Where do my customers come from?
MISD FOR BUSINESS · UPDATED
For most physical businesses the answer is: from closer than you think, from a handful of neighborhoods that produce most of your visits, and the mix changes by day and hour. Tuesday lunch and Saturday night are usually two different maps.
There are two ways to get your own answer. You can assemble it yourself from things you already collect, which costs time and sees only the customers you captured. Or you can measure the aggregate crowd around your address, which is what Pulse does. Both are covered below, honestly.
What do you already collect that answers this?
Delivery orders, reservations, and online orders carry addresses or ZIP codes. Loyalty signups usually have a ZIP field. Export three months of them, drop the ZIPs into any free mapping tool, and you have a first sketch of your trade area in an afternoon.
The sketch is real but skewed: it over-represents regulars and people who order ahead, and says nothing about the walk-ins who paid cash and left.
Which one question should you ask, and when?
A single question at checkout or the host stand works better than any survey form: "what part of town did you come from tonight?" Keep it to one question, have staff note answers for two normal weeks, and you'll learn more than most owners ever know about their own room.
The catch is discipline. Busy shifts stop collecting first, which means your busiest crowds are exactly the ones you don't capture.
What do the built-in tools show, and what do they miss?
A Google Business Profile shows roughly where people were when they searched for directions to you. Social profiles show follower cities. Both are free and worth a look, and both are coarse: platform-level areas, searchers rather than visitors, and no sense of how the mix shifts across the week.
What all the manual methods share
They describe customers you already captured. None of them can see the crowd that moves around your address every day: the people who could be your customers, where they concentrate, and which neighborhoods are growing or fading around you. That outside view is the difference between knowing your regulars and knowing your market.
What does Pulse do automatically?
Pulse measures aggregate crowd movement around your address, built on the Misd network: crowds, never people. Every Sunday your briefing answers "where did visitors come from?" and "which neighborhoods matter most?" in plain sentences, with the evidence behind each answer and one concrete thing to do. No exports, no mapping tools, no clipboard at the host stand.