I'm Erin. I'm 34 and I run a bakery. I opened it with $4,000 I did not really have.
I want to say the number first, because if I read a headline like that I would assume the person was lying and I would not read any further.
Our first full year we did just over a million. I have never hired anyone to do my marketing, I have never paid an agency, and I still could not tell you what most marketing words mean. I have five minutes on a Monday morning and that is genuinely all this takes now.
What "from nothing" actually looked like
Six tables. Two of them wobbled.
I had put everything into the fit-out and the oven, and I had this idea that if the sourdough was good enough, that would be the marketing. Everybody who opens a shop believes this. It is a very expensive thing to believe.
For the first four months, most days, I served maybe eleven people. I would stand behind the counter at half two with forty quid in the till and a full display, and then I would throw a lot of it away at five.
The thing a customer said in month five
A woman came in, looked around, and asked how long we had been open.
Five months, I said.
She lived four streets away. She walked past twice a week. She said she thought we were still being fitted out because she had never seen anything about us.
I went upstairs after we closed and looked at our page. Four posts. The last one was from the week we opened, and it was a photo of a ladder.
That was the whole problem, and it took me about a year to properly understand it.
People were not choosing somebody else. They did not know I was a choice.
This is the part I got wrong for ages. I thought I was losing to the two other bakeries in town on price or on quality, and I would get quite defensive about it.
I was not losing to them. I was not in the running.
When somebody wants somewhere to buy bread, or a birthday cake, or somewhere to sit for an hour, they look first - 91% of people use online search at some stage when they are choosing a local business.1 And they do not look at many. Nearly three quarters of them consider three businesses or fewer before they pick one.2 They decide in a couple of minutes.3
So there is no moment where a customer weighs you up and rejects you. There is a moment where three places come up, all of them clearly open and clearly bothered, and you are not one of them, and you never hear about it. You just have a quiet Tuesday and blame the rain.
The bit I would tell anyoneSearch what you sell plus your town on your phone, right now, before you read the rest of this. It takes four seconds. It is the most useful thing in this article and it is free.
Everything I tried, and why none of it lasted
An agency. I got one quote, in the second year. $2,600 a month. I laughed on the phone and then felt embarrassed about laughing, like I had been shown the price of being a proper business. That quote was not unusual, by the way - small businesses are typically quoted between $1,000 and $5,000 a month for this. 4
A freelancer. $280 a month. She was good. But every Monday she messaged me asking what I wanted to post about that week, and that was the exact thing I could not do. She got a full-time job in the spring and I never replaced her.
A design app. Still paying for it, if I am honest. It makes lovely square graphics. It has never once told me what to put on one.
Posting properly, on my own. Twice. Both times I managed about three weeks. The first time I stopped because we had a bad week with the oven, and the second time I stopped because I ran out of things I thought were worth saying. Nobody noticed either time, which I found more depressing than if they had.
ChatGPT, at eleven at night. This is the embarrassing one. I would sit on the sofa with the shop closed and my feet aching and ask it to write me captions. It would. They were fine. I would copy two of them and then put my phone down and not post either.
It was never the time. I had the time.
I want to be really clear about this because I think it is where everyone goes wrong.
I was not short of an hour. I was short of decisions. By half past nine at night I had made about four hundred of them - what to bake, who to put on Saturday, whether to chase an invoice - and there were none left for what the bakery should say this week.
Apparently that is most of us. 70% of small business owners spend under five hours a week on their marketing.5 Nobody says that out loud because it sounds lazy. It is not laziness. Marketing is last on the list, and last on the list gets done by whoever you are at eleven at night, and that person cannot decide anything.
What was actually missing
Nobody was deciding what my bakery should say.
That is obvious written down. It was not obvious to me for two years. I thought my problem was making the posts, so I kept buying things that make posts, and every single one of them handed the job back to me at exactly the same point.
I was the bottleneck, and I had been buying tools that assumed I was not.
What my flour supplier's daughter showed me
She runs a plant shop and she is not a marketing person either. She said, it does the deciding, and that was the first time anyone had put it in words I understood.
It is called Holo. You give it your website address, once. It reads what you actually sell and how you talk about it, and then every week it decides what your business should put out, and writes it. Posts for the page, ads , emails.
Then it stops and waits for you.
You read the week. You bin what you do not like. You fix a line if you don’t like how it looks. Then it goes out.
It decides, and you say yes. Everything else I had paid for was the other way round.
The first Monday, and why I call it the Five-Minute Monday
I put the website in on a Sunday night, mostly to prove it would be rubbish, and paid $12. There is no free trial, which annoyed me at the time. At $12 I decided I could risk it more easily than another £280 a month freelancer.
Monday morning there was a week sitting there.
It knew we do sourdough and that we close at three on Sundays. It had written something about the Christmas order list that was better than anything I would have written at eleven at night. It had also written one thing about "artisanal indulgence" that I would not say out loud if you paid me, so I deleted it.
The four it kept were this. An ad offering a free coffee with any loaf before nine, aimed at people within about a mile. A photo of the Friday sourdough with the actual time it comes out of the oven, because apparently people want to know when to turn up. One about doing coffee for the school run, which I had never advertised in my life because it did not occur to me that it was a thing worth saying. And a review a customer had left, which I would have felt too awkward to post myself.
I would not have chosen any of those four. That is the point I keep coming back to. Left to me it would have been another photo of a loaf with the word "fresh" under it, posted on a Wednesday because that is when I remembered.
Ten minutes, that first week. Then five. Then it became a thing I do with a coffee before we open, and I stopped thinking about it at all.
That is the whole system. That is the Five-Minute Monday. There is not a second part.
What actually happened
I am not going to give you a curve. What I can tell you is we went from eleven customers on a bad day to a queue on a Saturday, we did just over a million in our first full year, and the only thing that changed in how I run this place is that something else decides what we say.
What I can describe is the shape of it. The first thing that moved was not sales, it was people saying they had seen us - which sounds like nothing, and it is actually everything, because it means you have gone from not existing to being one of the three. Then Saturdays got busy, and stayed busy, which is the thing that changes a bakery because Saturday pays for Tuesday. Then the Christmas order list filled up in November instead of the week before, and that was the first time I thought this might genuinely be working rather than being a good month.
I took on a second baker in the spring. I would not have been able to do that on eleven customers a day.
The strangest part is what stopped. I do not lie in bed working out what to post. It is not on the list any more, and I had not appreciated how much room it was taking up until it was gone.
The two things I was worried about
That it would not sound like me. It did not, at the start. It does now, partly because I delete the ones that do not and it learns from that, and partly because I fix the bits I do not like before they go out. I have never put anything out that I would not have said.
That people would know. I thought somebody would spot it, or that Facebook would put a label on it and I would look unprofessional. Two years, nobody has said a word. And nothing goes out that I have not read - so it is not a machine writing to my customers. It is me choosing from a list instead of staring at an empty box at eleven at night.
What I say when people ask
Three other owners have asked me now and I tell them all the same thing.
You are not bad at this. You bought the wrong half. Everything on the market makes the posts and hands the deciding back to you, and the deciding is the bit you have nothing left for by the end of the day.
It is $12 a month. I sell more than that in coffee before nine. It is rated 4.9 out of 5 by over four thousand people, which I checked before I put my card in. 6
And it does not put anything out without me. That is my whole marketing now. Five minutes on a Monday, and the rest of the week I am a baker again.
Nothing goes out without your okay. You read the week, you approve it, it goes.
Holo
Nothing goes out without your okay.
You read the week, you approve it, it goes.
Start for $12 — 120 posts and ads this month
Sources
- BrightLocal, consumer search behaviour - how people decide on local businesses. brightlocal.com/research/consumer-search-behavior-decisions/
- BrightLocal, same study - how many businesses are considered before a decision.
- BrightLocal, how quickly consumers decide. brightlocal.com/research/consumer-search-behavior-speed/
- Marketing agency pricing benchmarks for small businesses. hawksem.com/blog/marketing-agency-pricing/
- Fiverr Small Business Month Survey, 2025 - weekly time spent on marketing. fiverr.com/news/small-business-survey-2025
- Holo customer rating. tryholo.ai/pricing
Comments (5 - three shown)
"They did not know I was a choice." I have read that line about six times. I have been telling myself for a year that people prefer the place on the high street.
Did the search thing before finishing the article. I am fourth, under a place that shut in January. Cheers for that.
The freelancer bit is exactly it. Mine was lovely and every week it was "what do you fancy posting" and that was the bit I was paying to not have to do.
