I bet everything on a frozen yogurt shop at 26

When I was 26, I emptied my retirement accounts and drained my savings to open a frozen dessert shop. It still wasn’t enough. So I put the rest of the buildout on credit cards and opened the doors anyway.

That shop was Tuttimelon. I’d spent my first 4 working years in finance, reading other people’s numbers. Now they were mine: a small business owner who bet everything on a dream and had to make the numbers work every single month. Before I ever spent client money, I spent my own.

I never learned marketing in a vacuum

I built Tuttimelon with two close friends. We shared responsibility for operating the shops, and each of us leaned into our own strengths. Marketing was mine.

That meant learning it the way an owner has to, never as a silo: as one lever inside a whole P&L, where every dollar of ad spend competes with rent, payroll, and inventory. All of it was right there around me: the build with a designer and a licensed architect, supply chains sourced from right here in the Central Valley, a team of more than 30 across two stores, sales, and the day-to-day. A campaign was never just a campaign. It was part of a business that had to actually work.

Our first location opened inside the Vintage Faire Mall in Modesto. It worked. The success there led to a second store at the Fashion Fair Mall in Fresno.

The marketing that actually moved the numbers

I learned to make decisions from the data, not from gut alone.

When we analyzed our sales, a handful of products consistently outsold the rest. The industry instinct is to keep rotating flavors to feel fresh. I made the opposite call. I kept our bestsellers as permanent mainstays so they were never out of stock. That one decision lifted monthly revenue by roughly 20%. Not by adding anything. Just by never running out of what people already came for.

I also learned, the hard way, that not all customers are worth chasing. When Groupon was in its heyday, we tried it. It worked, technically. People came. But they were deal-seekers with low lifetime value. They redeemed once, never paid full price, and never came back. Acquiring someone who won’t return is just spending.

The flip side taught me where the real return lives. We ran fundraisers with local schools and gave kids free coupons for winning awards. That crowd came back again and again, and brought their families with them. High lifetime value, real loyalty, and goodwill in the community we actually operated in. Same marketing budget, completely different outcome, because we were attracting the right person instead of the cheapest one.

Building an audience before it was easy

We built something a coupon never could. A community.

We took photos of customers with their frozen desserts and put them everywhere: our social media, an in-store TV running a photo slideshow, and taped up on our “yogurt wall.” We were a vibe. We were that dessert shop you had to stop by while you were at the mall.

We were serious about content too, years before Reels, Stories, or TikTok existed. Our team filmed gelato being designed, shot behind-the-scenes culture videos, captured how packed we got on Black Fridays. But we hit the wall every small business eventually does. You can post bangers all day, and if the algorithm doesn’t want to show your stuff, it doesn’t get shown. Organic was reaching maybe 2 to 5% of our own audience. So I learned to make paid work to extend our reach. Great content isn’t enough on its own. You have to know how to put it in front of people.

The grind nobody sees

Owning the shop meant owning every problem. The late nights. The morning an employee left the freezer open and we lost a whole shift to melted gelato and soured yogurt. The customers who lied for free product, the theft from the tip jar. You learn a lot about resilience when the buck stops with you.

You learn strange little truths too. When you operate in a mall, you learn to pray for rain, because when it rains, people come inside. Equal parts hustle, weather, and hope.

There was real joy in it. We won Best New Dessert Shop in Modesto from the Modesto Bee, and I still remember my parents on opening day and the pride of watching employees grow because we grew.

What actually did us in

It wasn’t the product and it wasn’t the marketing. It was rent.

We weren’t in a strip mall. We were inside malls, where rent runs at a premium because the mall “guarantees” foot traffic. As those costs climbed, the numbers stopped working. The math wasn’t mathing. No amount of great marketing closes a gap that structural.

Here’s the part that still stings. The yogurt fad was fading and consumer tastes were shifting, sure. But had we negotiated better leasing terms, I believe we could have survived even that. The market didn’t close us. The lease did.

I remember when we closed. I was disappointed it had to come to that. But I was also, strangely, grateful. I walked away with something I couldn’t have bought: the exact knowledge I’d need to make my next venture work. I fell forward, and I rolled everything I’d learned straight into what came next.

What it taught me, and why it makes me a better marketer

Tuttimelon didn’t make it. But progress is sometimes disguised as failure, and I’d do it again. It taught me marketing the way you can only learn it when it’s your own money on the line.

That’s the real inheritance from Tuttimelon. Not the two stores or the award. A marketer’s instinct sharpened by an operator’s experience. The range to see the whole picture, and the judgment to know which lever actually matters.

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