A Resy co-founder has launched the project with investments from Union Square Ventures.
(Bloomberg) — It’s Saturday night and you have landed on the Lower East Side in Manhattan, looking for a place for dinner, with no reservation. The restaurants are packed; even at not-hot places, the wait time will be a couple hours, you’re told.
This scenario is all-too-familiar to hungry diners in New York. Now, a new company, Blackbird, believes it can fix the problem with a loyalty program that lets diners accumulate points at independent restaurants. With enough points, stored on a blockchain, a diner can achieve the kind of status akin to airline and hotel programs. In the long term, it could mean discounts on checks and the invaluable perk of access to top restaurants. For now, it translates as free pastries, ice cream upgrades and, maybe, a drink at the bar.
“We are building the equivalent of the Starbucks app for individual restaurants,” says Ben Leventhal, Blackbird’s founder and chief executive operator, referencing the coffee chain’s loyalty program that has more than 28 million active users.
Independent restaurants don’t have the resources to create their own programs, Leventhal says, and Blackbird fixes that. It will also help operators identify valuable customers and repeat diners that they want to ensure get seats.
“We want to attack loyalty, benefits and ultimately payments,” says Leventhal, who was also the co-founder and former chief executive officer of Resy, the game-changing restaurant reservation platform that was acquired by American Express in 2019. (The amount was not disclosed, but the platform was valued at over $53 million in 2017).
“Every restaurant should be thinking about scaling brand and loyalty, but few have the resources,” says Gary Vaynerchuk, a co-founder of Resy and an investor in Blackbird.
“Anything that attempts to create connective tissue between a restaurant and its guests is going to be positive for the industry,” says Marguerite Marisol, CEO of Momofuku and Momofuku Goods, who is on Blackbird’s board. “Can we make more diners feel like regulars? We’re hoping that Blackbird pulls together POS [point of sale] and reservation data so we have a fuller understanding of our guests. That’s the value of Blackbird for us.”
This kind of information is increasingly important to restaurants as their profit margins plummet. Twenty-five years ago, they were between 15% to 20%; now they’re around 4%, according to IBISWorld Inc. Although dining rooms are consistently full, operators are struggling to stay afloat.
“Places can’t raise their prices fast enough to keep up with costs,” Leventhal says. “You can’t ignore the disconnect between popularity and profitability.” Even as sales go up, operators worry about keeping their doors open, because of rising costs.
Blackbird’s white paper acknowledges the success of myriad existing programs, like OpenTable and Resy, but maintains that their benefit is to third parties and not the individual restaurants.
Restaurateur Sean Feeney, whose Brooklyn-based restaurant Fini Pizza will be part of the June roll-out, is betting on Blackbird’s ability to help operators with tight resources connect with customers. “The restaurant will be able to make each guest that enters feel like a regular whether it’s their first or their 100th time visiting,” he says.
The vehicle for accumulating rewards on Blackbird will be a token, or NFT, called $FLY, stored on a blockchain. (Those concepts were much buzzier when news of Blackbird first became public last summer; since the collapse of the crypto market, Leventhal doesn’t reference NFTs so much.) There’s no charge for diners to use the app; restaurants will pay a “small fee” (2 cents to 5 cents per check in) and a percentage of transactions. Points will be accumulated by both diners and restaurants. It’s not clear what restaurants can do with their points, beyond pay Blackbird fees. “Utility will evolve over time,” Leventhal says.
Blackbird quietly started operating in April with a handful of New York spots including the new soft-serve ice cream spot Bananas on the Lower East Side, where multiple visits earn customers upgraded toppings. In early June, the company will officially launch their app and announce partnerships with over 60 restaurants, mostly in New York, including the two Michelin-star Saga and the cult favorite dining spot Estela in Soho.
Leventhal says he’s not looking to compete with his former colleagues at Resy in the reservation business, although in the future he sees the opportunity to integrate the platform with that kind of program. “I would be excited to partner with Resy,” he laughs. Now he is focused on what he calls a “streamlined SMS-based, AI-automated communication channel” that, optimally, would allow customers to chat with restaurants about the potential for a table.
He also envisions a future when Blackbird will handle restaurant transactions, although he wouldn’t discuss how the finances would be overseen or audited. “We think there’s an opportunity to innovate on payments,” he says. “Restaurants are paying very high percentage for credit card swipes. It should be much more seamless.”
Still, the question remains: Will diners opt for yet another restaurant program, when their digital wallets are already full of loyalty cards for chains? Among the incentives Leventhal is launching is a membership to the popular local New York pie spot, Upside Pizza. For an annual fee of $199, Upside Nolita members can get a free slice a day and access to surprise concerts played in the venue.
Leventhal’s goal is to have restaurants be able to communicate more directly with customers in a way that will be valuable to both parties. “I want to get restaurants comfortable with the idea of saying to [them], ‘just show up. And we won’t have you wait a second longer than you have to,’” he says.
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