Is this a thing? I’m doing some market research on some competitors in a niche, and a few of them are listing massive customer numbers (10,000+) on their sites that don’t seem to line up. This is in a 90% B2B, 10% B2C vertical.

From my due diligence, the competitors in question are small startups, that have been around for less than a few years. They don’t have VC funding that could explain the massive customer base vis-a-vis their headcount, and the customer / brand logos they have listed on their sites seem tangentially related to this vertical, at best.

From what I know about sweat equity, it can take decades to build up a thousand customers - yeah, you can do that warp speed with VC funding and the right sales team / strategy - but these numbers don’t add up. For what it’s worth, if you’re in a majority B2B space and have 10K+ customers, odds are we would have heard about you through the grapevine.

Is this commonplace, for startups (or businesses in general) to artificially inflate their customer base on a marketing site or claim customers that they don’t actually have based on the vertical? (for example, a wedding planning software claiming a law enforcement agency as their customer, wildly impractical). Is this even legal to make these claims?

Note: this is nothing I want to do, just trying to understand if this is just how the kool kids do marketing these days.