The day has finally come.
You’ve been saving money and working tooth and nail for years to start your very own ice cream shop.
Today, is opening day.
For weeks, you’ve been preparing to make sure today is the most impactful it could possibly be. After all, you only get one shot at a first impression!
You blew the entire marketing budget - ads, influencer placements, pre-launch events.
And, as a hail mary, you’re even giving out free ice cream to every customer today!
From behind the counter, you glance outside.
To your surprise, a line wraps around the building. Your marketing worked.
You unlock the doors, serve wave after wave of customers, and close that night feeling unstoppable.
If this pace keeps up, the future looks bright!
Tomorrow comes.
Mid-day rolls around, silence.
You haven’t had a single customer all day. What happened? Did the marketing stop working?
The customer-base that you worked so hard to build vanished overnight.
Panicking, you retrace your steps….
It was an ice cream store gold rush.
Every day a new shop launched.
Every day each one claimed to sell out.
The demand for ice cream was nowhere near close to the supply of ice cream stores - and investors wanted in on the action.
Scrolling down icecream dot com, the world-renowned ice cream store social media site, would reveal a new ice cream store with venture capital secured - some raising billions!
With so much money flying around - the opportunity was clear to you, you needed to open an ice cream store and secure your retirement.
Unbeknownst to you, all of the attention, capital, and hype surrounding ice cream stores was built on a house of cards.
Fluffy marketing, insider deals, fake engagement, and fraudulent ice cream sales.
On the surface, everything looked fine. Every ice cream store had people that said good things about them on social media, constant lines out of the door of each store.
But once the bubble popped, the truth came out.
Shops had been paying people to stand in line, paying for positive reviews, taking a net loss on every sale.
Metrics mattered more than product.
Fundraising mattered more than flavor.
The product was meaningless, the hype was everything.
After years of mediocrity, customers stopped trusting ice cream altogether. The ice cream community evaporated overnight.
The incentive to have a good product had disappeared entirely, whoever had the most marketing spend and incentives was the most successful.
What happens when the mediocre ice cream stores run out of incentives?
Replace ice cream stores with crypto products. Replace free cones with user incentives. Replace the lines out the door with inflated Discord numbers, vanity metrics, and mercenary community members.
It’s the same story.
At the end of the day, community building comes down to a single truth:
are people showing up because they care, or because they’re paid to care?
Real communities form around gravity:
A mission people want to gather around.
A product people would miss if it disappeared tomorrow.
A direction that reshapes the way they think about the world.
I hate to break it to you - but if you are trying to build a community around something without gravity, you are going to struggle significantly. No amount of incentives will compensate for emptiness.
Build a real product first, and the right community will gather on its own.
Check out my new website offmylawn.xyz thanks bye