Okay fine I’ll download Beli
Its CEO sold me on the app during a live podcast recording… but there’s one big caveat
Beli, a restaurant-focused social list-saving and -sharing mobile app, is not like other restaurant recommendation apps. This is not just because its leader is loath to share details of its white-hot growth… though she is. And it is definitely not because “everybody eats,” which is also something Beli co-founder and CEO Judy Thelen told me during an onstage interview last week… although we all do.
Beli’s big difference is its methodical data collection and analysis, gathered while encouraging people to dine out. It invites users — restaurant-goers — to tap the app to keep track of where they’ve been, where they want to go, what they like, and more. But not too much. In fact, Thelen says, “If people are spending too much time on the app, we’re not doing our job.”
That’s an unconventional position for an app founder in an ecosystem that usually rewards time spent with a product or service. So unconventional, in fact, that Beli didn’t take outside investment until it proved its own thesis — that it could collect and analyze info about diner behavior without requiring a heavy lift from its users. Then, Thelen told me, investors more easily understood why time spent on the app wasn’t the best metric to understand its success.
I learned all of this during an onstage interview last week at the Boston University Hospitality Leadership Summit, which we recorded and released this week as the inaugural live episode of my podcast, the Simmer. I’ve wanted to talk to Thelen for a while — and I’ve tried! — but her company has also eschewed traditional press in service of quietly building what Thelen hopes will become “the largest repository of preference data in the world.”
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