What Is a Promise Score? How Denzify Grades a Market from A to F

Every Denzify report, for any US city and any business type, leads with a Promise Score. It is a market viability score: a single number that answers “does measured customer demand in this market justify opening one more business of this type, given how many already exist?” This page is the canonical definition of the term: what goes into the score, how it maps to a grade, and, just as important, what it does not claim.

Why a ratio and not a competitor count?

Counting competitors alone tells you almost nothing. Forty coffee shops is crowded in a town of 20,000 and sparse in a dense downtown with heavy commuter traffic, we walk through that exact problem in how many coffee shops is too many. What matters is supply relative to demand, so the Promise Score is built as a ratio.

Conceptually, the formula is promise = normalize(demand_score ÷ (supply_score + a small constant)). The small constant keeps the ratio stable where supply is near zero, and normalization rescales results so scores are comparable across markets. The ratio is computed per census tract, a small statistical neighborhood defined by the US Census Bureau, typically home to 1,200–8,000 people, and rolled up for the whole market. The result is displayed on a 0–100 scale with an A–F letter grade.

What goes into demand and supply?

Denzify’s rule is measured data first, estimates labeled. Every input to the score comes from a named public or commercial dataset, not from a guess.

The supply side

Supply is the competitor count within a per-category trade radius around each location, sourced from Google Places, deduplicated, and filtered by primary business type (so a gas station that also sells coffee does not count as a café). The radius reflects how far customers actually travel for that category: about 600 m for a coffee shop, up to 4,000 m for a dentist.

The demand side

Demand combines who lives in the market, how much they earn, who works there during the day, and how much foot traffic passes through.

Three context metrics are reported alongside the score, not inside the ratio. White-space share is the share of populated census tracts (more than 500 residents) with zero competitor within the trade radius, genuine gaps on the map. The income multiplier compares local median household income to the US median. For niche business types, a peer-city benchmark compares your market’s businesses per 10,000 residents against comparable metros, for example, measured coworking rates across 12 peer metros ranged from 0.44 to 1.63 per 10k, with a median around 0.86.

How does the score map to an A–F grade?

The verdict bands are fixed on the raw normalized 0–1 ratio: below 0.3, 0.3 to 0.7, and 0.7 and above. On the 0–100 display, that is below 30, 30–70, and 70+.

The letter grade shown in reports weighs four axes: supply pressure, white-space share, the market gap versus the US benchmark, and demand context. When an axis has missing data, say a foot-traffic source is unavailable for a run, that axis is omitted and the remaining weights are renormalized. Missing data is never faked into the grade.

What does the Promise Score not claim?

Honest limits are part of the methodology, so here they are explicitly:

• It measures market structure, not operator skill. A great operator can win in a C market; a weak one can fail in an A market.
• It cannot see your deal. Rents, lease terms, and the quality of your specific concept are outside the data.
• Niche categories are graded against geographic peers only when the sample is large enough. If too few comparable markets are measurable, Denzify declines to grade rather than invent a norm.
• A C means conditional, not “no.” It flags a market where site selection and differentiation carry the decision.

What does a real Promise Score look like?

Denzify’s public sample report analyzes açaí bowls in Boston. The result: Grade D, 36/100, “Avoid.” The market has 33 competitors inside the city limits, saturated in aggregate, yet 72 populated tracts with zero competition, income at 1.25× the US median, and a daytime population ratio of 1.08×. Read as a whole: crowded on average, with real pockets of unmet demand. That nuance is exactly what a single competitor count would miss.

How is this different from eyeballing Google Maps?

Scrolling the map shows you pins, not demand. It cannot tell you how many people live within each competitor’s trade radius, how income compares to the US median, or whether daytime workers double the effective population. It also double-counts supply (duplicate listings, businesses whose primary type is not really your category) and shows nothing about the tracts with no pins, the white space. A structured market saturation analysis exists precisely to replace that guesswork with measured inputs, and the Promise Score compresses it into one comparable number.

Common questions

Is a C market a no?

No. C is the COMPETITIVE BUT VIABLE band, a conditional go. It means aggregate supply and demand are roughly balanced, so the decision shifts to where inside the market you open and how differentiated your concept is. The Boston açaí sample above sits one band below, a D with 72 zero-competition tracts: even a market that grades as crowded carries real pockets, just not everywhere.

Can two cities’ Promise Scores be compared?

Yes. The methodology is identical for every market: same data sources, same per-category trade radii, same normalization. Comparing a 72 in Raleigh against a 41 in Denver for the same business type is a like-for-like comparison, which is why founders often run several candidate markets before committing to one.

How do I get a Promise Score for my market?

Enter any US city and any business type in the analysis form and the full 12-section report, score, grade, maps, white space, and the context metrics above, arrives by email in minutes. A single report is $149 one-time; a 3-Pack is $349. Details are on the pricing page.