The Year in Blackbird 2024
Nearly 150M $FLY rewarded, the industry gets theirs, we went clubbing
It’s been a while since we posted here. Don’t worry, that will change quickly in 2025.
Cliche as it may be, the turn of the calendar year does create a nice little space here to talk about the state of things, both at Blackbird and in the whole of the restaurant industry. On the latter, I recommend reading:
Yannick Benjamin’s essay on the closing of his Harlem restaurant, Contento: “Running a restaurant in 2024 meant taking no salary while working a full-time hospitality job elsewhere in order to afford private health insurance.”
Stephen Harris for Noble Rot on “The 2024 Restaurant Scene”: “How can you tell if a chef has been to Japan lately? Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.”
And, exiting New York Times critic Pete Wells’ farewell post, “I’ve Reviewed Restaurants for 12 Years. They’ve Changed and Not for the Better”: “Restaurants that are packed for the first few weeks are empty six months later. The wisest owners now avoid serving anything that might go viral, because they don’t want their business to burn itself out.”
You might read these and think that not much has changed. If you believe Wells, who says farewell with one of the more deliberately obtuse essays of his tenure—one that attacks Blackbird for being innovative, for trying to make the payment experience, heaven forbid, easier and cheaper for everyone—then the industry is still sorta in a perpetual death spiral.
We strongly disagree, as you might expect. The thing about progress is that it takes time (and it happens despite naysayers like Wells doing their very best to push us backwards). For example, much of the disruptive force of Resy is just now being felt, as competition amongst the reservation companies have netted restaurants better tech at a tiny fraction of the cost they were paying for this technology a decade ago – with the lucky top-of-the-heap restaurants actually being paid to pick Resy over OpenTable or vice versa. It’s been a decade since Resy was founded.
As for Blackbird, we are hugely optimistic about 2025, because 2024 was a crucial building year for us. In 2023 we started with loyalty tooling and in 2024 we added end-to-end payments tech. As these two functions now combine, the power of the platform is starting to come into view. Here are three big highlights for the past year, among many others:
1.) We made the check-in a habitual behavior for a core audience of early adopters, who were rewarded for their efforts with huge $FLY points balances (nearly 150 million total $FLY was rewarded in 2024). With payments integrated, $FLY is now accepted for check settlement in most of our restaurants (it will be all by the end of 2025).
2.) We introduced the “Purple Puck,” a check-in puck that is exclusively for restaurant industry workers. This may seem like a footnote, but it’s not. We have said that Blackbird is a platform that is being built in partnership with its users, restaurant customers and restaurants. But in this language, we actually miss the third segment of the restaurant industry ecosystem: restaurant workers. How much do we believe in the importance of building something that benefits employees of restaurants? Quite a bit: since we introduced ‘employees only’ check-ins, more than half of all of the rewards we’ve given out have been to restaurant staffers, the beautiful humans who actually deliver all of that “hospitality” we love so much.
3.) Lastly, and in some ways most importantly, we had fun in 2024. Our membership clubs, like Breakfast Club and the Burger League, are awesome. Breakfast Club members have had almost 50,000 coffees together. Burger Leaguers have tasted almost 1,500 burgers across a dozen spots or more. We will lean into these clubs with even more vigor next year, starting with Beer Club, which we dropped a few weeks ago. If you’re already a member of one of our clubs, thank you. If you aren’t in a club yet, or are eyeing expanding your portfolio, we have opened up both Burger League and Beer Club, both heretofore sold out, for the remainder of 2024.
To be sure, there are still big strides to be made in 2025 and beyond, especially if, collectively, we want to build the restaurant economy of the future – one in which every restaurant controls their own financial destiny. No small task, that. But, get there we will, and we will do so with our partners in this endeavor: restaurants, restaurant industry workers, and restaurant customers.
Here’s to good meals in great company in 2025 and beyond. LFG.
-Ben