From a panic attack in my fourth year of university to helping over 2 million people worldwide manage their anxiety – my journey with Rooted has been nothing short of transformative.
I had the pleasure of sitting down with Eric Dyck on the DTC Podcast to share how a personal struggle led to creating an app that’s now making a meaningful difference in people’s lives around the globe.
Listen to my interview on their Youtube channel here.
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Transcript
Ania Wysocka: I actually designed and built Rooted for myself. Initially, I was in my fourth year of university when I had a panic attack out of nowhere. So I took to my phone to see if there was something there that could help and then I couldn’t find anything. I went to the doctor. They told me I was okay, which left me more confused. I started taking to the library to try to learn different things about anxiety and panic attacks and ended up lugging around these books around campus with me and wherever I went until I said, man, this should really just be on my phone. So that’s where the idea for Rooted came. And then I’m doing much better. And people around the world are getting to face and manage and work with their anxiety through Rooted as well. We’re now at over 2 million downloads.
Eric Dyck: Hello and welcome to D2C Podcast.
Speaker: I’m Eric Dick. Today we’re finding our center with Ania Wisaka, founder and CEO of Rooted, the app that offers relief from panic attacks and anxiety in your pocket. With Rooted, Ania solved her own problem.
Eric Dyck: And created an app that’s now helping.
Speaker: Over a million users.
Eric Dyck: In this podcast, you’re going to hear how Ania used App Store optimization to.
Speaker: Rank number one on panic attacks and how a big red button made all.
Eric Dyck: The difference, as well as how a simple change in onboarding increased the paid.
Speaker: Subscriber rate for Rooted 6x. Hope you enjoy this one.
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Speaker: Ania, welcome to the D2C podcast.
Eric Dyck: Can you start?
Speaker: I gotta say, you’re the first app owner we’ve had on the D2C podcast. We’ve dealt with a lot of physical goods, a lot of services. The first app that we’ve had on huge, huge market. I come from the app marketing world, first of all.
Eric Dyck: How you doing?
Ania Wysocka: I’m doing pretty good. I. Yeah. Rooted won an award yesterday, so that was a great start to my day, like knowing that and having celebrated it yesterday.
Speaker: Tell me about the award.
Ania Wysocka: It is a global impact Business Owner of the year award. You can see it here a little bit. There’s some fingerprints on it because it was being passed around but yeah, so it’s by the Innovators and Entrepreneurs foundation, and they found some. Basically encouraged businesses in Canada to be nominated and hear what kind of impact they’re having around the world. So it’s pretty cool.
Speaker: Tell me about Rooted’s impact around the world.
Ania Wysocka: So we’re now at over 2 million downloads and the biggest market being in the US and then also, you know, all of these other markets. Like, we’re translating to 10 languages now, so it’s, you know, huge in Brazil, you know, all in Europe. And yeah, it’s also in traditional and simplified Chinese, so.
Speaker: So if you’re helping 2 million people around the world with their anxiety, that’s. That’s definitely some great global impact. I feel like we’re in a real age, as Arcade Fire says, a really age of anxiety. It’s a bit of an epidemic. Can you start with a little bit of why you built Rooted?
Ania Wysocka: Yeah. So I actually designed and built Rooted for myself initially. I was in my fourth year of university when I had a panic attack out of nowhere. At least I didn’t know what they were. So I took to my phone to see if there was something there that could help. And then I couldn’t find anything. I went to the doctor. They told me I was okay, which left me more confused. They just didn’t have the time and resources to help me. And, you know, I learned this later on, years later, but in the moment when you’re suffering with that, it’s, like, really challenging. So I started taking to the library to try to learn different things about anxiety and panic attacks, and ended up lugging around these books around campus with me and wherever I went until I said, man, this should really just be on my phone. So that’s where the idea for Rooted came. And then, thankfully, you know, it’s been quite a few years now, but I’m doing much better. And. And people around the world are getting to face and manage and work with their anxiety through Rooted as well.
Speaker: And so, just a quick distinction. There’s generalized anxiety, which I kind of referred to the age of anxiety. But then there’s real acute anxiety. It’s funny, it was probably like two or three, two or three years after university for me, and I. And it was the first time I ever had a reaction with anxiety where it’s like I felt out of control of my body, even to an extent, whether it was through my breathing or through. And that. That feeling of being out of control of my anxiety or whatever I was going through tended to cascade like it could, like, it could get worse and worse because I’d be like, oh, man, I’ve never felt like this before. That must be weird. Oh, man, I must be. There must be something wrong with me kind of thing. And it really kind of triggered myself into a bit of a spiral. I remember going to the doctor and him just being like, you’re fine, you know, like a lot of. A lot of that. So I’m interested in, like, how. What about your app is working for people really well.
Ania Wysocka: So there’s a few things like you mentioned, there’s generalized anxiety, and then there’s the more heightened state of actually experiencing a panic attack, which it sounds like you did. So you know how bad they can get. And the tools that people are really using in the app, if they’re experiencing a panic attack, it’s that red button. It’s like this SOS button in the app and that walks them through a panic attack. And it’s based on cognitive behavioral therapy, and it basically is interactive. Depending on how you’re feeling, sometimes you might want to actually challenge the anxiety because that can ultimately help heal. But sometimes you just want it to go away so you can feel better. Right. If you’re in a busy subway or you’re camping, like, you don’t want to deal with it all the time. So that’s the most popular tool for panic attack experiencing people. And then in terms of anxiety, there are lessons on anxiety and panic attacks. So it works for both. And they actually go through what the physiological sensations are, what sort of mental effects panic attacks have, and they explain a lot of the stuff. That sounds like both you and I were super confused when the doctors were like, you’re okay. It’s like, well, no, something’s going on and I don’t know what it is. The lessons help explain that, and that does bring a lot of peace to people who are experiencing it for the first time. And then there are more general tools for anxiety, like breathing, visualization, journaling, sleeping, and it’s all gamified, so you collect points as you go.
Speaker: Very cool. And it’s a monthly subscription app as well, right?
Ania Wysocka: It’s annual, monthly, or there’s a lifetime plan as well.
Speaker: What does it run you a month, essentially, when it works out between the yearly and stuff. What does it actually cost per month?
Ania Wysocka: So it’s six bucks a month or 60 a year.
Speaker: Amazing. You’ve got 2 million users. Well done. First of all, congratulations.
Ania Wysocka: It’s premium, right? So not all those users are paying by any means. It’s like there’s a ton of free content in the app and then they can choose to subscribe.
Speaker: Very cool. What was V1 like when you decided, okay, I gotta get this off my bookshelves and into an app? What was your process like and what, what did V1 look like?
Ania Wysocka: The process looked a lot like me drawing in my notebooks and trying to figure out how to wireframe an app. Essentially I went to an agency and I told them what I wanted to do. They were fully behind it, but I couldn’t afford what they actually quoted me. So I realized that I had to just do a lot more of it myself. I’m a non technical founder, so I had to also find a developer, like a contract developer. And yeah, it looked a lot like Wireframing. I used Photoshop to do the designs which like, you know, I don’t think people would do now. You’d probably use Illustrator, other Figma, you know. But it worked for me at the time it was pretty scrappy, but the MVP itself was the router button. So that SOS button I told you about and the lessons. So it didn’t include the other tools.
Speaker: And then how long upon launching it did you realize that you might have something here?
Ania Wysocka: Really pretty quick. It was pretty cool. And thinking that, you know, when I launched it, I thought if it could help one or two other people, that would be really cool because I’ve been suffering for years and this has been total crap, like just so debilitating for me. And then within just a couple months, people were leaving feedback saying like, wow, I’ve tried so many different tools and nothing helped me in the moment like Ruta did. And so to see those words was just extremely validating and it really contributed to Rooted’s organic growth, how people naturally responded to it.
Speaker: How has it done organically, like how? I remember I worked for a gaming company, Tiny Mob. I don’t know if you remember that back in the day in Victoria.
Ania Wysocka: I remember the name for sure.
Speaker: And we launched, I remember launching. They had some contacts at Apple and it was sort of like a Clash of Clans competitor. They were trying to take down Clash of Clans, which was a big challenge and but I remember they had, they had, they had. They were on the radar of Apple and so when they launched, they were featured actually I think in both the US and Canada. We drove over 100,000 downloads. I think in the first like couple days of the launch. It didn’t have the legs that particular company. But how did the actual launch go? Like was, did you have you just have it been like a slow, a slow burn to grow to 2 million or.
Ania Wysocka: Yeah, I’d say definitely not 100k in two days. That sounds like features were really different back then. Like they used to have when you were featured in the App Store, it would just show for everybody all at once. But now it’s all personalized. So like my App Store content is different from yours, so the features don’t give as many downloads anymore. But that sounds really cool and I’m a little jealous. But yeah, it was pretty slow. I mean, I just went on social media I was engaging on. Back then it was Instagram and Facebook really? Because this is back in 2018, so I was doing a lot of commenting, liking entering discussions a little bit on Reddit, all of that to really drive those first users. And I also did some local pr. You’ll find that a lot of people like pr, maybe sounds a little funny for a startup, but you’ll find that in your local city, like a chamber of commerce or your local tech accelerator, they do want to promote local tech. And so they did share those stories when I sent the press release. And I do think that gave a little bump as well.
Speaker: Very cool. What other growth tactics have kind of worked in the, in the app game? Are you, are you running Facebook ads?
Ania Wysocka: I’m not currently, no. No. It’s like 95% organic right now. So it’s really a lot of focus on App Store optimization. Rooted ranks number one for panic attacks and then it’s either number two or three for anxiety, like depending on the day. So that’s a big part of it. I think one thing there to note is that I focus on panic attacks even though it was a way lower search volume keyword than anxiety. And it’s kind of interesting because when you’re a founder and you know your thing works, you do want to use like the most active keyword, right? Because you’re like, this is for anxiety. But then I also knew that I was going up against like venture backed startups and I’m like, yeah, I’m probably like, it’s still new. Not so many apps were out about anxiety yet. Because again, that discussion about mental health didn’t happen until later. But it was enough that I, yeah, focusing on panic attacks just worked better. And so I was able to rank high with panic attacks first and then over time with anxiety. If you look at the charts and.
Speaker: It’s such a real fit with your, with, with one of your central features with that sort of like the button right which is sort of this. This feeling of actually solving that problem or really addressing that problem. So actually tying, you know, that initial feature set to the term panic attack probably was pretty profound for people because it’s like, there wasn’t anything like that. You know, there’s probably other places where you could get resources on panic attacks and anxiety and that kind of thing, but that. I don’t. I don’t want to say novel. The novel, not novelty. The novel idea that you kind of came up with for that button was probably a big part of the success.
Ania Wysocka: Yes, I think so, too. I think it was just about like, you know, you want to get your product in front of as many people as possible, and so you’re tempted into using these bigger keywords sometimes because you know that people with anxiety might also have panic attacks. And this way more people see it. But yeah, you’re totally right. That smaller, smaller percentage that are actually looking for panic attack support are really the right people, and those people are often the power users that then go on to share and promote the app. So I’m really happy that, you know, we did end up focusing on panic attacks instead of anxiety.
Speaker: You mentioned App Store Optimization. I remember back in this, when I was at the company was like, 2013 or something, and I remember feeling very in the dark about how to go about optimizing one’s listing. Can you talk a little bit about that process of App Store optimization and what you found that works?
Ania Wysocka: Yeah, I’d say it’s still a little bit in the dark. You know, like, there’s no clear list of exactly what it is, but definitely the product page and the keywords used in the product page. There’s obviously the title, the description, the subtitle, and your images also go into it. The reviews, what people are leaving, how they’re interacting with the app, and then also what keywords they use in their user reviews. Like, do they match your product page? Are you. You know, is your product page actually leading people to the content they think they’re getting? Yeah, those are the main things that I focused on.
Speaker: And then when it comes to a freemium app and getting people to actually to upgrade to the paid version, what have been sort of your wins on that side of things?
Ania Wysocka: That’s a really tricky one. And it actually came up yesterday at the ceremony because we were talking about social impact, and it’s like, well, sometimes social impact and business building and growth and monetization, they clash. Right? Because you’re leading your company with these values of wanting to provide A resource but at the same time it’s really expensive to have and maintain an app. So that’s a little tricky because I think I at first was like walking on eggshells around the users around monetization I was offering so much for. I didn’t want to offend anybody. I wanted to make sure people had access to things that they might otherwise not afford because like there are other resources for anxiety that are super expensive. So it took me a while, but it wasn’t until March 2021 that I did a simple hack that increased revenue by six times. And it was just to move the free trial page to the beginning of the onboarding. That’s it.
Speaker: From where?
Ania Wysocka: From like just being in the app. So basically you had free content in the app, but then if you want to add or look at additional stuff then you have to subscribe and then that’s when you would see the trial page. But just by moving it to the beginning of the onboarding, yeah, it increased by six times and was able to just be able to do so much.
Speaker: More and just lead with like hey, there’s a not being shy about it, right? Like you wanting to help. I understand that mentality of like want to get it out there, help as many people as possible and being shy about oh you might want to pay for it kind of thing. Very Canadian of us. Right. But to put it front and center in the, in the application to see a six fold increase, that’s incredible.
Ania Wysocka: Yeah, yeah, it really was. And I think that’s really where the bread and butter lie is like that onboarding optimization and like doing experiments during that, Those first like 20 seconds you really have the user there. That’s where a lot of conversions happen. Actually.
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Speaker: Is it like it’s. Is it on rails to some extent. When you’re, when you’re, you know, you know, obviously you need to continually evolving the product, keep servicing the product, make sure it’s. The reviews keep flooding in. But with its place on the App Store right now, it probably has a fair amount of momentum and growth.
Ania Wysocka: Yeah. So it’s still primarily organic. I’m thinking that for Q4, with prices being really high with a lot of ad spend, I was going to sit this one out and focus a lot on the in product funnel, which again is that onboarding experimentation and trying to see if I can increase some conversion rates within the app itself. And specifically those conversion rates typically for apps will be like your install to sign up, your install to paywall view and then your paywall to trial and your trial to paid conversion basically. So those four are kind of what I’m focused on for this quarter. And then I do want to get set up though and experiment a bit more in Q1 with ads.
Speaker: Yeah, well, like if you like what’s your growth rate? Because I feel like I looked at some PR that you had that when you hit a million users and looking now you’re at 2 million. Like what, what’s your growth rate like? Like what if you weren’t going to invest heavily into ads, you know, at the start of next, like by the start of next year, where do you.
Ania Wysocka: Think you’d be at by the start of next year?
Speaker: Yeah.
Ania Wysocka: So basically it took like three years to get to a million and then it took one year to get to 2 million and now it’s at like 2,150,000. So I think that within a year and I measured that from October because that was like the launch and then it’s weird, it like it’s also my birthday and then the big things happen around my birthday. It’s like a weird thing. But I think that by next October it would be at over 3 million.
Speaker: Amazing. How big is your team now?
Ania Wysocka: So it’s myself and some contractors, they’re kind of all over. They’re awesome though. They’re basically. I’ve got two junior contractors for software development. They’ll do like front end work and then two more senior software developers that are more full stack and they’ll work on refactoring the app itself. And then I have an awesome social media person, she does my TikTok now and engagement on there because I totally slept on TikTok. I should have jumped on it earlier. I do have a little regret because I, yeah, I was totally given the heads up and I just like ignored it. I was like too busy or whatever. But now we’re experimenting with it. It’s actually really fun.
Speaker: You have such a good founders, you’re such a good founder and you have such a good founder story as related to your product. Have you tested that? Like, have you tried being the face of the app at all? Have you stayed away from that?
Ania Wysocka: I haven’t. I have in PR now, Like, at first I was so uncomfortable, but like, you have to understand, nobody even talked about panic attacks then. And I did not want to be the face of it in the sense that like a. I didn’t think it was about me. I wanted it to be about like the app mascot Ron, which you see back here, and be. It’s just like a vulnerability. I didn’t want to be like the panic attack person, you know. But now, since then, I’ve really learned that showing your face, telling your story can really help connect to users and it also makes users feel a bit less alone. So there’s a huge win in sharing your story. But I have not. On social media, I’ve done podcasts like this, I’ve done some YouTube style like panels and boot camps and I’ve done the PR stuff, like actually sharing my, my photo there. But other than that, I haven’t like actually gone on social media. It’s in the plan, though. It’s on my to do list. But it’s like, I don’t know, it’s a little uncomfortable.
Speaker: I understand, like I’m, I’m like, it’s. I’m on camera every day, all day. But when it comes to like an in conversation and in conversation, I feel 100%, but I have this. I don’t know, it’s imposter syndrome or what of just like turning the camera on me, like, you know, and speaking to it directly without talking to a person. I don’t know what that is.
Ania Wysocka: Yeah, I guess when you don’t get feedback from the audience, it’s challenging. Right. When you’re public speaking or right now we’re having a conversation and we know the other person’s listening and nodding and when you’re just speaking to a screen, for me, it’s much more difficult.
Speaker: Yeah, I concur. So you’re going to try some ads, you think, in Q1 or in 2023. Is that something you’re just going to do on your own? You’re just going to sort of to start, you’re just going to get it out there and see how it goes.
Ania Wysocka: I have a contractor who I’m onboarding right now. We’re just going to kind of prep a bunch of creative for that launch. And I also have connected with the team at Bravo. They’re basically moneylenders and kind of like clearco and Rooted actually won an interest free loan from them for like a month of spend. So that’s kind of how I’m gonna kick it off is with them. And then their value add is that, you know, they have worked with so many different apps and they can provide and yeah, just provide some advice really.
Speaker: I think it’ll go really well. I think I remember when we were doing this Clash of Clans competitor, we were getting installs way back when. I remember Clash of Clans was getting. They were. My rep told me that Clash of Clans was getting hundred dollar installs and we were getting $50 installs just because we were kind of nipping at their heels and our ads were playfully calling them out in some ways. But I just feel like there’s just such an audience. Like what is the. What. What’s the biggest audience for this?
Eric Dyck: Is it older people?
Speaker: Is it younger people? Gen Z’s millennials? Who’s. Who’s really taking to the app?
Ania Wysocka: Mostly it’s a bit of a mix, but really the primary audience will be females between 24 to 35. But with TikTok and I think a big trend of anxiety and youth now, which is pretty sad. But I do see the number of unknown age rising and unknown is typically people under 18 because we don’t collect anything on them.
Speaker: Interesting. I saw on your website you have like some of your favorite stories. You’ve got like families that use it and like young kids that are already sort of using it.
Ania Wysocka: Yeah, yeah. So I think that was the youngest paying user of ruta is like 6 years old and that’s her parents pay for it. And they sent in a message saying hey, this is so helpful. It’s like the only thing we found that works with our daughter. And then our oldest paying users like in his 70s and his kids sent us a note being like he’s finally doing better. And the nurses at the care home wanted to say thank you. And yeah, so it’s pretty awesome to have this like wide range of use cases for rooted and there are certainly risk use cases I didn’t even think of. You know, when I was launching it, it was just primarily for my demographic because that’s just what I knew. I wasn’t going out and doing a bunch of user tests. I wasn’t going out and surveying or anything. I was really, like, scratching my own itch. So it’s still cool to hear those stories, but definitely the majority is females, 24 to 35.
Speaker: You know, a lot of the brands, the D2C brands that I interview, a lot of them are thinking about building an app. You know, tapcart, you can sort of build an app, make your. Make your Shopify experience into an app. I was wondering, as an app, do you have any thoughts or plans to expand into physical goods, into services, into marketplaces, into anything else?
Ania Wysocka: I think that at first I was excited by everything, and then now I’m just trying to focus more. So I have been saying no to a lot more things and, like, partnerships and stuff, not because I don’t want partnerships, but just because anything that, like, takes work and you don’t know if it’ll actually work. Like, I want to focus on what’s working. And that’s a bit different now compared to at the beginning. But, yeah, I think in terms of physical things, like, sometimes our friend Hamza, for example, made this, and it’s pretty cute. It’s like a physical version of Ron. And users ask for things like this all the time. They want a plushie or they want something that will, like, emit a calming scent. And that’s definitely on my mind. I’m thinking about different types of apps, like maybe in the VR space, you know, something like that. But nothing else. Like, no other marketplace at this time?
Speaker: No very.
Ania Wysocka: Unless VR app is technically a different marketplace, but it’s still an app.
Speaker: I don’t know. And so that could potentially be a place where people. Like a Metaverse place where people calm down.
Ania Wysocka: Yeah. Hang out with this guy.
Speaker: That’d be pretty sweet.
Ania Wysocka: Yeah, like.
Speaker: Well, he’s got goggles on. I’d have goggles on. It’ll be a Metaverse party. Yeah. Very cool. So how big can this thing get?
Ania Wysocka: I ask myself that question every day. But the goal is to get to, like, 10 million users and see what happens along the way. Till then.
Speaker: Amazing. What kind of. You mentioned partnerships. Like, what would an ideal partnership for this look like? Do you have partnerships with different health facilities or care facilities or different health professionals? What kind of partnerships would you be interested in in the coming years?
Ania Wysocka: Yeah, so probably the most exciting partnership is with healthcare facilities. And the reason is it’s that way to kind of bridge that gap between social impact and the monetization that I mentioned earlier, where it’s not actually the people who need it that are paying for it, it’s people who are meant to care for them, you know, so that is a really great relationship when those partnerships form. And we just finished a pilot with a health insurer and we’re moving on to the next stage of that. So that’s pretty exciting. And yeah, just sort of seeing how we can work with different larger corporations that want to support people with mental health. That’s the ideal partnership.
Speaker: Nice. And I can just see ads working if you can get that. If you can get your funnel dialed to the point where, you know, it all makes sense financially. Like, I just see ads for this kind of thing all the time. For calm. Do you consider calm a competitor?
Ania Wysocka: Not really. They’re incredible. I think they’re awesome. But they, like, meditation is different than panic attacks.
Speaker: Totally.
Ania Wysocka: They’re a competitor in the sense that they’re in the health and fitness space and I love seeing what they’re doing and learning from what they’re doing. But I wouldn’t say they’re like a direct competitor. They’re also venture backed, so it’s like a total different story when it comes.
Speaker: Because they’re kind of like a Netflix in a way. They’re coming out with new, you know, new sleep stories all the time, new things that kind of come out.
Eric Dyck: How much sort of.
Speaker: What’s the content flow for Rooted? Like how much new content is going into Rooted? Or is it sort of like, here’s the stuff you need to get through this?
Ania Wysocka: There’s definitely less updates than like, it’s not about updating the content as much. It’s about updating the features and the app itself and the tools. But we do an update at least once a month. And I’m adding in audio content. Yeah, roughly once a month. For example, now I’m working on visualization for the World cup that’s happening in the next two weeks. So I’m translating it into German, Spanish, Portuguese and French. And it’s going to be a visualization for athletes that struggle with anxiety and panic attacks. Because as we learned during the pandemic, a lot of them open up about that and how that can be quite debilitating for them before a game. So that’s an example of content that we add, I think also thinking of sounds, like calming sounds, white noise, different music, that sort of thing. We also add frequently.
Speaker: Very cool. If we were to give you $50,000 to scale rooted as a grant, you don’t have to pay back. Where in 2023 would you put that, Would you put it all into ads?
Ania Wysocka: It would be split between working with the developers on some new features that I have planned and ads.
Speaker: Yeah, very cool. Can you speak at all about the new features you’re planning or the shape of them?
Ania Wysocka: A lot of it is around, maybe these aren’t features as much because around that experimentation that I told you about, I want to remove the need for authentication when a user signs it. So basically you don’t have to sign in. There’s a lot of people that are still hesitant about associating their email even though we actually don’t use it for my. Like we’re, you know, compared to what we’ve probably could do more marketing with it. We don’t. But I still understand the hesitation that users might have. So I want to remove that process and just have that process be a bit easier to basically sign up and get started with. Rooted. And yeah, I won’t speak to the features just yet.
Speaker: Got it. I’m curious because you’ve been, you know, I’ve worked with you when you’ve been at previous positions. You’ve kind of been in tech for a long time, but you’ve really made the leap to entrepreneurship. Like how has your life changed since becoming an app success?
Ania Wysocka: I don’t know that it’s changed so much except for, you know, since the pandemic, even when I was still in a full time role. Like I just think that the freedom of really choosing my own schedules, quite profound. Like that’s probably the biggest change. And then since I have been full time on Rooted, I mean I’m 100% on my own schedule. Like that’s the coolest part. I mean I don’t have to do meetings if I don’t want to do meetings. Like it’s, it’s lots of fun. I really value that. I value basically being my, the warden of my time, you know, and not having anyone else do that. I’d say that’s the biggest change. But in terms of success, like as an app. Oh, I guess I get invited to cool events and stuff. That’s pretty cool.
Speaker: Yeah. I saw you met Sampar the other day.
Ania Wysocka: Yeah, yeah. In San Francisco. I also got to tour the Apple hq, which is really cool.
Speaker: Very cool. Well, remember the little people?
Ania Wysocka: What was your name again? That’s true.
Speaker: Nice. Well, it’s super nice catching up with you here. I think I just, I think apps, they’re such an attractive business. I feel like like the fact that you’ve got this team, you’ve got a team of three or four with contractors and that, and that you’re reaching this many people, having this profound an impact on people is pretty, pretty special.
Ania Wysocka: I think it’s so special. I think tech in general is just so special to facilitate these types of resources and access to resources. And I think that maybe one day I’ll have like more of a full time team. But right now I just enjoy it so much that everyone’s doing their things, they’re contributing when they can and where they can and I just find it really fun. I’m really enjoying this newfound, again that freedom with time and I want everybody else to have it too, that I engaging with. But yeah, I think the goal is to just sort of do it in this way for as long as possible.
Speaker: I heard this morning about Elon ordering all of his staff back into the office and it gave me, it didn’t give me a panic attack, but it gave me a little pang of like, ugh, like, I’m so glad that we’re a fully remote team that I can fully make up my team. Only time I go in my hours, the only time I go into the office is for like social events, for happy hours and, you know, fun stuff like that and that. And that honestly was. Has been a huge weight off of me cognitively. Like you just all of the, you know, getting to, getting to work, just all of the, all of the interactions that go on on a daily basis, like, I don’t know, there’s part of me I need to get out into the world a little bit more. But part of me has just been so grateful for the ability to focus on things. Working from home has been a big win for me.
Ania Wysocka: Yeah, me too. Me too. I value this so much and I think it’s partially why I went into something tech related. I obviously couldn’t have predicted the pandemic and remote work being so popular, but the idea of being in charge of my own time is just so appealing. And now more of us have that and that’s really cool.
Speaker: Nice. Well, one of these days I’ll run into you in the real world, but until then, it’s been awesome to catch up. Thanks for coming on the podcast today.
Ania Wysocka: Awesome. Thank you. Cheers, thanks for having me.
Eric Dyck: Thanks so much for listening to today’s episode.
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Eric Dyck: At Direct to Consumer all one word co. I’m Eric Dick and this has been the D2C podcast. We’ll see you next time.