Why I left marketing to walk people around Berlin

I spent ten years in digital marketing. I was good at it. I knew how to make a number go up, how to write the line that makes someone click, how to build the thing that turns a stranger into a customer.

Then I moved to Berlin, and a few years later I started walking backwards through the middle of it, talking to strangers about a city I did not grow up in. People ask how that happened. This is the honest version.

The product nobody needed

Marketing is not a dishonest profession. Most of the people I worked with were careful and genuinely trying to be useful. My problem was not that I was asked to lie. It was quieter than that.

Towards the end I was working on a product that was fine. It did what it said. Nobody was harmed by it. It also changed absolutely nothing in anyone's life, and if it had disappeared overnight the world would have carried on exactly as before.

I could not stop noticing that. And once you notice it, the craft stops protecting you. You can still write the good line, and the good line still works, and none of it means anything. I was spending the best hours of my day making people want something that did not matter, and I was doing it well, which somehow made it worse.

Berlin was not the plan

I moved here in the middle of 2023. Not to change careers. Berlin was a change of address.

But Berlin does something to you if you walk it. It is a city that refuses to organise its own history neatly for visitors. A gap between two buildings is just a gap until someone tells you why the block is missing a tooth. A square is just a square until you understand that the medieval town it belonged to was cleared away twice, by two different governments, for two opposite reasons.

I spent a long time reading and walking. Not for work. I did not know it was going to be work.

The first tour

I gave my first real tour at the start of 2026. There were three people.

It went well. What I remember is not the tour, though. It is the fear beforehand, which was extremely specific: I was not afraid of being boring, or of forgetting my route, or of nobody turning up. I was afraid that somebody would ask me something I did not know.

That fear has not entirely gone away, and I have come to think it is the correct fear to have. It is the one that makes you read. I will write separately about what happened the first time it actually came true.

What I brought with me

People assume I threw the marketing years away. Almost everything I do now runs on them.

I know how people search, so I know what visitors are confused about before they ask. I know how to write a page that answers a question instead of performing enthusiasm. I know exactly what a review is worth, which mostly means knowing what it is not. I run this alone, so I am also the website, the photographs, the booking system, and the person answering email late at night.

What changed is the direction the effort points. In marketing, the work goes into making people feel something about the product. Now the work goes into the product and the feeling takes care of itself. If the tour is good, people say so. If it is not, nothing I write afterwards will save it.

That is a much simpler way to live.

What I actually do

I run a tip-based walking tour through Berlin's historic centre, from Alexanderplatz to Museum Island, and a private tour line for people who want something built around them rather than around a crowd. I guide in English.

The route is deliberately not the usual one. Most Berlin tours are about the twentieth century: the Wall, the Cold War, Checkpoint Charlie. Mine starts eight hundred years earlier, in the medieval town almost none of which survives, and moves forwards through Prussian ambition and GDR symbolism to whatever the Humboldt Forum is supposed to be. Visitors notice this before I explain it. It is the thing they mention most often afterwards.

I am not a historian and I did not grow up here. What I have instead is that I read constantly, I check what I say, and when I do not know something I say so out loud.

Some months are precarious. Tip-based work means you find out what your morning was worth after it is over, and I will write about that honestly too, because it is the part of this job people romanticise most and understand least.

But I have not once, since the beginning of this year, finished a day of work and wondered what it was for.

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I run walking tours in Berlin. If you want one built around your group rather than a crowd, tell me what you are looking for.