Hi Danielle, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
Hi! My name is Danielle Casilio, and I am the founder of Yelli, an app-based software that modernizes the way restaurant teams train and communicate.
I grew up watching my family run a ready-mix concrete business in southeast Pennsylvania. Hard work was definitely ingrained into me, we were always working on something even if we weren’t actually at work. My dad even refused to pay for cable for a few years because we were truly never inside enough to watch it.
When I was 16, I decided I didn’t want to work in concrete, but wanted to start making my own money. I started waitressing at the local diner, and quickly found out I was good at it. I was meeting lots of new people, getting to make decent money, and since I was working for tips, I had control over how much or how little I was making. My first taste of being my own boss!
After high school I moved to Kansas, and then Texas for college. I worked in a few mom and pop restaurants along the way – most notably a rowdy German biergarten – while I earned a degree in psychology. After graduating I knew I didn’t want to stay in Texas, so I moved to Los Angeles for a new adventure.
The plan was to take a year off from school, get to know the city, and if I liked it I would enroll in graduate school here. During that first year I started working and quickly networking in the LA restaurant industry, and before I knew it graduate school was an afterthought. I was having fun, making good money, and enjoying the work I was doing.
While I wasn’t ready to take on a full time management position (that would have paid less than what I was making in tips), I did often take on the role of lead server. I love organization and systems, so my responsibilities were to oversee the front of house operations from the staff perspective and try to make them better, along with training new team members.
After doing this for a few years, I started to see a pattern across all of the restaurants I had worked in. In a nutshell, the pattern was chaos! Lots of information that needed to be communicated quickly, lots of disorganization, and lots of frustration. I started to look around for a software solution, but couldn’t find exactly what I needed. That’s when I decided to build Yelli.
I’m good with computers, but am by no means an app developer! We put a team together and (very slowly) built a beta version of the app to test. From there I put together a focus group of my service industry colleagues and tested it out for a few months. After another year and a half of rebuilds and testing, we decided to soft-launch the app in late 2021, and have since then been refining the product and growing the company.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I guess that depends on your definition of a smooth road.
To me, it’s all about perspective. I would say the road has been very unpredictable, which to some people might be rough. I learned from a young age how to be flexible and how to shift my outlook on a situation, or at least attempt to, before getting too bent out of shape about it.
I’m not saying I’ve never gotten upset about hitting an obstacle in the road! There’s been quite a few. I just think that without those obstacles I wouldn’t have learned anything, and probably would have gotten really bored with the whole thing.
I remember when we were first starting out and I was begging people for feedback. Everyone kept telling me “it’s good” or “yeah, I like it” but I wanted to talk to someone who would challenge my ideas. I wanted someone to try to break it, change my perspective, show me the flaws of what we built. It wasn’t until that started happening that we were able to create a really cool product. Embrace the challenges, that’s where the payoff is.
Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Yelli?
Yelli was founded in July of 2019, and we launched late 2021. Our goal at Yelli is to modernize the way restaurant teams train and communicate.
Yelli is an app-based software, available as a web application as well as a mobile application for iPhone and Android devices. It is a subscription service, so each restaurant purchases a subscription and then can invite their individual team members to join.
Within the app, the restaurant can create their own training portal. They can build or upload all of the information they need their team members to have access to. This includes menu information, uniform guidelines, steps of service, cleaning and sidework lists, and other procedures throughout the restaurant. Yelli creates learning tools like flashcard decks with this information, making it easy for new employees to learn the details quickly.
Yelli also allows managers to create and issue tests to their employees, send alerts, and track the training status of each employee. In the next 12 months we plan to also develop a full scheduling feature, group messaging, and integrations.
Currently we have more than 30 restaurant teams onboarded with 500+ active users in The United States, Canada and Europe. We plan to grow to 150+ restaurants within the next 12 months.
Visit our website www.yelliapp.com and follow us on social media as we continue to grow!
Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
This is my favorite childhood memory, and the one that makes me know I ended up in the right industry!
When I was 5 or 6, my grandmother would pick me up from school and I would hang out with her while everyone else was still at work. She would cook dinner for the family, and I would help. Around dinner time, I would set up my “host stand” (a cardboard box with hand-drawn menus) at the front door. As my family came in, I would greet them and walk them to their seats. We called it Nonni’s Restaurant, and I definitely ran the place.
Pricing:
- $79/month
- $899/year
- $499 Setup Service
Contact Info:
- Email: [email protected]
- Website: www.yelliapp.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/yelliapp/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/yelliapp
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBxKvW0GaahLUWb4428W0Sg
