Hyper-Niche Comps & Rarity Scoring

Hi everyone, I wanted to share a couple of new tools I’ve developed to better assess public deals. **Quick Background** What started as a private tool has become a public business listing search engine that allows normal language search (“find a plumbing business in Milwaukee with over 500k cf”) and returns hyper-specific results from across the web. **Hyper-niche Comps** Most comps are based on very broad industry buckets (Food & Beverage, Fitness, Education, etc.). In practice, those averages are often misleading. A generic "Fitness" multiple doesn't help much when you're valuing something like a martial arts studio with recurring memberships, low capex, and owner involvement. Using overly broad comps can easily lead to bad pricing assumptions. Instead of industry-level comps, we break listings into much narrower peer groups and link every listing to one of these clusters. For example: "Fitness" → Martial Arts & Dance Studios "Automotive" → Car Washes vs Repair Shops When you open a listing, you can now see how it compares to its actual peers (e.g., martial arts studios trading at a median 3.1x cash flow multiple), along with historical trends for that specific niche. **Rarity Scoring** How typical is a given listing? Does a new, similar one pop up every day or once a quarter? If I pass on this, how likely am I to see another one like it soon? We now label each cluster as Common, Uncommon, or Rare based on how often similar listings appear. It's not a quality score, but helpful for deciding when to wait versus when to act. These are both metrics we wanted to see when assessing public deal flow, and we hope they can be useful for you too. **What’s Next** We quietly opened up the beta program to the SearchFunder community a few months ago to see if this was something useful. Since then the platform has seen over 1,000 searches! Given the level of engagement and feedback on the project, we have decided to move this from a side hobby to a professional endeavor. This means more focused time on expanding data sources and deep analytical features to help find businesses. This also means we will be moving to a subscription model early in the new year. But fear not! If you’ve signed up (for free) to get daily notifications of new deals, you will automatically get access to Founder pricing (life time discount). And basic search will remain free forever. As always, feedback is welcome — especially if there's a comparison or metric that would make this more useful for your search. https://firmflare.com