Founding 100
Virely · Atlanta, Georgia

Earned,
not bought.

Every customer your business has ever had is one of two things. You paid to rent someone's attention — or somebody you served well told a friend.

You know exactly what the first kind cost you. Now count the second kind.

Count what you earned Read what we don't claim
Customers — Bought Illustrative example · one month
Paid social$310.00
Search ads$142.00
Marketplace fees$96.00
Discount codes$52.00
Total$600.00
Every line tracked. Every line timed.
Stops the day you stop paying. Illustrative figures for a hypothetical single-location business. Not a customer's results and not a prediction — your costs will differ.
Customers — Earned Same month
No receipt was issued.
Two people · a conversation · no record
Nobody counted a single one. That's the whole problem. We can't tell you what this column is worth to your business, and neither can anyone else — because nothing in a normal business writes it down.
The one number on this page

They would. They don't.

Ask any owner where their new customers come from and they'll answer without thinking. Ask how many they got last month and the room goes quiet.

60%

Never got handed a link

Of people who didn't take part in a referral program, 60% say the reason is simple: nobody they know ever sent them a code or a link. Not scepticism. Not indifference. Nothing arrived.

That's not a people problem, and it isn't about whether your customers like you. It's that nothing exists at the moment of a recommendation to carry it — or to count it.

Source: impact.com, Customer referral marketing research: A consumer perspective (2024) — impact.com/research-reports.

Two things you should know before you weigh that number, which we'd rather say than be asked. One: it's vendor research — impact.com sells referral software, as do we, and it is in both our interests for this figure to be large. Two: the full methodology is gated, so we can't independently verify the sample or the wording of the question.

We used to run a different pair of figures here — the widely quoted 83%/29% referral gap. We removed it. It's attributed everywhere to Texas Tech University with no paper, no author and no consistent year behind it, and the earliest appearances we could find were already repeating it as received wisdom. A page arguing that unverifiable numbers are the problem can't rest on one. The full account is in the press kit.
Bought growth

Renting isn't owning.

Buying customers isn't wrong. We'll buy some ourselves, and we'll say so when we do. But be clear about what you're buying — because none of it accumulates.

01 — Rented demand

The marketplace

It brings you a diner. It takes a cut of every plate. And it keeps the diner.

“You paid to meet somebody you're not allowed to keep.”
02 — Rented attention

The ad account

It works exactly as long as you're paying. Stop, and traffic returns to where it started. Six months of spend, nothing accumulated.

“That's not growth. That's a subscription to demand.”
03 — Theatre

The punch card

It rewards the people who were already walking in. It feels like marketing. It's a discount on business you already had.

“We sell one of these too. Keep reading — we're going to tell on ourselves.”
Earned growth

One customer
becomes two.

A recommendation is the only thing in marketing that produces a person who has never bought from you, from someone you already served well, without renting anyone's attention to do it. That isn't a nice sentiment. It's the only mechanism on this page that compounds.

124816

Somebody tells somebody

It already happens, and it has always been invisible — which is exactly why no one can tell you how much of the business it accounts for.

The moment gets a record

A link, a code, a table tent. Something exists now where nothing did before.

You can finally count it

Not points. Not clicks. People who had never bought from you, buying.

The part other vendors won't print

Our rewards program
does not grow your business.

We sell two mechanisms and they're usually spoken about as one thing. They aren't. Here's the honest version, on our own website, where you can hold us to it.

This grows you

The referral engine

A customer brings in somebody who has never bought from you. The result is a new person in your door.

  • Output: a first-time customer
  • The only thing that makes a business bigger
  • Judge us on this number, and no other
This doesn't

The points and rewards

A customer earns rewards for coming back. They were, in all likelihood, already coming back.

  • The evidence that rewards programs drive growth is weak, and we're not going to pretend otherwise
  • What it actually does: gives people a reason to return
  • What it really does: gets you a customer list instead of a drawer of receipts
On the evidence: Byron Sharp, How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don't Know (Oxford University Press, 2010), and the wider Ehrenberg-Bass Institute work on which it draws, find that brands grow chiefly by reaching more buyers rather than by deepening repeat purchase among existing ones — and that measured rewards-program effects are small. We think that's right, which is why we won't sell you the second half as growth.
Every competitor we have claims both halves. We're claiming one, because one is what the evidence supports. We'd rather sell you a smaller true thing than a bigger false one — and if the rewards half is what you wanted, the honest answer might be that you don't need us at all.

— Brenton Wright, Founder & CEO, Virely
Count what you earned

The metric big companies use,
and you can't.

In 2021 Harvard Business Review published Earned Growth Rate — the share of your growth that came from customers you earned rather than bought. Companies with customer-based accounting can work it out. Almost no small business can. Try it. Nothing to sign up for, and nothing leaves your browser.

Earned growth estimator
01
02
03
04
05
06
Earned share of new customers
30%
Question 2 ÷ question 1.
Cost per bought customer
$21
All of last month's spend, divided only by the customers you bought. Some of that spend probably helped earn the others too — we're deliberately not giving ourselves that credit.
Earned growth rate
+2%
Net revenue retention 90% + earned new customers 12% − 100%.
If you answered question 2 from memory, you guessed. Everybody does — there's nothing in a normal business that records the moment one customer tells another, so the number doesn't exist to look up. That's not a failure of attention. It's a missing instrument. A referral code is the instrument.
Earned Growth Rate is not ours. Fred Reichheld, Darci Darnell & Maureen Burns, “Net Promoter 3.0,” Harvard Business Review, November–December 2021 — where Reichheld, who created Net Promoter Score, set out its weaknesses and proposed an accounting-based measure in its place. Earned Growth Rate = Net Revenue Retention + Earned New Customers − 100%.

What this estimator does with your answers: it treats question 4 ÷ question 5 as net revenue retention, and question 3 ÷ question 5 as earned new customers. Both are proxies. Real customer-based accounting cohorts every customer and follows them across periods; six boxes on a web page can't. Treat the output as an order of magnitude, not a figure for a board pack.
Our own number. We publish Virely's earned growth rate here, on the same page where we ask you to compute yours. If we're not willing to show ours, this whole section is a sales pitch.
Pricing

Flat monthly.
No cut of your customers.

Three platforms. Each does one job properly. Take one or take all three — they work on their own and they work together.

Dealsby Referrals

Counts the customers who came because somebody told them — and hands the ones who would have, but didn't, something to send.

$59/mo
Growth tier $99/mo
  • Referral links, codes and in-store table tents
  • Native iOS and Android apps
  • Referral Pulse analytics (Growth)
  • 1 location · email outreach included

Dealsby Appointments

Takes bookings at 11pm on a Tuesday, and makes sure the 2:30 actually shows up.

$59/mo
Growth tier $99/mo
  • 24/7 online booking on any device
  • Deposits to protect the calendar
  • Automatic SMS and email reminders
  • Self-service rescheduling

Dealsby Reservations

Smart availability and turn logic for restaurants and venues, with language that matches your industry.

$59/mo
Growth $99/mo · Enterprise $399/mo
  • Floor plans and real-time availability
  • 75-minute turn logic and confirmation codes
  • Waitlist with automatic guest promotion
  • Recurring bookings for your regulars
  • Adaptive terminology across 14 industries
All three together: $141/mo — 20% off $177.
The customer record belongs to your business. Not to us, and not to a marketplace.

Prices in USD, current as of July 2026, and subject to change. Communication add-ons: Small $25/mo · Medium $55/mo · Large $115/mo. Pay-as-you-go $0.025 per SMS, $0.001 per email.

Georgia first

We're taking
100 businesses.

Not thousands. One hundred — because the founder is giving every one of them his mobile number, and there are only so many hours in a week.

Your price never goes up

Not locked for a year. Locked for as long as you stay subscribed. When our prices rise, yours doesn't.

Applies to the platforms on your account at signup, at the tier you signed up on. Add a platform or move up a tier later and that part is priced at the rate then current. Taxes and usage-based communication charges aren't covered. Full terms: virely.co/founding-100-terms

You get the founder's number

Not a ticket queue. His actual phone.

One mobile number, one founder, up to 100 businesses. He answers when he's awake, and he'll tell you when he can't.

You'll know what you earned

Referral software isn't new and we won't pretend it is. What's rare is a small business that can answer “how many of last month's customers came because somebody told them” with a number instead of a shrug. You'll be able to.

What we want in return. It isn't a testimonial.

We want you to tell us when it doesn't work.

We'd rather hear it from you in week three than find out from a reporter in month nine.

Count what you earned first Apply for the Founding 100
Closes September 30, 2026 — full or not. Georgia businesses · United States only · 18+