Judy Thelen and Eliot Frost met at their first job out of college. They’ve done everything together since, including going to business school, getting married and, nearly four years ago, launching Beli , the increasingly popular restaurant rating and list-keeping app.
“We’re at over 58 million ratings,” Thelen said. Users log on and rate restaurants all over the world. Thelen and Frost don’t track how many hours users spend engaging with their product, “because if you’re spending a lot of time in the app, you’re not going out and doing things in the real world,” she added. “Beli is supposed to help you eat.”
The more restaurants users rate, the more accurately the app’s algorithm can recommend others based on their preferences and connect them to users with similar taste. “We’ve gamified ranking,” Thelen said. And as the number of ratings for a spot grows, the more reliable—or democratic—Beli becomes overall.
Recently, they offered some insight into how they built the app and why it’s quickly becoming an indispensable tool to so many who love to dine out (or order in).
Their Problem to Solve
“Judy and I are just completely restaurant obsessed and really have been since day one,” Frost said. He grew up in New York City, begging his parents to take him out to the newest dining spots. Thelen’s experience growing up in Chicago and then Bloomfield Hills, Mich., was a little different. “My dad’s an investor, and he invests largely in public restaurant chains,” she said. “We were going to fill-in-the-blank chain restaurant every night of the week and talking about the business side of it.”
After college, at the internal investment office of the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, Frost handled risk management and Thelen dealt with commodities investing. “We, like a lot of people, really started building our relationship around trying new restaurants in the city,” Frost said. During that dining-driven courtship they identified a few key frustrations.
“We had this massive Google map of everywhere we were eating together,” Frost said, all ranked (from least to most favorite) and color-coded, with notes and lists of favorite dishes. “It probably sounds a little bit familiar if you’re on Beli.” But it quickly became clear to them that the existing technology fell short.
Frost and Thelen also learned the hard way to view hype skeptically: “Way too often we were going to restaurants that had five-star ratings or really good critic reviews, and not being super happy with them ourselves,” Frost said.
Ultimately, they decided to build the app they needed. “There are entrepreneurs, or founders, who are like, ‘I just need to start a company,’ and will start tons of companies,” Thelen said. “We’re not those people. This was the problem we wanted to solve.”
It happened when they were at Harvard Business School (together). Thelen had planned to continue on the investment track and Frost to move into big tech. But they changed their minds and unofficially majored in Beli. They started working on it as their summer internship after their first year and continued through graduation, in 2020. Frost had previously taught himself how to code and now added app development to his autodidactic curriculum; that took care of the early stages of back-end development.
Initial funding came in small amounts from Harvard classes and programs that provided grants to startups. For their first investor round, they reached out to friends and family. “That was great because by the time we went to raise [institutional money], we had a product that was really working and growing like crazy,” Thelen said.
The Social Component
They waited to launch until the first year of the pandemic had passed and people had resumed dining out. Social media was instrumental in getting the word out and helping them with one of their primary goals, “to build community around food,” Thelen said.
Today, @beli_eats has 672K followers on Instagram and 403.6K on TikTok. The content they post on both platforms highlights places the couple have visited themselves, with their own ratings. They also post shortlists of the highest-ranked spots in a particular city for a certain type of cuisine or dish, and track the most highly rated new places each month.
On Beli’s social-media accounts, Thelen and Frost post videos of their own dining adventures (always narrated by Frost), but you’ll never see either founder on your screen. “Taste is personal,” Frost said. “If I don’t like something, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t like it. If I love something, you don’t have to love it.” The posts are meant to get people excited about dining and sharing their feedback.
At this point, however, the couple’s social media presence has become its own source of restaurant intel for anyone who cares to follow along on Instagram or TikTok. It’s not doing as much to drive people to the app as they had originally imagined.
“With the app, growth is primarily driven through referrals, word-of-mouth—80% of it. From that alone, I know most people on the app do not follow us [on social media],” Thelen said. And Frost confirmed, “We have way more users on the app than followers on social media.”
On the Money
So far, Beli has minimal revenue, though the couple does intend to make it a profitable business eventually. They’re approaching monetization cautiously, so the app continues to serve users while benefiting any future sponsors. In-feed ads are out of the question. “We want you going in there and trusting what you see,” Thelen said. “We don’t want you to be like, ‘Was that paid for? Was that actually recommended to me?’ ”
The couple has launched one initiative to test the commercial waters: the Beli Supper Club, an invite-only subscription service with a combination of in-person events and premium app features. It’s limited to New York City for now, and although they require a membership fee, Thelen and Frost aren’t making money on it—yet
They have also been exploring partnerships with reservation-booking platforms such as OpenTable and SevenRooms. (Beli is integrated with both so users can book through those platforms directly through the app.)
Asked if they’d considered building their own reservation function into their product, Thelen replied, “We definitely think about everything.” But she went on to note that they run the company “really lean,” with a team of five, and they aren’t in any hurry to hire a big sales team. Frost put it this way: “We like to focus on those few things that we think we can do really, really well.”
Numbers, Crunched
The Beli app has enough ratings data to tell us a lot about how we’re dining now, the world over. Frost and Thelen shared findings they find particularly revealing.
Top 5 Trending Cuisines in the U.S.
- Taiwanese
- Vietnamese
- Steakhouses
- Ramen
- Chinese
Top 5 Most Expensive Cuisines (on average in the U.S.)
- French
- Japanese
- Italian
- American
- Korean
Highest Average Food Rating
- Tokyo
- Kyoto
- Lima
- Florence
- Rome
