The Harvard Business School Grads Behind Beli

Judith M. and Eliot P. Frost are huge, Type A foodies. When they first started dating, they meticulously documented their dates on a sprawling Google Map — ranked, color-coded, and filled with notes of their favorite dishes and inside jokes (they named the dates after “Friends” episodes). And as their love grew, so did the map.

“We built our relationship around trying new restaurants,” Judith tells me. I had first met the couple at the HBS Entrepreneurship Summit that weekend, where Judith presented on the “Winning in a Highly Competitive Market” panel. She spoke to a crowd at Klarman Hall, where the two once sat as students merely five years ago.

Inspired by their Google love map, the couple — now married — created Beli during their time at Harvard Business School. Beli, a social-media food app, allows users to track, map, and share restaurants they’ve frequented. In the past year, Beli had 30 million rankings, surpassing Yelp in the number of ratings globally.

“We weren’t just casually going to restaurants before. We were already pretty intensely tracking it, and that was how this idea came to be — always keeping lists and maps of restaurants,” Judith says.

But the pair’s obsession with food started long before business school and even their relationship. “We’re both restaurant- obsessed, and really always have been,” Judith says.

Growing up, Judith and her dad — an investor — frequented chain restaurants, discussing costs and business prospects over meals. Eliot learned to code by scraping Yelp data, causing the website to ban his parents’ account.

After graduating from Pomona College and the University of Michigan, respectively, Eliot and Judith met at McKinsey & Company where they both worked in internal investment. In 2018, they enrolled at HBS together.

At Harvard, they began thinking of entrepreneurship more seriously. After taking a product management class and receiving a stipend from the Rock Summer Fellows to build a startup, they decided to create Beli between their first- and second-year summer.

“Every foodie kept some sort of restaurant list, whether it be in notes, Docs, Excel — you name it, but they were in all these tools that weren’t built for restaurant discovery, and they weren’t doing them together,” Judith says.

In addition, the pair realized that restaurants’ five-star reviews were often inflated, making it hard to differentiate between options. Many people have also never written a food review in their lives.

“So the idea for Beli became: can we create a really good restaurant list keeping tool and, through that, provide a lot better recommendations?” Judith says.

Their company, however, did not receive the enthusiastic reception at HBS that they had hoped for. Professors and investors frowned upon consumer companies, especially ones that sought to upend legacy companies like Yelp.

“We’re building a social media company, and that’s one of the riskiest types of business to build because you don’t have that monetization from the start. There’s no clear path to revenue,” Judith says.

“We got a lot of pushback at HBS, from the faculty specifically. Mostly they did not believe in us,” Judith adds.

Yet, the pair persevered — driven, in part, by their love for food. That summer, financed by the HBS Rock Summer Fellows Program, they iterated and tested their ideas. The couple frequented the Time Out Market Boston and asked strangers about food ranking systems. They sent surveys to friends asking them to rank restaurants they’ve visited.

But just as their plans gained traction, the pandemic hit, and the dining world stilled to a stop.

In their Boston apartment, they ordered takeout from restaurants to sample and launched a beta test version of their app. More than 100 of their friends and HBS classmates signed up.

“We knew after our first summer that this was something we were going to do, and so we were all in,” Judith says. “When we graduated into the pandemic, it didn’t shift anything. If anything, it provided a bit of an opportunity for us to just heads down, build something really strong and a good product.”

As they built up their social media persona from the ground up, one video went viral. In the Instagram video viewed more than 600,000 times, Judith twirls her fork in front of a densely-dotted Beli map. Words on the screen read, “When you’ve ranked every restaurant you’ve ever been to.”

Judith says the video — accompanied by a “silly Type A sound” — captured the hearts of foodies.

“We immediately got thousands of signups, and we didn’t even have an app on the App Store,” she adds.

In 2021, the Frosts officially launched the app. Since then, the platform has recorded 30 million rankings. I was first introduced to the app by a friend more than a year ago and have recorded my meals across continents religiously since, becoming closer with one of my friends after we discovered our shared love of food. Every week in New York City last summer, we went on Beli dates.

“So much of this is really about friendships and relationships. Dining is just this inherently social community thing. It’s all about getting people to go out and do things in the real world,” Eliot says.

When I visited Eliot’s Beli profile — named “eli-beli” — it displayed that he recently visited Boston’s Yume Ga Arukara before our interview. The username is a nod to his high school nickname, Beli — the inspiration for the app’s own name.

For the couple, Beli is now integral to their lives (and their relationship). Their wedding — which happened right before the app’s official launch in the App Store in June 2021— was Beli-themed.

A few weeks before the wedding, Judith’s dad decided that all wedding merch needed to show the words “Beli” on it.

Soon after the wedding, Beli went live — and Judith and Eliot didn’t take a break. “We always say we’ll do our honeymoon when we’re done with Beli,” Judith says.

—Associate Magazine Editor Xinni (Sunshine) Chen can be reached at sunshine.chen@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @sunshine_cxn.