Interview with
Dan Delaney
Founder, BrisketLab, Delaney Barbecue, Delaney Chicken
Interview by Kenny Chung
Interview with
Dan Delaney
Fouder, BrisketLab, Delaney Barbecue, Delaney Chicken
Interview by Kenny Chung
Dan Delaney burst onto the NYC food scene in 2012 with his pop-up concept BrisketLab, where he pre-sold meat by the half pound and set up events at bars and office spaces. Since then, he moved onto permanent spaces including his barbecue restaurant BrisketTown in Brooklyn, and several Delaney Chicken restaurants, serving fried chicken sandwiches. I spoke with him over the phone in September 2019, as he was in Mexico City preparing for a new burger restaurant concept. We discussed how BrisketLab came to fruition, and the importance of creating pre-launch buzz and email marketing in general.
BrisketLab was such a unique concept. How did you come up with the idea?
Before I brought up my smoker from Texas, I was talking to a lot of friends in the barbecue restaurant space. They told me there would be a lot of potential problems with doing it the way I originally wanted to, especially in the eyes of the health department. I didn’t have the money or infrastructure to build a real kitchen. BrisketLab had a more elusive feel largely as a result of practical reasons – from me not wanting to get in trouble with the law. But the result was that it also created buzz and extra excitement.
Heading into the summer of 2012, I remember reading about BrisketTown on Twitter and in food blogs. How did you originally seed the idea and get the word out?
Before starting on this endeavour, I had already been making video content for the internet and writing an email newsletter [called Eater’s Digest], so I was quasi-connected. I also studied and have a degree in technology, so it was pretty much in my wheelhouse.
Did you reach out to journalists specifically?
I had emailed most mainstream publications like the [New York] Times and Eater, and I said “we’re about to do the most exciting food event of the summer in New York City. If you don’t write about it, your audience will be frustrated that they didn’t hear about it.” And it worked, and they wrote about it.
Delaney Barbecue catering. Photo courtesy of DanielDelaney.com
A screenshot of the BrisketLab website from DanielDelaney.com
How did the website play into your marketing?
I wasn’t sure how I would do fundraising, but I wanted to get a read on the response from potential constituents. So what I did was launch a “coming soon” website to collect email addresses. We collected over 7,000 email addresses over a week. We realized that if we just dumped those people into Kickstarter, they would feel disappointed because they thought they were signing up for something more exclusive. I was also worried that people wouldn’t be looking to buy a lot of meet, and that there needed to be urgency.
How did you foster immediacy?
We built a proprietary web interface that let us query our inventory of meat to display on our homepage. When people made a purchase, the quantity of remaining meat went down. We also built a calculator because we feared people would just buy one pound and that wouldn’t be enough funding for us. We let people specify how many events they wanted to go with and the number of friends they would bring. It would then suggest an amount of meat; the average order was three pounds of meat, or $75 worth.
And did you also leverage your email list?
To keep up the idea of FOMO [fear of missing out], I started to send out emails 500 at a time. It would tell people “you’re the first 500 people and we’re giving you access to the website for an hour, and then we’ll invite the next 500 people.”
Once BrisketLab was over, did you use your email lists to gauge interest in a brick-and-mortar location?
The truth was I didn’t start BrisketLab with the goal of starting BrisketTown or to become a business owner. I did BrisketTown because I had all these people saying BrisketLab was the best barbecue they’ve ever had and that I should keep doing it. “Here’s a check, why don’t you open a restaurant?”
How did your marketing efforts change once you opened a physical restaurant?
Very differently. It was a combination of right place, right time. We opened up when New York City was starting to become hungry for barbecue. I was gladly accepting tons of press; if someone wanted to write something, I would always do interviews. The unusual way we got our funding made for a good story.
BrisketTown in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Photo courtesy of DanielDelaney.com
Why did you continue with email marketing instead of other channels?
I’ve always felt when people say they spend nothing on marketing, that’s a stupid attitude. Marketing is a smart thing, not a bad thing. In general, email is the best form of marketing. You can have a captive, focused audience willing to engage with whatever you’re selling. That’s better than any ad you’re placing on Facebook or Instagram.
I remember your emails had a unique and personal tone. Was that done intentionally?
Email was a way to create intimacy with the brand. They were written by me in a casual, first-person narrative. You may be hard-pressed to find another restaurant in New York that had patrons that felt as connected to a restaurant as those going to BrisketLab and BrisketTown. It felt like being part of a club.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
I transitioned to brick-and-mortar knowing literally nothing about running a restaurant or about business. If I had the opportunity to do it again, I wish I would have somebody to help me navigate the waters more. There was never a business plan. I didn’t understand how much to charge. I built it totally wrong.
How did those experiences inform your next project?
We’re about to open up a new restaurant in Mexico City, but I’m doing it with a restaurant group, not as a solo act. We have a team of people running the restaurant, so that’s not my job anymore. It’s quite different!
