A Virely research note · Rev 3.0 · July 2026

Earned,
or bought.

Every customer you have ever had arrived one of two ways. Someone told them about you, or you paid to put yourself in front of them. In 2024 the Federal Reserve asked 7,653 small employer firms what their biggest operational problem was, and the answer was finding customers. This page is about the column nobody counts.

The evidenceWork out your own gap
The two columns

One customer
into two.

This isn't referral and loyalty software. It's customer acquisition for businesses that don't have a marketing budget. There are only two ways to get a buyer, and only one of them stops working the day you stop paying.

Earned

  • Someone told them
  • A customer handed them a link
  • They arrived already trusting you
  • Costs nothing to hold
  • Compounds — every new buyer can bring one

Nobody counts this column. That's the gap.

Bought

  • Rented demand — the marketplace owns the customer
  • Rented attention — ads stop, customers stop
  • Discounted — you paid with margin instead of cash
  • Meters forever
  • Resets to zero the day you stop

Counted to three decimal places, by the people selling it to you.

Why this is a systems problem, not a feelings problem. The earned column isn't empty because your customers don't care. It's empty because nothing exists at the moment of a recommendation to prompt it or record it. Two people, a conversation, no receipt. You cannot manage what was never written down — and you cannot even tell whether the last hundred people who walked in were earned or bought.
The evidence

Four numbers.
One funeral.

Rev 1 of this page carried more than twenty statistics. Most couldn't be traced to a primary source, so we cut them. Rev 3 cuts one more — the one this whole page used to be built on. What's left is what we can stand behind, labelled with how much weight it will hold.

57%
of small employer firms named reaching customers and growing sales their top operational challenge in 2024 — ahead of staffing, supply chains, and credit.
Tier A · primary  Federal Reserve Small Business Credit Survey, 2024
7,653 small employer firms, all 50 states. Rev 2 of this page also called it the first time on record that finding customers outranked staffing. The Fed doesn't make that claim; we did. It's gone.
60%
of people who never took part in a referral program say the reason is simple: nobody they know ever handed them a referral code or link.
Tier B · third-party, vendor-funded  impact.com, “Customer referral marketing research: A consumer perspective” (2024)
Two caveats, published rather than waiting to be asked. One: impact.com sells referral software, so this is vendor research and you should read it as such. Two: the methodology is gated and we have not independently verified it. Note also that this figure is widely miscited to impact.com's “State of Referral Marketing 2024” report — that one studies 120 referral programs, not consumers, and does not contain this number. The consumer report is the one to cite.
38,952 / 34,762
Georgia small businesses opened and closed in the most recent year measured. The market isn't shrinking — it's turning over. Roughly 95 doors close a day and slightly more open.
Tier A · primary  U.S. Small Business Administration — Georgia small business profile
Federal administrative data. We're printing the openings next to the closures because the closures alone make a scarier page than the data supports.
1,374,972
small businesses in Georgia — 99.7% of all Georgia businesses. 1,175,541 of them have no employees at all.
Tier A · primary  U.S. Small Business Administration / U.S. Census Bureau
Federal administrative data
83% / 29%
of satisfied customers say they would recommend a business; roughly 29% actually do.
Retired 17 July 2026. This page was built on it. It isn't any more.

We could not find it. It is attributed everywhere to “Texas Tech University” with no paper, no author, no journal, and no consistent year. The earliest appearances we could locate — a 2017 marketing firm's PDF and a May 2018 legal-industry blog — already repeat it as received wisdom, with no citation of their own. A statistic whose oldest known ancestor is somebody quoting it is not evidence. It's folklore with a decimal point.

It was a good number for us. It made the argument for free, and it made it emotionally: they love you and they're not saying so. That's exactly why it needed to go. The replacement claim is narrower, colder, and true: this isn't about whether people would recommend you. It's about whether anyone ever handed them the means to.
The gap, in your business

You cannot name
a single one.

Not one customer, out of everyone you served last month, who you can prove told somebody else about you. That isn't a knock on your record-keeping. Nobody can. The instrument doesn't exist in most small businesses, so the earned column has never been counted once.

Rough is fine. This runs on your number and one piece of third-party research — nothing of ours, because we're pre-launch and have none.

Nobody handed them a link Had the means, chose not to
—
customers served
?
arrived earned — unknown
—
at most, never had a link
What that number is not. It isn't customers you'd gain by buying software, and we're not going to pretend it is. It's an upper bound on how many people left your business last month with no way to bring you a second one — because the 60% figure describes people who didn't refer anyone, and you don't know how many of yours did. That unknown is the product of the same missing instrument. Both halves of this calculator are the same hole.
The uncomfortable half. You cannot tell which customers are in the highlighted group. Not one of them. A recommendation that never happened leaves no trace at all, and neither does the link that was never handed over. That silence is the largest single thing in your marketing, and it is currently unmeasured.
The metric

Earned Growth Rate.

Fred Reichheld invented Net Promoter Score, then spent twenty years watching it get gamed. In Net Promoter 3.0 (Harvard Business Review, November 2021) he conceded the critique and replaced the score with something you can't fake, because it comes off the ledger instead of a survey.

Earned Growth Rate  =  Net Revenue Retention  +  Earned New Customers  −  100%

Not our metric. Reichheld's, published in HBR, five years old, and adopted by companies far larger than anyone reading this. We're pointing at it because of the second term. To compute Earned New Customers you have to know which buyers arrived because somebody told them — and there is exactly one thing that records that at the moment it happens: a referral code with a name attached.

The instrument argument, in one line. Reichheld defined the metric in 2021. Most small businesses still can't calculate it, because the earned column has never been instrumented. That's the whole business we're in.
We'll publish ours. Virely will report its own Earned Growth Rate — the real one, including the quarters it looks bad. A company selling an honesty instrument that won't point it at itself is selling something else. And the Founding 100 will be the first cohort in Georgia to have a measured earned column rather than an estimated one.
Who is telling you this. Virely is pre-launch. We have no customers, no platform data, and nothing to report about how our software performs. Every number on this page is somebody else's research, cited so you can go and check it. When we have our own, it'll be labelled as ours and you can discount it accordingly.
What we built

The instrument.

Dealsby Referrals hands the link over. It records the moment a customer recommends you, names the person who did it, and names the buyer who arrived because of it. It's the only one of our tools that produces a person who has never bought from you before.

1

The link exists

Every customer leaves with something to hand over. That single fact is what the 60% is about — not sentiment, not enthusiasm, not how much they like you. Means.

2

The hand-off is recorded

Who gave it, who used it, what they spent. The conversation still happens between two people; now it leaves a receipt.

3

Your earned column has a number in it

For the first time. Earned New Customers stops being a feeling and starts being a figure you can put next to what you spent on ads.

Our rewards program does not grow your business. We sell one, and we're not going to credit it for growth. The published evidence on rewards programs is weak, and we're not going to be the ones who pretend otherwise. What it honestly does: gives people a reason to come back, and gets you a customer list — probably your first. Those are retention and frequency jobs. They're worth doing. They're not this.
See every source we use Dealsby Referrals