Blackboard Eats Launching Mobile App

Maggie Nemser launched Blackboard Eats in September 2009 with Los Angeles as the first city. Almost two years and hundreds of thousands of newsletters later, it has expanded to New York and San Francisco. Now with the anticipated app launch next week, Blackboard Eats goes mobile. In this interview, Maggie discusses what to expect from the app and if there are plans to branch into more cities.

For restaurant lovers who have been hiding under a rock, tell us about Blackboard Eats.

Blackboard Eats offers great deals and exclusive experiences to food lovers. We're edited and written by handpicked, seasoned food editors who come from Gourmet Magazine, Food & Wine, Epicurious, Bon Appétit. And we all choose restaurants that we love and send a writer in anonymously. We don't accept comps. And we offer exclusive deals to our subscribers. 

Where are you from and how did you start up Blackboard Eats?

I grew up in Manhattan and I was always tasked with choosing the restaurant that I would have to accompany my father and his clients to dinner at. And I would scour Zagat at age 8, 9, and 10, trying to sound older, trying to make reservations at all these great restaurants. And to me it was theater, it was an escape a wonderful way to forget about a kid who teased me at school that day and be at this fabulous restaurant with chefs, and all this excitement and ambience and it all just moved me.

How did that translate to creating the company?

So I was always just passionate about it. So when I graduated from college I was a producer at MTV and spent my free time writing about restaurants for myself, wrote lists for my friends, contributed to various publications, moved to L.A. with my boyfriend who was opening a restaurant, and met Deanna Brown who believed in me. And I told her that I would be cheaper and smarter than any food editor she could hire and ended up as the editor of Yahoo Food where I worked for three years, and then became the food editor on Shine as well as the food editor on Yahoo Food.

And while doing two jobs for price of one. And I had this idea when I got all these press releases, offering all these exclusive deals from restaurants from all of these local PR reps, I noticed there was no one place for all of this content to live in a carefully curated and organized fashion. So restaurants were sort of idly sending out all these wonderful deals and exclusive dinners and there was no place for them to go. And Yahoo has a national audience so I couldn't promote Sunday Sangria at Primitivo. And I also felt like having a national conversation would feel a little diluted sometimes. And I was excited about that local conversation where you could really speak to the excitement, the smells, flavors, and tastes of the city.

So where did you go from there?

Three things happened. And I don't talk about this often, but I was having dinner with a girlfriend who pulled out a 30% off coupon and this was years ago. And I thought, "Wow, that's a lot of moxie to pull that out." And I thought it was really neat. And I wondered if I would do that and if we had a schema yet where this was acceptable. And I thought what if you could get rid of that clumsy coupon element and make it sexy, make deals cool. Because ultimately we all brag about you know, "My skirt's from a thrift store," we all brag about that great deal we got, but how do you bring that to food and dining out without sacrificing the experiences that we love to have. And then the final thing was that I found this love of life who loved eating out but not maybe as much as I did and I wanted to be able to scale that lifestyle of going out eat all the time but keep our checkbooks in check.

From idea to product how long did it take?

In January I had the idea. I quit in March. And then we were in production into the following summer.

Without giving up any trade secrets, how do you get all these deals?

Well, what is different about Blackboard Eats than all the other deal sites out there is that we are editorial and not advertorial. So where the Groupons of the world would get a rev share from a restaurant and ask for 30% off and take 50% of it, we're free. And because the restaurants know that we are really passionate about the food-only space, they know that they're going to be read by people who are active diners and passionate food lovers. So they're going to attract the kind crowd that they're looking to bring in the doors. So I think that the combination of the editorial, the team members, the careful curation, and the free bit is what attracts the great restaurants.

When's the launch date for the app?

The launch date for the app, as you probably know, is always in Apple's hands when they decide it, but it looks to be next week. The app is really a way to enhance Blackboard Eats' user experience by allowing them to play with all these fun functionalities that will ease their experience. So, we are introducing a Heat Map where when you're out and about you can see what specials are live that are close by in relation to where you are. You can get specials on the go.

You can utilize a tip calculator if you're trying to figure out the pre-discounted total after a few glasses of wine and you're out with four friends [laughs]. We are allowing easy ways to share and make reservations right from the app, so if you get a special and you just want to click on OpenTable or a number to call immediately, you can. We'll be linking out to OpenTable to make reservations easily, to make this a one-click experience. And then you'll have all your codes stored under a section called "My Codes." So if you're in a restaurant and you don't want to sift through your email to find a passcode, or you don't feel like saying your passcode, you can simply show your virtual membership card.

What's the process of getting an app created — start to finish?

Well we were trying to make sure you could do all the fun things you could do on Blackboard Eats, but make it a little bit cooler, and try to take it that one step further where  what would be the ideal experience for the subscriber. And I think the Heat Map is huge because we're so often — especially in New York City and L.A. — out meeting friends spontaneously and trying to find out where to go — that's always the famous question. And to see a little pin pointing to all the restaurants that you know are already hand-picked, vetted, that is without having to suss through lots of reviews that may or may not be critics' picks... we're all comprised of editors' picks. So you're able to really find something that you know is going to be first-rate and then get an additional special while you're at it.

Is this app aimed at taking anyone on?

For better or worse we do very little competitive sweeps, we do a lot of things in a vacuum intentionally to be authentic. We have a lot of sensibilities about what we want to see, and we've really sort of naturally extended our brand. So we weren't looking at anyone as a model and trying to beat them out. There are a lot of people doing what we're doing, but we're doing it differently than anyone who is doing it out there. And we just deal in food, so we're not going to send you 30% off liposuction and sneakers in the same breath as a restaurant. And we only feature restaurants that aren't in trouble — restaurants that people want to go to. So I think people really come to us for food. And we're sort of the food lover's guide to the cities that we're in right now, which is San Francisco, New York, L.A. We also have a market edition, which is all artisanal foods that you can order by mail with a discount.

Is there anything the app can do that the site doesn't?

I think that people right now know that we have a section called the guide. And they may or may not peek in there, but I think this Heat Map that's going to show you all the past places we've featured. Whether or not we have a special there at that time is sort of irrelevant. I think they're going to like to see what place to go to that's around them. That real-time access to great, carefully curated choices is going to be a pleasurable experience.

And right now you're in... ?

We're in New York, L.A.., San Francisco, we have a market edition. We are looking to expand this summer into other cities.

What differences did you notice in these markets?

I found L.A. and New York to be quite similar. Restaurants were relieved we were here. They were excited to deal with us. We quickly dispelled the idea that we're taking money from them, because those are the calls that they get every day. And when we launched, we were sort of the first in the food-only market. We were the only people doing this. We launched on September 24^th, 2009. Groupon had just launched, I think, a few months before, but there was no food-only site like this. But now there are tons. So when they get calls every day but they're always asking for money. 

When they hear Blackboard Eats I think they now know that we're editorial really, but you know... San Francisco was a harder market to penetrate. But we just did a great special with Betelnut Restaurant where it was an off-the-menu prix-fixe that featured things that you could only get if you were a Blackboard Eats subscriber. Things that the chef had wanted to do in the restaurant but found — wonderful dishes like fish head, and things that he found his regular customers weren't as excited about. And now he was able to experiment. I think San Francisco got it at that point. They were like, "Oh, we get it. Blackboard Eats isn't just about a deal." We're about experiences. We felt a really new breath of welcome.

Why was San Francisco so tough at first?

And I think the reason also why it was more difficult to penetrate San Francisco was that because it was our third market, there had already been an influx of all of these deal sites, so to get it across that we are editorial, and who our editors, and the care we approach each restaurant with, when we finally get that across they're really happy with us. But sometimes it's hard to get that sentiment across with the oversaturation of the market.

What do you wish you were asked more often about Blackboard Eats? Is there something people don't know that they should?

I don't think that people really understand the whole advertorial versus editorial piece. I think that there have been so many articles written about the deal boom, but very little attention has been paid to the fact that the deal site and the restaurant or the shop are sort of in bed together as partners, and it's advertorial. They're advertising because they're both sharing money and we have advertorial but we market it clearly as "Sponsored Specials," or "A word from our sponsors." But our core blasts are free and we handpick the restaurants and send writers anonymously and pay our way.

What should that mean to people?

We don't accept comps. And that difference is big because when writers go in on a comp they're going to have the chef prepare their dish perfectly, the service will be immaculate. Everything will be fabulous. We go in and we give an honest depiction of the experience. If the experience isn't up to snuff then we don't run the restaurant. So there are a lot of levels of gatekeeping that I don't think we've done a great job of touting. When I go to a web site and I feel like they're just singing their praises, sort of like, "Look at us, look at us," it feels a little contrived. So I like the idea that people figure that out about us and I wonder if we could have done a better job facilitating that discovery. 

What did you use as a guideline for that ethos?

I always grew up reading The New York Times' reviews, reading The New Yorker — Table for Two, really taking seriously the process and understanding it. I fact-checked for Moira Hodgson at The New York Observer when I was in college as an internship. I just loved the process. I thought it was so pure. And while one could say there is an element of partnership because we are asking for something exclusive from the restaurant for our subscribers, we're not letting the restaurants check the review before it goes out. We're not accepting money from them. So it is a different level of editorial, a different way of editorial, but it feels clean, it feels legit, and I think people like that. I feel people trust us.