Today we're chatting with Lisa Oreshkina and Eteri Saneblidze, founders of The Breakfast App. If you're not already familiar, The Breakfast App is a new app for meeting other creative people over, well, breakfast. It's not dating, not networking, just breakfast. They've recently launched in San Francisco, and if you'd like to try it out you can use the code RDCV for a nice little discount. In the interview we chat about their background, how the pair met, and what it was like founding a startup for meeting IRL during a pandemic.
Hey Lisa and Eteri! Who are you and where in the world are you right now?
Hey! We are the founders of The Breakfast — an app for meeting and talking with awesome creatives over breakfast. We’re talking to you from Lisbon, Portugal, where we are based.
Eteri has been an entrepreneurial soul and a brand visionary since her early twenties. She previously co-founded the first Ukrainian online store of design-forward gifts and a direct-to-consumer linen bedding brand called Sea Me.
Lisa is an information and product designer who has worked with and co-founded several companies in various spaces: from business sociometry SaaS to social QA platforms.
What is the story behind how you two met, and how did it eventually lead to the creation of the Breakfast App?
We met in Lisbon back in 2015 when the startups we were working on at that time were selected for an acceleration program called Lisbon Challenge. Eteri came from Ukraine and Lisa from Russia, a fact that would later come to play its role in our story.
In the following years, we travelled across Europe and the US, always looking out for new people to meet. It felt very natural: meeting a local can be a great introduction to a new city, and hanging out with creatives is the perfect way to share your ideas, learn new things, and discover new opportunities. Overall, we enjoyed the feeling of being connected to the world by having someone we could talk to in basically any city around the globe. But that was just our own lifestyle.
It all clicked one day when we were discussing how people form and transfer trust to each other when making professional introductions and connections. It was a late night in a fancy bar in Odesa, Ukraine. Eteri argued that there is no recipe for a good match, it’s a matter of regularly meeting and talking to people until you find “your people.” The only missing part was that there needed to be some common activity to make it easy for two people to gather, without a specific romantic or professional agenda. And that’s when Lisa said: ”breakfast.”
It took us an hour to draft the whole app in a notebook. And about a year to finally release it to the public, exactly 1.5 months before the global pandemic started.
Due to the pandemic, all sorts of in-person social events had to be held virtually. Based on your experiences with both offline and online experiences since then, have you noticed a change in the way we meet and interact with other people?
Yes! The pandemic showed us that seemingly comfortable and convenient things can bring us to a rather miserable place. Zoom meetings are amazing when what you need is information. But when you are looking for a connection, for energy, for life, there’s nothing that can replace an IRL conversation. Humans are wired to interact in the physical world — it makes us happier, healthier, and more fulfilled.
We all know that from our personal experience of keeping ourselves isolated in our homes. But knowing it is not enough, we need to implement connection as a practice in our calendars, just like we do with the gym or meditation.
The choices you’ve made in crafting the Breakfast App, down to the invite system and the language you use, all feel very intentional. Something I find especially interesting is the idea of a “chance” - could you explain why you came up with the concept and how it reflects the types of connections you hope to cultivate?
Totally! Thanks for mentioning that!
A chance is The Breakfast’s alternative to a “match“. Because we don’t believe in matches.
Existing social apps have created this transactional attitude between people, where we swipe and browse numerous profiles looking for a match that will ideally fit our filters, both on the app and in our minds. Even though that was fun in the beginning, it has started to feel exhausting and, frankly, miserable.
At The Breakfast, instead of endless scrolling and swiping, you get only one chance per day.
A chance is serendipitous and playful. You can take it, you can pass it on. And it can be anything: you might hear a random story that feels supportive to you at this stage of life, or you might find a friend or a job connection. You can fall in love, come up with a start-up idea, or just learn something new.
But if you think about it, all major shifts in life happen when you meet and talk to new people, oftentimes by chance. The Breakfast is a space for more of these chances to happen.
You’ve done a lot of work to celebrate other creatives, such as partnering with companies, hosting interviews and talks, and curating a directory. Has your involvement in these communities shaped your perception of what the Breakfast App might be and how it might evolve over time?
Yes, we try to do a lot because we love connecting with inspiring people and projects in lots of different ways. And definitely, our vision evolves as we continue to be in conversation with our members and partners.
For instance, we came up with the term “modern creatives” because it’s an identity that is much more than just a profession, it’s a lifestyle. Being a modern creative means participating in multiple creative projects, shifting domains, working remotely, easily moving from one new city to another, and being curious to know what other people are doing with their lives and energy.
We are the only app that is optimized for real-life connection, so we see interest from a variety of communities and brands: co-working and co-living spaces, hotels, media, tools, self-development and professional groups. You can already see some of these companies in our Directory, but creating even more value for their communities using our technology is something we are working on at the moment.
In the past, you've posted several heartwarming “breakfast stories” about chance meetings turning into a little something more. Could you share any other encounters (personal or not) from the app that have stuck with you recently?
Oh yes! Our team was so touched to receive an email from our members who got married after meeting on The Breakfast in Kyiv.
Another story we love is from an art director in his early thirties who had breakfast with a cancer researcher in her 50s. He told us he met his soulmate that morning.
A recent one is about a member who was choosing between moving to Istanbul or Lisbon. He ended up deciding on Lisbon — only because The Breakfast is not yet launched in Istanbul!
Interestingly, we started to receive more feedback from people who identify as introverts, because they feel much more comfortable in a 1-on-1 conversation rather than in crowded small-talk-centered meetups.
We love these stories and look forward to receiving more as our community continues to expand!