build a labyrinth, not a funnel

 
 

explorations on garden ethos in growing a business

some months ago, I wrote the post build a world, not an audience to articulate my reframing of sharing your work on the internet — not as a bid for capturing and converting attention, but as the creative practice of digital world-building; cultivating environments and ecosystems, then shared, like gardens, with kindred strangers to wander through.

recently, I’ve been thinking about the next layer. how do I apply this same ethos to business?

as in, how can I deconstruct traditional digital marketing and sales systems, and reimagine them — in a way that can be a vessel for my creativity, while honoring the need to be materially sustainable? this is, again, the question of integrating art and money, which I wrote about last year in my series on the artist entrepreneur.

today, I’ll propose that instead of building content marketing funnels to “capture” and “convert” leads, we instead offer our digital ecosystems as labyrinths to hold our creativity, for visitors to wander through with freedom, pleasure, and curiosity — a place where we prioritize process, adventure, and pathways — over metrics and conversions.

a labyrinth ethos can be the guiding spirit to building a business that feels deeply creatively generative, energetically aligned, and sustainable — one that allows us to feed our souls, and our lives.

but first things first.

let’s unpack the difference.

I’ll spend part 1 unpacking and deconstructing the marketing funnel, and part 2 sharing my vision for the labyrinth.





part 1: why marketing funnels drain my creativity

my story

my first “day job” out of college — while trying to figure out how to be a writer/artist — was learning how to do digital marketing for a small business. I attended marketing conferences, and learned all about organic traffic, leads and prospects, customer avatars, paid ads, SEO, call to actions, and conversion rates. I learned that marketing and sales systems were honed down to a science — a metrics-backed cocktail of buyer psychology and persuasion.

when I jumped ship at age twenty four to figure out how to work for myself, I started to apply what I learned to my own business — only to feel the total inauthenticity and futility of my effort. I met a massive wall of inner resistance. I couldn’t follow the 10 step marketing plans. or, I forced it, and hated it.

it took me many years to abandon traditional marketing entirely — and another few, to come up with my own philosophy and framework.

a marketing funnel 101

a marketing funnel is structured as an upside down cone — where the goal is to capture and attract as much “traffic” as possible at the very top of the funnel, and then nurture them through the buyer’s journey of awareness, consideration, and conversion. it’s a funnel because you inevitably lose “leads” as you attempt to move them from the funnel opening to the skinny end.

if they’ve reached the end of the funnel, it means you’ve successfully converted them into a paying customer. whether or not they make it through each layer of the funnel — and how many of them make it through — is measured as the conversion rates — a metric that is forecasted by other things, like click rates, open rates, engagement rates.

marketing funnels definitely work. many businesses I admire and respect even do them really well — in that it doesn’t feel weird, icky, and manipulative. it is certainly possible to build marketing funnels that feel good.

but. they just didn’t work for me. because no matter how hard I tried — I couldn’t motivate myself to create them, just as I couldn’t motivate myself to maintain any sort of presence on social media platforms.

I didn’t care that marketing funnels worked. the process of creating them didn’t work for me. I didn’t enjoy forcing my creativity through the structure and logic of a funnel, where everything has an ulterior motive to sell, and everything can be optimized.



the pressure to optimize everything

because marketing funnels make the path to success a measureable metric, you inevitably feel the pressure to optimize the performance of everything you create — your social media posts, blog posts, email newsletters, freebie offerings, or email nurture sequences. under this perspective, digital world-building is a very inefficient strategy; because you’d want your website to be a high performance, high conversion machine. in other words, a very persuasive brochure.

under this framework, you can obsess over which piece of content has the highest open rates, click rates, conversion rates, or SEO rankings. but, you forced to contort your creativity to try and win the marketing game — a game measured by numbers, clicks, and dollars.

this funnel proposes that more is always better. having more traffic is better, because you’ll only convert 10 or 20 or 30% of that traffic into subscribers, then only 2.35% (or whatever) into paying customers.

under the tyranny of metrics, it is too easy to feel insufficient.

therefore, your priorities for how you spend your time and energy will not be dictated by the creative urges that feel most alive within you, but by what actions will close the deal — even if that means using tactics to grab attention, to produce a sense of urgency, trigger feelings of scarcity, or manipulate the dopamine levels of those you’re trying to sell to. that is, your audience.



the anxiety of creativity not for sale

how does a marketing funnel shape the way you relate to your audience?

a funnel is, by nature, a filter.

it filters human beings into cold or warm leads, prospects, paying customers, repeat customers, or “evangelists.” you could argue that this is exactly the filtering mechanism that your business needs — in order to figure out who are the right customers for your offering. my counterargument would be to say: yes, but there are many ways to do this work of filtering — without imposing a way of seeing that turns human beings into dollar signs.

the language of the marketing funnel poses binary options: captured or uncaptured, converted or unconverted. every action you take becomes a means to an end, and every action becomes part of a tactical, psychological dance that you do with your audience — in the hopes that they will buy something from you.

thus, everything in your marketing funnel — everything on your website, every single newsletter you send, every podcast episode, even every interaction with a stranger — takes place against this implicit / explicit motive to sell.

this motive to sell hums at the background frequency of every creative output.

when you create something that isn’t a lead magnet, an SEO-optimized blog post, an attention-grabbing email title, or a highly sharable, digestible social post — you’re made to feel like you’re wasting your time. under the logic of a marketing funnel, any creativity that does not lead to profit seems inefficient and anxiety-provoking, at best. at worst, in your most existential moments, it feels totally meaningless.



the gravity effect of funnels

a funnel works by gravity.

it is designed to pull you through each layer — through teasing, enticement, curiosity, perks — creating urgency and pleasure, playing with your highs and lows, your dopamine spikes and feelings of scarcity.

moving through it is like falling through the floors of a 4 story building — where the last and final fall requires your payment. only by paying can you resolve the tension of gravity. only by paying will you land — hopefully, in a new place of promise and potential; where you finally have access to the solution to your problems, or the pathway to your dreams.

or, you resist. you feel the forces of funnel gravity pulling on you — launch sales, limited offer emails, discounts, pop-ups, raving testimonials, “Mary M just bought from Atlanta, Georgia,” countdown timers, additional juicy bonuses — and… you protest the gravity of the funnel. you ignore it.

this is most of us, most of the time. we’re so used to being inside marketing funnels all the time that we’re more immune to their gravity. the more immune we become, the harder and more clever the funnel must be in order to be successful.

we can certainly still make them work.

or, we can consider new alternatives, entirely.



*

part 2: the labyrinth ethos for building a business



the spirit of a labyrinth

a labyrinth is a complex, winding garden path that leads to a center. I’ve been deeply inspired by labyrinths since encountering this 1922 book Mazes and Labyrinths by William H. Matthews.

from mazes and labyrinths by william h. matthew

from mazes and labyrinths by william h. matthew

 

my favorite description of a labyrinth is attributed to the filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, of Pan’s Labyrinth.

“Unlike a maze, a labyrinth is actually a constant transit of finding, not getting lost. It’s about finding, not losing, your way…”


labyrinths are actually different than mazes — which, full of dead ends, are designed as puzzles and challenges for testing spatial awareness. a labyrinth only has one path that leads to the center.

its purpose is not necessarily the arrival at the center, but experience of moving through the environment. its purpose is your relationship with the journey itself.

if you surrender to a labyrinth, you’re able to be inside of it, rather than in a rush to “get” anywhere. it is about prioritizing process over product or end result.



the labyrinth as vessel for art & service

the spirit of a labyrinth — in its valuing the journey over the destination, the process over the product, the creative biodiversity of its environment over its metrics or profit optimization, and most essentially — the act of being and existing over persuading, or selling — this spirit can be a guiding ethos for business.

your business — as an energetically efficient, public practice of your creativity — is a practice that exists in service to the world.

money is the side effect, not the goal.

while a marketing funnel has no use for art, the labyrinth is a structure that is expansive enough to hold it. in a labyrinth, every expression of your creativity manifests as individual plants, flowers, trees, birds, rocks, streams — everything you create is a tiny part of the whole. you pour your creative expressions into this world. then, you sculpt and design its pathways for more thoughtful travels for your guests to experience.

as a world, the labyrinth is a home for creativity and your paid offerings; where your creativity only adds to the richness of your offerings. it’s a spirit that integrates creativity and entrepreneurship; art and money, that is, the practice of being in full service to the world, and in full personal expression.

the labyrinth is a more powerful, inspiring, and values-aligned metaphor to describe how I want my visitors to engage with my business. but even more importantly, it’s a metaphor that describes how I want to exist in relationship to my business — and that’s enough. because without my commitment, there is no business.


how it works: the winding path to the gated center

the single-path winding design of a labyrinth doesn’t need to be a literal manifestation in your ecosystem. since I like providing my guests endless paths in a choose-your-own adventure journey, I think of the single-pathed design as more more symbolic and metaphorical. it is an invitation inward — into my world, into yourself — where I serve as a guide for your journey.

in a deliberately designed labyrinth, you, as a visitor, do feel that sense of voyaging inwards — of multiple paths guiding you towards the center — but without hurry.

there, you might discover another inner labyrinth — this time, a private one: a gated secret garden, a fruit orchard, a mysterious castle, or a portal to another dimension — another layer of this adventure, which asks for your payment — your energetic investment — for admission.

you will get the sense that this gated center is its own separate labyrinth — which will transport you elsewhere, deeper, to a place with even more bounty. after all, having enjoyed the wealth of this public garden, you’re even more curious about what worlds lay beyond it, past the gate.



money as a side effect

you could say that the psychological journey of a visitor moving through a labyrinth — from its outer layers towards its inner gated center (where the offerings lives) — mirrors that of a marketing and sales funnel, in that they go through the three stages of the buyer’s journey: awareness, consideration, and “conversion.”

this is true. because in order for someone to buy from or work with you, this journey of discovery, growth, and internal commitment still needs to happen.

a labyrinth will never try to filter you down the funnel, to push you to make a binary choice at each layer — to opt in, or not opt in. to buy, or not buy. it is a self-paced garden journey, where the purpose is the experience; not a metrics-optimized, conversion-oriented filtering machine.

in a labyrinth ethos, everything you create for your business ecosystem is not a means to an end, because the end goal is not money.

the end goal is creativity itself — the process of creativity, channeled into higher service. when the channels of giving are truly aligned, money is a natural side effect — an important side effect that nourishes the entire ecosystem. but, a side effect, nonetheless.



a labyrinth world simply exists

to wander through the layers of a garden labyrinth — regardless or not if you end up in the gated center — is very different than falling through a marketing funnel, being pressured to “take action” at every step.

a labyrinth never pressures action.

a labyrinth has no manufactured urgency.

a labyrinth does not launch.

a labyrinth does not need you to buy.

a labyrinth never pushes. it only pulls.

a labyrinth generously gives its gifts at every turn.

a labyrinth simply exists.


a labyrinth exists and it doesn’t need you — in order for it to exist. it beckons you inwards, it invites you to discover it. it offers its bounty for all to enjoy, then it offers secret hidden garden, mysterious library-castle, cozy cafe-restaurant, [whatever metaphor feels right to describe your offering] — as a deeper labyrinth within it, available for admission, for the right people.

after you’ve taken already taken one journey through its public garden labyrinth, the inner private labyrinth feels even more magnetic.

the labyrinth lets you decide whether it’s the right time for that adventure inwards. it doesn’t waste its time persuading, or tempting, or selling. it gives you full freedom of choice and free will, and waits for you to knock at its gate, should you choose to.

meanwhile, it focuses on cultivating its own wealth — in inner and outer gardens — it continues to nurture its own lush, alive, ongoingness.

this, to me, is the kind of place I’d want to spend my time in — the kind of internet, business, and world that I want to live in, inhabit, and build.

 
 
 
growing a business, digital ecosystemsKening Zhuintrovert marketing