CheapEats Restaurant Guides

As Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Alexa created the CheapEats Restaurant Guides Series and blog network as guides to good quality inexpensive restaurants where real people eat all the time.

Community and crowd-sourcing are at the heart of CheapEats Restaurant Guides, since the guides are designed to share the best places to eat cheap in cities with a wide range and number of cuisines, neighbourhoods and restaurants. Alexa has built communities of CheapEaters in each city building on the proven concept that involvement creates advocates.

Alexa manages remote teams CheapEaters — these teams are made up of 15 20 writers per city and 10 15 copy editors for the writing and production of 5 best-selling editions of CheapEats Restaurant Guides.

In addition to running the business and curating the content, Alexa has created a customised and innovative digital workflow for production and content creation to allow the CheapEats teams to participate in each stage of development of the final guides.

As founder, publisher and editor-in-chief, Alexa conceived of, created, built, lead, wrote, and developed CheapEats’s unique crowd-sourcing approach. Alexa marketed the guides including creating the promotional strategy, selling and pitching. Alexa sought out and gained celebrity endorsement (through participation) and established a professional yet accessible and authentic tone and voice for CheapEats.

CheapEats resonated in the marketplace and generated sales, media interest, influencer and consumer engagement.

CheapEats Restaurant Guides became bestsellers in two markets with over 15,000 copies sold. Alexa continues to innovate on her proven model with new approaches and CheapEats editions in development.

Alexa is a pleasure to work with, and write for she made reviewing for CheapEats Toronto entertaining and educational at the same time. I enjoyed the experience so much Im back for the third edition of the book.

Jennifer SudburyWriter

Ive worked with Alexa on a few projects over the past decade. Alexa’s the true innovator, keen collaborator, and gifted community-builder every marketer and PR professional dreams of having on their team. She’s extraordinarily thorough and strategic in her work, yet very efficiency-minded and willing to take calculated risks. She brings deep insight and Einstein-like technological smarts to the table, but she’s able to translate the most complex ideas into very simple explanations with context and a great sense of humour.

Above all, I always appreciate the heart and soul Alexa brings to the table. Particularly in our work together on Second Harvest’s Toronto Taste, it helps tremendously in keeping our team enthusiastic and focused on the cause.

Anna Withrow,Communications Strategist Business Developer