Resy
Ben Leventhal started as a food blogger covering New York City's restaurant scene in the early 2000s. What began as a hobby evolved into Eater, which grew into "a snarkily influential voice in the dining world" and expanded to cover restaurants in multiple cities. Through building Eater, Leventhal developed deep insights into the restaurant industry and recognized a critical problem: many restaurants struggle to survive.
Leveraging his understanding of the dining world, Leventhal co-founded Resy, a booking app designed to help restaurants squeeze more value from their seats. The initial strategy was to charge diners higher rates for access to hot, in-demand tables—essentially applying dynamic pricing to restaurant reservations.
The premium pricing model flopped. Diners weren't willing to pay more for reservations at popular restaurants. Rather than abandon the business, the team pivoted rapidly, shifting their approach to find a business model that actually resonated with their market.
The pivot eventually paid off. Resy became successful enough to attract the attention of American Express, which acquired the company for $200 million in 2019—a significant validation of the platform's value to the restaurant industry.
- •Deep domain expertise from running Eater gave Leventhal credibility and insight into restaurant pain points that outsiders would miss, enabling him to identify a real problem worth solving.
- •The usage-based pricing model aligned incentives with restaurant value creation rather than trying to extract surplus from diners, making the solution genuinely useful to the actual customer.
- •Enterprise-direct sales allowed Resy to build strong relationships with restaurants as true partners, letting them demonstrate tangible value and iterate based on direct feedback from the decision-makers.
- 1.Spend significant time working within or deeply observing your target industry before founding, so you can distinguish between assumed problems and real pain points that customers will pay to solve.
- 2.When your initial monetization model fails, pivot the pricing structure rather than the product—test whether the problem is real but your approach to capturing value is wrong.
- 3.Sell directly to enterprise customers in your target market and use their feedback to refine your solution, creating advocates who understand and evangelize your value proposition.
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