Beli’s married co-founders on how their partnership is their company’s ‘superpower’

Judy Thelen and Eliot Frost built their relationship around the same activity that inspired their company: dining out.

The married couple, co-founders of social restaurant review app Beli, met while working at McKinsey in New York. The self-proclaimed “restaurant-obsessed” pair created a Google map that tracked everywhere they ate together. “It was ranked, color coded, notes, favorite dishes, all that,” said Frost.

Together, Thelen and Frost attended Harvard Business School, and their dedication to tracking restaurant data became more than a hobby. The two launched Beli in the 2021 and have since collected over 120 million restaurant ratings—largely from Gen Z and millennial users—according to Thelen.

In a conversation with Founder Brew, Thelen and Frost discuss launching their consumer app and the best rules to follow when married to your co-founder.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What are each of your roles within Beli?

Judy Thelen: I’m the CEO, Eliot’s the CTO, and up front we were very clear on how we wanted to make decisions, so that way we didn’t end up in a deadlock, can’t-ever-get-anywhere situation. Our roles blend across a lot of different things, but essentially I run product, Eliot runs more of the infrastructure and the technical side of it, and then we split marketing...

Eliot Frost: …share partnerships, fundraising, stuff like that.

Thelen: We didn’t have a background in restaurants or tech, but the nice thing about finance was, at least for me, I’m a numbers person, super super data-driven, and that discipline on everything comes down to: What are you actually seeing? How are people actually using something? What are the numbers telling you? That made it so we never were making emotional decisions.

Frost: I fell in love with coding at McKinsey but left thinking I wanted to do something more consumer-facing.

Beli launched in 2021 but you were originally supposed to launch in 2020. What did you do in the time in between?

Thelen: We started building in business school and knew we were going to do it full-time, and then we went to graduate. It was spring of 2020 and the pandemic hit, and it was not the time to put something like this out. We didn’t know if it was safe to eat out. Restaurants were closed. We had a 100-person beta—classmates, friends—not the right way to test a product, but it was a function of the times.

Then in spring of 2021 we were like, “Okay, we need to see if people actually want this,” or we don’t have jobs. So we, for the first time ever, said something about Beli on our social media channels. We got thousands of people signed up that day.

You’ve said before in interviews: “Don’t do what we did,” when it came to using your friends and classmates for beta testing. Why is that?

Thelen: Friends aren’t honest. It’s really hard for your friends to give you real feedback because they’re your friends, so that’s one. Obviously saying friends aren’t honest is a bit of an exaggeration, but it’s really hard for a friend to hurt your feelings, and so they’re not likely to tell you the harsh stuff.

Two, your friends are likely not the target persona. They’re just convenient, and so you would be getting feedback from people that aren’t actually the people you’re trying to target, which is not helpful. Those are probably the two biggest reasons not to lean on friends.

What business metrics do you think are overrated?

Thelen: We don’t track time spent in the app, and that as a social company is usually the most important metric. Beli is all about getting you to do things in real life, and if you’re spending a long time on Beli, we’re not getting you to do that, and that goes against what we believe in…Making sure that the metrics you’re tracking are aligned with your values and your mission is really important.

Frost: Focusing on fundraising as an end goal rather than a means. There’s a lot of pressure to feel like if you raise a lot of money, then that means you’re successful, but that’s kind of backward. Fundraising is a tool that helps you bring the company to a next stage, and isn’t something you should seek out as an accolade on its own. I think a lot of people fall into that trap.

What would you tell someone thinking of founding a company with their partner?

Thelen: For us, it’s our biggest superpower. The fact that I can work with someone that I completely trust makes making decisions a lot easier, and we can be very honest.

If you’re founding with a partner—just as you’re picking a co-founder in general—picking someone who has a complementary skill set is really helpful.