The Funnel Is Older Than The Aeroplane. No Wonder It Doesn't Fly!
“The cost [of performing the funnel] doesn’t show up in your campaign metrics. It shows up in the mirror. You become someone who got comfortable pushing a stranger toward a decision they weren’t ready for, and you must live with having become capable of that.” - Jo Starling
The Funnel Is Older Than the Aeroplane — No Wonder It Doesn’t Fly.
I’ve Built Something Else.
Every founder I’ve ever worked with built their “thing” for roughly the same reason, even when the pitch deck said something else. They wanted to contribute. To fix something they’d found lacking. To offer a solution, something that mattered, something the world was quietly short of. That’s the actual catalyst for almost every business I’ve ever helped shape — not “acquire customers.” Give something worth giving.
And then someone hands them a funnel.
Leads. Conversion. Top-of-funnel, bottom-of-funnel. Filter them, narrow them, spend them. They learn the standard vocabulary like I learned the Nutbush, but most founders never stop to notice how strange it is — that the very steps they’re told to build their marketing around treat a person as an input to be processed, not someone to enjoy the dance with. For a founder who started their business because they wanted to contribute, that formulaic process doesn’t just feel slightly off. It feels like a quiet betrayal of the exact impulse that got them into business in the first place.
Here’s what I’ve realised, after thirty years of watching this play out: selling isn’t evil. It’s not the part we “contributors” find nauseating. It’s just an exchange — someone offers something, someone else decides if they want it. There’s nothing shameful in that. But wrap it in funnel language, aim it at a founder who’s contribution-inspired to their bones, and it curdles into something else entirely. Business starts to feel icky. And that icky feeling, left unexamined, is a total turn-off — one that quietly shapes everything downstream of it.
Selling makes me sick.
I know that particular repulsion in my own bones, because I met it long before I ever ran a business. I grew up in a household with a network marketing side-hustle. As a little girl, I loved “playing shop” on pick-up days — boxes on the table, the small ritual of it. But as I got older, I started catching the conversations underneath the ritual. Someone’s new connection stopped being a person and became a “prospect.” The question wasn’t “do you like them” — it was how many friends they had, how strong their network was. I started to see the people I’d grown up amongst as salivating cannibals, hungry to devour other people’s networks. That pre-qualification of humans — weighing someone by what their connections were worth before you’d even decided whether you liked them — is where my repulsion for the funnel formed. I had the feeling long before I had the word “extraction” for it.
I’ve watched the same fundamental dilemma surface the same three workarounds, over and over, in almost every founder I’ve sat across from:
Resist, and live on hope. Refuse to “do marketing” in any deliberate way, and hope the work speaks for itself loudly enough. It rarely does. Not because the work isn’t good — hope just isn’t a distribution strategy. And underneath the waiting, something quieter builds: watching worse offers outsell you, built by people who weren’t afraid to ask for the sale.
Capitulate, and quietly build a part of yourself you can’t admire. Learn the scripts. The urgency lines, the manufactured scarcity, the pressure dressed up as “best practice.” Get good at it, even — most people can, if they keep at it long enough. But the cost doesn’t show up in the campaign metrics. It shows up in the mirror. You become someone who got comfortable pushing a stranger toward a decision they weren’t ready for, and you must live with having become capable of that.
Or pay someone else to do the icky part. Except that money doesn’t exist yet, not in year one — and selling needs to start the moment your boots hit the pavement, long before there’s revenue enough to hand it to anyone else. This isn’t really a choice most founders get to make early. It’s a future relief, dangled in front of someone who still has to do the thing they’re repulsed by, alone, for however many years it takes to finally afford to stop.
None of these have ever sat well with me. I’ve always strived to help people succeed as their most resonant, authentic selves — not as a slightly-hollowed-out version of themselves wearing a funnel-shaped costume because someone told them that’s what marketing looks like.
So, I set my mind to the actual problem, rather than the symptom. Not “how do I make the funnel feel less bad” — but where, precisely, does it bend a contribution-inspired person out of shape? Where does it catch? I went looking for the exact seam where an honest exchange gets twisted into an extraction, so I could name it, and build something that didn’t require anyone to contort. What came out the other side of that is the INTERACT Arc™ — a philosophy and a framework, built to let human relationships do what the funnel was never built to do: hold and retain.
And here’s the part that stunned me when I finally went looking for it properly: the funnel is old. Not “outdated by a software cycle” old — genuinely, historically old. Its earliest form was written up in an advertising trade paper in February 1898 by E. St. Elmo Lewis, an American advertising pioneer who was trying to explain how a good print advertisement should work: attract attention, hold interest, create desire — with “get action” added not long after. He built it studying door-to-door life insurance sales. It wasn’t even given its funnel shape until 1924, when William Townsend paired Lewis’s stages with the image of a narrowing cone.
Sit with that for a second. 1898. That’s before the Wright brothers had flown a single metre. Before radio broadcasting existed as a commercial idea. The tool nearly every business on earth still structures its marketing around was built for a travelling insurance salesman standing on someone’s porch, in a world where most homes didn’t have a telephone, let alone a newsfeed. Lewis wasn’t wrong for his moment — by every account, it was a genuinely useful, honestly built tool for the world it was born into. The problem was never his intent. The problem is that the world changed completely, and the funnel never did. We just kept using it, unexamined, on people it was never built to meet.
I didn’t want to keep inheriting someone else’s century-old porch-step tactic and calling it strategy. So, I developed the alternative: The INTERACT Arc.
The Funnel wrings people for a sale. The Arc builds them into a tribe.
That’s the flag, once the work was done. If you want the full shape of what the Arc actually is — not just what it's answering — that lives on The Arc, in full. This blog is just the why.
© Jo Starling 2026. All Rights Reserved. Please feel free to quote my articles, but please give credit accordingly and include a link back to this site (www.arc.jostarling.com). All images are protected. Please contact Jo Starling for conditions for publishing by requesting use through my contact page.
