Is There a Funnel Game?

Here are some fun things you can do to launch businesses literally overnight.

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---Transcript---

What's up, everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. I got a question for you. Are you currently buying dead businesses? If not, you got to listen to this episode. All right, I'm not going to lie. I'm having so much fun on some side projects, which goes against everything that I preach. If you've been in my inner circle and if you've been to my coaching programs, I always tell people, "Focus on one thing, and you've got to kill the other babies."

And so I understand I'm being a total hypocrite by doing this and talking about this, but alas, my ADD-ness needed an outlet, and so this is my outlet. It was either this or go watch a show on Netflix. I'm like, "All right, I'm just going to do this instead." So listen with caution, but hopefully, it gets you as excited.

So during COVID, all sorts of chaos happened. At the same time, there were a lot of really good businesses that went out of business because, honestly, the entrepreneurs who were running him don't know how to run funnels. That's literally it. And now that recently all the iOS updates and all the fighting between Apple and Facebook and stuff, the game is getting harder. And guess what? The people who are good at funnels are the ones who are winning. That's it because the people who are really good at funnels can spend more to acquire customer and everybody else.

And so, if you haven't mastered the funnel game yet, you have to learn it, or else you're not going to survive. And luckily for my funnel hackers, I've been teaching and training you guys for a long time. And most of you guys are rockstars, and you get it, therefore, you're having success. But for those who aren't, they're going to be out of business soon. And it leads to a really interesting, really cool, really fun opportunity for people like us, where we can take our funnel building skills, look at cool businesses that once we're profitable, that no longer are because the market changed and they weren't able to shift, and you can come in, and you can do some really cool things with it.

I want to give you guys a couple of case studies. I'm not going to tell you the details on anyone because none of them were live-live yet, but they're all close to live, and they're exciting. So there was one supplement company that I was really excited by, and I was a customer for a long time, and then they went out of business. And I started buying that supplements products because their sales video was so good. Right?

It went out of business. And then the next three or four years, I kept messaging the old owner like, "Why'd you take it down?" He's like, "Ah." They had their reasons. And I was like, I" want to buy it. I want to buy it." And finally, this year, I was able to negotiate to buy the entire company for a fraction of what they spent on just the sales video back in the day. And now we're about two weeks away from relaunching that brand and that company, which is so exciting. We literally just took it, took the formulas, tweaked it a little bit, took the sales video that was good, built out a funnel, and now we've got this new asset that's literally, we just can turn ads on, and it'll print money for the rest of my life until we sell it or something. But it's exciting.

Another thing is another supplement I was taking that was one of my favorite supplements, and then during COVID, it stopped coming. And I messaged the owners, and they're like, "Oh, supply chain management issues. We had to shut down." And I was like, "I love this company. I want to bring the brand back. If I help finance it, can we bring it back?" And we figured out a deal. And now I'm an owner of that company, and that's about to launch as well.

And then another, there was this really cool T-shirt company that I used to love. It was so exciting. And then the other day, I went to buy a T-shirt from them, and the site was down. I was like, "What?" And so I went, and I found the site, I found the owners, and I was like, "Dude, you guys, why is the site down?" Like, "Oh, we shut it down." And so I made an offer, and I bought it for insanely low price. And we bought the entire T-shirt company, which is exciting. And that's rolling out soon,

But there are millions, literally millions of deals like this out there. And somebody asked me, like, "I don't know how to find them. I don't know how to look for them." I would start opening your eyes. There are so many of these deals out there where you can take them, put a funnel on them, and boom, you're back in business. And there's tons.

In fact, one of the ways I used to do this back in the day, it's been a while since I did this, but I used to go to ClickBank, and ClickBank has their marketplace. And the marketplace is interesting because they rank things based on what's selling the most. Right? So like page one, you see the number one seller, number two, number three, all the way down to 10. But what I would do is I would go to like page 99. And you go back there, and there's some amazing offers that, one time, were amazing, but for whatever reason, the person stopped driving traffic to it. They may have done a product launch. They did something, and it's just sitting there. And it's basically dead.

I can't tell you how many of those old offers I would go to like, "The copy's good. The funnel's good. The product's good." I messaged the owner. I'm like, "Hey, what's happened to this product." They're like, "Oh, our Facebook account got shut down," or, "Hey, I did an initial launch, and then we just don't have any traffic." They don't have enough Facebook ads or a million different reasons why. Right? Or maybe there was an upsell and a down-sell, so Facebook ads didn't work, and so they just need an upsell. If they just applied some funnel techniques, it'd be good.

Or, "Hey, we could plug a challenge funnel in front of this thing, and that's the product we sell at the back of it. And the product is great." And I'd find these things way deep, buried In ClickBank's marketplace, and message the people. And then come back to them and be like, "Hey, number one, can I buy it from you?" Which is going to be more expensive because you're going to buy the domain, the brand, all that kind of stuff. Or number two is like, "I don't want to actually buy this from you. Can I license it from you?"

And then you may be like, "What's the licensing?" And it's like, "Well, basically, I'm going license to sells it. I'm going to license the product and license all the things." And a lot of times, it's really, really cheap to license at all, and then you can create your own brand out of it. And I've had literally dozens of deals like that, where I spent less than a thousand dollars to license somebody's entire business and product.

I got the ebook. I got the course. I got the sales, and I got everything for a thousand bucks, and it's something they probably spent 20 grand launching five years earlier. And it's still good. It just needs to be polished. It needs to be plugged into a funnel. It needs some traffic. It needs an upsell. It needs a down-sell. It needs something, but that's it. And there are so many opportunities and deals like that out there that I think most of us are forgetting or missing.

So start looking at what are the businesses out there that are struggling? What businesses have been shut down? What things did you use to buy that you no longer can buy? Could you buy the company? Could you license the product? Could you become a reseller? Could you apply your funnel knowledge to it? I've seen tons of people who got out there, taken really good products that are selling in one way. And they go and license it and then plug it into a funnel, and they own all the online distribution or the funnel distribution. Right?

They find authors who are selling books on Amazon and have no funnel. And they come, and they build the funnel for them. And then they give a royalty back to the author, but then they own the thing. Right? There's so many ways to make money in this game. And so anyway, I feel like my ADD dabble a little bit in some of these fun things. And like I said, we got two supplement brands and a T-shirt brand that are all launching from my ADD-ness, which is so much fun. So I guess that's better than watching Netflix.

Anyway, so I just want to show it to you guys because maybe it'll get the wheels spinning. Some of you guys who don't have businesses yet, maybe are like, "Well, I get the funnel game. I just don't have a business yet." Well, cool. There's a couple of ways to go start a business from scratch really, really inexpensively, really quickly, and in a way where you don't do all the product development, or the copy, or all these things that maybe you're not as good at. You can find those things that are already finished, that are done, that are out there. I bet you 50 buck.

In fact, I know this. If you go to flippa.com, F-L-I-P-P-P-A.com, there's hundreds of websites that are for sale. Also, Shopify has an exchange. I think it's called the Shopify exchange or something. If you go to Google, type in Shopify stores for sale, it'll pull up. It's a marketplace. Tons of you will have Shopify stores that are selling them. And I literally almost bought four or five of them last weekend. I was going through them all. I'm like, "Oh, my gosh." One was like Dollar Shave Club. It was like shaving stuff. It was like really cool shaving stuff. And there's also a beard club with all these beard things. I'm like, "I don't have a beard, but how cool if I bought a beard company and a shaving company, and I owned them both?" And they were super cheap.

And basically, these guys created the brand, created the logos, created the products, launched it, didn't know how to actually drive traffic or sales. And all this stuff's done. All the hard work is finished. The suppliers, the manufacturers, the logos, the design, everything is done. They just have a Shopify store, which, as you guys know, is not going to make you nearly as much money as the funnel. I was like, "I'm just going to buy the Shopify store, plug the offers into a funnel, and boom, we're off to the races.

And again, these are all skillsets that you guys have been learning here inside of our community. If you've been learning at Funnel Hacking Live, which, if you don't have your tickets yet, we're like 30 days away from that. Go to funnelhackinglive.com. But there's that. Right? There's the books. Right? If you've read the dotcom secrets book, you know how to do funnels. If you go to the one funnel-a-day challenge, if you've been incorporating into our community, you're learning the skillsets. You've just got to grab something and apply it to it.

And it's literally the principle is universal. Right? Any product. And there's tons of out there, and you can start plugging it in so that you can go and you can create your own courses, which is an amazing way. You can go and get stuff off of Alibaba or Shopify, or excuse me, like from China. Or you can find people who already did, who already put together the store, who did all the hard work. They just don't know how to sell it. You can grab it, structure in a funnel, and boom, it's off to the races.

I literally, my team, I sent them probably 30 of the Shopify stores I wanted to buy. And all of them would have been a cool little business that could be making, I don't know. Who knows? Five, 10 grand a month, just on autopilot by us just literally taking the products, plugging them into a funnel, getting an agency to drive Facebook ads to it. And then it just sends me money every single month. How fun is that? How cool is that? Are you guys getting this? This is what I'm talking about.

This is why this game is so much fun. That's why I still can't sleep at night because this funnel game is expansive. It's always growing. It's so much fun. And anyway, I hope you guys are half as excited as I am. My goal is to keep you guys excited because this game is the best game that's ever been played. And you guys have a chance to play it at a level that nobody else in the history of all time has been able to do. Back in the day, people had to buy mailing lists and postage stamps, all sorts of stuff. Where you guys can literally just get a click funnels account, throw some things up, buy some Facebook ads, and you're in the game. That's it. It's so much fun.

Anyway, I'm going to go. I just wanted to bring it up to you guys while I was having fun. Thanks so much for listening. Hopefully, it gets the wheels in your head spinning. I recommend go to flippa.com, and look for what's for sale. Go to ClickBank and scroll deep in the marketplace to the forgotten offers, and go find a forgotten often there and see if you can buy it from them, or you can license it from them. Go to Google and type in Shopify stores for sale. And again, I can't remember the name, but it's like a Shopify exchange that has all these Shopify store owners or people who did the whole thing, figured it out, got all the hard work done, and couldn't figure out how to make money with it. Now they're listing it for sale, and you can buy it.

So many cool ways, so many fun things you can do. I hope this helps. And that's all I got. Thanks, guys. I appreciate you all for listening. Thanks for being part of our community. Get your tickets to Funnel Hacking Live. Again, it's at funnelhackinglive.com, before we are sold out. And I'm actually spending a lot of time at Funnel Hacking Live, talking about this and these unique opportunities. I call it virtual real estate. We're going to talk about virtual real estate and how to find it, and where it's at, and what you can do with it, and a bunch of other cool things. So that's all I got. Appreciate you all. Thanks for listening and hanging out, and we'll talk to you all again soon. Bye, everybody.

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