What each one
actually outputs.
Not "features." Output — the thing that exists after the software runs. Only one of these three is a new customer. The shaded row isn't a fourth platform; it's a feature inside the first one, and it gets judged by the same rule as everything else.
| Platform | What it does | What comes out |
|---|---|---|
| AcquiresDealsby Referrals Grows you | Puts a link, a code or a table tent in your customer's hand, records the moment they pass it on, and asks the ones who would have but never did. The gap it closes is mechanical, not emotional: 60% of people who didn't take part in a referral program say nobody they know ever handed them a code or a link. Source: impact.com, Customer referral marketing research: A consumer perspective (2024). Vendor research, gated methodology — why we still cite it, and what we dropped to get here. |
A person who has never bought from younew buyer · net new |
| ↳ Inside ReferralsPoints and rewards Doesn't grow you | It ships inside Dealsby Referrals and we're not going to let the row above launder it. Points don't bring you anyone. What they honestly do: give people a reason to come back sooner, and — for most of the businesses we talk to — build a customer list for the first time, which is the thing you need before any of this works. |
A customer you already had, back soonerfrequency · not net new |
| ServesDealsby Appointments Doesn't grow you | Takes the booking at 11pm, holds the slot, sends the reminder, collects the deposit. It doesn't find anyone. It stops you losing the ones you already found. |
A customer you already had, keptretained · not net new |
| ServesDealsby Reservations Doesn't grow you | Turns the table on time, holds the floor plan honest, promotes the waitlist when someone cancels. Capacity, not demand. |
A seat that would have sat emptyutilization · not net new |
Start with the
problem you have.
Not the one we'd rather sell you. If the answer is "none of these yet," that's a real answer and it's below too.
| The problem you actually have | What you need |
|---|---|
| Enough people walk in — you just lose them to no-shows, phone tag and after-hours calls you never return. | Appointments. Not Referrals. |
| You're full at 7pm and empty at 5, the book is on paper, and cancellations sit as dead tables all night. | Reservations. Not Referrals. |
| Your regulars love you and would tell people — but you have no way to hand them anything, and no idea who came from whom. | Referrals. This is the one. |
| You don't know a single customer's name or number. No list, nothing to send. | Referrals — for the list first, growth second. |
| Nobody comes back, and the ones who do don't rate the product enough to mention it. | None of ours. Fix the product. |
| You need 50 customers by Friday. | None of ours. That's ads, and they'll cost you. |
There's already a
number for this.
If growth means new buyers, you need a figure that counts them and refuses credit for everything else. One exists, it isn't ours, and it's the reason the architecture above is built the way it is.
Earned Growth Rate
Published by Fred Reichheld in Harvard Business Review, November 2021 — "Net Promoter 3.0," the article where the man who invented NPS conceded that a satisfaction score can't be audited and replaced it with something that can.
The metric is Reichheld's and HBR's, not ours — we didn't invent it and we don't own it. You can compute it on paper without buying anything from us. We'd just rather you compute it than take a vendor's word for anything, including ours.
We used to draw you
a flywheel.
It looked great. Acquire → Schedule → Experience → Retain → and round again, each turn bigger than the last. Every vendor in this category has one.
Here's the problem with it
A circle implies every stage causes the next one. It implies that a good experience mechanically produces a referral, that retention feeds acquisition, that the whole thing compounds on its own if you just buy all four quadrants.
The marketing science doesn't support that. Businesses grow by increasing the number of people who buy from them. Serving your existing customers well is necessary — it isn't growth, and a diagram that blurs the two is doing sales work, not explaining anything.
So we took ours down. The table above is what's left when you remove the arrows that were doing the arguing.
What we removed, and why
We're publishing our own corrections rather than quietly editing pages.
| What | Status | Why |
|---|---|---|
| The flywheel diagram | Removed | Implied causation between stages that the evidence doesn't support. |
| "83% would refer, 29% do" (attributed to Texas Tech) | Removed July 2026 | We could not find it. No paper, no author, no journal, no consistent year — the earliest appearances already repeat it as received wisdom. We ran it ourselves before we caught it. Replaced with the sourced figure in the architecture above. |
| Growth claims for points | Never made again | Points don't produce a new buyer. See the shaded row above. |
The full account is in the press kit.
Standalone by design.
Three platforms. The Virely Growth Suite isn't a fourth product — it's what we call it when you run more than one, and the only thing it changes is the bill. No shared customer data. No cross-platform dependencies. No forced bundling. Take one, two, or all three — and the customer records belong to your business, not to us and not to a marketplace.
Dealsby Referrals
The only one that brings you someone new.
- Referral links, codes and table tents
- Native iOS and Android apps
- Referral Pulse analytics — measured in referred new buyers (Growth)
- Points and rewards — for frequency and your customer list, not growth
Dealsby Appointments
Stops you losing the ones you already have.
- 24/7 booking on any device
- Stripe deposits protect the calendar
- SMS and email reminders
- Self-service reschedule and cancel
Dealsby Reservations
Capacity, turned honestly.
- Floor plans and live availability
- 75-minute turn logic, DSBY codes
- Waitlist with automatic promotion
- Adaptive terminology, 14 industries
Flat monthly.
No cut of your customers.
One platform on Starter is $59/mo. All three is $177/mo, or $141.60 with the 20% suite discount — $35.40 off. No contracts, month to month, cancel and your data exports with you.
| What's included | What costs extra |
|---|---|
| Every feature in your tier | SMS beyond your monthly allowance (pay-as-you-go) |
| Unlimited customers and staff logins | Email beyond your monthly allowance (pay-as-you-go) |
| Your customer data, exportable any time | Nothing per referral, per booking, per cover, per transaction |
Be one of the
hundred we measure.
We're pre-launch. The first hundred businesses on Dealsby Referrals are the only cohort we'll ever have that was measured from day one — before the software, during, after. That's where our first real number comes from, and we'd rather earn it than estimate it.
What you get, and what we ask
You get: Founding 100 pricing held for as long as you stay, direct access to the people building it, and your baseline measured before you start — so the number at the end is yours to keep, whatever it says.
We ask: permission to publish your results in aggregate, anonymously, as part of the Georgia Earned Growth Index. Not testimonials. Numbers.
One email when there's something real to show you. No drip sequence, no launch countdown. Unsubscribe in one click. 18+ — all three Dealsby platforms require subscribers and their customers to be 18 or over.
Running a floor or a calendar instead? Reservations and Appointments stand alone — you don't need Referrals to use either, and we won't pretend otherwise to move you up a tier.