The Ice Cream Shop Has Outlived Every Guru Who Taught You Marketing

Why the most durable small business in America has never written a word about marketing

Image generated by the author using Notion AI

A man used to walk into my bakery every weekday at around a quarter past seven.

He never had to order. By the time he reached the counter I was already folding two shrimp empadas into a bag, and the only thing either of us said out loud was some version of good morning.

That was my entire marketing department.

*Not a member yet? You can read the whole story here.*

My wife and I opened that first bakery in São Luís, Brazil, on August 22, 2007.

We sold empadas (small savory pies, closer to a Cornish pasty than to anything North American). Most people will tell you a new business needs six to twelve months to find its feet. We reached cruising altitude in two weeks.

Two months later we opened a second location. Then a third. We stopped at eight.

I arrived at six in the morning and the ovens were already warm because somebody on my team had beaten me there. I knew the regulars by name. I knew what they wanted before they said it out loud. I knew which corner of the display case moved fastest on Saturday and which flavors would still be sitting there on Tuesday if I did not pull them by noon.

Over twelve years we sold more than four million pastries, which took two hundred tons of flour and a hundred and fifty tons of butter. I interviewed close to a thousand people to keep eight counters staffed.

Our marketing budget across all of it was zero.

The website that never opened

Four months after that first store, in December of 2007, I read The 4-Hour Workweek.

The seed it planted was a reasonable one. What if I could build something that did not require me standing in a store at six in the morning?

So I built HowToMasterNLP.com, with landing pages and paid ads and a free tips newsletter. I ran a webinar on how to build rapport with strangers. The irony of that one took me a while to appreciate.

I had a hard time getting results.

It took me a few years to notice that while my bakery with no marketing was feeding a city, I was learning marketing from people whose entire business was marketing, and I was getting nowhere.

One of those two businesses was working. Guess which one I decided needed fixing?

Half the shops make it. Fewer than a third of the teachers do.

The SBA Office of Advocacy tracks survival for every new employer establishment in the United States. Across the 1994 to 2022 cohorts, 49.2% were still open at year five. Restaurants and food service beat that number slightly, at 51.4%.

The information sector, where the online business tends to land in federal data, has 29.1% of its establishments left at year ten. That is the weakest of any category the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks.

More informal sources actually track that 81% of digital marketing businesses fail after only 4 months.

The scoop shop on the corner beats the marketing expert by twenty-two points over a decade.

Why the counter goes quiet

Ask yourself who writes the courses.

Somewhere on your side of town there is a woman who has scooped ice cream on the same corner for twenty-two summers. She is not writing a course. Right now she is scheduling three teenagers for the Saturday shift and arguing with a supplier about the price of vanilla, and she would find the phrase customer acquisition cost adorable.

Her business pays her, so she has never needed to invent a second one.

The online marketer who lasted eighteen months has a different problem. The original business did not pay. Teaching is what is left.

Teaching marketing is not a symptom of doing it well. It is a symptom of needing another revenue line.

That is the whole distortion. Almost the entire supply of marketing education is drawn from the least durable category in the economy, because in that category, the teaching is the product.

The survivors are at the counter. The casualties are at the webcam.

Three things a counter won’t let you do

First, you can’t fake it. Nothing stands between the spoon and the tongue. There is no page copy, no email sequence, no positioning statement. She hands you a taste of the coconut sorbet and your face decides before you do.

Second, you can’t stay wrong for long. Rent arrives on the first. An ice cream shop needs somewhere between 80 and 150 customers a day at a ten to twelve dollar ticket before it breaks even, and it learns this by month three. A domain costs twelve dollars a year, which is cheap enough to let you be wrong for four years and call it iteration.

Third, you can’t avoid the answer. Her feedback loop closes in ninety seconds, on a face, in front of her. Yours closes in thirty days as a percentage, drawn from strangers you will never meet. One of those teaches you what people want.

Where this comparison breaks

These numbers aren’t a clean comparison, and you should say so before I do.

A closed shop is a locked door, a terminated lease, a public record. A dead online business is a domain that quietly stops renewing, and nobody counts that as a closure.

The definition protects the online business. Whatever the real gap is, it is wider than the tables show.

The advice was never addressed to you

Every tactic you have absorbed was built for a business with no fixed costs, no physical constraint, and no obligation to still exist next year.

That is worth sitting with, especially if you have spent the last few years assuming the problem was you. Your instincts are not obsolete. They were simply trained in a harder environment than the one your teachers were describing.

You were never the beginner in the room. You were the only person there who had made payroll.

The counter test

Run three of your own tactics through one question: would you do this at a counter, in person, to somebody standing right in front of you?

• Your lead magnet. Would you ask a stranger for a phone number before you let them look at the display case?
• Your webinar. Would you keep somebody standing there for forty-five minutes before you told them the price?
• Your sales page. Would you say those words out loud, at normal volume, to a person whose name you knew?

Where the answer is no, you have found the thing that is broken. Three no’s means your judgment wasn’t the problem.

What the shop figured out first

Every shop that lasted twenty years arrived at the same practice without ever naming it. They put something in your hand before they asked you for anything at all.

I ended up calling that the Ice Cream Funnel, mostly because the ice cream shop got there decades ahead of me. I wrote a book about it, and it details how you can apply very simple principles to start getting traction online.

You can check it out here.