Beli: your food diary and dining advisor
Consumer social, food, restaurant discovery
Food is a foundational piece of the human experience.
A bite of a childhood meal can transports us back to our youth, running around grandma’s kitchen and stealing morsels of food straight from the pot. A bite of a new cuisine opens the window to a new culture, glancing into a nation’s history, struggles, and celebrations. A bite of our favourite meal instantly brings us to our happy place, encouraging us to brace the stress of the day with a smile on our face.
Food is human connection. First dates, family dinners, boozy brunches with friends— food is at the centre of it all.
By now, its probably clear: I am a foodie.
Growing up in China, food was a big deal.
During Chinese New Year, my entire extended family (nearly 200 people) would gather and feast. The aunties would cook for the entire day, with the most amazing smell emanating from the kitchen. In exchange for “taste testing”, I would clumsily help make dumplings, which soon became known as the “ugly duckling dumplings.”
Since then, my love of food grew stronger. I’ve spent countless hours researching the best food, from local taco trucks to Michelin star restaurants. So, when a friend told me about an app to track my dining experiences and discover amazing restaurants, I scooped it up like the last dumpling on the table.
In the past few years, Beli quietly became the hot new social app. The “someone you know just joined Beli” notification became a weekly staple. Nearly everyone in my social circle has used or heard of Beli, and it quickly became one of my favourite apps.
To learn more about Beli, its growth story, and a critical evaluation of the company’s future— read more to find out!
What is Beli?
Founded in 2019 by Judith Thelen and Eliot Frost, the restaurant-obsessed couple decided to solve a problem that bothered them for years.
Ever since meeting at McKinsey at 2015, the pair developed their relationship over exploring different restaurants in the gastronomic centre of the US, New York City.(Being in NYC with the McK dining budget sure is a great combo!)
However, despite their love for restaurants and their meticulous tracking on Google Maps and Excel, restaurant discovery remained a real pain. Existing platforms like Yelp and Google lack personalization and provided poor, inflated, and paid-for recommendations— Judith and Eliot were determined to find a better way.
The idea for Beli came during their time in HBS. Despite the faculty’s pushback (consumer social apps are very hard to build with narrow path to profit), Judith and Eliot knew they needed to create a better experience for diners. After securing some financing, Beli (named after Eliot’s high school nickname) was born.
There are 3 main features that define Beli and makes it differentiated:
The rating system: Unlike the traditional rating of 1-5 stars on Google Maps / Yelp, Beli uses a personalized and comparative ranking system. When ranking a new restaurant, Beli asks if I liked it more or less than a similar one I’ve tried before. Based on my answer, the restaurant receives a score (/10) and is slotted in my ranked list.
The beauty of Beli’s system is that everything is personalized. You control the list, rank restaurants based on your own experiences, and you make increasingly tougher calls between similar spots. Unlike Google Maps, where everything clusters around 4 stars stars because people psychologically avoid extremes, Beli pushes you to give real scores—from 1s to 10s—so your food diary also doubles as a ranked list.
Social media: Beli is more than a list— it’s also a social dining experience. Beli shares your food journey (e.g, restaurant ranked / bookmarked) to friends and allows you to explore your friends’ lists as well. Uniquely, each friend has a “taste similarity score” to you, helping you weigh their recommendations and discover like-minded diners.
The importance of social media cannot be understated. In today’s world, food is the new social currency. A table at the hottest spot or a photo from a fine-dining restaurant screams taste, access, and wealth. Social media is a megaphone. We’ve gotten used to using social media as a way to flaunt our lifestyles. By turning every meal into a shareable moment, Beli feeds our ego and our feed.
Recommendation engine: Unlike its alternatives, Beli offers personalized restaurant discovery. By creating an algorithm that blends crowd sourced reviews and your unique taste profile, each new restaurant receives a predicted score. Instead of using outdated TimeOut lists, Beli helps users discover restaurants unique to their tastes.
In my experience, the recommended restaurants are often more unique, comprehensive, and accessible than randomly searching on Google Maps. The predicted scores aren’t perfect, but they are directionally helpful in predicting whether or not I would enjoy a dining experience.
Digitization of the restaurant industry
Food is the centrepiece of our society. Regardless of what’s going on in the world— elections, festivals, war— people eat.
Currently, more than 1/3 of US consumer’s food spending go to restaurants, which has steadily increased by ~90% over the past two decades.
In response, businesses have sought a myriad of ways to capture value. Within the restaurant industry, the vast majority of value is, of course, captured by restaurants. However, digital-enabled auxiliary services have increasingly began to capture value.
Amongst them are PoS services like Toast and TouchBistro, reservation services like OpenTable, and most notably, delivery services like DoorDash and Uber Eats. Consumers have embraced these services. Currently, ~22% of restaurant sales come from online order and 63% of restaurants use a cloud-POS service.
Their common theme? Convenience. Restaurant ops got smoother, and food became more accessible.
However, there are still plenty of whitespace in improving the quality of the dining experience.
For consumers, a burning question is how to get the best bang for your buck. On average, US consumers spend $54 dollars per dine-in meal. Nevertheless, many report that they are unsatisfied with the experience. How can consumers walk in the front door with more confidence that it’ll be a quality experience?
For restaurants, many are using social media to bring in new customers. Currently, restaurants invest 3-6% of their revenue on marketing; however, 74% of them spend money on on outdated methods like Facebook ads. How can restaurants harness the power and data of social media to market to quality customers?
Beli may be the solution.
What I like about Beli
1. Dining is missing a vertical social media platform… Beli fills the gap
Consumer social companies are notoriously hard to build.
Incumbents amassed hundreds of millions of user, leading to some of the stickiest, most addictive, and entrenched products ever created. Whilst some companies (e.g., BeReal, Clubhouse) experienced meteoric growth, their declines were just as fast.
Building a consumer social app is hard. Making it popular is even harder. Making it sustainable? Nearly impossible.
Well… nearly impossible.
Winners in the consumer social space are focused on particular verticals, combining useful functionality with a social experience. People want a purposeful network. For example, Strava for running, AllTrails for hiking, Letterboxd for movies.
Selecting the right vertical has 2 criteria:
Something people spend a lot of time on. This means as an app, you can get enough interactions to create network effects.
Something people care about / enjoy. The activity needs to convey some sort of social capital (social media on doing laundry probably won’t fly).
Eating, as a high enjoyment activity that takes up a significant chunk of our lives, does not yet have a consumer social platform.
Beli can fill this space.
2. Beli is at an inflection point of the social media growth journey
Consumer socials follow a familiar growth pattern after emerging from obscurity.
According to the very sophisticated and rigorous GenZ framework, there are 4 phases:
“OMG you use x too?” —> “you HAVE to get on x!” —> “Follow me on x <3” —> “Wait… you still use x?”
Beli is entering phase two.
Back in 2022, it had just 2.5 million restaurant ratings. That number grew to 6 million in Q2 2023 and has since exploded to 58 million as of Q2 2025, surpassing Yelp. Beli is gaining significant traction amongst young people— 80% of its total users are under 35. Anecdotally, most Gen Zs I know have at least heard of Beli—even if they haven’t used it yet. (Don’t worry, I’m doing my part and waiting for my referral commission.)
While usage is still concentrated in core markets (only 10% international users) and early adopter circles, the current growth rate suggests a looming inflection point. What’s especially telling is that Beli’s growth has come almost entirely through word of mouth. The founders have made minimal investments in paid ads, which makes the viral loop forming around the product all the more powerful—and all the more real.
3. No innovative direct competitors exist in the dining space
Beli’s closest competitors are legacy companies like Yelp and Google Maps, followed by food blogs and individuals’ restaurant lists in Notes or Excel.
Beli holds a clear edge over the general rating competitors. The customized rating system, recommendation algorithm, friends’ reviews all contribute to a superior UX.
Food blogs like The Infatuation, Eater, and TimeOut offer great editorial content—but they’re not built as user-facing apps, and lack features like restaurant tracking or personal curation. If anything, they are complementary to Beli’s functionalities.
As someone who switched from a massive excel list to Beli, I have to say that Beli has saved me hours of time through a much more intuitive and enjoyable platform.
4. Small team rapidly checking off a laundry list of growth opportunities
One of the most impressive things about Beli is how small the team is. At ~5 people, Beli almost feels like the founders’ random side quest than one of the fastest growing consumer social apps in the world.
Don’t let the size of the team fool you on what they can do. Beli has always been consistently launching new features. For example, integrations with OpenTable for reservations and Google Maps for restaurant uploads, as well as in-app features like detailed segmentations (i.e., restaurants vs cafes vs bakeries) and total user scores.
With a strong track record, Beli is in a position to expand. It can accelerate its growth by raising more capital, hiring talented individuals, and investing in a long list of potential growth opportunities that I will discuss later.
What my concerns are
1. Dining is a low frequency activity, creating user habit will be difficult
Only 42% of diners eat out once a week or more. As economy slows, 50% of US consumers report plans to spend less in discretionary categories.
If users don’t engage with a new app frequently, driving consistent adoption will be very difficult. The nature of social media virality requires frequent engagement by a large user base. If the frequency is low, then it means Beli would have to amass an abnormally large user base to drive the same level of network effect.
Therefore, despite the 180% CAGR growth in ratings, the truly important metric of active user count may not be keeping pace. Instead, Beli likely has a ton of users with <20 reviews and have since became inactive due to the infrequency of dining out.
2. Transition from food tracking to recommendation is a must, but may be difficult
Although there’s value in being a food diary or personal restaurant log, that alone isn’t enough to drive long-term retention or defensibility. The real differentiator—the feature that sets Beli apart—is its recommendation engine.
Recommendations create habits, bring users back, and scale far beyond what manual lists or static reviews can offer. Most importantly, it deepens user trust: when the app consistently helps you find places you love, it earns a permanent spot in your daily life.
However, the transition to be recommendation-first has two challenges:
First is technical. Accuracy is everything— a bad experience will erode trust and cause users to churn. Beli must refine its engine using social graphs and AI to better capture something as subjective as “taste.” With AI and rich user data, Beli could make major leaps in recommendation accuracy.
Second is branding. Beli currently markets itself as a “social restaurant tracking app,” but to support the shift, discovery needs to take center stage. This means both messaging and product design should highlight personalized recommendations—ideally with a dedicated discovery page, not just a tucked-away button.
3. Slow internal growth could be a red flag
I’ve asked myself many times: why does Beli have so few employees?
Sure, perhaps the founders want to take the unconventional path of bootstrapping a consumer social app instead of burning VC money.
However, I am concerned by how long the hiring posts have been up on Beli’s website. Clearly, Beli wants to expand and hire more talent. There seems to be no advancements in hiring throughout the last few quarters despite reasonable compensations.
Whilst what the small team has accomplished is impressive, the lack of hiring for a seemingly fast-growing company is concerning.
4. Unclear revenue and exit path
This is a common problem for consumer social apps.
Social apps need users. Users will only sign up if it’s free. Hence, for a long and painful period, consumer social companies are literally money burning machines in hopes of attracting users.
Although Beli has taken an unconventional path with minimal fundraising and organic word-of-mouth growth, the lack of monetization opportunity still remains a problem. There are opportunities to monetize (e.g., ads, premium); however, balancing monetization without diluting the user experience is a delicate and difficult problem.
Without solving these problems, exiting the company will be difficult. Who are some potential buyers? Can Beli eventually IPO? When could it exit?
For investors, those remain massive question marks.
Food for thought
There are a few growth levers Beli can leverage to improve user experience and expand into new revenue streams:
1. Leverage consumer data to create intelligence platform for restaurants
Beli is sitting on a gold mine of consumer data.
The platform has the food journal of millions of users, including an intimate understanding of their top restaurants, taste profiles, and even favourite dishes.
The opportunity for a consumer intelligence SaaS platform is immense.
Restaurants would gladly pay for this data— to understand exactly which types of customers they can attract, to customize menu based on customer preference, to launch loyalty programs, or to benchmark against competitors.
The list goes on.
2. Enable monetization opportunity for micro food-influencers
To create a base of superusers, Beli could become a platform for food influencers.
Top Beli users could have the opportunity to create subscriber-only / paid lists, where they provide detailed restaurant reviews, dish analysis, and advanced filters. The monetization opportunity will empower food influencers to migrate to Beli with their follower base, driving virality.
Beli has a distinct advantage as a food influencer platform. Compared to micro food blogs, Beli can allow their users to find influencers that share similar affinities ( by % taste profile match). Therefore, instead of going to the general Time Out blogs, you can find someone else who also loves grill cheese to track down the best spot in NYC.
Like Substack, Instagram, and Patreon, users could unlock premium content (restaurant lists), support their favourite influencers, and connect with other foodies.
3. Hear me out… Beli could launch a dating / social connection feature
Rogue idea. However….
Food is often at the core of human connections. Bonding over a nice meal is an experience like no other.
Beli has developed an understanding of their users’ taste, and importantly, how similar that taste is with other users.
What if… Beli can connect you to people with similar taste and same bookmarked restaurants, finding not only like-tasted people, but also suggests an idea for a first date for group meals.
This data-empowered IRL social connection model is on the rise. Recently, platform like 222 and Timeleft are becoming very popular. In this world suffering from an epidemic of loneliness, Beli can connect people over what bonds us the most— food.
4. Beli could also benefit from the following laundry list of features:
Reservation marketplace (buying and selling hot restaurant reservations)
Plans with friends (i.e., invite friend to explore a mutually bookmarked restaurant)
More sub-categories under “restaurants” (e.g., fine dining, fast food, delis)
Daily restaurant recommendation (1 restaurant a day)
Videos in feed
User created categories (similar to how users can curate their playlists on Spotify, you can segment dining categories to be as detailed / broad as you want)
Final thoughts and recommendation
I like to evaluate companies on 4 key criteria: runway for growth, ability to execute, product-market fit, and defensibility.
Runway for growth: 4/5. Over the past few years, Beli has amassed a large a loyal user base with little marketing. It is at the inflection point of gaining widespread adoption to be the next cool, hip app. Additionally, many new features and revenue opportunities could be explored.
Ability to execute: 3/5. Beli has done a fantastic job growing the platform and launching new features with a tiny team. However, hiring, managing talent, and exploring “out there” growth opportunities will require a different and yet-to-be proven skillsets by the management team.
Product-Market Fit: 3/5. Beli has proved that people want a better alternative to track and discover restaurants. The platform has a strong base of superusers with 1000+ ratings each and witnessing rapid adoption by new users. However, the market size may be limited to only foodies and (low) dining frequency.
Defensibility: 4/5. There are no real direct competitors to Beli. Additionally, given the time and effort required to build up one’s list, the switching cost for avid Beli users (100+ ratings) is simply too high to justify leaving.
Overall rating: 7/10— Invest with confidence
I truly mean it when I say Beli is one of my favourite consumer social apps today.
Judy and Eliot found a critical need in the market and created a one of a kind solution that changed redefined how we think about ratings and discovery.
It has became as more than just a fun food app. Beli is creating a new category: social-first dining discovery.
This model works. I’ve seen first-hand how fast the app is spreading amongst young people, all through word-of-mouth with minimal advertising spend.
The team has built a strong foundation. If they can navigate the monetization, user frequency, and hiring challenges ahead, Beli will be destined to become the next breakout vertical social platform.
I’m rooting for them.
In the meantime, you can find me on Beli @arthurh to keep up with my dining, in addition to my writing journey— always happy to compare favorite restaurants!