Baton, a marketplace for buying and selling small businesses, has publicly posted valuations and local competitor rankings for two million small businesses across the country: a bid to do for Main Street what Zillow did for the housing market a decade ago.

The launch, called Business Profiles, comes from a company literally built by a former Zillow executive. Chat Joglekar, Baton’s co-founder and CEO, spent years at Zillow before starting Baton, and he’s explicit that he’s running the same playbook: publish a free, public number, and let curiosity do the rest.

“Our biggest competitor isn’t someone else trying to sell small businesses,” Joglekar said. “It’s the small business owner who hasn’t considered selling and thinks the only option is to shut their business down.”

In an interview with Fortune, Joglekar argued the real obstacle isn’t rival marketplaces or traditional brokers, it’s that most owners don’t know Baton exists at all. “Awareness is our biggest competition, not other competitors,” he said. “It’s almost frustrating that millions of small business owners still aren’t aware of us. That’s why we’re so excited about Business Profiles.”

The stakes behind that framing are large. Roughly 41% of the country’s small businesses are owned by baby boomers, or about 2.3 million companies, employing more than 25 million people and holding an estimated $10 trillion in assets. More than half of those owners have no documented plan for what happens next. McKinsey projects some six million small-business transitions are coming by 2035, representing up to $5 trillion in enterprise value. The firm’s data found that fewer than one in three owners has an exit plan, and fewer than one in 10 can name their company’s value within 10% of what it’s actually worth.

McKinsey’s Institute for Economic Mobility found that of the roughly 510,000 small and midsize businesses that exited the market in 2022, 92% simply closed, compared with just 5% that were sold and 3% that transferred to new owners, often within a family. That’s the number Joglekar has in mind when he frames Baton’s real rival. “The competition is kind of the 92% of people that just shut their business down,” he said, a reframing that turns a demographic crisis into a market opportunity, and positions Baton not against brokers or rival marketplaces but against inertia itself.

Baton says it has data to close the gap: millions of data points on small businesses, including estimated revenue, team size and customer satisfaction, plus tens of thousands of comparable sales, all folded into a public valuation and a local competitive stack rank. Type in a business name, and an owner can see roughly what it’s worth and how it stacks up against the shop down the street, all before they’ve ever talked to Baton, listed anything, or paid a cent.

“Over the past five years, we’ve built the most sophisticated database of small business valuations in America,” Joglekar said, “and we’re hopeful that by revealing this data we can get small business owners to start thinking about their company as a valuable asset.”

The free valuations are a funnel, not the whole business. If an owner decides to sell, Baton runs the process for a monthly retainer and a success fee. The company has operated for nearly five years, has worked on hundreds of sales, and is now closing seven deals a week—a notable jump from the roughly 2,000 valuations and 100 total sales Baton had reported just months earlier, a gap worth clarifying directly with the company.

To be sure, small businesses are a messier asset than houses. There’s no MLS, no standardized square footage, no comparable-sale database anyone can query for free. Baton’s valuations lean on inputs like PPP loan data and other public records—not an owner’s actual financials, which the company only incorporates if and when someone claims their listing and engages. That means the first number two million owners see may be closer to a guess than an appraisal, generated for businesses that never asked to be valued in public.

For its part, Zillow discloses a median error rate of roughly 2% for homes currently on the market—but that number climbs to around 7% for homes that aren’t listed, and the company’s own fine print says only 99% of Zestimates land within 20% of the actual sale price.

Baton’s counter is that a rough number beats no number. The company points to owners who had no idea what they were sitting on—sellers who came in through an early, low-commitment version of this product, tested buyer interest, and ended up with real offers.

“If every small business in America understood their valuation, I believe the U.S. would be a better place,” Joglekar told Fortune. “It’s such a key bit of information that’s locked away and almost hidden from small business owners, even as they grow … most of the supply is ill-equipped for that discussion. We’re just trying to equip them.”

Whether the new public valuations hold up as more of that data becomes visible—or whether Baton ends up relitigating the same accuracy debate Zillow has fought for years—is the test Business Profiles is now setting up for itself, in full public view, two million times over.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com