My New Obsession: Beli App

Originally published April 29, 2025 on Eats by Liwen.

In a few years, you might be asked something like, "You've lived in Baltimore, right? I'm traveling there next weekend and would love some recommendations."

By then, when you try to conjure an image of the best spots that you and your college friends commonly frequented, only blurry memories surface. Easily, you imagine the warmth and familiarity from this memory, recall with certainty that it was without a doubt the best burger spot in town, and know the general neighborhood it was in, but darn, that name taunts you from the tip of your tongue.

Especially when we travel, the culinary experience can make or break the trip. When you leave, you'll fondly remember the highlights, like that hidden gem of a restaurant that you randomly stumbled into, too hungry to check its reviews beforehand. The taste still lingers in your head, but the name, which may be in a foreign language, is likely forgotten.

So, in June of 2023, when I first heard of a solution to all these problems, I was sold. This is Beli, a social-media restaurant tracking app with a unique rating system.

Screenshot of ranking a restaurant on Beli

To use this app to rank a restaurant, it prompts you with a series of comparisons against places you have previously ranked. Essentially, they ask, "Would you rather go to restaurant X or Y." This process repeats a few times, and through this binary search sequence, the app will be able to determine the exact position relative to all your rankings and this determines a 0-10 numeric score.

The this-or-that comparison also helps with the experience of the app. UX designer and influencer mythdesign explains that the app's interface "takes the work off the user" and has the additional benefit of "having more accurate ratings."

"I love that the app gives meaning to the rating, unlike the arbitrary five-star system. For example, if my friend rates a place a 9.0, it roughly means that it's one of the top 10% of places she's eaten at," says Catherine Kim, who has ranked more than 800 places. "There's real value in its accuracy. I've avoided spending money at a restaurant I wouldn't have liked."

Another focus of the app is on being a social media platform. There's a feed where can see where your friends have recently gone and underneath each restaurant's page, you can see the scores given by each of your friends. The social aspect keeps a user hooked.

"I have never tracked where I've been, like with Google Maps or maintaining a notes list, but I find myself being using Beli every other day," says Aarush Prasad, a 4th-year student at Hopkins. When asked what makes it different, he responds, "It takes 20 seconds to rank a restaurant, and I keep coming back because all my friends are on the app as well." With this feature, it was no surprise that it took off in our Hopkins community. We are now boasting more than 200 users at Hopkins and our students have collectively ranked more than 37,000 places on the app.

The map view of all restaurants I've been to in Baltimore City.

I have been thoroughly charmed. Two years after my initial discovery of Beli, my friends describe it as my biggest obsession. I've climbed to the number one position on the Hopkins leaderboard. Some weeks, my screen time on Beli rivals apps like Instagram and TikTok, designed to suck you in. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I even pay for their premium tier, dubbed "Beli Supper Club," simply because I am a fan of this app and a secret admirer of the team behind this masterpiece. When you think about how the Beli team chose to take on a market that had already been saturated by huge players like Google Maps, Yelp, and TripAdvisor, you'll realize that their success is no coincidence and an impressive one. When you take a closer look at the strategies they have deployed, you realize that it is all intentional. This is not surprising given the CEO of Beli, Judy Thelen, is a graduate of Harvard Business School and previously worked at a top consulting firm, McKinsey & Company.

The first thing I noticed was their invite message. Despite the app being open for anyone to download on the app store, when you refer a friend, which is required to unlock features of the app, it sends a referral link with the text, "Hey! Sharing an invite to Beli—an invite-only social restaurant tracking app…" They've kept this invite message likely because exclusivity captures the attention of users. Physiologically, this strategy appeals to the human desire for uniqueness and privilege which is why it is commonly deployed by luxury brands.

More importantly, this referral link alludes to how they addressed a common business problem called the "Cold Start Problem" which is essentially a chicken-and-egg problem. If your product is network-based, where people need to use it for the app to mean anything, how do you get the first users to be interested? Think about Airbnb, why would you use it if there are no listings of places you can book?

This problem is part of a general "Cold Start Theory" which is described in 5 stages: 1) the cold start problem, 2) the tipping point, 3) escape velocity, 4) hitting the ceiling, and 5) the moat. There is no doubt that the leadership at Beli studied this theory.

As mentioned previously, Beli broke through the cold start problem through the invite-only tactic, deployed by successful platforms like LinkedIn. It not only defers the work of growing a network to the users, but it also guarantees that the users engage with each other. In the case of Beli, the initial user will invite all their foodie friends, who happen to be the only people whose eating habits the inviter would be interested in. This creates an engaged network where they will like, comment, and tag each other. Additionally, it's likely the referred is also equally as passionate about food which results in higher quality content.

After a product aces the cold start problem, it'll reach the "tipping point" where your goal is to prevent the community from drying up. This was an easy problem for Beli to tackle simply because everyone must eat, and when most of your user base is in New York City, you can trust them to eat out a ton. This is where the simplicity of the ranking system plays in their favor. The content (eating at a restaurant) is naturally produced with no additional effort and then it takes just a few seconds to put it into the app. As a result, the retention rate of users on the app is extremely high.

The next stage is "escape velocity." For a successful product, you need to scale your growth. This explains why they put so much focus on their Instagram account, which is equally popular separate from the app. The Instagram account @beli_eats has 658k followers and their posts consistently get more than a million views. This account is like any food influencer account, thus targeting the general audience. Thus, Beli employs the "Acquisition Effect," which organically captures users from a different platform to steadily grow their user base.

After the period of viral growth, they will "hit the ceiling," which is when their number of users plateau. We see them address this problem by the consistent launch of new features. Since the app can be a tracking app independent of its social features, it means that even if your friends stop posting, users who just want to know where they've eaten will continue to be loyal.

Lastly, is building the moat. More important than a successful product having a set of competitive advantages, is that the advantage must be durable. I'm excited to see how Beli innovates to address this challenge. To be quite honest, the app itself is simple to build and the idea is not revolutionary. Their strongest asset is the cult following they have captured. There are still many improvements they can make. For example, the algorithms they have implemented to predict how much you would like the restaurant is not anything complex and they are extremely weak in suggesting where to go.

Friends ranking a place on Beli after eating together

The Beli app has integrated itself into my friends and my life. It's added another layer of fun onto an already enjoyable activity. As food is served, everyone's phones are pointed at the food, capturing content for the post, and at the end when scores come out, there's a fun reveal and we laugh about how differently we judged the food. We have become more intentional about where we eat and what we eat. Now, that eating out has also been gamified, we've become very adventurous. We say, "Let's try something we haven't been- you know, so I can rank a new place on Beli."