Would you pay for dinner in crypto?

More on Blackbird’s ambitious plan to change the way we experience restaurants

Blackbird, the web3 loyalty platform from Resy co-founder Ben Leventhal that frequently enjoys outsized attention in this newsletter, announced its new payments feature today. Diners can pay inside the app, either with saved credit and debit cards, or crucially, with Blackbird $FLY, the company’s fungible token that lives on an L3 blockchain. 

I talked to Blackbird founder and CEO Ben Leventhal about the feature (and more new things) for Fast Company; you can (and should)  read that piece here, as it explains in detail how and why Blackbird functions as it does. 

Blackbird is a loyalty platform and customer relationship management tool for restaurants that requires a fair amount of buy-in from both restaurant guest and restaurant operator to work at its best. For example, restaurants have to install a (reasonably innocuous) NFC reader that diners physically tap with their phones when the come inside. Luckily (for them), Blackbird the company and Leventhal as its leader are very good at making a comprehensive and convincing argument. 

At the heart of the service is $FLY, which Blackbird issues as a kind of hospitality currency. Diners earn it when checking into restaurants; they earn more of it when they interact with restaurants in a way that Blackbird deems favorable to the ‘restaurant economy.’ (Their words.) For example, a diner gets three times the amount of $FLY per check-in if they opt to share details like their birthday and zip code with the restaurant (and with Blackbird itself, of course.) The new payments function lets diners pay using $FLY, in real time. It’s not applied retroactively to the charge, it’s functioning currency given in exchange for goods and services. Restaurants on Blackbird can hold on to that $FLY and give it to more diners, or, soon, use it to pay Blackbird’s platform fees, which is a new detail I only learned yesterday.

In tandem with today’s news, the company issued an updated version of its Flypaper, the report-slash-proof-of-concept that lays out its logistics, reasoning, and future plans. The document reminds me of reading a startup’s sophisticated pitch deck or SEC regulatory filing. (Packy McCormick wrote about Blackbird in an extremely thorough edition of

Not Boring by Packy McCormick

today; same vibe.) When you’re head-down in the details of a compelling narrative, it’s easy to follow, easy to buy into the logic of a company that requires a near total re-think of how loyalty and guest engagement work. 

Also, I don’t need to remind Expedite readers that Blackbird is a small network compared to other third-party restaurant services like reservations and delivery. (It’s why I joke about the outsized coverage, but look, I love a fresh idea.) Blackbird’s using the same strategy to grow as Leventhal’s Resy before it: get popular and buzzy restaurants to sign on to the platform and the diners follow. Then more restaurants join to win more diners and more diners join to go to restaurants while everyone earns $ FLY. That’s a flywheel, a business term that I’m surprised Blackbird hasn’t co-opted (yet) for its marketing. 

In a handful of conversations with operators who use Blackbird at their restaurants, they understand that, as with any network, it needs momentum — this flywheel — to grow. I’ll echo Not Boring here, who nailed the sentiment: “Blackbird is hard to pull off no matter who you are, but it’s especially hard if you aren’t Ben Leventhal.” 

Blackbird wouldn’t share an update on the number of restaurants on the platform, but a rep told me they’ve grown 10x in the last year. When the company announced its $24 million Series A last fall, it announced around 80 restaurants had signed on, though just over 20 were actively using the software. A map of New York City shows a healthy number of restaurant customers, especially downtown and in Brooklyn, no surprise there. It’s actively expanding in Charleston, South Carolina and my hometown of San Francisco, also the home of Blackbird investor and fast-casual sensation Souvla, founded and run by chef Charles Bililies. 

Blackbird is built on the blockchain, a decision that I feel ready to say is critical to its future success as a fuel for the restaurant economy and what comes next. (My FastCo piece has more on why.)

There’s one more new thing buried in Blackbird’s announcement that’s worth a look. 

Thanks to the amount of data it elicits from diners on the platform, Blackbird is generating a dynamic “guest value score” for restaurants. It turns the diner’s value to a restaurant into a number. It’s not a rating or review, Leventhal told me, it’s a numerical visualization of the potential importance of a particular customer to the restaurant. For example, all other things being equal, someone who lives closer to a restaurant will have a higher score *at that restaurant* than a guest from out of town. 

The idea of assigning a value to what used to be a mental calculation by a well-connected owner or manager — ie., Who is this person? How do I know them? What do they like? How can I get them to come back? — is a benefit of well-connected technology, and team Blackbird has done a good job at pulling enough valuable info from customers to make the numerical score meaningful. Adding payments to the product mix will only bolster these efforts. 

Ideas, concepts, crypto aside, Blackbird’s own value can be calculated relative to the mental energy it replaces. Or, as the owner of a cocktail bar in New York’s East Village told me, “I don’t have to worry about waking up at 7am to missed 1am texts from regulars trying to get a table.”