are going to have better relationships with those friends. Wednesday Waffles is one of those tools that you can use to demonstrate that you care about someone because you can go back to them after know if someone believes that you have demonstrated that you care about them they are going to care about you and if you then are sharing with them information about your life about the issues that you're facing you're celebrating the good news and
00:14:40
Speaker
their good news, your good news, but also have the confidence to share the things that you're less happy about, you're more likely to get a positive reaction than being supportive because you've demonstrated that you also would be supportive of them as well.
00:14:55
Speaker
Absolutely. Yeah, you're just choosing to do life with these people, right? Whether it's your friends or your family or your co-workers. We all know, although it's scary, that life is more fulfilling when you're authentic and vulnerable and You will be surprised at how people respond to your authenticity and vulnerability. They will respond with their own authenticity and vulnerability.
00:15:18
Speaker
And world just, it sounds cliche, but a better place that way. Yes. Our goal is to make the world less lonely and encourage that behavior amongst more people. Yes, I agree with you. I'm going to play devil's advocate for a little bit now, though.
00:15:33
Speaker
let's Let's go. go.
00:15:37
Speaker
Let's go. Ooh, right. Waffle. You know, in North America, a waffle is something that you eat. And food can be a great way to bring people together. So, yep great waffles. We don't have them quite so much here in the United Kingdom, though. The word waffle means something else here in the UK. You can buy waffles to eat them. But the word waffle here is you're talking about someone who's just talking a lot without making a lot of sense or adding an awful lot to the conversation so you know but will the name still work in the uk and do you think yeah that's actually that is actually why we named it that to be honest and i know that i know waffling in the uk has a bit a bit of a negative connotation but i think
00:16:26
Speaker
it can also just be um like the gift of the gab, right? Someone that's just talking on. And so our intention was, hey, just because you don't think you have anything to talk about this week, just because you don't feel like anything exceptionally exciting has happened in your life, just talk. Just tell tell your friends that, you know, you're doing a load of laundry and that you just stopped at the grocery store. And just you don't have to talk about anything,
00:16:54
Speaker
ah so grand, like the highlight reels or like the high highs or low lows that we put on different types of social. It can just be the mundane things that are going on in your life because people want to hear that too. And that humanizes you and normalizes you in a way that other social media out outlets don't.
00:17:12
Speaker
And so we did intentionally keep the, yes, there's a play on food in some of our design on the app. Like if you're day late, you get a moldy waffle. Once you've completed everyone's waffles, we tell you that you ate. it is more ah in line with that UK and Australian term, to be honest.
00:17:31
Speaker
Right. Cool. So you should just waffle on for two, three minutes. Exactly. Just have a waffle about what is happening in life and yeah, just the mundane sort of things, waffle away and share that with people. And there's probably an awful lot of humor in those as well without, without being intentional humor.
00:17:49
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. That's the goal is just waffle on about whatever you've got going on in your life. We'll cut you off in three minutes, you know, so you can't waffle too long. But ah I think people
Privacy and Future Features
00:18:00
Speaker
enjoy that. They enjoy hearing just what everyone else is up What happens to the videos when they're up there? Do they stay up there forever or or do do they expire?
00:18:08
Speaker
They do stay up there forever. we have some really cool, fun features coming. Everything is encrypted. Privacy is the most important. thing to us, especially given the nature of what some people might share. So your group are the only ones that have access to your videos. But we do have some fun opt-in features that are coming down ah the pike where ah we are able to kind of give you a year in review after you've been waffling for a year. We have all of these videos of you telling, you know, your friends what you've been up to. So similar to a Spotify raft and what that might look like with some of the stats and updates on your, on what kind of music you listen to, we'll be able to give you that on your life. So you'll have a bit of a, personal journal to wrap up the year.
00:18:55
Speaker
And so that is opt-in, obviously, again, for privacy reasons, especially in the UK, but they do stay on there. So you have access to go back and kind of look through history, if you will. Yes, that sounds like something where people could see the the progress that they're making on on life and how you every day may feel like it's the same as every other, but with a tool like that, you'd be able to say, yeah, I am a different person now to what I was 12 months ago.
00:19:23
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's ah being able to look back on your life ah from a in a year and see how you've recorded every single Wednesday. Most people don't journal anymore.
00:19:33
Speaker
so it's a great way to kind of operate in that sense as well. There's benefits outside of just deepening prime chips. Are there any people who you would say shouldn't use Wednesday waffles?
00:19:44
Speaker
That's a great question. i know. I actually think because you can, you don't need a whole group to waffle. um You, I think people assume that you need to waffle with a bunch of people. You can do it one-on-one. And so I think that it's a really healthy mechanism that doesn't really have any, none that I can think of at at least, any negative side effects. I think we've gotten, you know, wa some of our other co-founders waffle with their parents. And although there's some technical challenges to get through at first.
00:20:17
Speaker
It's awesome just to be able to see what's going on in their lives and what they find important and what they value and building a different type of relationship with your parents later in life than you would have had when you were a kid. yes And so I would encourage everyone to do it. We have got a couple of businesses that do it that are They use it as a replacement of their weekly stand ups because people can just watch off ad hoc. They don't have to watch all at the same time.
00:20:44
Speaker
I think it's a great practice. Obviously, I'm biased, but i think I think everyone should give Waffling a try. Yeah, well, that's why I'm here, because then, yeah, I'm thinking that if you are an adult who's waffling with your parents who would be seniors, retired, giving your parents, when they are retired, the opportunity to show you without telling you the things that they are interested in and engaged in gives you more of an opportunity to stop and take a breather,
00:21:15
Speaker
And think, okay, how can I best support people who've supported me to actually live a better life, I suppose, in as they as they age?
Supporting Friends and Family
00:21:25
Speaker
Because um we all want to be supportive of, whether that's a an elderly parent, relative, or someone that we know who might have have disabilities. that um um some of the most difficult conversations to have with a friend or relative who's suffering from life-altering illness or has a disability can be well they can be very difficult but I can imagine that if that person has the opportunity to just share things in their life the challenges they're facing and the things that give them joy then you are able to be a much more
00:22:02
Speaker
productive, supportive friend as well, because they haven't to go through that embarrassing. So what can I do for you? Do you want me to do this? Do you want me to do that? No, just watch the waffle. Exactly. And you know, we the other thing that we do have that's coming shortly is prompts based on group type as well. So if you really don't feel like you have anything to talk about that day, we don't know what to talk about. We'll give you some prompt questions like tell Tell your family about the favorite moment of your last family vacation you took or ask your parents what like they wanted to be when they grew up or tell your kids what you wanted to be when you grew up. Tell your kids something that you learned later in life that you wish you had taught them when they were younger. Well, that would take more than three minutes.
00:22:46
Speaker
but But that's the challenge. You got to get through it. But we do offer up some, if you really can't think about what you want to talk about and update them on that week, we do kind of give you some questions that would,
00:22:59
Speaker
allow you to open up a conversation in the future for later. That sounds good. You mentioned children there. I wonder if there is a minimum age for using Wednesday waffles.
00:23:09
Speaker
It depends honestly on ah government regulations in different countries, but we, I think it's 16th if I'm, yeah. um Yeah. If I remember correctly for the most, for majority of countries.
00:23:23
Speaker
Right. So 16 years old would be there either the legal limit or the minimum recommendation from ah Wednesday Waffles. So something that a parent can make ah a choice about what they want their children to be involved in.
00:23:36
Speaker
Exactly. Yeah. It's a pretty pure platform. However, and only you can't find other people on there, right? You and only can create groups with the contacts that you have. But to every parent's discretion, absolutely. The internet is a crazy place and everyone should... take that You've dropped some hints about the things that are going to be happening at Wednesday Waffles, but what's the what's the thing that is really exciting you at the moment about Wednesday Waffles and what
Future Developments and Revenue Model
00:24:04
Speaker
the future holds? Yeah, I think the most exciting thing that we have coming is um the ah the gamification of friendship. And so what I mean by that is, let's say you and your waffle group
00:24:18
Speaker
complete a streak where all of you watch and all of you waffle every single week for three months, um then you your group would get entered into a draw to win like a week vacation at at an all inclusive or a $500 Airbnb gift card to like go away for a weekend.
00:24:38
Speaker
And the the reason is because A, you've completed all the tasks, you're actively waffling every week and you've developed a streak, but we believe that we want to be able to offer people ways to take their friendship out of app as well and into real life. Because although this is a friendship deepening tool, nothing really can beat in-person connection and human connection and relationships. And so We're really excited to be able to offer both and give you guys a reason to get outside of the app and into real life and deepen those relationships physically as well. That's great. Of course, that would cost Wednesday Waffles some money, though. Yeah. So what's the revenue model for Wednesday Waffles? Is it advertising or is that will people be paying a membership? ah We have both. So we do have a um subscription premium features that are coming and that's a paid model.
00:25:31
Speaker
Things such as being able to choose what day of the week you waffle on and not have it be Wednesday. There are better prizes in the streaks for when you um all win and premium subscription. the ability to record extra time is another one. As you had mentioned before, three minutes isn't long enough. Those are all premium features that are coming and then partnerships or advertisements, but the partnerships would look like partners with the prizes that we are giving away in those draws. um And so I guess technically it's advertising, but that would be a partnership model that we have as well. for my partner
00:26:09
Speaker
That's great. You know, you mentioned that sometimes three minutes isn't long enough and sometimes 30 minutes isn't long enough, but it's been a very interesting conversation.
Closing Remarks
00:26:19
Speaker
Daniela, I really do appreciate it. It has flown by, but thank you very much for being such an interesting guest on Reston Recreation.
00:26:27
Speaker
Thank you so much for having me. It was a great conversation. Thank you. I am Michael Millward, the Managing Director of Abbasida, and in this episode of Rest and Recreation, I have been having a conversation with Daniela Granzotto, the co-founder of Wednesday Waffles. You can find out more about both of us by following the links in the description.
00:26:50
Speaker
At Rest and Recreation, we believe in inner health and happiness. We can't make you happy, but one of the best ways to stay healthy is to know the risks early. That is why we recommend the health tests available from York Test, especially the annual health test.
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You can access easy to understand results and guidance to help you make effective lifestyle changes anytime via your secure personal wellness hub account. There is a link and as you would expect, a discount code in the description.
00:27:46
Speaker
I'm sure that you will have enjoyed listening to this episode of Rest and Recreation as much as Daniela and I have enjoyed making it. So please give it a like and download it so you can listen anytime, anywhere.
00:27:58
Speaker
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00:28:10
Speaker
Until the next episode of Rest and Recreation, thank you for listening and goodbye.