One market, read end to end.
Every company we work with has its own definition of an ideal customer. We turn the measurable half of that definition into questions, then read every company in a market against them, month after month, recording where each answer came from and when. Everything below came out of one such build, running on somebody else’s market so that you can pick it apart before you ever talk to us.
What is invented, and what is not.
The only invented thing is the company doing the selling. We will not put a real client’s market on display, so we made one up instead: TieOut, a company that sells software to help a bank merge its record keeping after it buys another bank. Its customers are US community banks. The research is written for TieOut, so its name and the names of its products appear throughout.
Everything else is real. The banks are real companies, the filings are real public records, and the dates are real. Where the research couldn’t answer something, we left the gap on the page rather than filling it in.
What the build produced.
From the run that finished on 21 September 2026. The market was read between 18 and 21 September, and is read again every month.
What is in it.
There are eight ways into the same piece of research. Start wherever you’re most skeptical.
The standard
We list every trait we measured, explain why each one can be checked before a conversation ever happens, and show the ones we tried and threw out.
An account
We read one company in full and explain every finding in plain English, each backed by the record it came from. The questions we couldn’t answer are in there too.
The segments
We found four distinct groups inside this market, sized each one, and set out what each group has a live reason to care about. Seventeen companies the evidence could not place are reported as their own line.
The sources
We list every kind of source we used, what each one gives you, and what each one won’t tell you.
The study
This is the study we published, in which the whole market is measured against the same standard.
Explore
You can filter, compare and dig into the evidence yourself rather than taking our word for any of it.
Score yourself
You can score your own company against the standard and see where you’d land.
The plan
This is the plan we’d have sent the company on day one, before any of this research existed.
One finding, and where it came from.
The account page reads a single company in full. This is one line out of it, shown the way every line is shown: what we found in plain English, the record underneath it, and the date it was read.
Serial acquirer, three absorptions in three years
MetBuying banks is something it does regularly, not something that happened once. That makes it a repeat customer rather than a one-off sale.
Heartland Tri-State (FDIC-assisted merger, 2023-07-28, $139.4M), BancCentral (merger, 2025-06-20, $243.0M, 4 branches), Bank of the Plains branch purchase (2026-02-13, $445.6M), plus 2 branch closings and 1 branch sold.
Anyone could find this one. It is three dated lines in a public federal record, and the link goes straight to them. What can’t be done by hand is the same work on every company in a market, refreshed every month, with the source and the date still attached to each answer. That is the part we build.
Your market, read end to end.
Everything above came out of one build, on one market. Your market plan is where the same work starts on yours: what we would measure, which slice of your market is worth owning first, and how much of it public evidence could settle before anyone is contacted.