The marketing funnel is one of those ideas that's so widely accepted that nobody questions it. Awareness, interest, consideration, decision, action. It sounds logical. It's also wrong.

Not wrong in the sense that people don't go through stages. They do. Wrong in the sense that building your marketing around a funnel makes you do dumb things.

The first dumb thing is treating the top of the funnel as a separate problem from the bottom. "We need more awareness" is a common thing companies say. But awareness of what? Awareness among whom? Awareness that leads to what? When you separate awareness from conversion, you end up spending money on impressions that never turn into anything.

I've watched companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into "brand awareness" campaigns that generated millions of impressions and zero customers. When I asked how they planned to connect awareness to revenue, they showed me the funnel diagram. As if the diagram itself would make people buy things.

The second dumb thing is optimizing each stage independently. You hire one team for top-of-funnel, another for mid-funnel, another for bottom. Each team optimizes their stage. Top-of-funnel drives tons of traffic. Mid-funnel nurtures with emails. Bottom-of-funnel has great landing pages. But the whole thing doesn't work because the people entering at the top are the wrong people, and no amount of nurturing fixes that.

The funnel metaphor implies that you pour a bunch of people in at the top and some percentage drip down to the bottom. But people aren't liquid. They're individuals with specific needs. Marketing isn't filtration. It's matching.

Here's what works better: start at the bottom. Find your best customers. Understand exactly why they bought. Then find more people like them. That's it. No stages. No nurture sequences. No awareness campaigns. Just: who are the people who need this, and how do I reach them?

Shopify didn't build a funnel. They built a tool for people who wanted to sell things online and made sure those people could find it. Notion didn't run awareness campaigns. They made a product people wanted to share, and showed up in the places where potential users already were.

The funnel is a map, and like all maps, it's a simplification. The danger is when you mistake the map for the territory. Real people don't move through neat stages. They bounce around. They hear about you, forget, hear again, try a competitor, come back, ask a friend, read a review, and then maybe buy. Or they see your product, want it immediately, and sign up in three minutes.

Forget the funnel. Find the people who need you. Make sure they can find you. Make it easy to buy. That's marketing. And pick one metric to know if it's working.