The Russell Brunson Show

Even for me who has done literally hundreds and hundreds of webinars, sometimes they don’t work. What are the adjustments we make to make it work better next time? Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Hey. What's up, everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today I'm going to tell you about my most recent failure, that happened yesterday. All right, everybody. So usually, on most things you have a chance to hear the highlight reel. Normally I will tell you a story about how like, "Oh, five years ago, six years ago, I did a webinar and it bombed, and now I'm amazing." But rarely do you get to hear me talk about my failures in the midst of the failures, when I'm still licking my wounds and trying to figure it all out. So, that's our mood today. I hope you guys don't mind. It's actually interesting. A lot of you have heard my story about 10X, where I did $3.2 million in 90 minutes. What a lot of you don't know is like two months prior to that, I had spoken at an event, and I had tweaked my pitch a little bit. I did the pitch in a little small audience, and it completely bombed. And you know, two and a half months later I did it at 10X and killed it. And I told the story about 10X and I killed it because that's the story that's fun to tell, but I didn't tell the story about how two months earlier, I did a webinar to a group of people and completely bombed. Or not a webinar. Like a live event. That's the thing about this game. There's always the ebbs and the flows, the ups and the downs. I've been reading a new book by Tim... Tim something. Dang it. I should know this. Tim Grover. Tim Glover. Something. Anyway, it's called Winning. He wrote one called Relentless, which was good, but Winning is way better. Talking about winning in there. He's like, "Winning is unforgiving. Winning doesn't care about you. Winning, there's ups and the downs, and it's just... " Anyway, so today, or after yesterday I'm like I feel like winning is beating me up a little bit. But it's okay, because it's how you learn. And so, but I'm just like everybody else. Like yesterday... And I did a webinar yesterday, or a podcast yesterday, so if you listen to the last podcast, you'll hear me talk a little about this. But I was excited. We bought a new company. We spent multiple eight figures on the new company, so it wasn't small, and we were doing a webinar to the customer list to sell ClickFunnels. Because the whole purpose of buying this company was to use it as a front end to hopefully people in ClickFunnels, right? And so, I'm all excited because we're going to turn these people into ClickFunnels members. It's going to be amazing. Anyway, so I do this webinar. And first off, I'm like, "Dude. Well, I'm on fire. Things are feeling good." And then I look over at the comments, because at a couple parts I played little videos. So the videos, I looked at the comments, and oh my gosh. These people, my new customers that I just spent multiple eight figures on, are not happy. They are pissed. They don't like the webinar. They don't like the beat. They think I talk too fast. They think that this is like an MLM pitch. They think all of the things. And I start reading these things by a whole bunch of people, and John on my team runs in. He's like, "The comments are going south." I'm like, "Yeah. I don't know what to do." I'm doing a webinar. The whole bunch of people, I've got to keep going. And so I get back on. I do the whole webinar. And afterwards, you know. What I was expecting to be a high six figure day, maybe seven figure day, ended up being a five figure. A low five figure day. I was like, "Oh, man. That was not good." Because I've got to pay back multiple eight figures. I needed this to convert better than it did. So at first I was just like, the initial was just like anger, and then depression. These are all in the moment, right? And then it's just like I want to be depressed. I want to go hide. I just want to quit. But then I'm like, "I can't quit. I need to pay back the loan that we took out for this company. I've got to figure this out." Right? So after being kind of bummed for a little bit, then it was like, "Okay. I've got to figure this out." So after about an hour of me moping and wanting just to quit and run and hide in a hole and everything... Because it's weird. I don't know about you guys, but there's so many emotions. I'm not sure if you saw the 10X documentary. If not, I think it's 10xdocumentary.com. We did a whole documentary on this. But I spoke at the first 10X. We had $3.2 million in sales. The next 10X was in a stadium. It was three times as big. 35,000 people. Everyone thought I was going to make a billion dollars, and I bombed at it. We have a whole documentary documenting the bomb. But the thing for me is it's hard for a couple reasons. Number one is like I always want people on my team to feel the energy of what we're doing. Right? Because the more excited they are, they're more excited about their jobs and what we're doing. And so, leading this webinar, we had 7,500 people register, and we're talking to them and getting them excited. And the day of the webinar I message them, "It's webinar day. It's going to be so much fun." Like we're pumped and excited, and the webinar is happening. And then when it doesn't happen, partially it's like, "Oh, I feel like I let all of them down. Right?" Because the 10X thing, if you watch the documentary, I felt the same way. I felt like I let all these people down. We flew all these people in, and everyone was excited to see this thing, and it didn't happen. And so, like ugh. Partially it's me licking my wounds, because I felt like I let everybody down. The second half for me is just like embarrassing. Right? I'm a performer. I'm an athlete. I'm an entrepreneur. I step up, I perform. And when I step up and don't perform, it's embarrassing. Right? One of my friends, he's a UFC fighter. He fought a big fight. He's in the top four or five. This is just like a month ago. Two or three weeks ago, actually. And he went out there and he lost in the first round. He got tapped out. And he went to Instagram instantly afterwards and posted. He's like, "I'm embarrassed." That's how I feel. It's like it's embarrassing. Just embarrassing. Even my wife. I get home, and Colette's like, "How'd it go?" And I'm like, "Uh, I just want to crawl in a hole and hide." So, I'm telling you these things for a couple reasons. Number one, I want you to know that I go through it as well. Because I'm sure you guys go through this too, right? Where you're expecting this, and then this comes in and you're frustrated or depressed or angry. All of the emotions come in, right? So I wanted to share with you, hopefully to help you just understand that even me, at this level in the game for me, I still go through that. I'm going through it right now, like in the middle of it. In the middle of being embarrassed and being frustrated. Like I didn't even want to go to the office today. I just want to sit at home and watch movies and eat ice cream. That sounds good, actually. Maybe I will do that. Just kidding. Well, I'm not completely ruling it out yet, but anyway. But then the second half is where the lesson is. Because after licking my wounds and being depressed and being embarrassed, and all the emotions that come with that, then I was like, "Well, I've got a job to do." Right? And wrestling is the same way. I lose a match, be frustrated, embarrassed, angry, all the things, and then it's like, "Well, I've got to come back and win this tournament." Or, you know. Placed third in this tournament. "I've got to come back and compete in the next tournament. I've got to come back and like... " So now it's like what are the adjustments I make? I'm like, "Okay. Well, the webinar didn't work, so I'm not going to go set out 500 replay emails, because it didn't work, and so it's not worth the effort. Right? So we're calling an audible. We're shifting that." Number two, it's like, "Okay. We misunderstood our audience." Right? The audience who I thought they were were definitely not who they were, so who is the audience? I've got to figure this out. Like Danny Kennedy 101, message to market match. My message did not match the market, right? So I've got to figure this out. In fact, when we lost ClickFunnels the first five times, it was an interesting thing. Same thing. The first five launches of ClickFunnels failed, failed, failed, failed, failed. And number six is when it hit, because I'd figured out the message to market match. What is the message that this market needs to buy the product? So I realized I had a message to market mismatch. So the first question is, who is the actual market? So we started digging through the data, and like who are they. I assumed they were this. They're not. So, who are they? And I figured that out. Okay, now what is the purpose? Why are they buying this product? Why did they come into this room? Why in this ecosystem? What's the reasoning they had? Okay, now we know that. Now the mechanism. I just talked about getting from zero to a million bucks. First off is like you've got to figure out who is it you're selling, then you start figuring out what is it you're actually selling, and then how you're selling it. The what and the how, right? And so, I know the what's ClickFunnels. It's like it has to be that. That's the whole purpose, right? So I know who now. The who, I misunderstood the who. Number two is like what? Well, I'm still selling the same what. So, the last one is how. What is the mechanism? What's the thing that we're using to sell? Right? And I thought that the webinar was going to be the thing to sell everybody. Now that I quickly figured out, okay, the webinar's not the thing. Okay, well what is the thing? How am I going to sell people this product? I'm like, well they just bought... I'm looking at what the product they just purchased, which is video creation software that helps make doodle videos and things like that, right? So it's like, okay, this is the mechanism that they bought, right? They're buying software that helps them do this, so I need to use that same mechanism to convert them. So, right now I am in the process. Within an hour of me bombing the webinar, I had hired a writer to start on this process. But now we're working on a Video Sales Letter for my OGs. We call them VSLs, for those who are newer. It's called a Video Sales Letter, VSL. And we're going to hand sketch out the VSL. So, someone comes in. They bought software that does VSLs. I'm going to have them hand sketch out a VSL. We're going to have them surveying the VSL to figure out which audience they are, and then the VSL will change on the fly, depending on who they are. So if, "This person is this market or this market or this market or this," who they are, it will speak specifically to that who, and bridge the gap on why they now need ClickFunnels. So that is the second test, and that test may bomb. I may go and spend a month trying to build this thing out, paying to hand do all the videos, all of the thing, and it may completely bomb. But that's the game, right? It's trying and failing, trying and failing. But it comes back to understanding it's the core things, right? Understanding, okay, who is the market? Right? The market to message match. Who is the market? What's the message you need to actually convert that, and keep tweaking that and change that until you figure it out. ClickFunnels, I failed five times. Five launches before we hit it. And I could have easily failed on the first or the second or the third or the fourth or the fifth, but I didn't, luckily. Thank heavens. Woo hoo. Otherwise most of you guys wouldn't even be here. And I kept working until we figured it out. Three weeks before... Or two weeks. Whatever it was. A month ago. A month before the 10X event, I tried my presentation, and I flopped. I tweaked the market to method match, tweaked those things, and then a month later, whatever it was, at 10X, boom. $3.2 million in sales. Right? So, it's our ability to look at the failures, lick our wounds quickly, and then make the adjustments that are the key to winning this game. Okay? Because man, I don't care what level you are. I don't care if you do this for 20 years, like I had. I don't care if you've done that webinar 150 times live, and you know exactly what words to say in order to get people to buy. If it fails, sometimes it does, and you've got to come back and figure out what are the adjustments. My buddy who's a UFC fighter, right? Lost in the match. He's going to come back and look at the adjustments. What are the adjustments he's got to make? I think that's where a lot of people, they fail. It's that they failed, and then they think that they're a failure, as opposed to like, "I failed. Crap. That method didn't work, but I'm stubborn, and I've got pigheadedness. I'm going to keep trying and keep trying and keep trying." And for me with ClickFunnels, six times, we got it. Gave this offer. It may even take six times. Maybe eight, maybe 10, maybe 15, maybe 30. But I have to make it work, right? And the same thing's got to be true for you. Okay? If it hasn't worked yet, all right. That's okay. Let's get back to the drawing board, and you've got to think. Did I mess up on the message? Is the market wrong? What do I got to tweak? And keep doing it until you've figured out the method that's going to work for that audience. So, anyway. I hope that helps. You guys are hearing me talk about it in the midst of the pain, as opposed to later. They always say in vulnerability, like show your scars but not your open wounds, but I've got an open wound. There it is. I just dumped some salt on it to embarrass myself in front of you guys even more, because that's how much I love you guys. But hopefully it gives you some understanding in some of the things you need to be able to lick your wounds and get back up and keep trying, because it's going to happen. It happened to me. It's going to happen to you. It's going to happen to other people. But the ones who win are the ones who are able to sit in the frustration of the moment for a moment. Because as annoying as it is, it feels good to be like, "Duh," and letting that pain just kind of writhe inside of you. You know, it's like someone stabbing you and turning the knife, twisting the knife. It's like I want to feel that pain, so I can be angry enough and frustrated enough to do the work to figure it out. Because if you're like, "Oh, I failed. Whatever. You know, win some, lose some," and keep moving on, you're not going to be successful. I want to sit in that pain for a little bit, so I can be like, "Ah, I'm so angry. I'm so embarrassed. I'm so frustrated." Like all of the things, and twisting that knife, because that's what gets you to be like, "Okay. I've got to change this. I've got to figure something out." Right? And that's what gives you the fuel you need to make the adjustments and to change, right? I mean, losing. I lose a wrestling match, that pain and that frustration, that embarrassment, those things are the things that drive me now to get back in the gym and to figure things out. And as an entrepreneur, the same thing. You bomb a campaign. All right. Let it hurt. Feel it. Okay, now you feel that? That sucks, right? Okay, now let's get back to work and let's fix this thing. And that's kind of the way you guys got to be looking at. That's the way I'm looking at it, right? The annoyance and the pain of me bombing on this thing is the fuel that I need to fix it, and I'm excited now to fix it. Still upset, still frustrated, still have that pain in my gut from failing, but that's okay. Again, that's the thing that's going to drive me through figuring it out. And we're going to figure it out. And when I figure it out I'll share it with you guys, because I have to figure it out. It's just not like, "Oh, that'd be nice." It's like, "No, I'm multiple eight figures in the hole right now in this company. We've got to figure out how to turn it around." And I will. We'll figure it out. But this is my mindset. This is how I'm doing. These are the things I'm looking at. Okay? What was the market? What did I screw up on? Right? What's the message? Where did I screw up there? Okay, what am I selling, and how am I selling it? What are the methodologies? What do I got to tweak? What do I got to change? And those things put together is how I win this game. So just remember, you guys. It's a game. Don't let it stress you out. Don't let it keep you up at nights. But realize it's a game that you're playing. If you want to win, you've got to be able to move, to adjust, and yeah. So, there you go. I appreciate you guys. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode and learned something, please share it. Let people know. That's the best thing you could do for me, is tell someone. Like, "Dude, go listen to Russell's podcast this week." Or if you hate it, then don't. That's cool, too. I get it. I'm not going to be everyone's cup of tea, as they say, which is totally fine by me. So for my people, you'll hear my voice, and hopefully this will help you. So thanks again for listening, and I'll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye, everybody. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Understanding funnel stacking is the key to survival in 2021 and beyond. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Good morning, everybody. This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Today is webinar day. I'm excited. Hopefully it's webinar day for you too, because webinars day, as long as you don't mess it up, it's usually payday. So, got some cool stuff to talk to you about. I'll be right back after the intro. Okay. So, heading to the office today, today is webinar day. That's a special webinar day, and I'm excited. I had a lesson that I want you to learn from this. So, how do I phrase this best? So, I just know when we first launched ClickFunnels, the way we did it was, I did a webinar, every single... Well, I told people I'd do a webinar a week for a year. But I was doing like three to five webinars a week, sometimes two or three a day for a year. And that's how we blew up ClickFunnels initially. That gave us initial momentum to get things into outer space. And then, over time we've got funnels and we do funnel stacking. Someone buys a book and they're pushing a webinar, and then from there, we take them through a whole sequence to get people to ascend and move up. And a couple of years ago I did a funnel hacking lab, I gave a presentation called, "Funnel Stacking," and talked about the importance of it and why it's like, have just a funnel, is not... Some people's business is like one funnel, that's their whole business. I'm like in the future, you got to become better at funnel stacking, which is like taking from funnel one to funnel two, to funnel three and moving them up your value ladder. And back then it was like, because this is how you make more money, but it wasn't like a necessity. And you probably heard me say before, one of my favorite Dan Kennedy quotes, he said, "Whoever can spend the most money to acquire customer wins." So, that's why funnels are so essential. When I got started back in the day, you guys heard of my story, right? I sold a potato gun DVD, and that's all I sold, and I was able to make money on that. But then Google shifted and got more expensive. And so we had to build out funnels to be able to still be profitable. And honestly, for the most part, I think most business owners over the last five or six years can have a funnel and make money and be profitable because just the funnel metrics. But something's happened over the last couple months and you may have heard of this. Our friends over at Google and our friends over at Apple and our friends at Facebook all started hating each other and fighting and battling. And because of these wars, all of our tracking and all sorts of stuff shifted, it changed. And I'm not sure if you've noticed it, we've noticed it, but the cost per acquisition or cost to acquire customers has gone up dramatically in most of the businesses and most of the funnels we have because of these new updates. And it's super annoying. But guess what? For those of you guys who are listening to me who are funnel hackers, who understand this stuff we've been talking about, is a slight annoyance that'll actually yield you more money at the end of the day because you understand these principles. Okay? So, what's going to happen is, first off, everybody who just had a funnel and that was their business, it's going to be harder for them to make money in that funnel. They're going to get closer and closer to break even, or losing money in their funnel. And a lot of people, a lot of your competition, a lot of people around you are going to be out of business. So there's number one. There's the bad news, a lot of people are going out of business. The good news is, most of your competition is going to get out of business, which means eventually at cost is probably going to drop, your ability to serve people is going to be easier. And so, those who stick through this are going to win, and it's going to be better for you in the longterm. So, that's the positive. This is the pattern that I've seen year after year, decade after decade now. This is what happens. And so, I warned you in the beginning of Traffic Secrets, I said, "There's a storm coming." We're in the eye of the storm right now, it's happening. And so, ad costs are going up, most businesses who are not sophisticated, who don't understand funnel hacking, and these principles are going to be gone. But for you guys, it's like, now's the time to start preparing, and so, what that means is, no longer is just your funnel breaking even, like going to be the thing that builds you the right business. That's step number one. Now you have to get into funnel stacking. Some of you guys, it's not the first funnel is going to be the second funnel that breaks you even. Okay? Did you hear that? It's not the first, it's the second funnel that breaks you even. Or some might be the first, the second and the third breaks you even, after that, you're profitable. The biggest companies, they could go the deepest. Now, for us who aren't VC backed, like for example, HubSpot... I think it's HubSpot. We were looking at their metrics and they go like a year or two years in the hole. So, they'll spend $2,000 to get a trial customer and they don't make any money on that person for two years, but they can do that because they've got all these VCs backing them. People like me and you, who are bootstrapping, we don't have unlimited budgets. So, we still have to break even quickly or we can't keep scaling. So the goal always initially was, break even in your first funnel. And then your second funnel is all profit. But now it's going to be going deeper because of just these new changes in how things are playing out. And so, it's important for you to do funnel stacking where it's like, hey, this may be my book funnel. And from there, I push my webinar funnel and from there it's my high ticket funnel and we're taking them through the sequence. And maybe it's like in the middle of the webinar funnels where you break even, or maybe even at the end of the webinar funnel, you're at break even or something, but you got to start figuring those metrics out and start figuring that process out. And so, that's something to think about. One thing people ask me is, "How do you track these things?" And Alex Becker actually has this really good tool now, called Hyros, H-Y-R-O-S, that we're using for our tracking. And it's probably the best thing out there right now. It's still not flawless, no one's flawless. Someday. Someday someone's going to build a flawless system. But it's been super helpful for us to be able to see the tracking from funnel to funnel and kind of see what's happening with people. But anyway, I want you guys to understand that this funnel stacking is a key. So for example, that's why I'm so excited about today's webinar day, because recently we acquired a company and I'm going to give more details, probably Funnel Hacking Live I'll first start talking about it. But we acquired a company that has a whole bunch of front end funnels. And we bought the funnels because they're so profitable. The average cart value is like, I don't know, 130, $140. So, he spent a lot of money to acquire a customer, which is why each of the funnels gets three to 500 new buyers a day, which is awesome. And my goal long-term is to get all those people into ClickFunnels. That's the whole business model. We bought this company because we're buying all their front end funnels so we can push people into ClickFunnels in the backend. Now, in the middle of those acquisitions, when these iOS, Facebook, Apple updates started happening and the cost to acquire a customer went up and all of a sudden these funnels were a 25% profit margin went down to 0% profit margin. And at first, everyone's freaked out like, "Oh, we should cancel the deal. We shouldn't do it." I'm like, "No, you don't understand, this is why we have to do the deal. This is the key." Yes, it sucks that the margin is now gone from these funnels, but the same thing, is like, we're still at break even or maybe a little bit in the hole, but we're acquiring all these customers and then we can put them into our second funnel and that's where it becomes profitable. And so, the question is, what is the second funnel? What's that look like? How is it going to work? And so that's what I'm testing today. So, what I'm doing today is, I'm doing a webinar to the entire buyer list, entire customer list of this company we bought. I think we have seven or almost 8,000 people registered. So it's going to be a big webinar day today and hopefully I don't bomb it. And it's a big payday, but who knows I could bomb. So we do a webinar, and if the webinar goes well, I take that webinar presentation and then we plug it into the back end of every one of these funnels. So, somebody buys the product, they go through the funnel hit the thank you page, thank you page will plug in the actual webinar, gets them on the webinar. And now, the first funnel stack has been completed, and it gets somebody from buying the software, getting thank you page, watch the webinar, buying ClickFunnels. And again, that becomes the first funnel stack. And so, that's the key. That's the thing I want you guys understanding is that, I think a lot of people are like, "Oh, you're going to make a ton of money off the webinar." I'm like, "Not enough money to pay back what we bought this company for." I'm only doing the webinar to be able to create the second piece in this funnel, the funnel stack, thing that's going to plug into the back of all these funnels. So now all these customers coming in every single day, we can transition them from funnel one to funnel two, which gives us profit, but then also plugs people into ClickFunnels, which is our continuity. And that's the beginning of the funnel stack. And then there's things from there, we'll take them on, but that's the key, the principle concept. Does that make sense you guys? Hope it does, because that's the key. I want you guys to understand the funnel stacking is the future. Just like we went from single products to funnel, was the last two decades. The next decade is moving from a funnel to a funnel stack. And so, that's the key. If you want more info, I think I have a book I wrote back in the day called, "Funnel Stacking." And I think I have it as an ebook now. I might mess up my domain. I think if you to funnelstacking secrets.com, there's a free ebook there that shows you my funnel stack from book to webinar to high ticket. And it shows you the email sequences, the numbers, the breakdown, and kind of a cool thing that you can use if you're trying to think through your funnel stack. But anyway, just want you guys getting that in your mindset, and we'll talk more about it, especially Funnel Hacking Live and other places, but the big key right now is, as it was products to funnels, now we're going from funnels to funnel stacking. And those who can spend the most money to acquire customer will win, and those who can't are going to lose. And so, if you want to win this game, it's time to start learning these skills and become more advanced in your marketing. So hope that helps. Thank you guys for listening. That said, it's webinar day, wish me luck. And hopefully it's a webinar day for you wherever you are listening to this. If not, schedule a webinar. It gets people on it because webinar day is payday. It's the best day of the week. Thanks guys. And I'll talk to you soon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here is a trick to increase your stick rate, increase your perceived value, give you the ability to charge more, all while making your customers stick longer. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Hey, what's up everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to The Marketing Secrets podcast. For today's episode, I want to quote myself. "If you are good at something, you should turn it into software." All right, everybody, hope you guys are doing awesome. I am heading home from the office today. And there's actually a really cool mastermind group that I'm part of, that meets once a year. And they have not met in almost two years now, because of the whole COVID thing. And they're meeting right now, and I'm not able to be there. And it's breaking my heart. But I got a message from my friend, Alison Prince, who is there. And she said, "You've been being quoted three or four times." I said, "What are people saying about me? My ears are burning. Tell me, tell me." And she said that someone quoted, and she read the quote, which was basically something I said last year. The event which is Whatever you're good at, just turn that into software. And I want to give you context, because this group is some of the best personal development gurus in the world. Literally, the who's who. You would know probably 95% their names. And most of them have courses. They got products. They got podcasts. They got YouTube channels. They got all these things where their teaching their stuff. And all of them have bigger reach, bigger following, bigger list, bigger everything than I do. But the reality is, I think, for the most part, I make more money than almost all of them. Not all of them. There's a couple that I'm gaining on. But as a whole, pretty substantially, I make more money than most of them. And when they were talking about last time, I was like, "You guys are all brilliant. You have these ideas. You have these things, but you're selling it as a course. And a course is good. But, man, if you could turn that course into software, it would change everything." And like, "Oh, that doesn't work for me." And I was like, "Yes." You have to understand their art is personal development, right? My art is building funnels. And so for years, I did courses, teaching how to build funnels, and how to lay them out, and how to write copy, and how to do these things. But it wasn't through until we turned our knowledge into software that my businesses went from good to insane, right? And you think about Funnel Scripts, right? We taught people how to write copy for decades. And nobody wants to buy copywriting, so we turned it into software, and boom, Funnel Scripts is a Two Comma Club ex-award winner. Talked about building funnels, and how to do it, and the strategy. But it wasn't until we turned into software that it blew up. I've watched Garrett White recently. Garrett White, if you know, he did live events where men came out to Wake Up Warrior. And he would take them down the beach, and he'd beat them up, and he would make them tough, and turn them into men. And it's amazing, right? And he did that for five or six years doing events every single month. And then, now he stopped those. He shut them down. And now he's turning what he does into software, where you log in to software, you do the thing, you read the thing, you read the message. You listen to the app, you check the thing off, and you're doing the things. And he's transitioning it from information to information blended into software. And so for you guys, I want you think about that. In fact, let me step back. One of my very first mentors, a lot of you guys know this, is Dan Kennedy and Bill Glazer were my first two big mentors. And in their company, Magnetic Marketing, they have a newsletter where they sell access to the monthly newsletter, right? And one of the things that Bill used to always talk to me about is he's like, "You have to have in any kind of continuity, you got to build in pain of disconnect." Meaning, it gets harder for somebody to leave, right? And he said, "The biggest problem in their business was there was no pain of disconnect." People were buying the newsletter, which was great, and it's great recurring income stream. But if something happened, right? Their credit card failed, some bills happen, whatever. First thing to go is info, right? This has been helpful, but I don't have to have this membership. I don't have to have this newsletter. I don't have to have these things for whatever reason. So they're able to cancel them really quickly and very easily, because there's no pain of disconnect. Whereas, ClickFunnels right now, when someone gets an account to ClickFunnels, and set up their site, they set up their funnel, and things are happening in their thing. They have their email list, and they've got things happening. If things shift, and things get hard, and things happen, the last thing they're going to cut is ClickFunnels because the pain of disconnect is so high. They stop paying their bill to ClickFunnels, their business falls apart, right? I remember in the continuity business, when we were doing membership sites and stuff, people would go three, or four, or five months, stop paying. We've been hounding him, trying to get him to pay things like that. Whereas, ClickFunnels is opposite, right? Someone stops paying, sites go down. And within five minutes, they're calling us like, "Oh, here's my credit card. Let me update it." Right? It just shifts the thing, because the pain of disconnect is so high. And so, the problem traditionally with information products, or coaching, or things like that is that there's no pain of disconnect, right? People have it, they can cancel it. And it's simple to do because there's no pain of disconnect. But as soon as you take your course, right? And you turn it into software. Now someone's logging in, they're going in, they're filling out things or taking notes. They've got things they're building up. Now all these things are there. They're stored in the spot. And if they were to cancel, they lose all this information, right? And so, how do you turn your knowledge, the things you're good at into software? I just want you guys thinking about that. We've done it a couple of times this year. One of them recently, and the site's not live yet. It maybe live by the time you guys hear this. But if you go to braindump.com, we have a process that we use to brain dump, and get the ideas out of our head. And we taught it to people. I showed them how to use it in Trello. I showed people how to do it in different ways, to do in Google Docs. And this is how we brain dump our ideas to write a book, or create a course, or do different things like that. And it was good. Some people paid for us, most people wouldn't, because it was like, "How would I pay you to show me how to brain dump my ideas?" And so, we took this idea, this skill set, this knowledge we have, we turned into software. And the software now allows you to brain dump stuff. And what's cool about it is, number one, it makes the process so much simpler, so much easier. I can just give it to people. They can do it very fast, very easily, which is exciting. That's number one. My number two, is now there's a pain of disconnect. If you spend a week, or a month, or year brain dumping your ideas into our software, you don't want to cancel, because if you do, you lose all the stuff you've brain dumped, right? You lose all your notes, your ideas, all that stuff disappears with you. And so, the pain of disconnect is very, very high. Whereas, if you bought a training course, let's say, you're paying 30 bucks a month to go through my course in how to brain dump your ideas. After month number one, I get the gist, right? I already listened to it or I don't need it any more, whatever. It is easy to cancel. Whereas, the software, now you're part of it, you're probably going to use it forever, right? And so, just want you thinking through those things, right? How do you take what you know, and turn into software? When you do that, you're going to increase your valuations. Your company will be worth more. You increase your stick rates. Your stick will be longer. You increase happiness. People feel the increased perceived value, software feels more expensive than courses, and about a million other things. So anyway, I thought it was cool because they quoted me today during the mastermind meeting. And I wanted to share the quote with you guys, since I'm not able to hang out with all my friends who are super cool. And literally, these people that are changing the world, and I can't be there with them, which is too bad. But at least, I'm doing something cool here as well. So anyway, I don't want to complain about not being there. I stood back for a very important and very cool reason, so no stress. But hopefully, that helps you guys. With that said, I'm home, I'm going to play with my kids, which is the number one reason why I was not able to go. I'm going to go have some fun with them. So appreciate you guys. Thanks so much for listening. And go figure out how to turn your ideas into actual software. Thanks so much everybody. And we'll talk soon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Weird Gucci shoes pic got me 120K views. What I learned and what I would do differently next time. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- What's up, everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secret Podcast. Today, I want to talk about the concept of capitalizing on momentum. All right, so I had a really unique experience. Some of you guys know that by default I wear a t-shirt and jeans almost every day, but then for Funnel Hacking Live I used to try to dress up. And so I'd buy my own clothes and I didn't know how to buy clothes and so I would just... Anyway, looking back now, it's embarrassing looking at what I thought was nice. But I feel like the third or fourth Funnel Hacking Lives, one of my friends, Bart Miller, was like, "Hey, can I dress you because you're embarrassing yourself and everybody else?" And I was like, "Okay." And so he started dressing me, and it's been a fun experience. I'm not comfortable with most things he tries to put me in like suit jackets and all sorts of fancy things. But I've got my spot where I'm like, "Okay, here's Russell dressed up. I'm wearing nice jeans. I'm wearing a shirt. I'm not tucking it in though." The shirt may have cuff links because those are cool. I'm probably even in the cool watch. That's cool. And probably some cool shoes. But that's about the extent of where I'm going to go. And so once a year we go shopping and we buy a bunch of cool stuff. I wear it at Funnel Hacking Live and then I wear it every time I'm on stage for the rest of the year. And then usually, by the time it's been a year, those clothes have been worn out and then I go buy new clothes. And so that's how I run my fashion. The Russell Brunson fashion happens that way. So, anyway, it's funny. But I had a really cool experience this time. Again, every time we're shopping, I'm way out of my comfort zone. I don't know what half these things are. I didn't know what Gucci was. I didn't know, you know what I mean? I don't know anything about brands or fashion or anything. I remember the first time we walked into a Gucci Store five years ago, I was like, "No, I'll never wear something like this ever in infinity years." The shoes have bugs on them and fur and weird stuff, and I was like, "Yeah." But anyway, last time, two years ago I went into Gucci and they're these cool looking tennis shoes that were ClickFunnels colors. I was like, "Sweet. We'll get those. I mean, I can wear tennis shoes that look like ClickFunnels." And they were awesome. And so I've broadened my horizon to some of the weird brands that are out there. Anyway, so this year, we went back into the Gucci store and, again, they had a couple of cool not weird shoes that were in between. I'm like, "Okay, these are cool." And there are these one pair, they were sneakers. And they were weird colors like blue and yellow. And so they had me trying them on. I got one of my size, but one on each foot. I put the yellow or the blue on the right foot and the other one on the left foot. And I'm sitting looking at them, I'm like, "I have no idea if these shoes are cool or lame or whatever." And instinctively, I grabbed my phone and I took a picture just to send it to my wife Collette who was shopping somewhere else. I was like, "Are these cool or are these lame. I don't even know." So I sent it to her, and then at the same time, I was like, "I'm going to post this on Instagram." So I posted it on Instagram, and on Instagram you can do like a voting thing. So I put it an Instagram and I was like, "Yellow or blue? Just vote whatever it is." So I post that, and then I go back, put the shoes away, and we go continue shopping. Anyway, so there's the backstory, in case you guys were thinking Russell's spending infinity dollars at Gucci every single day. That's not the reality. The reality is, it's still weird to me and I just happened to be trying these shoes on, posted a picture, and had people vote. So, that's the story. Then, two hours later, I open Instagram and I open the thing where it shows you the score of people voting. And at the time, 70,000 had voted or had seen the thing. And I was like, "What?" I've never had 70,000 people view one of my stories. That was in two hours. And then I looked down and it had 10,000 had voted, or whatever it was. And it kept going, kept going, and by the time the 24 hour window had gone and it disappears from my Stories 120,000 people had seen it. I think 35,000 people had voted on it. And it was crazy. So, that happened, and after it happened, and again I still don't exactly how it happened, I have some ideas and things, but for some reason, the Instagram algorithm is like, "This is getting a high percentage of votes. Therefore, it's good. Therefore, we should show it to everybody that Russell knows. Plus, we should probably post it on the search feed and other places like that." Anyway, it blew up. And then what's crazy is, I get this huge momentum surge and then stupid Russell doesn't even think and then my next couple Insta Stories are me eating food or doing stupid things and that was it. And then, again, I'm not even paying attention, and then the next day come back and I look and, again, 120,000 views, 30,000 votes. And I was like, "Man, that is crazy that happened. I still don't know how it happened." And then I looked at my next Story, and my next Story had 60,000 views on it. The next one had 40,000, then 30,000. And the ones that had 60,000, 40,000, 30,000 were me doing stupid things that didn't even matter and I missed the momentum. I should've been like, "Hey, by the way, I'm going to be wearing one of these pair of shoes at Funnel Hacking Live. Swipe up to get your ticket." Or it could have been like, "Hey, if you want to learn how to afford Gucci shoes, go buy my book," or something to capitalize on the momentum, and I didn't I missed it, And I missed the window. Now, this is obviously a dumb, dorky example of a fluke thing where I posted and Insta Story, got a bunch of viewers for whatever reason, I had attention for literally 24 hours, and then it was gone after that. The next day, I tried to post something and my views went back down to, normally, I get, I don't know, 10,000 to 15,000 people to view a Story. So it dropped back to normal and I was like, "Ah, I missed my window." I had momentum, I could have had this amazing opportunity, and I lost out on it. So anyway, that's the context, but the lesson I want to teach you guys is just, there's times in our life where we get momentum, and it could be in sports, it could be in a relationship, it could be in business, you do something and something goes viral or something hits or you speak on stages and the big happens or you launch a podcast and tons of downloads or something, you do something, and it gets momentum. And I think so many times, we get so excited by the momentum that we don't try to capitalize on it. And it's actually capitalizing on the momentum is where you make money or something good happens from it. I know that there's so many times, like when ClickFunnels passed 50,000 members and we hired the Harmon Brothers to do this viral video and launched it and we did this big thing to get momentum. And we even brought in all these big influencers. We did the event and Gary V came and spoke at it. We did a bubble soccer event and got the Guinness Book of World Records thing. We did this big, huge thing, we got a whole bunch of momentum, and then we didn't capitalize on the momentum. Afterwards, we were like, "Oh, we had all these influencers there and we didn't get them to promote it. We didn't do interviews with them. We didn't do these things. We had the momentum and we didn't capitalize on it." And, looking back, oh, we probably lost literally millions of dollars sometimes because we didn't capitalize on the momentum. And so if you look at your business, there's two things when you're trying to drive traffic and create attention. There's two things you're doing. You're going to do things to create momentum, and then you've got to capitalize on that momentum. I look at a lot of influencers who are really good at creating momentum, but then they don't capitalize. Where people are really good at capitalizing on no momentum and they're just buying ads and making money that way, but there's a sweet spot where you can do things to organically create momentum and then capitalize at the same time. And it's that yin-yang of those two things. There's a sweet spot there where you can really have some big success. And so a couple of things I'd recommend from this. Number one is started thinking about, what are things I can do to create momentum? By me knowing that me posting a yellow and blue Gucci shoe and have people vote, I'm like, "Oh my gosh, people like these dorky little quizzes I didn't know about." And if the quiz turns out good, Instagram's going to reward it and I'm going to get 120,000 people to watch it. Now that I know that, guess what I'm doing? Knowing this is the way to get momentum, I'm going to start looking at things differently and how do I do things? Similarly, oh, I said that word right I think, last year, we did a video where I was telling my story and we had hired these actors to act it out and we did it and it got five million views. That created a bunch of momentum and then we didn't capitalize on it. So I'm like, "Okay, how do we do that again? We create Stories." But then, the first thing creates the momentum and the second thing comes back through and it capitalizes on the momentum. How do I structure those things? And so part of is looking at things like, what are the things you've done in the past that have created momentum? Can you do them again? What are things that other people do to create momentum? Can you model those to create the momentum? And then the second half is, as I create the momentum, be prepared now to capitalize on the momentum on the other side. And that's the other side of it. So, anyway, I wanted to share that. Hopefully, it gets the wheels in your head spinning, because I think that as you consciously start paying attention to that like, how can I create the momentum and then how can I capitalize on it? That's when you have success. You don't have success when you randomly just create momentum like I did and then you're not prepared to capitalize on it. I missed a big opportunity. But, man, if you can get those two things where you start looking at like, what are the things I can do to create momentum? What are the different levers, the things, the ideas, the things I can tweak, I can effect that, cause that? And then being prepared on the other side to capitalize on it. So hopefully, that helps you guys as you're thinking about it. Because traffic, I'm going to go buy Facebook ads. That's good. But how can I buy Facebook ads to create momentum? What are the other things I can do to create momentum? What are posts I can make that get people to share and to comment to create momentum? What are these different things? You start thinking differently and it gets really exciting. So, anyway, I hope this helps. I know that when I get excited I talk fast. This is an eight minute podcast and I probably jammed 30 minutes of stuff into it. So if you need to go back and listen on half speed, please do that. But hopefully it gets the wheels spinning of just, what are the things you can do every single day? 120,000 views off of a picture of my shoes, that would have cost me 20 grand in Instagram ads to get that same amount of views, and I didn't capitalize on it because I missed it. And so just thinking through those things and crafting them and testing things out and having fun with it. That's the game we get to play every day, guys. It's so much fun. I hope you're enjoying the game. If not, start looking at it as a game again. This is fun, this is something that should be exciting, all these crazy things. The fact that I posted that picture and got that many views is crazy, but that's part of the game. That's the fun part of the game. So I hope this helps. I hope it gets the wheels in your head spinning. With that said, thanks so much for listening and I'll talk to you guys all again soon. Bye, everybody. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Here are some fun things you can do to launch businesses literally overnight. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A new way to look at the “big domino” and how it’ll help you function as an entrepreneur. Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- What's up everybody, good morning. This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. Today, I want to talk about something that I know all of us entrepreneurs deal with a lot, which is pressure and noise. If you listen to Alex Charfen, if you studied him, the entrepreneur personality type, he talks a lot about how entrepreneurs, when you are able to lower pressure and noise, you can do greatness. You can change the world, but when the pressure and noise gets higher, it gets really difficult. And oftentimes it turns into chaos and into bad things. And so I talk about that during this episode, because I'm in definitely a state of increased pressure noise and I want to talk about what I'm doing to deal with it and how it's helping. So with that said, I'm going to cue up the theme song. When we come back, we're going to dive deep. All right. So sure, like most of you and every... Okay, what step you are in your entrepreneurial journey? If you are beginning, if you are growing, if you are scaling, if you are selling, if you are buying, if you were like, whatever you're doing, there are times when you have increased pressure and noise. And Alex Charfen's one of my friends, I love his stuff. He was one of our head coaches for two comma club, X coaching program for a while. And he has a whole message, he talks about entrepreneurial personality types, EPT as he calls it, people like us. and he always says, "You're not broken, you're not weird, you're just different. You're and entrepreneur and that's okay." And in his teachings, he talks a lot about just how entrepreneurs, a lot of times we think we're crazy. And like a lot of times entrepreneurs are the ones who snap and go crazy and go off the deep end and other times they're the ones who are creating the most amazing things in the world. And he talks about there's this fine line between greatness and chaos, right? And for entrepreneurs, the biggest thing you do is you have to if you can decrease the pressure noise around you, then you can succeed. But when the pressure noise goes up, that's where you typically, they crash and burn. If you think about if you've had a chance to crash and burn a business or two, you probably know it was during a season or a time of increased pressure noise, and it's hard to handle it. And that's when things happened, right? That's why it's so important to build a team and to have people around you and things help support you to decrease the pressure noise so you can succeed. So there's a little mini chunk out of Charfen's training so you guys understand kind of the context I'm talking about. But in my life over the last 30 days, has been an insane, increase in pressure noise. I can't talk about all the things, but people I love who I work with daily, or who have had health issues that I was not expecting, there's that. And then we just finished our first acquisition and we were in the middle of our second acquisition, so new companies coming in. We also have Funnel Hacking Live in 30 days. We also have a new coaching program that we are changing. We also have, I can't tell you all the things, there's a lot of stuff and it's exciting. And it's partially, it's the most exciting time of the business, right? I just have so many fun things and so many things I'm excited for it. But then on the other side, man, between all these things, I was not planning over the last 30 days the pressure and noise and things have gone up dramatically. And I don't know about you guys, but it's made it for me it's hard to sleep at night. I lay there in bed I'm so tired but I can't sleep because there's just these things happening and all the stuff and the stress and all the balls you're juggling, you don't want to drop them, right? And I'm curious, have you guys ever felt that before? And for me, the last month it's been hard to sleep. And then I come into the office and there's so many things to do that half of them I don't know where to start and there's this and there's this and there's this and all of them are on fire. And it's overwhelming sometimes. And so it's interesting because by default I want to get things done so I go and I start working, I'm trying to get task after task. But it seems like an insurmountable thing. And so earlier this week, I had a thought, and you guys have heard me talk about the big domino before, right? In every sales presentation, it's one big domino. If you can knock down that one domino, it takes care of everything else and all the other dominoes fall down. And it's true in selling, but it's true in a lot of aspects of life, right? And I started looking at all my big, huge tasks and all the things. Each to do had like 500 little sub to do's. Instead of looking at all the sub to do's, I started looking at the bigger tasks with bigger project and saying, "Okay, what's the one big domino I can do that's going to knock down all these little tasks?" There's no way I can do all of them, it's virtually impossible. What is the big domino or who is the big domino? Who is the person that's going to come that could take this off of my plate? What's been interesting is to be able to look at this differently, I've had to completely slow down, which has been hard for me because I'm like, "I'm not going to make it to the finish line if I stop." But at the same time, I'm not going to make the finish line no matter what. So, it's forced me to stop and say, "I got to find the person or the thing or whatever that's going to knock this thing down." It's made me sit there in my thoughts for a lot longer, which has been good. And I've often thought of how do I get done with the task? The thought is like, "Who is the person I can find it or what's the process or thing I need to do that gets rid of all the other tasks so I can actually make it to the finish line?" And as I've been doing that, it's been interesting because sometimes you ask better questions, you get better answers. And so that's the question I started asking. And all of a sudden the answer started coming clear and it was like, "Okay, well if I had a person for here, this would make all these things disappear." I'm like, "Well, who's the person for that? I don't know somebody." And it's like, "Okay, let's think." And sitting in your thoughts and thinking and thinking and praying and thinking and trying to figure things out. And all of a sudden it's like, "Oh, what about this person? Or how about this? Or how about this?" Or literally one of the things was a text message from a friend who was like, "Hey, there's this person you should meet." And it's like, "Oh my gosh, that person I think is the big domino is can knock down this set of things for me." And it's been interesting because this week I had a whole task list of stuff I had to get done and I had not had a chance to do my tasks yet. But I've had longer meetings, which I hate meetings. Typically, I have slow two to three hour meetings with certain people to build a relationship, to be able to hand the reins to somebody to then go and knock down the domino for me. And I can tell you Friday was the first time this happened. I remember leaving Friday and it was the first night I was just not stressed. When I left, I was like, "Oh my gosh, this might be possible." And today I did it again and it's like, "Okay, this might actually be possible." And it wasn't for me speeding up or spending more hours or doing more things. It was me stopping, stepping back and trying to figure out the big domino. So for you guys, as you are entrepreneurs and you have increased pressure noise, and you're stressing about all the things, I want to encourage you to slow down, or maybe even stop for a moment and look at those tasks differently. Not from "How in the world am I going to get get this done, where am I going to find the extra time?" But, "Who is the big domino or what is the big domino that if I can figure that out, it makes all these other ones irrelevant." And that's been the thing for me that's keeping me sane. It's getting me excited and helping me to now finally starting to see the finish line again. Like, "Oh my gosh, it's there, I can see it, it's possible, you're saying there's a chance I could actually make it to the end." And so, as I'm getting through that and again, I spent two and a half hours meeting somebody today and I'm like, "Oh my gosh, I feel better. I'm going to probably sleep tonight a little bit. I'm pumped about that." It made me think I'm going to stop for a second and just do a quick podcast for my people, because I'm sure some of you guys are in that same season. If you're not now, you will be soon. And so just remembering the big domino concept in a way that you can solve these kind of problems for yourself. So I hope that helps, I hope that was useful. I'm grateful for all you guys for listening, for subscribing, for paying attention. I'm trying to serve you at my highest level and sometimes it's overwhelming, but I feel like we're doing good work. And I feel like the fruits of this stuff that we're creating for you guys right now is going to change a lot of lives, hopefully your life. So keep your eyes out. Everything from Funnel Hacking Live until January of 20, whatever next year is, 2022, it's going to be a crazy ride. You'll see a lot of stuff happened and it's going to be, fun. So I'm pumped. I'm pumped to show you what we've been working on. That's all I got. There's the tease. All right, appreciate you all each for listening and we'll talk to you all soon. Bye, everybody. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The final installment of an interview reflecting on the challenges of the entrepreneurial journey and inspiring listeners to think about their own startup stories. Discussions include personal stories, the role of a good offer in creating successful funnels, and becoming the king of sales funnels. They also introduce Actionetics, discuss building anticipation and testing ideas, and express gratitude towards ClickFunnels employees.

In this podcast, Russell Brunson discusses the power of ClickFunnels and their experience selling it. They also talk about the secret project and their unique culture. They explore the competitive mentality in both wrestling and business and the challenges of selling software after transitioning from the info market space.

Enjoy part two of this classic episode series where Andrew Warner from Mixergy interviews Russell on the ClickFunnels startup story! Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Alright everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I hope yesterday you enjoyed part one of the Clickfunnels start up story interview at the Dry Bar Comedy Club with Andrew. I love the way he interviews. I hope you’re enjoying it as well. So we are going to dive right into part 2 of 4 from this interview. And again, if you’re liking these interviews please, please, please take a snapshot on your phone, post it on Facebook, Instagram or wherever you do your posting and tag me in it and use hashtag marketing secrets so I can see that you’re talking about it. I’d appreciate it. With that said, we’re going to queue up the theme song, when we come back we’ll start in on part 2 of the interview of the Clickfunnels start up story. Andrew: You know what, I’ve talked to a few of your people because they’re so good, that Dave could really be a leader on his own, start his own company, he’s got his own online reputation, the whole thing. I keep asking him, “Why do you work for Russell? What is it that lets you be second to Russell who’s getting all the attention?” And I’ve got some answers and would you mind coming up here and in a second I’m going to ask you. No, come back here and I’ll just bring you up in a second. Actually, you know what, it looks like you can come pretty fast. I thought that it would be a little bit more, I thought it would be more of a thing to get mics on people. And I realized if Collette can do it…. Okay honestly, dig down deep. Why did you want to stick with him? Brent: Through all that stuff? Andrew: Yeah. Brent: I don’t know. My heart was just racing. As he started telling that story, it just makes me sick to my stomach. As you scroll down and look at all those businesses of, for years, every 30 days it was a new business launch, it was crazy. Always why I stuck with him is, you know, Collette mentioned that spirit. He’s absolutely different than anybody else I’ve ever met in my entire life, a friend…. Andrew: Of what? Give me an example. Let’s be more specific. Back then, not today, he’s got this track record, adoring fans, I asked him to do an interview, everyone wants him on his podcast. Back then when it wasn’t going so well. Give me an example that let you know this is a guy who’s going to figure it out eventually, and I could possibly go down, watch him go to jail, but I believe that it’s going to go up. Brent: Well, at the time when things are crashing, I saw him as the income stopped. And he had started a program that he loves, obviously wrestling, and he brought an Olympic wrestling coach to Boise and he brought all these amazing wrestlers to Boise and he wanted them to be able to train and get to the Olympics, he wanted to help them get there and live their dream. And you know, he was supplementing, at the time the business was paying for these guys to do a little bit of work for us, they weren’t doing very much for us. But I saw him out of his own pocket, be paying for these guys. And I knew how hard he wanted to support them. And there was a day when my wife and I, we were struggling because I just, I was concerned about him financially because he was supplementing and trying to keep this business afloat, and we talked about things and I came into the office one day and I asked if I could talk to him and sat down, and kind of spoke in language that I normally don’t speak in, I might have dropped a bomb or two. It was, I was so concerned I pretty much told him, I can’t keep doing this, I can’t keep watching you every month pulling the money that you saved for your family to try keep jobs for other people. I said, I’ll leave if that helps you. And the fact that he stuck with people, that was the true character of who he is. Andrew: He kept paying your salary, kept sticking with you, and also constantly launching things. Brent: Absolutely. Andrew: That you’ve never seen anyone implement like him. Brent: You know some people call it faith or belief. He has this inherit belief that he can truly change people’s lives. Andrew: That’s it, even when he wasn’t fully in control of his own. Alright thanks. Thanks for, give him a big round of applause, thanks for being up here. I feel like this is the thing that helped get you out of trouble and potentially, and getting out of potential jail. What is this business that you created? Russell: So we, during the time of that and this there was time, probably a year and a half-two years that we were trying all sorts of stuff. And again, marginal success on a lot of them, nothing like….and this was the one, we actually, this is before….I’ve done a lot of webinars and speaking from seminars and stuff like that, but this is right when auto webinars were coming out and Mike Filsaime had just done an auto webinar and a couple of people, and I felt like that was going to be the future thing. So we’re like, what do we do the webinar on? We didn’t know. And we flew out to Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher’s office for two days and picked their brains, went to Rich Schefren’s office for a day. And then on the flight home, I’m just like sick to my stomach. I couldn’t figure out what’s the thing that we could serve people the most right now. And on the flight home I was like, all the internet marketing stuff we do works for internet marketers, but we’re way better at like local business. Like if a chiropractor implements like two things it works. Or if a dentist does it. But I was like, I don’t want to be the guy going to dentists, but we could be the backbone for that. What if we created an opportunity where people could come in, we train them, and we connect them with the right tools and resources, and then they could go and sell to chiropractors and dentists. And that’s what the idea was. We turned it into an offer called Dotcom Secrets Local, it was a thousand dollar offer at the time. Did the auto webinar for it, and it launched and within 90 days it had done over a million dollars, which covered payroll taxes and then got us out of debt to the point now we could stop and dream again, and believe again and try to figure out what we really wanted to do. Andrew: Dotcom Secrets Local to a million dollars within 90 days. And how did you find the people who were going to sign up for this. A lot of us will have landing pages like this, we’ll have these funnels. How did you get people in this funnel? Russell: And this was pre-Facebook too, so it wasn’t just like go turn Facebook ads on. But you know, one thing that happened over all the years prior to this, I’d met a lot of people and go to a lot of events and get to know everybody. And everyone I met, you know, you meet a lot of people who have lists, they have followings, they have different things like that. I just got to know them really, really well. And in the past I’d promote a lot of their products, they’d promote my products. So we had this one and we did it first to my list, and it did really well. So I then I then called them and I’m like, “Okay, I did this webinar to my list, these are the numbers, it did awesome. Do you want to do it to your list as well?” and they’re like, “Oh sure. Sounds like a great offer.” We did that list and it did good for them too. And we told the next person and then, if you have a webinar, it’s kind of like the speaking circuit, if you’re good at speaking then people will put you all over the place. Same thing, if you have a webinar that converts, then it’s easy to get a lot of people to do it. So as soon as that one worked and it converted well, then people lined up and we kept doing it, doing it, and doing it, and it was really quick to get to that spot pretty quick. Andrew: I went on Facebook recently and I saw webinar slides from Russell Brunson, I went to the landing page, Clickfunnels page and I signed up and I’ll talk about it maybe later, but I bought it and I know other people did. And I’ve seen other people say, “Russell’s webinar technique is the thing that just works.” I’m wondering how did you figure it out? How did you come across this and how did you build it and make it work? Russell: Yeah, so rewind back probably ten years prior to this, when I was first learning this whole business. I went to my very first internet marketing seminar ever, it was Armand Morin’s Big Seminar. Did you ever go to Big Seminar? Anyway, I went to it and I had no idea what to expect. I thought it was going to be like, I showed up with my laptop and I was going to like, I thought we were a bunch of geeks going to do computer stuff. And the first person got onstage and started speaking and at the end of it he sold like a two thousand dollar thing. And I’d never seen this before. I saw people jumping up and running to the back of the room to buy it. And I’m like this little 23 year old kid and I was counting the people in the back of the room, doing the math, you know doing the math and I’m like, that guy made 60 thousand dollars in an hour. And the next guy gets up and does his presentation and I watch this for three days and I was like, I’m super shy and introverted, but that skill is worth learning. If someone can walk on a stage and make 100,000 dollars in an hour, I need to learn how to do that. So I started that. And it was really bad for the first probably 8 or 9 months. I tried to do it. I’d go to places and I just, I couldn’t figure it out. And then I started asking the people who were good because you go there and all the speakers kind of talk and hang out, and I’d watch the ones that always had the people in the back of the room. And I’d ask them questions, I’m like, ‘What did I do wrong? I feel like I’m teaching the best stuff possible.’ And they’re like, ‘That’s the problem, it’s not about teaching, it’s about stories, telling stories and breaking beliefs.” So for about the next two years I was about once a month flying somewhere to speak, and then when I would go I would meet all the speakers and find out what they were doing and I’d watch them and I’d take notes on the different things they were saying and how they were saying it. And then I kept taking my presentation and tweaking it, and tweaking it, and tweaking it. And you know, now 12 years later, I’ve done so many webinars, it kind of worked. The process works now. Andrew: You are a really good story teller and I’ve seen you do that. I’ve seen you do it, and I know you’re going to do it even more. What I’m curious about is the belief system that you were saying, breaking people’s…what was it that you said? Russell: False beliefs. Andrew: Breaking people’s false beliefs. How do you understand what, like as you look at this audience, do you understand what some of our false beliefs are? Russell: If I knew what I was selling I could figure out for sure. Andrew: If you knew what you were selling. Alright we’re selling this belief that entrepreneurship does work. And I know we’re all going to go through a period like some of the ones that you had where things just aren’t’ working, other people aren’t believing in us, almost failure, what is at that point, the belief system that we have to work on? What do you recognize in people here? Russell: So usually there’s three core beliefs that people have. The first is about the opportunity itself right. So like with entrepreneurship, the first belief that people have is could I actually be an entrepreneur? And some people who actually believe that, they’re like, I’m in. And that’s an easy one. But for those who don’t there’s a reason and usually it’s like, they saw a parent that tried to do it. And the parent tried to be an entrepreneur and wasn’t able to and they saw that failure. Or they’d tried it in the past and they failed or whatever it is. So it’s showing them that even if you tried in the past and showed different ways, let me tell you a story. And for me, I could show 800 different failures. But eventually you get better and you get better until eventually you have the thing that actually works. So I tell a story to kind of show that, to make them believe that, oh my gosh maybe I just need to try a couple more times. And then the second level of beliefs is like beliefs about themselves like, I’m sure it works for you, Russell or Andrew but not for me because I’m different. It’s helping them figure out their false beliefs, and if you can break that, then the third one is like, then they always want to blame somebody else. “I could lose lots of weight but my wife buys lots of cupcakes and candy. So I could do it, but because of that I can’t.” So then it’s like figuring out how you break the beliefs of the external people that are going to keep them. Andrew: And how would you know what that is? How would you know who the external influencers are, that your potential customers are worried about? Russell: I think for most of us it’s because the thing that we’re selling is something that, one of our, Nick Barely said “Our mess becomes our message.” For most of us, what we’re selling is the thing we struggled with before. So I think back about me as 12 year old Russell, watching Don Lepre, like what would have kept me back? And I would have been like, I can’t afford classified ads. Like if you showed me how I can, if you could tell me a story of, oh my gosh I could afford classified ads. Now that belief’s gone and now I’m going to go give you money. It’s just kind of remembering back to the state that you were in when you were trying to figure this stuff out as well. Andrew: Who was who I met when we were coming in here that said that they were part of Russell’s mastermind and I asked how much did you pay and he said, “I’m not telling you.” I can’t see who that person was. But I know you got a mastermind, people coming in. I’m wondering how much of it comes from that? working with people directly, seeing them in the group share openly, and then saying, ah, this is what my potential customers are feeling? Russell: 100% At this point especially. People always ask me, “Where do you go, Russell, to learn stuff?” and it’s my mastermind, because I bring, all the people come in and they’re all in different industries and you see that. You see the road blocks that hold people back, but then they also share the stuff that they’re doing and it’s like, that’s 100% now where I get most of my intell. Because people ask me, “Why, you’re a software company, why in the world do you have a mastermind group?” And it’s because the reason why our software is good is because we have the mastermind group, where they’re all crowd sourcing, they’re doing all this stuff and bringing back to us, and then we’re able to make shifts and pivots based on that. Andrew: Somehow we just lost Apple, but that’s okay. It’s back, good. There we go. This is the next thing, Rippln. Russell: I forgot I put that one in there. Andrew: I went back and I watched the YouTube video explaining it. It’s a cartoon. I thought it was a professional voice over artist, no it’s you. You’re really comfortable getting on stage and talking. But basically in that video that you guys can see in the top left of your screen, it’s Russell, through this voice over and cartoon explaining, “Look, you guys were around in the early days of Facebook, you told your friends, here’s how many friends you would have had, for the sake of numbers, let’s say you told 7 people and let’s say they told 7 people, and that’s how things spread. And the same thing happened with Pinterest and all these other sites. Don’t you ever wish that instead of making them rich by telling stuff, you made yourself rich? Well here’s how Rippln comes in.” and then you created it. And Rippln was what? Russell: So Rippln was actually one of my friend’s ideas, and he is a network marketing guy so he’s like, “We’re building a network marketing program.” And I’d like dabbled in network marketing, never been involved with it. And he came and was like, “Hey, be part of this.” And I was like, “No.” and then he sold us on the whole pitch of the idea, network marketers are really good at selling you on vision, and I was like, “Okay, that sounds awesome.” And then my role was to write the pitch. So I wrote the pitch, did the voice over, did the video, and then we launched it and we had in six weeks, it was like 1.5 million people signed up for Rippln, and I thought it was like, “This is the thing, I’m done.” My down line was like half of the company. And I was like, when this thing goes live, it’s going to be amazing. And then the tech side of it, what we’re promising people in this video that the main developer ended up dying and he had all the code. So they had to restart building it in the middle of this thing. And it was like thing after thing and by the time it finally got done, everyone had lost interest. It was like 8 months later, and I think the biggest check I got was like $47 for the whole thing. And I was just like, I spent like 6 months of my life. It was like a penny a day. It was horrible. Andrew: I’m just wondering whether I should ask this or not. Russell: Go for it. Andrew: So I stopped asking about religion, but I get the sense that you believe that there’s a spiritual element here that keeps you from seeing, my down line is growing, the whole thing is working. Is any of this, does it feel divinely inspired to you? Be honest. Russell: Business or…? Andrew: Business, life, success, things working out, so much so that when you’re at your lowest, you feel like there’s some divine guidance, some divine hand that says, “Russell, it’s going to work out. Russell, I don’t know if I got you, but I know you got this. Go do it.” I feel that from you and I… Russell: I 100% believe that. Andrew: You do? Russell: Every bit of it. I believe that God gives us talents and gifts and abilities and then watches what we do with it. And if we do good then he increases our capacity to do more. And if we do good with it, increases our capacity… Andrew: if you earn it? If you do good, if you use what God gives you, then you get more. So you think that that is your duty to do that and if you don’t do more, if you don’t pick yourself up after Rippln, you’ve let down God. Do you believe that? Is that it? Or that you haven’t lived up to… Russell: Yeah, I don’t think I feel that I’ve let down God, but I definitely feel like I haven’t lived up to my potential, you know. But also I feel like a lot of stuff, as I was putting together that document, all the pages, it’s interesting because each one of them, looking in hindsight, each built upon the next thing and the next thing. And there’s twice we tried to build Clickfunnels and each one was like the next level, and each one was a stepping stone. Like Rippln, if I wouldn’t have done Rippln, that was my very first viral video we ever created. I learned how to pitch things and when we did the Clickfunnels initial sales video, because I had done this one, I knew how to do this one. So for me, it’s less of like I let down God, as much as like, it’s just like the piece, what are you going to do with this? Are you going to do something with it? It doesn’t mean it’s going to be successful, but it means, if you do well with this, then we’re going to increase your capacity for the next step, and the next thing. But we definitely, especially in times at the office, we talk about this a lot. We definitely feel that what we do is a spiritual mission. Andrew: You do? Russell: 100% yeah. I don’t think that it’s just like, we’re lucky. I think the way that the people have come, the partnerships, how it was created is super inspired. Andrew: You know what, a lot of us are selling things that are software, PDF guide, this, that, it’s really hard to find the bigger mission in it. You’re finding the bigger mission in Funnels. What is that bigger mission? Really, how do you connect with it? Because you’re right, if you can find that bigger meaning then the work becomes more meaningful and you’re working with become, it’s more exciting to work with them, more meaningful to do it. How did you find it in funnels? What is the meaning? Russell: So for us, and I’m thinking about members in my inner circle, so right now as of today I think we had 68,000 members in Clickfunnels, which is the big number we all brag about. But for me, that’s 68,000 entrepreneurs, each one has a gift. So I think about, one member I’ll mention his name’s Chris Wark, he runs chrisbeatcancer.com and Chris was someone who came down with cancer and was given a death sentence, and instead of going through chemo therapy he decided, ‘I’m going to see if I can heal myself.” And he did. Cleared himself of cancer. And then instead of just being like, ‘cool, I’m going to go back into work.’ He was like, ‘Man I need to help other people.’ So he started a blog and started doing some things, and now he’s got this thing where he’s helped thousands and thousands of people to naturally cure themselves of cancer. And that’s one of our 68,000 people. Andrew: See, you’re focusing on him where I think a lot of us would focus on, here’s one person who’s just a smarmy marketer, and here’s who’s creating….but you don’t. That’s not who you are. Look, I see it in your eyes and you’re shaking your head. That’s not it at all, it’s not even a put on. Russell: It’s funny because for me it’s like, I understand because I get it all the time from people all the time, “Oh he’s this slimy marketer.” The first time people meet me, all the time, the first time their introduced, that’s a lot of times the first impression. And they get closer and they feel the heart and it’s just like, “oh my gosh, I had you wrong.” I get that all the time from people. Andrew: Brian, sorry Ryan and Brad, are either of them here? Would one of you come up here? Yeah, come on up. Because they felt that way, right? Russell: I don’t know about them. I know who you’re thinking about. Audience member: I think it’s Theron. {Crosstalk} Andrew: No, no stay up here, as long as you’re here. Theron come on up. Audience member: If it wasn’t me, then I’m going to sit back in the seats. Andrew: Are you nervous? Audience member: A little bit. Is there another Ryan and Brad? Russell: Different story, another story. Do you want to come up? Theron had no idea we were bringing him onstage. Andrew: Come on over here. Let’s stand in the center so we can get you on camera. Does this help? Russell: Do you want me to introduce Theron real quick? Andrew: Yeah, please. Russell: So Theron is one of the Harmon Brothers, they’re the ones who did the viral video for us. Andrew: I heard that you felt that he was a scam. What was the situation and how did you honestly feel? Theron: I don’t know that it…well… Russell: Be honest. Theron: I know, I don’t think that I felt that Clickfunnels itself was a scam, Russell: Just Russell. Theron: But that it just felt like so many of the ways that the funnels were built and the types of language they were using, it felt like it was that side of the internet. So I became very, well basically we were kind of in a desperate situation, where we had a video that had not performed and not worked out the way we wanted it to work out. Andrew: The video that you created for Russell? Theron: No, another client. Andrew: Another client, okay. Theron: And so our CEO had used Clickfunnels product to help drive, I think it was attendance to a big video event. And so he had some familiarity with the product, so he goes to Russell and at the same time Russell’s like, “I’m a big fan of you guys.” So he’s coming to us and these things are happening. Yeah, it was almost the same day. So we’re thinking like this and we’re like, “Well, they seem to really know how to drive traffic, to really know how to drive conversion. And we feellike we know how to drive conversion as well, but for some reason we missed it on this one.” So we’re like, “Well, let’s do a deal.” Andrew: What do you mean missed it? Okay, go ahead, go through to the end. Theron: We were failing our client. We were failing on our client. We weren’t giving them and ROI. So we said, let’s do a deal with Russell and we’ll have our internal team compete with his team, and we’re humble enough to say we’re failing our client. We want our client to succeed, let’s bring in their team and see if they can make a funnel that can bring down the cost for acquisition, bring up the return on investment for our client, and they were able to do it.  And then we said, what we’ll do is we’ll write a script, we’ll take you through our script writing process, but we don’t want to do the video because we don’t want to be affiliated with you. Russell: The contract said, “You can’t tell anyone ever that the Harmon Brothers wrote the script for you.” Andrew: Wow, because you didn’t want to be associated with something that you thought was a little too scammy for… Theron: Yeah, we just didn’t want our brand kind of brought down to their brand, which is super arrogant and really wrong headed. And in any case, so we go into this script writing training, and I wasn’t following his podcast, I wasn’t listening to enough. I mean, read Dotcom Secrets, those kinds of things are like, well, there’s some really valuable stuff there, this is really interesting. A nd then as we got to know each other and really start to connect, like you said, heart to heart. And to feel what he’s really about, and the types of team, the people that he surrounds himself with, I was like, wow, these are really, really good people. And they have a mission here that they feel, just like we feel that about our own group. And in any case, by the end of that 2 day retreat we’re like, all off in private saying, “First of all we like what we’ve written and second of all, we’d really like to work with these guys and I think we’re plenty happy being connected to them and associated with them.” So it’s been a ride and a blessing ever since. Russell: We’re about to start video number two with them. Andrew: You what? Russell: We’re about to start video number two with them right now. Theron: Anyway, we love them. Andrew: Alright, give him a big round, yeah. Thanks. This was pivotal for you guys. Lead Pages, there’s an article about how Lead Pages raised $5 million, and you saw that and you thought… Russell: Well, what happened was Todd, so Todd’s the cofounder of Clickfunnels, and he was working with us at the time and he would fly to Boise about once a quarter and we’d work on the next project, the new idea. And that morning he woke up and he saw that, and then he forwarded me the article. And he’s Atlanta, so it’s east coast, so I’m still in bed. And he’s got a 4 hour flight to Boise and he’s just getting angry, because Todd is, Todd’s like a genius. He literally, when he landed in Boise and he saw me and he’s like, “We can build Lead Pages tonight. I will clone, I will beat it. We’re going to launch this, this week while we’re here.” He’s that good of a developer. He, I’ve never seen someone code as fast and as good as him. He’s amazing. So he comes in, he’s mad because he’s like, “This is the stupidest site in the world. We could literally clone this. Let’s just do it.” And I’m like, “Yes, let’s clone it.” And we’re all excited and then he’s like, “Do you want me to add any other features while I’m doing it.” And I’m like, ‘Oh, yes. We should do this, and we should do this.” And then the scope creep from the marketer comes, and we ended up spending an entire week in front of a whiteboard mapping out all my dreams, “If we could do this and this and what kind of shopping cart, and we could do upsells, and what if we could actually move things on the page instead of just having it sit there. And what if…” and Todd’s just taking notes and everything. And then he’s like, “Okay, I think I could do this.” And he told me though, “If I do this, I don’t want to do this as an employee. I want to do this as a partner.” And at first I was like, ugh, because I didn’t want to do the partnership thing. And then the best decision I’ve ever made in my life, outside of marrying my wife was saying yes to Todd. Said, “Let’s do it.” And then he flew home and built Clickfunnels. Andrew: Wow. And this is after trying software so much. I have screenshots of all the different, it’s not even worth going into it, of all the different products you created, there was one about, it was digital repo, right? Russell: That was a good idea. Andrew: Digital Repo, man. What was…. Russell: So I used to sell ebooks and stuff, and people would steal it and email it to their friends and I’d get angry. Andrew: Can I read this? How to protect every type of lowlife and other form of human scum from cheating you from the profits you should be making by hijacking, stealing, and illegally prostituting….your online digital products. Russell: Theron, why did you think we were…..Just kidding. So no, it was this really cool product where you take an ebook and it would protect it, and if somebody gave it to their friend, you could push a button and it would take back access. It was like the coolest thing in the world, we thought. Andrew: And there was software that was going to attach your ad to any other software that was out there. There was software that was going to, what are some of the other ones? It’s going to hit me later on. But we’re talking about a dozen different pieces of software, a dozen different attempts at software. What’s one? I thought somebody remembered one of them. They’re just the kind of stuff you’d never think of. There was one that was kind of like Clickfunnels, an early version of Clickfunnels for landing pages. Why did you want to get into software when you were teaching, creating membership sites? What was software, what was drawing you to it? Russell: I think honestly, when I first learned this internet marketing game, the first mentor I had, the first person I saw was a guy name Armand Morin and Armand had all these little software products. Ecover generator, sales letter generator, everything generator, so that’s what I kept seeing. I was like, I need to create software because he made software. In fact, I even shifted my major from, I can’t remember what it was before, to computer information systems, because I was like, I’m going to learn how to code, because I couldn’t afford programmers. And then that’s just kind of what I’d seen. And then I was trying to think of ideas for software. And every time I would get stuck, instead of trying to find something to do, I’d be like let me just, let me just hire a guy to go build that, and then I can sell it somebody else as well. So that’s kind of how it started. Andrew: And it was a lot of different tools, a lot of different attempts, and then this one was the one that you went with. I think this is an early version of the home page, basically saying, “Coming soon, sign up.” The first one didn’t work out. And then you saw someone else on a forum who had a version that was better. What was his name? This is I think Dylan Jones. Russell: Oh you’re talking about the editor, yes. Okay, so the story was, Todd built the first version of Clickfunnels and Dylan who became one of our cofounders, I’d been working with Dylan as a designer for about 6 years prior. And he his hands, and we talked about this earlier, he is the best designer I’ve ever seen in my life, he is amazing. He would, but he’s also, this is the pros and cons of Dylan. He, I’ve talked about this onstage at Funnel Hacking Live, so I have no problem saying this. He would agree. But I would give him a project, and I couldn’t hear, he wouldn’t respond back to me, and I wouldn’t hear from him for 2 or 3 months, and then one day in the middle of the night he messaged me, “Hey, rent’s due tomorrow. Do you have any projects for me?” and I’d be so mad at him, and I look back at every project we’d done in the last 3 or 4 months that other designers had done, and I’d just resend him all the lists, just boom, give him 12 sites and I’d go to bed. I’d wake up 5 or 6 hours later and all of them were done, perfectly, amazing, some of the best designs ever, and then he’d send me a bill for whatever, and then I’d send him money and he’d disappear again for like 5 months. And I could never get a hold of him. I’d be like, “I need you to tweak something.” And he was just gone. And that was my pattern for 6 years with him. And then fast forward to when Todd and I were building Clickfunnels, we were at Traffic Conversion and we were up in the hotel room at like 3 in the morning trying to, we were on dribble.com trying to find a UI designer to help us, and we couldn’t get a hold of all these people, and all the sudden on Skype Dylan popped in, I saw his thing pop up. I was like, “Todd, Dylan just showed up.” And he’s like, “Do you think he needs some money?” I’m like, “I guarantee he needs money.” So I’m like, “Hey man!” And Dylan messaged back. He’s like, “Hey.” I’m like, “Do you need some money?” and he’s like, “Yeah, you got any projects?” I’m like, “Yes, I do.” I’m like, “We built this cool thing, it’s called Clickfunnels, but the UI is horrible and the editor is horrible and there’s any way we could hire you for a week to fly to Boise and just do all the UI for every single page of the app?” and he kind of said no at first because, “I’m developing my own website builder. I might have spent 6 years on it, so I can’t do it.” Andrew: It was this, he had something that was essentially Clickfunnels, right? Russell: No, no. It was just pages though, so it’d just do pages, there was no funnels. Andrew: Right, closer to Lead Pages. Russell: Lead Pages, but amazing. You could move things around. But he did tell me that, “I’m working on something.” So eventually we got him to come, flew to Boise, spent a week, did all of our UI, and then we went and launched our beta to my list. So we launched the beta, got some signups, and then a week before the launch, launch was supposed to happen, all the affiliates were lined up, everything was supposed to happen. He sends me, I don’t know if he sent you the video, but he sends me this little video that’s like a 30 second video of him demoing the editor he’d built. And I probably watched that video, I don’t know, at least a hundred times. And I was just sick to my stomach because I was like, “I hate Clickfunnels right now. I can’t move things on my pages, I can’t do anything.” I was just, and I sent it to Todd and then I didn’t hear from him for like an hour, and he messaged me back and he’s like, “I’m pissed.” I’m like, “Me too.” And I’m like, “What do we do?” and I was like, “We have to have his editor or I don’t even want to sell this thing.” And I called Dylan and I’m like, “Would you be willing to sell?” and he’s like, “No, I’m selling it and we’re going to sell it for $100.” It was like $100 this one time for this editor that designed all the websites. I was like, “Dude, it is worth so much more than that. Please?” and we spent all night going back and forth negotiating. And finally, we came to like, “I will give you this editor if I can be a cofounder and be a partner.” And Todd and I sat there, brainstorming and figured out if we could do it and finally said yes. And then him and Dylan and Todd flew back to Boise and for the next week just sat in a room with a whole bunch of caffeine and figured out how to smush Dylan’s editor into Clickfunnels to get the editor to be the editor that you guys know today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Enjoy part one of this classic episode series where Andrew Warner from Mixergy interviews Russell on the ClickFunnels startup story! Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com ---Transcript--- Good morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson. I want to welcome you back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. And you guys are in for a very special treat over the next four episodes. So let me give you some context on what’s going to happen, and why you should be so excited. Alright so, my favorite podcast, other than mine of course, that all of you guys should be subscribed to is called Mixergy. Andrew Warner is the guy who runs Mixergy podcast and I love that podcast because of Andrew. He is my favorite interviewer. If you look at how a lot of people do interview podcasts, they ask questions and I don’t know, I’ve suffered from this in the past as well. I’m not a good interviewer, at least not now. I’d like to learn how to do that skill, but I’m not a great interviewer. And most people who do podcasts with interviews aren’t like great interviewers, but Andrew is like the best interviewer I’ve ever seen. The way he asks questions, how deep he goes and the research he does before the interviews, and all sorts of stuff. Anyway, I love his style, love how he does it so what’s cool, I’ve actually been on the show twice in the past. And the first time, I don’t even, sorry, the second time, he totally caught me off guard. I remember he asked me some questions and I didn’t really know and I responded and he told me after, he told me live on the interview that he doesn’t edit his interviews. He was like, “Well, that was the worst answer you’ve ever given.” I was like, “Oh, thanks.” Anyway, it just totally caught me off guard, but it was cool the way that he just like kind of holds your feet to the fire. So a little while ago I thought, I want to tell the Clickfunnels startup story. But I didn’t want me to just to tell it, I wanted someone who would tell it from a different angle, who would ask the questions that I think people would want to know and do it in a really cool way. So I called Andrew and I’m like, “Hey, I’ve been wanting to do this thing, and I want to do an event around it. Would you be interested.” And he was like, luckily he said yes. So it’s funny, Andrew’s famous, I think I might have talked about this in the interview too, but he’s famous for these scotch nights he does, and as a Mormon I don’t drink so I can’t go to his scotch nights. So when we planned this interview, we planned it in Provo, Utah at this place called the Dry Bar Comedy Club. So a dry bar is a bar with no alcohol. So it was kind of a funny thing. We brought those two things, my world and his world together in this one spot to a dry bar, and told the Clickfunnels startup story. And it was cool, ahead of time he did so much research. He interviewed people who love me, people who hated me, he interviewed our old business partners who are no longer part of the business. He did everything and then he came and I told him, “Everything’s, you can ask me any question you want. Nothing, no holds barred, feel free to do whatever you want.” So we did the interview and it was about two hours long, and I loved it. I think it turned out amazing. And I hope you guys like it too. So I’ll tell you some of the details about the Clickfunnels startup story. How we built what we did, what happened, the ups, the downs, the negatives, the positives. He brings a couple of people up onstage to tell their parts of the story. Anyway, I really hope you enjoy it. So what we’re going to do, I’m going to have each episode over the next four episodes be about thirty minutes long so you can listen to them in pieces. I hope iyou enjoy them, I hope you love them. And if you do, please, please, please take a screen shot of your phone when you’re listening to it, and go post it on Instagram or Facebook and tag me. And then do hashtag marketing secrets and hopefully that will get more people to listen to the podcast. And then please, if you haven’t yet, go rate and review, which would be amazing. So with that said, I’m going to queue up the theme song and when we come back we will start immediately into part one of four of the Dry Bar Comedy Club Interview. Keith Yacky: Clickfunnels has changed a lot of our lives. We all have an origin story. Mine was something similar to, I set up my website on GoDaddy and things were going great. And then Dave Woodward was like, “Dude, you need Clickfunnels.” I’m like, “I don’t need a Clickfunnel. I don’t even know what a Clickfunnel is.” And he’s like, “No, seriously man. This is going to totally change your business.” I’m like, “Bro, I have GoDaddy. They have a commercial on the Super Bowl, Clickfunnels doesn’t. But when they do, I’ll do it.” Well, boy was I wrong. I changed over and it absolutely changed our business and changed our lives. So thank you for that, Dave. But here’s the thing, in every industry there’s somebody that comes along that really disrupts the industry, that really changes it, and that really does something amazing for that industry. And as we all, why we’re here, we know that person is Russell Brunson. And he has changed a lot of our lives. So before I bring him up here, they have asked me to ask you to make sure you don’t do any live recording of this next interview, because the gloves are coming off and they want to be able to present it to the world. You can do little Instagram clips if you’d like, like 15 second ones and tag them. My understanding is the best hashtag and the best clip, gets a date with Drew. I don’t know, that’s just what they told me. So blame them. But with that, again, no videoing, and let us just absolutely take the roof off this place as we bring up our beloved Russell Brunson. Give it up guys. Russell: Alright, well thanks for coming you guys. This is so cool. I’m excited to be here. So a couple of real quick things before we get started. For all of you guys who know, who came to be part of this, we had you all donate a little bit of money towards Operation Underground Railroad, and I’m really excited because Melanie told me right before I got here the total of how much money we raised from this little event for them. So I think the final number was a little over $13,000 was raised for Operation Underground Railroad. So thank you guys for your continued support with them. Just to put that in perspective, that’s enough money to save about 5 children from sex slavery. So it’s a big deal and a life changing thing, so it’s pretty special. So I’m grateful for you guys donating money to come here. And hopefully you’ve had a good time so far. Has it been fun? I really want to tuck my shirt in now, I’m feeling kind of awkward. No it’s been awesome. Okay so what we’re going to do now, I want to introduce the person who’s going to be doing the interview tonight. And it’s somebody I’m really excited to have here. In fact, I met him for the first time like an hour ago, in person. But I want to tell kind of the reason why I wanted him to do this, and why we’re all here. And I’m grateful he said yes, and was willing to come out here and kind of do this. So Andrew runs a podcast called Mixergy. How many of you guys in here are Mixergy listeners? Mixergy is my favorite podcast, I love it. He’s interviewed thousands of people about their startup stories and about how they started their businesses. And it’s really cool because he brings in entrepreneurs and he tells, gets them to tell their stories. But what’s unique about what Andrew does that’s fascinating, the way he interviews people is completely different, it’s unique. I listen to a lot of podcasts and I don’t like a lot of interview shows because a lot of them are just kind of high level. Everyone you listen to with Andrew, he gets really, really deep. The other fun thing is he doesn’t edit his interviews. So there was one interview, I’ll tease him about this right now. But I was listening to it on my headphones, and him and the guest got in kind of an argument and a fight and then it just ended and they aired it. I was like, “I can’t believe you aired that, it was amazing.” And then I was on his podcast a little while later, and he asked me some questions that I couldn’t quite understand perfectly, so I was trying to respond the best I could and kind of fumbled through it. And instead of letting me off the hook, his response was, “Man Russell, that was probably the worst answer I’ve ever heard you give in any interview ever.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh.” So I’m excited for tonight because I told it was like no holds barred and he could ask me anything he wants about the ups of Clickfunnels, the downs of Clickfunnels and anything else, and it’s going to be a lot of fun. So I’m excited to have him here. So with that said, let’s put our hands together for Mr. Andrew Warner. Andrew Warner: I think my mic is right over here. Thank you everyone, thanks Russell for having me here. Most people will contact me after I interview them and say, “Could you please not air the interview?” And you actually had me back here to do it in person. And you were so nice, you even got us this room here. Check this out, they set us up, they’re so nice at Clickfunnels. They said, “Andrew, you’re staying here, we’re going to put you and your family up the night before in a room.” My wife was so good, look that’s her journaling. My kids were playing around, sleeping in the same, sleeping together, enjoying themselves. And then I went to call somebody who was basically let go from Clickfunnels. And my wife goes, “Andrew, why do you have to do that? That’s not why they invited you here.” And I said, “I do know Russell. I know the team. They actually did invite me to really help get to the story of how Clickfunnels started, how it built up.” And the reason I was up calling people, understanding the story is because I want to make it meaningful for you. I’ve talked to a lot of you as you were coming in here, you want to know how they got here, what worked for Clickfunnels, what would work for us. So that’s my goal here, to spend the time understanding by interviewing you about how you did it. So I want to go way back to a guy a few of you might recognize, and I know you would, and ask you what drew you to this guy when you were younger? Russell: Don Lepre Clip: “One tiny classified ad in the newspaper that makes just 30-40 dollars profit in a week, it could make you a fortune, because the secret is learning how to take that one tiny classified that just made 30-40 dollars profit in a week, and to realize that you could now take that same exact ad and place it in up to 3,000 other newspapers around the country….” Russell: I’m having nostalgia right now. So this is the story of that, I was 12, 13 years old, something like that, and I was watching the news with my dad. And usually he’s like, “Go to bed Russell.” And he didn’t that night and then the news got over and I think he thought I was asleep and Mash came on. So Mash started playing and then it got over, and then this infomercial showed up. And I’m laying there on the couch watching Don Lepre talk about tiny classified ads, I was totally freaking out and I jumped up and begged my dad to buy it and he said no. And I was like, “Are you kidding? Did you not listen to what he said?” Did you guys just hear that? That was a good pitch huh? It’s really good. I love a good pitch. It is so good. So I went and asked my dad if I could earn the money. So I went and mowed lawns and earned the money and ordered the kit and I still have the original books to this day. Andrew: Were you disappointed? I bought it too. It was the dream of being able to do it. Russell: That’s why I like you so much, that’s amazing. Andrew: And it’s just, all he sent you was a bunch of paper guides with how to buy ads, right. Were you disappointed when you got that? Russell: No, I was excited. I think for me because the vision was cast, it was like, he said right there word for word, you make 40 dollars a newspaper, and if you’re disappointed, but he put that same ad in 3,000 newspapers, imagine that. So I had the vision of that, I think the only thing I was disappointed in, I didn’t have any money to actually buy an ad. And that was more like, I can’t actually do it now. Andrew: You are a champion wrestler and then you got here. Is your wife here? Russell: My beautiful wife right here, Collette. Andrew: Hey Collette. And your dad had a conversation with you about money, what did he say? Russell: So up to that point my dad had supported me, and I figured he would the rest of my life, I think. I don’t know. So I was 21 almost 22 at this time, I was wrestling so I couldn’t get a job because I was wrestling all the time. Then I met Collette, fell in love with her and then I called my parents and I was like, “Hey, I’m going to marry her. I’m going propose to her and everything.” Expecting them to be like, “Sweet, that’ll be awesome.” And my mom was all excited, I’m not going to lie. But then my dad was like, “Just so you know if you get married, you have to be a man now. You have to support yourself.” And I was like, “I don’t know how to do that, I’m wrestling.” And he’s like, “Well, I’m not going to keep paying for you to do it.” I’m like, “But I literally got the ring. I have, I can’t not propose now.” So that was kind of the thing. So it was interesting because about that time there was another infomercial, there’s the pattern, about I can’t remember exactly the name of the company, but they were doing an event at the local Holiday inn that was like, “Hey, you’re going to build websites and make money.” And it was like the night or two days after I told my dad this and he was like, “you’re in trouble.” And all the sudden I saw that, so I was like, there’s the answer. So I’m at the holiday in two days later, sitting in the room, hearing the pitch, signing up for stuff I shouldn’t have bought. There’s the pattern. Andrew: Did you feel like a loser getting married at 22 and still counting on your dad for money? Did you feel like you were marrying a loser? Russell: Actually, this is a sad story because she actually, my roommate at the time, she actually asked him, “Do you think he’s going to be able to support me in the future?” and he was like, “Yeah, I think so.” I’m like, I didn’t know this until later. I don’t think I felt like a loser, but I definitely was nervous, like oh my gosh. Because my whole identity at that point in my life was I was a wrestler and if that was to disappear…I couldn’t have that disappear. So I was like, I have to figure out something. There’s gotta be some way to do both. Andrew: To both what? To be a wrestler and make money from some infomercial? Russell: I didn’t know that was going to be the path, but yeah. Andrew: But you knew you were going to do something. What did you think that was going to be? Russell: I wasn’t sure. When I went to the event, they were selling these time share books and you could buy resale rights to them, so I was like, oh. And I remember back, because I remembered the Don Lepre stuff, so I was like, maybe I could buy classified ads and sell these things. And then I was at the event and they were talking about websites, and that was the first thing I’d heard about websites. And they’re talking about Google and the beginnings of this whole internet thing. So I was like, I can do that. It made all logical sense to me, I just didn’t know how to do it. I just knew that that was going to be the only path because if I had to get a job I wouldn’t be able to wrestle. So I was like, I have to figure out something that’s not going to be a 40 hour thing because I’m spending that time wrestling and going to school. So I had to figure out the best of how to do both. Andrew: And you obviously found it. My goal today is to go through this process of finding it. But let me skip ahead a little bit. What is this website? Russell: Oh man, alright. This is actually, the back story behind this is there was a guy named Vince James who wrote a book called the Twelve Month Millionaire. And if anybody’s got that book, it’s fat like a phone book. It’s a huge book. I read and I was like, this book’s amazing. And at the time I was an affiliate marketer, so I had a little bit, maybe a thousand people on my list. So I called up Vince and I was like, “Hey, can I interview you about the book and then I’ll use that as a tool to sell more copies of your book?” and he was like, “Sure.” So he jumped on the phone with me on a Saturday and he spent 3 hours letting me interview with any questions I had. And I got to the end of it and I still had a ton of questions and he’s like, “Well come back next week and do it again.” So I interviewed him for 6 hours about it. And then we used that to sell some copies of his book and then it just sat there, probably for 2 or 3 years as I was trying different ideas, different businesses and things like that. But every time I would talk to people I would tell them about this interview. I’m like, “I interviewed this guy who made a hundred million dollars through direct mail.” And everyone wanted to hear the interview, everybody asked me for it. So one day I was like, “Let’s just make that the product.” And we put it up here and this was the very first funnel we had that did over a million dollars, my first Two Comma Club funnel. Andrew: A million dollars. Do you remember what that felt like? Russell: It was amazing because it was funny back then. There were people, a few people who were making a lot of money online that I was watching and just idolizing everything they’d do. I was trying to model what they were doing. And I’d had little wins, you know $10,000 here, $15,000 here, but this was by far the first one that just hit. Everyone was so excited. Andrew: How’d you celebrate? Russell: I don’t even remember how we celebrated. Andrew: You married a winner after all. I mean really. Do you remember what you guys did to celebrate? No. Russell: I don’t even remember. (audience responding, inaudible) It was in my list. That’s a good question. Andrew: It’ll come up, that list is going to come up in a second too. You ended up creating Clickfunnels. How much revenue are you guys doing now, 2018? Russell: 2018 we’ll pass over a hundred million dollars, this year. Andrew:  A hundred million dollars, wowee. How far have you come? Russell: Like when did we start? Andrew: Today revenue, as of today, October 2018? Russell: Oh this year? Oh from the beginning of time until now? Andrew: No, no I mean I want to know, you’re going to do a hundred million dollars, are you at 10 and you’re hoping to get…. Russell: These guys know better than me, do you know exactly where we’re at right now? 83 million for the year. Andrew: 83! I love that Dave knows that right, so I want to know how you got to that. I went through your site, pages and pages that look like this. It’s like long form sales letters. I asked my assistant to take pictures, she said, “This is, I can’t do it, it’s too many.” Look at this guys. I asked him to help me figure out what he did. He created this list, this is not the full list, look at this. Every blue line is him finding an old archive of a page he created. It goes on and on like this. How long did it take you to put that together? Russell: It was probably 5 or 6 hours just to find all the pages. Andrew: 5 or 6 hours you spent to find these images to help me tell the story. Years and years of doing this, a lot of failure, what amazes me is you didn’t feel jaded and let down after Don Lepre sold you that stuff. You didn’t feel jaded and let down and say, ‘This whole make money thing is a failure.’ After, and we’re going to talk about some of your failures, you just kept going with that same smile, the same eagerness. Alright, let’s start with the very first business. What’s this one? This is called… Russell: Sublime Net. How many of you guys remember Sublime Net out there? Andrew: You guys remember this? Anyone remember it. You do? Russell: John does. So actually this is the first business for the first website I bought. I was so proud of it, and I spent, I don’t know, I wanted to sell software so I was like, ‘what could I name my company?” So I figured out Exciting Software. So I went to buy Exciteware.com, but it wasn’t for sale. So I bought Exciteware.net and Collette was working at the time and she came home and I was so excited, I’m like, “We got our first website. We’re going to be rich.”  And I told her the name, I was like, “It’s Exciteware.net.” and she looked at me with this look like, she’s like, “Are you selling underwear, what is the…lingerie?” I’m like, “No, it’s software.” And she’s like, “You can’t, I’m not going to tell my mom that you bought that. You gotta think of another name.” I’m like, “Crap.” So that was the next best name I came up with was Sublime Net. Like the band Sublime. That was it. Andrew: And I was going to ask you what it was, but it was lots of different things. Every screenshot on there is a whole other business under the same name. What are the businesses? Do you remember? Russell: There was website hosting, there was affiliates sites, there were, I can’t even remember now, trying to remember. Everything I could think of, resell rights…. Andrew: Lots of different things. How did you do, how well did you do? Russell: Never anything, very little. I remember the first thing I ever sold was an affiliate product, I made $20 on it through my Paypal account, because I remember that night, I do remember I celebrated. We went out to dinner and I had a Paypal credit card, and we bought dinner with $20 and then the guy refunded the next day. It was so sad. But I was proud that I had made money. Andrew: How did you support yourself while this was not working? Russell: I didn’t. My beautiful wife did, she had 2 jobs at the time to support me while I was wrestling and doing these things. She was the one who made it possible to gamble and risk and try crazy things. Andrew: Can I put you on the spot and ask you to just come over here and just tell me about this period and what you felt at the time? Is that, I know you don’t love being onstage, Russell is good with it, but I know you don’t love it. If you don’t mind, I’m just going to go with one more story and then I’ll come back to you. You cool with it? Good, she seems a little nervous. Actually, wait. Let’s see if we can get her right now. Oh you are, okay. Russell: Everyone, this is Collette, my beautiful wife. Andrew: Do you want to use his mic? Collette: Sure. Russell: She’s so mad at me right now. Collette: I wanted to come to this, who knew? Andrew: You are like his, he’s so proud that he had no venture funding. But you are like his first investor. Russell: That is true. Collette: Yes, I’ll be his first investor. Andrew: Can you hold the mic a little closer. How did you know he wasn’t a loser? No job, he’s wrestling, he’s buying infomercial stuff that doesn’t go anywhere. We know he did well, so we’re not insulting him now, but what did you see in him back then that let you say, ‘I’m going to work extra hard and pay for what he’s not doing?’ Collette: What did I see in him? It was actually his energy, his spirit, because I’m not going to lie, it was kind of not love at first site, we had, we were geeko’s, do you know what I mean? Shopped at the Goodwill, in baggy pants and tshirts, I don’t know. But it was the person who just was always positive and we had the same goals. Andrew: That’s the thing I noticed too, the positivity. When these businesses fail, we’re showing the few on the screen, it’s easy to look back and go, ‘ha ha, I did this and it was interesting.’ But at the time, what was the bounce back like when things didn’t work out? When the world basically said, you know what as sales people, when they don’t buy your stuff it’s like they don’t buy you. When the world basically said, ‘we don’t like you. We don’t like what you’ve created.’ What was the bounce back like? Hard? Collette: No, because I come from a hard working family. So I work hard. So you just work hard to make it work. Andrew: And he’s just an eternal optimistic, and you’re an eternal optimist too, like genuinely, really? Collette: Yeah, I guess. It works. Andrew: His dad said, ‘No more money. You had to cut up your credit cards too.’ Collette: Yeah. Andrew: What was, how did you cut up your credit cards. What was that day like? Collette: Hard. Yeah hard. Those that don’t know, I’m a little bit older than Russell. So I’ve always had this little bit of independency to go do and buy and do these things, and then all the sudden I’m like, step back sista! You gotta take care of this young man, so we can get to where we’re at. Anyway, but now… Andrew: Now things are good? Collette: Now things are amazing. Andrew: Alright, give her a big round of applause. Thanks for coming up here. These businesses did okay, and then you started something that I never heard about, but look at this. I’m going to zoom in on a section of the Google doc you sent me. This is the call center. The call center got to how many employees? 100? Russell: We had about 60 full time sales people, 20 full time coaches, and about 20 people doing the marketing and sales, so about 100 people in the whole company, yeah. Andrew: 100 people doing what kind of call center, what kind of work? Russell: So what we would do, we would sell free CDs and things like that online, free CDs, free books, free whatever, and then when someone would buy it we’d call them on the phone, and then we’d offer them high end coaching. Andrew: And this was you getting customers, how? Russell: Man, back then it was pre-facebook. So a lot of it was Google, it was email lists, it was anything we could figure out to drive traffic, all sorts of weird stuff. Andrew: And then people come in, get a free CD, sign up for coaching, and then you had to hire people and teach them how to coach? How did you do that. Russell: Yeah, that was the hard thing. When we first started doing it, I was just doing the coaching. People would come in and we had a little, Brent and some of you guys remember the little offices we had, and we’d bring people in and we were so proud of our little office. And they’d come in and we’d teach them for 2 or 3 days, teach an event for them, and then as it got bigger it was harder and harder for me to do that. So eventually, and a lot of people didn’t want to come to Boise. I love Boise, but it’s really hard to get to. So people would sign up for coaching, and then they’d never show up to Boise and then a year later they’d want their money back. So we’re like, we have to get something where they’re getting fulfilled whether they showed up to Boise or now. So we started doing phone coaching, and at first it was me, and then it was me and a couple other people, and then we started training more coaches, and that’s kind of how it started. It was one of those things though, at  first it was just like 5 or 6 of us in a room doing it, and it worked and so then the next logical thing is, we should go from 5 people to 10 to 20 and next thing you know, we wake up with 100 people. I’m like, what are we doing? We’re little kids, it scares me that I’m in charge of all these people’s livelihood, but that’s kind of where it was at and it got kind of scary for me. Andrew: Sometimes I wonder if I’m hiding behind interviewing because I’m afraid to stand up and say, ‘here’s what I want. Here’s what I think we need to do. Here’s how the world should be.’ So I’m amazed that even back then, after having a few businesses that didn’t really work out, you were comfortable enough to say, ‘Come to my office, I’m going to teach you. I’ve got it figured out.’ When you hadn’t.  How did you get yourself comfortable, and what made you feel comfortable about being able to say, ‘I could teach these people. Come to my office.’ Who call up, who then become my coaches, who then have to teach other people? Russell: I think for me it was like, when I first started learning the online stuff and entrepreneurship, I think most people feel this, it’s so exciting you want to tell everybody about it. So I’m telling my friends and my family and nobody cares at first. And you’re like, I have to share this gift I’ve figured out, it’s amazing. And nobody cares. And then the first time somebody cares, and you just dump on them, you want to show it to them. So I hadn’t made tons of money, but I had a lot of these little websites that had done, $30 grand, $50 grand, $100 grand. So for me it was like, if I can show these people, I know what that did for me, it gave me the spark to want to do the next one and the next one. So for me it was like I want to share this because I feel like I figured it out. So that was the thing coming in. We weren’t teaching people how to build a hundred million dollar company, but we’re like, “Hey, you can quit your job. You can make 2 or 3 thousand dollars a month, you can quit your job, and this is how I did it. This is the process.” So that’s what we were showing people. Just the foundation of how we did it, and we showed other people, because they cared and it was exciting to share it with other people. Andrew: Is Whitney here? There she is. I met her as she was coming in. I wanted to get to know why people were coming to watch this, what they wanted to hear from you. And Whitney was asking about the difficult period, the why. I’m wondering the same thing that she and I were talking about, which is why put yourself through this? You could have gotten a job, you could have done okay, why put yourself through the risk of hiring people, the eventual as we’ll see, closing of the company, what was your motivation? What was the goal? Why did you want to do it? Russell: I think it shifts throughout time. I think most entrepreneurs when they first get started, it’s because of money. They’re like, ‘I want to make money.’ And then you get that and then really quick, that doesn’t last very long. And then it’s like, then for me it was like, I want to share that with other people. And then when other people get it, there’s something about that aha moment where you’re like, oh my gosh they got it. They got what I was saying. And that for me was like the next level, the next high. It was just like, ah, I love that. And back then we had some success stories coming through, but now days, it’s like the bigger success stories come through and that’s what drives it on. That is the fascinating part. That’s why we keep, because most software company owners don’t keep creating books, and courses and inter….but when people have the aha, oh my gosh, that’s the best for me. Andrew: That’s the thing, you get the high of the thing that you wanted when you were growing up, that you wanted someone to show it to you, and if you could then genuinely give it them, not like Don Lepre. But Don Lepre plus actual results, that’s what fires you up. Russell: That does fire me up. That’s amazing. Andrew: What happened? Why did that close down? Russell: Oh man, a lot of things. A lot of bad mistakes, a lot of first time growing a company stuff that I didn’t, again, we just woke up one day it felt like, and we were in this huge office, huge overhead, and about that time, it was 99, 2000 something like that, and there was the merchant account that me and most of the people doing internet marketing at the time, we all used the same merchant account, and they got hit by Visa and Mastercard, so they freaked out and shut down. I think it ended up being 4 or 5 merchant accounts overnight, and we had 9 different merchant accounts with that company, and all of them got shut down instantly. I remember because everything was fine, we were going through the day and it was like 1:00 in the afternoon on a Friday. They came in like, “None of the, the cards won’t process.” And I’m like, couldn’t figure out why they weren’t processing. We tried to call the company and no one’s answering at the company. Finally we get someone on the phone and they’re like, “Yep, you got shut down along with all the other scammers.” And then she hung up on me. And I was like, I don’t know what to do right now. I’ve got 100+ people and payroll is not small, and we didn’t have a ton of cash in the bank, it was more of a cash flow business. And Collette actually just left town that night, and she was gone. I remember Avatar just came out, and everyone was going to the movie Avatar that night, and I remember sitting there during the longest movie of all time, and I don’t remember anything other than the sick feeling in my stomach. I was texting everyone I know, trying to see if anyone knew what to do. And everyone was like, “We got shut down too.” “We got shut down.” Everyone got shut down. And we couldn’t figure out anything. So we came back the next day and I called everyone up, and actually kind of a funny side story, I had just met Tony Robbins a little prior, earlier to this. So that night I was laying in bed, it was like 4 in the morning, and my phone rings and I look at it and it was Tony Robbins’ assistant. And I pick it up and he’s like, “Hey, is there any way you can be in Vegas in three hours? There’s a plane from Boise to Vegas and Tony wants you to speak at this event. It’s starting in three hours. You need to be on stage in three hours.” I’m sitting here like, my whole world just collapsed, I’m laying in bed sick to my stomach and I’m like, “I don’t think I can. I have to figure this thing out.” And then he tells Tony, and they call me back. “Tony says if your business is…if you can’t make it, don’t show up. You’re fine.” So I didn’t go and then the next morning I woke up and there was a message on my phone that I’d missed. I passed out and I woke up and it was a message from Tony. And he was like, “Hey man, I know that you care about your customers, you care about things. I don’t know the whole situation, but worst case scenario, if you need help let me know, and we can absorb you into Robbins research or whatever and you can be one of my companies, and that way if you want, we can protect you.” And I heard that and I was like, “Okay, that’s the worst case scenario, I get to work with Tony Robbins? That’s the worst case scenario.” So then I called up everyone on my team and I was like, “Okay guys, we gotta try to figure out how to save this.” And Brent and John and everyone, we came back to my house and I was like, “Okay, what ideas do we got?” And we just sat there for the next 5 or 6 hours trying to figure stuff out. And then we went to work, and I wish I could say that everything turned around, but it was the next probably 2 or 3 years of us firing 30 people, firing 20 people, closing things down, moving down offices. Just shrinking for a long, long time, until the peak of it, it was about a year after that moment, and we were in an event in Vegas trying to figure out how to save stuff, and I got an email from my dad who was helping with the books at the time, and he said, “Hey, I got really bad news for you. I looked through the books and it turns out your assistant who is supposed to be doing payroll taxes, hadn’t paid payroll in over a year. You owe the IRS $170,000 and if you don’t pay this, you’re probably going to go to jail.” And I was like, every penny I’d earned to that point was gone. Everything was done and we’d lost everything and I was just like, I don’t know how to fight this battle, but if I don’t fight it I go to jail apparently. And I remember that’s a really crappy feeling. Brent, some of you guys are reliving this with me right now, I know. I remember going back that night, laying in bed and I was just like, “I wish I had a boss that could fire me, because I don’t know what to do, how to do it.” And that was kind of, that was definitely the lowest spot for me. Andrew: And you stuck with him? Wow, yeah. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices