Fitness funnel fatigue
I'm so tired of being in someone’s purchase funnel. You probably are too. And although we have tried different methods to grow, I’ve been mostly disgusted with what experts will advise on how to do it.
I was motivated to make OLLIN grow because I believed that more eyes would reveal its value and eventually help it evolve into something greater than I could do or see on my own. More coaches, more athletes, more training, and, yes, more cash flow—because almost every development I envision requires capital.
This is a bootstrapped business. It exists with no loans and no investors. It's funded by myself and all of the members who see its value, not just with their money but also with their words and contributions. To this day, I have not taken any money from OLLIN for myself; it is a passion project by definition. And although I’ve dreamed about it taking off and being a monolith, it seems that growth is not always straightforward, and that my first vision of the path is not the last.
In an attempt to gain more traction, I had to learn quite a few things: how to make it appealing to the average person, how to make it easier to understand, and eventually, what I truly wanted it to be. I had to go to school.
It turns out there are quite a few side effects to this process, not the least of which is a rising animosity toward a world that increasingly looks like one giant purchase funnel. It is obvious to anyone that the world is shifting from an anonymous, bureaucratic engine that feeds you what you want, to an individual brand based on a personal name and hype machine. I don’t think I know of one person that doesn’t ache from the fatigue of consumption or that hasn’t become increasingly skeptical of purchasing because they have been tricked so many times by clever marketing and terrible delivery. Despite my hesitation, I pushed forward into the world of scaling.
How do you educate yourself on subjects that are rot with cringe worthy tactics? If you Google: “how to market or how to sell” surely, you will be put in front of the very system you seek to avoid. So I started paying attention to brands that I respected. I realized that they broke up the task of acquiring a customer into a few categories: Marketing (signalling to the population what you sell and how valuable it is), selling (collecting payment your product or service), and Continuity (repeat customers), because no business can be successful without a predictable influx of income.
In educating myself on marketing, I found that there are very few "real" methods. Most marketing boils down to exploiting basic human desires (sex, food, rage, or fear) or hijacking the autonomic nervous system with attention-grabbing sequences that appeal to the subconscious need for closure. The last tried-and-true technique is to just overwhelm the market with your message, as many believe a market is "captured" by whoever can spend the most on acquiring a customer—admittedly—this is only an option for very large companies with expendable resources.
After dabbling with all sorts of structures, I landed back on just making stuff that I enjoyed watching and making. I figured if I liked it, someone like me might like it, too, and want more of it. All the brands that I respect are unapologetic in their authenticity—but this does not mean they are “successful”, and this is difficult to see from the outside. Just because you have an audience does not infer that you are profitable. Getting attention to your brand and communicating its value effectively is only a fraction of the battle, you also have to have the margin to exist in an ever changing market and economy. This is where most people do not understand business. They see top line revenue, and if they are “advanced” they see what the business cost to run. But there is actually a cost in acquiring a customer, and without this metric, no business can escape shrinking margins, inflation, or the colossal disasters that affect every small business—like a pandemic for instance.
When I say something “works” what I mean is that you were able to attract an unknown person to inquire about what you do, and then that person felt compelled to purchase your product. But what I really discovered is that this is the short view. Most business ends at the point of sale, and because of this, they have high turnover. What I want to “work” is that someone finds our stuff, as time goes on they become more engaged and more enamoured in the concepts and the ideas—in other words, our value increases over time. This is the opposite of most commerce, where I am excited by the notion that someone has created a fix for my specific problem, and then as time goes on, I become increasingly more disappointed with the product, the company, or the service.
The aim is not to find a customer, but to find a cult member. They not only continue to be a part of our project, but they have found so much value that they tell others who could have similarly insightful experiences.
This is organic growth. It is slow—painfully—because it is usually predicated on the quality of product and the personality of the purchaser, but it maintains the most consistent business with the least churn and the lowest overhead. It is also what we have done by accident, which is why I find the inorganic market so, well, inorganic. The idea is that as long as your product is good, you can market correctly and grow faster—the reality is that you must jump through an ever changing obstacle course of social platforms that change the rules frequently, and this, I despise.
What most people call “marketing” today is an algorithmic process dominated by one or two major marketplaces (Google or Meta). There is a skill to advertising on these platforms, but you'll probably end up paying a dispassionate 9-to-5er who couldn't get hired at a "real" tech company to do it for you. It’s worth it because these companies—although worth trillions—are a fucking nightmare to deal with.
Your only problem using these platforms is to figure out what gets the most attention, the quickest, and make sure it converts to more sales. The algorithm does everything else.
This means that an inordinate amount of effort is spent hijacking human attention, specifically the first 3-seconds. As terrible as this sounds as an incentive—and it is one of the worst in history—it is true, no one can support you business lest they know about it.
The platforms have changed rapidly over the last decade, making marketing seem like a new frontier, but it isn’t new. I discovered a great history of advertising and marketing through David Ogilvy. What I found is that all modern takes are essentially perverted copycats of his initial thesis: Marketing is about communicating an idea that relates your brand or product to a feeling—which is why it is so closely tied to branding. What David created for Rolls-Royce shows this better than any explanation ever could. In a single ad featuring a photo of the exotic car, the text read:
“At sixty miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”
When you learn that David spent seven months reading instruction manuals and engineer's notes just to find this one sentence, you realize that marketing and advertising—in their highest form—are the most refined forms of communication. This gave me hope.
When I started to educate myself on sales, I learned very quickly that most of the industry works by overwhelming a potential customer with three main strategies: a perception of value, limited time or availability, and status. This felt like despair. I once read a definition that "selling something is simply agreeing to the value of it and exchanging." I liked this, but I found it essentially unpracticed in reality—at least in businesses that grow quickly.
When I educated myself on product development, I found a deep well of history’s greatest minds—Franklin, Edison, Jobs, and Enzo were obsessed with one thing: their creation. But this also revealed a familiar story—a war that has been waged since at least the birth of capitalism, and something I’ve felt in full force for the past year.
The purpose of commerce is to provide valuable goods to people who might not otherwise have access to them. It's a noble pursuit, and a rewarding one. In trying to provide as many people as possible with this value, you need help. This "help" can come from ideologically aligned people, cut from the same cloth and passionate about solving the same problem. In return, you share your profits with them for their help. This is a noble partnership.
But realistically, these people are few and far between. What you get instead are people who see value being exchanged and want in on the exchange with little to no interest in the development or work required to create the value. These are the vultures of commerce. This includes bad employees, lazy contractors, greedy board members, and others who see a good product as something to exploit: venture capitalists, government regulators, attorneys, lobbyists, and special interest groups. But perhaps more than anything, the cause for the erosion of a product or idea is a bad customer fit.
I mention this because part of my education was learning of the many variations these vultures come in. I have hired and fired, partnered, and divorced myself from many misaligned humans. It was—and is—an expensive education. Figuring out who is a good fit to help you work the business will inform you of how to find a good fit for a customer. They are not all created equal.
In attempting to market the value of our product to others and sell it, we often devalue it in the form of discounts. In wanting to make it available to all, it's common to attract the wrong type of client—those looking for the cheapest deal, not the best product. I am not the first one to notice this, but the hardest clients I have ever dealt with are price obsessed and value ignorant. They take the most effort and find the least value because their focus is on trying to get the cheapest service, they also tend to have a mindset that can’t fathom both parties winning in the exchange, they have to feel like you lost for them to feel success, and this is a toxic trait.
In nine months of this experiment, I have grown OLLIN by a significant amount. I'm not ungrateful for the growth, but I am skeptical of the outcome. As marketers, sales specialists, and business strategists will tell you: “just get more customers”. What the best business owners, CEOs, and founders will say is that who your clients are is more important than how many you have. I have learned to not listen to the former, and study deeply the latter.
One thing that has changed in OLLIN as a byproduct of this influx is the shift in interaction. There is less back and forth, not as many questions, and not as many new ideas being proposed. This means that the value of the program has changed, and I don’t think it's for the better. I feel it on my end. One of the things I look forward to is how someone changes what I do, how they might be inspired by an idea and explain why and how they modified it.
All this time, while I've been trying to sell the value of the program to others, I’ve been missing why it's valuable to me. I pushed on the wrong thing to grow. What I need to grow is the interaction between us members. The exchange of value for me posting training ideas isn't money; it's feedback. It's my own evolution.
If you are a member here, I consider you a partner. You have invested simply by showing up, and for that, I thank and congratulate you. But you aren’t finished until you’ve helped me make this whole idea better.
What I'm asking of every single person here is a favor: you need to interact. Comment, share, question, or voice your opinion. My hope is that it's public, but a private note works too. Share your modifications to the sessions, how they felt, why they sucked, or what about them made you curious. What I promise you’ll get out of it is more value than you could ever imagine.
This happens because you will start a process that you can't purchase: building relationships with others who are here for the same reason. We are all disillusioned by the fitness industry and know there is something greater under the surface.
What I learned most about business, about marketing, sales, and the entire industry is that without a distinct focus on the product, your vision can never be realized.
There are so many people offering shortcuts in the fitness industry. And it isn’t a surprise that most of the people that become “gurus” for saving your gym business are people that leveraged hard in their gym model and then escaped as quickly as they could.
I have no issue with marketing or sales, but HOW someone does it can tell you more about the company, their character, and their product than what they are telling you.
We Are OLLIN is about using fitness to explore the mind, our behavior, and our relationships. It is complex, hard to grasp, not reducible to a 3-second hook, and this is what makes it greater than anything else that I see out there; because the person who will benefit from it the most will not only be reading this final paragraph of a long article, but they will have the innate desire to connect with others who have an attention span past 3-seconds, and deep curiosity about our mental and physical nature.
Upward, TMB
