Trainings
Russell Brunson’s Original: “You’re Just One Funnel Away”
Russell Brunson’s Original: “You’re Just One Funnel Away”. Okay. So what I want to do is I want to go on a journey with you guys. My journey, which started way back over here on my timeline in my backstory. So those who know me or have heard about me or know anything about this, I got started initially. I started learning about business when I was 12 or 13-year old kid sitting there with my dad, he was watching the news and I was watching it with them and I was sitting there, I’m like, I can’t believe he hasn’t told me to go to bed yet.
This coolest thing in the world. And the news was on. And then when the news ended, then mash came on and I was like, I don’t, he must think I’m asleep or something. Like he hasn’t told me to go to bed and I’m sitting there like trying to move.
I don’t want him to know as I’m watching mash with my dad. I thought it was the coolest thing in the whole world. And then when mascot did like him still, they didn’t say anything about him he’s got to be convinced I’m asleep. This is so cool. And then the next thing came on and it was an infomercial, late-night infomercial with Dawn, the pre, how many guys remember Don Lepre!
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Yes, just an amazing person. And he had an infomercial and I was so grateful for him and for his passion, his excitement, talking about what he was doing and he was talking to infomercials on how to place tiny little classified ads. You can make a fortune. Right?
And it was called, it was the coolest thing. I remember sitting there listening to him and I was like, this makes so much sense. I’m looking at my dad, like you paying attention to what’s happening.
Like this guy is a the whole thing made so much sense to me. He said, I took a class, I took a classified ad, I put it in a newspaper and I made $30 and I told my friends, my family, I started a business.
I made $30 this week, and they all laughed at me. He’s like, so then I took that same ad and I ran it in a thousand newspapers the next month and I made $30,000 and I was just like mind blown.
And I’ve been to, I’ve been ruined from that day on when it comes to the world. I’m like, I can’t, I can’t do something like this. I was so excited. I saved a bunch of money mowing lawns and everything and eventually I bought down the priest kid on an infomercial. I had read through it all. I learned it and I wasn’t able to actually do anything though because I didn’t have money to do direct mail and all, all sorts of things like that.
That’s how I first heard about direct response marketing. Remember? After I got done with the priest’s kid, I got so excited. I was at the grocery store with my mom one time and we’re walking out and on the checkout stand there was a magazine, it was called small business opportunity magazine.
Had a whole bunch of little cartoon people in front of him. He hasn’t seen that magazine before. That’s it. This is like the greatest swipe file of direct response ads ever. So I know at the time though, I just like, there’s like 30 things on how to get rich quick and I’m like, sweet, I want to get rich quick. That’d be awesome. So I had my mom buy me this magazine. I went home and if you look at it as like 140 pages of ads and four pages of articles, it’s pretty awesome.
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And so I’m looking at every single ad. I’m like, Oh my gosh, I can sell gold chains at the mall and make money. It’s like call this my hundred number for free and Vulcan in my chair free info kit sent to my house. And like the next page, it’s like something else. I page after page 140 pages, I called every single 800 number to request the free info kit. And about a week later I started getting these gifts in the mail versus like two or three letters.
Then it was like 10 or 15 letters and it was like 60 or 70 letters. And I think those people start selling my name to other mailing lists. It’s going to become like hundreds of letters and the mailman not physically shove the junk mail in the mailbox anymore cause there was so much coming in.
So I get home from junior high and I’d come home at night, I’d walk into the house and I see on the bar, I see two or three letters from my parents and Russell’s stack of junk mail and they’re like, there’s your junk mail.
I was like, Oh, I want to take my room. And I’d opened. I like to read these things in mind. This is so cool. And all these money making ideas. So that happened at a young age. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do anything. Well, I tried once. So this one person convinced me that direct mail was the key.
And like all you do is you get a list of buyers who bought similar products and you write a sales letter and you mail it to those people. A percentage will buy it. I’m like, awesome.
The only problem is I can’t afford a mailing list and I don’t have any stamps or any envelopes or anything. And so I had done something, I made a little bit of money doing some chores and I asked my mom to go take that money and instead buy stamps and bring me home stamps.
So she brought me home 38 stamps. That’s how much money I had made and had 30 stamps. I was like, this is so awesome. I used to tell me, my brothers and sister and parents always used to tease all on my parents that tease me, my brothers, my sister did, because I’d always say I’m going to be a millionaire any minute now and like this is going to work.
And they used to be like, Oh you a millionaire yet. Oh and like totally make fun of me. Right? So I had these 38 stamps. I’m like, okay, if I can get 10% of people to say to buy these three people, if I sell a $50 product, $150 I was like, Oh, like I’ll be rich.
So I didn’t know what to do. And so they talked about sales letters and so I was like, I write settlers, I printed out on blue paper, somebody blue paper, they’ll be more likely to read.
So I have one on my parents’ computer. I wrote little cells that are printed out, 38 copies of it. I couldn’t afford an envelope, so I just folded it and stapled it. And then I didn’t actually have a mailing list.
So I just open the white pages and flip through and randomly pick 38 names and I’m like, this is going to be huge. So I wrote it, put my stamp on it, all my savings put in the mailbox and I was just like, I am going to be rich. This is going to be amazing. I sent it out, told everybody like when this comes back it’s over.
Like I’ll be able to move out. I have my own house, it’s going to be amazing. And unfortunately, nobody responded. So that was the only time I was able to invest. I didn’t have the money even by a classified ad in the newspaper.
So I just kind of after that I just kept reading all these, these all this junk mail and learning from all these people. And then a couple of years later I got into wrestling and I kind of forgot about making money, but there was a seed that had been planted.
So I wrestled through high school, had a lot of fun, got a college scholarship. I wrestled through college and while I was going to college, met my insanely beautiful wife and most of you guys, not, she’s right here hiding so and met her and fell in love really quick and I spent the next like three or four months trying to convince her. In fact, there’s probably the hardest sell I ever had to convince her that I was the right one. Luckily she said, do you see that picture as kind of a geek?
Not going to lie anyway, convinced her to marry me. And it was, it was amazing. And by the time we got engaged, I realized my dad said, well, when you get married like I’m not going to keep supporting you. Like that’s when you become a real man. You have to like being like what I want.
But dad, like I’m wrestling in the covering my school, but he would always send me money to pay for food and stuff and he’s like, no, like if you get married like you’re kind of on your own. Like Oh my crap, I want to get married but I don’t want to grow up yet. I’m being it.
And my wife was fiance at the time, wife now she was working and she was making money and she got a second job to support us and I was like wrestling. I’m like, I don’t have any money. And so I’m like, well I gotta do something. And then luckily the greatest thing rural happened to happens to a lot of us. I was up late at night stressing out about this and then this little thing popped up on TV.
It was an infomercial and it was this guy talking about how people are making money with these little websites and that they were doing an event at Holiday Inn.
They the next day and that you can come and get tickets to. I’m like, Whoa, this is it. So I like to call the number and get my tickets, the holiday. And I showed the holiday and his like little tiny room with like 50 really, really like desperate people sitting there. And I get in there and there’s the dude on stage, he’s all like in a suit and tie. And I’m like, Whoa, that guy looks rich. And he started doing his thing and within like five minutes he closed me on like this $50 thing.
And so I ran the back and I hadn’t had my one credit card. I think I have like a $300 credit, like all I had earned so far. So I bought my $50 thing, I ran back, I’m like, Oh, if I’m gonna make so much money with this. And then he pitched this on a website, which was like three grand.
And I was like, Oh, I never was running back by websites. I’m like, I can’t afford a website. Dang, it. And they pitched website hosting at $80 a month and all these things. And so like, and then they’re teaching like, Hey, if you call your bank you can get your credit extended. I’m like, Oh sweet, I didn’t know that. So I’m calling the bank and like, Hey, can you make my car at $1,000 learning all these things.
And so getting my credit card bigger and which was kind of cool. And then I bought everything he told, cause I’m like all I need the whole thing. So I buy it all. And he convinced me, he’s like, PayPal is evil.
He’s like, you have to have a merchant account. There’s $6,000 for a merchant account. I’m like, I don’t have $6,000 she’s, he’s like, well you can’t make money online without a merchant account.
Six grand. And I’m like, God, but I couldn’t afford that. Right. Everything else. So then I went home, I was like, cool, I got a domain name, I got hosting $1,000 worth of internet web stuff. And then we jumped online and I was like, I’m going to have a website.
[And I was really excited. I started Googling some things and eventually, within that 15 minutes, I realized that website hosting is not $80 a month. I realized that domain name is not like a thousand dollars I only, I was like, Oh, Oh crap.
Like I got taken like for all these, I’ve just like, I was freaked out and so I end up calling next day and I was like, Hey, so my son is a minor and he was at your event last night and he charged all his credit cards and he needs to be out of this contract. And they, they got me on the contract, give me my money back.
That’s one trick if you ever need to get out of the contract, it’s worked almost every time.
So those are the real.com secrets. All right, so, so the other contract, but that point like I was in, I was like, Oh my gosh, like I can, I see sell stuff on the internet. And so that started this thing about time. My wife and I were getting ready to get married and I was like trying to sell stuff and I was selling all sorts of different things. I remember initially I thought maybe it’s eBay like people make money to eBay.
And I remember driving to the thrift store buying everything that I could find that I thought was worth value. And then like on my bike with like grocery sacks full of crap, like driving my bike back home and I remember like about a Michael Jackson records. I’m like two records are so old, this has gotta be worth like hundreds of dollars. I ended up selling it for 13 cents on eBay, so depressed anyway and all these things.
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And I was like, and I was boxing him and I was shipping these things out and like when all of a sudden that, I think I made like 40 or $50 but my costs were like 150 $200 and it was like I was going to try to find boxes to box all these weird things I bought and it was just horrible thing.
And I’m sitting in the post office with like 18 different boxes of weird things like records and all these things and there’s this dude standing there with a big huge box full of CDs, like hundreds and hundreds of CDs and I’m here with like a wheelbarrow full of like odd boxes. I’m like, dude, what are you selling? He’s like, Oh, I sell information products. I said, what does that mean? He’s like, all these cities have info burden on. People pay me and I ship them a CD.
I’m like, these are the same CDs. Like yeah, I have CD burner. I just burned them and then I put them in these things and I send them out so could you me, they’re all the same size.
I could like buy one box and just like it’d be so much easier and so that when we start talking about information products, I was like, I don’t know. That was even a thing.
And so I got all excited about information products and I started Googling stuff and started learning about health information products. I ended up finding, this CD was called, it was a CD that had like 8,000 coloring book pages for kids and the guy was selling it. So I emailed him, I was like, dude, the CD’s cool, like as I can, I buy the rights from the CD so I can, I want to sell it.
And he was like, I’ve never done that before. But sure for 200 bucks, I’ll sell you the rights and you can sell it too. I’m like, Oh, sweet. So I gave him $200 I didn’t have, and he gave me the rights, they had the CD and then basically all I do is I had a burn it on CD burning.
I could mail out as many times as I wanted. And he had a big long sales letter. He let me use it, I put his sales letter up and I started trying things. And what was cool is I started making sales, not a lot, like every other week we make a sale for 20 bucks and then I’d go burn a CD and I put it in the envelope and I ship it out. And I was just like, this is so cool. My information products became like the thing.
And I was trying to figure out how that whole thing worked. And, and that’s why I started bumping into people like Yanik silver and on all these different internet marketing gurus and watching what they were doing, selling information products. And I was just hooked at that point. And by the time I started watching what they were doing, I started learning. I started creating different things that my flashlights still alone am sorry about that.
And I started creating things in back one of my very first products ever. Is anybody in this room remember the product zip brander yes, like three people. VJ does. So I had all these info products and I was buying resell rights, other’s people’s products.
I’m selling these things and I remember like, I was like, wouldn’t it be cool if there was a way where like when I send this file, this digital file to somebody if like when they first open it instead of just getting the file, they’ve seen an ad for my product and then they see the file.
And I like, that was my first like a light bulb. I’m like, Oh my gosh. I was like, it’s like zipping a file, but you’d zip it and they’d be branded. So they open it. They’d see your ad first as like this is like, I thought it was it like that is my idea. This is going to change the world as we know it. Right.
And so I bought zip brander.com and I remember Armand Morin at the time was one of the guys I was studying and like I was just like, Armand is so cool. Like everyone was, sites look very similar. They’re so cool. I’m looking in the arms. I hit a big header graphic with his picture, like the arm folded with the tight with a suit coat on. I was like, Oh dude, that’s what I need.
So I got a picture of me folding my arms and suit coat and the had this header inside a header look just like his, his would always like he covered generator and size, like zip brand look identical.
And then this is where my funnel hacking started. So he had his big long sales letter. I’m like, that looks weird but Armand’s doing this, I’m going to do it. So like I look at sales and I wrote my own based on that and then I was like, how do I, how do I create this? I didn’t know that.
And so my first thought is like, Oh well I should just become a computer engineer. Like that’d be the coolest thing. Like I want to make software. So I switched my major to like computer information systems, like learn how to code, right. It was about the time that the semester was changing. So I get to class the first day and he, she gets up there and starts talking about code and like databases and all of these things, structures and I sitting there like, Oh crap, I have no idea what he’s talking about.
Like not even a little bit. And within about 15 seconds I realized that I’m not a coder and never will be a coder. Couldn’t understand. I thought I was a Spanish class or something and I’m just like, I don’t even know what he’s saying, but I didn’t know how to change my major again and I kind of was.
So I just kind of stayed in it and, and in a little while I kind of got depressed on my glasses, my one idea, like I guess I can’t do it. And then I remember I was listening to a teleseminar, I was on a wrestling term, we were driving to California, it’s like a 16-hour drive.
And I downloaded on my, it was pre-I-pads, it was like this little tape player thing, a whole bunch of teleseminars arm had done. I’m listening to these things in the back of the car where all the other wrestlers are like partying and having fun and like listening to music.
And I was listening to these seminars and they were totally making fun of me. The whole thing, if you meet any of the wrestling buddies like they relentlessly made fun of me the entire trip. Like you’re such a nerd like you’re never gonna make any money. I’m like, no, I swear I will.
So I’m listening to these things the whole way. And in one of these things like 22 hours into this, this thing I’m listened to, Armin says like, yeah, I don’t code software. I go to this at the time it’s called script line, it’s going to script lands and I pay guys in Romanian India really like hardly anything to build stuff. And I was like, Armin is not a programmer.
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I thought, I thought he was a programmer. There are people in India that can do this. So I went literally that night jump on script Lance and, and I up actually prior to that I tried to hire a company to do it and they quoted me like $5,000 I was like, okay, well I don’t have that.
And so I took the same description I’d given these guys and I posted on script Lance and instantly I got a, I got all these people started bidding on it. One guy was like, I’ll do it for 5,000 I’ll do for 2000 for a thousand for 500 for it.
And came down all way down to this guy named Cyprian in Romania, said, I’ll do it for 20 bucks. I was like, I got 20 bucks. So I picked him and he’s like, all right, so this is how I’m going to do it. And I’m like, I know what you’re talking about, but just do it. So he did spend like two or three days. He sends it back. He’s like, here it is. So I tried it and I like the zip to file and I open it and my ad shows up. I was like, you did it.
Oh my gosh. And he’s like, yeah, thanks for the 20 bucks. I was like, no, you’re just like, this is going to be huge. Like I’m going to make millions of dollars. I feel guilty. Give me $20 can I pay you an extra a hundred he was like, yeah. So I gave him $100 and I felt good about it and that was the very first software product that I ever did and he didn’t make me millions.
I’d probably made, I don’t know, 10 1520 grand with that product because the first one had a sales letter, started driving traffic. I was doing Google ads, I was finding JV partners, all these things. And I started selling it and that was like the first thing that actually made me any money.
Is that exciting?
How many as ones that render the first 30 people in the back. Just kidding. Nope, just doesn’t work anymore. The coding, all of the soft working like 10 internets ago, so it’s done. But that was my first software product was so cool about that time is when I started doing more info products. That’s when the potato gun came out. Piggy gave when DVD, all these things.
I was just doing all these little businesses and none of them were like huge smashing, like million-dollar successes. I didn’t pull Dan Henry and read a book and five months later made 1 million bucks. Like I was like, Hey, I made five grand here. Oh, I made $200 here, or, and these little things kept happening.
It was so cool and I’m in every project did a little bit better. It was, I kinda was like slow momentum. Like everyone did a little better than the last one because I get more customers who are coming in and more people.
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And then I kept just making things in different markets, potato guns and all these sorts of different things and each one got a little bit better and it was just fun. I remember back then I start doing teleseminars and I was like, I get like 30 people in line and I talk about something that’s selling at the end and some people go by it.
It was so exciting and that was like the start of this whole thing for me. And then one of my friends, BJ, he’s sitting over here, he used the wrestler Nebraska and I wrestled the Boise state is our senior year. In my senior year, I’d made, I made pretty good money, probably 150 $200,000 somewhere in there my senior year. And he’d heard about it. And so Boise tears rest in Nebraska and we’re sitting there wrestling and we’re glaring each other cause we’re opposite teams.
And afterward, he’s like, Hey man, so some times you told me you’re making money, is that true? And I was like, yeah. He’s like, how are you doing it? How are you doing it? And so we kinda talked about a little bit and then we flew back to our places fit in our college and we kind of talked back and forth a couple, you know, for a little while. And then after college got it. And he’s like, Hey man, I want to do what you’re doing. Can I get a job?
And I was like, you want a job? He’s like, yeah, well what would you do all day? He’s like, I don’t know. I’ll do what you’re doing. I’m like, okay, and can we talk about marketing stuff? He’s like, Oh I love talking about Mike Huff. He’s so cool. I have nobody talk about this stuff.
Like I thought it was just me. I was like, you’re like, you’re actually interested in this thing. He’s like, yeah, like, okay, yeah man, I’ll give you a job. So come on down. So he’s like, all right. So he jumps in the plane, flies to Boise and moves like literally into her office, slept in her office for like six months and he gets there and he’s like, okay, so how does this work?
I had never really had an employee before. I’m like, I don’t really know either. I’ll pay you and then we can talk about marketing and we’ll sell stuff and it’ll be awesome. Now me as an entrepreneur, I was in this mode of I eat what you kill. Like I’d sell something, make a bunch of money. And I was like, sweet. And then we won’t do anything for like four or five months and we’d create something, sell it, make a bunch of money.
And then that’s kind of the model that I was on for a long time. Right. And then BJ came in, he wanted to be an employee and I was so excited. I’m like sure. And so he’s employing. Then the weirdest thing that happened is every two weeks he wanted to get paid whether we made money or not. I had never heard that. But I was like, okay, so here’s some more money.
And then two weeks later I’m more my like, Oh crap, we haven’t sold anything for like a long time. And so then, and then he had some other friends that came along the right, this is cool. I wanna work for you too. I’m like, all right, come on over man, let’s get jobs.
So I gave them jobs, one of his buddies and his wife and then some other people. As soon as I got all these friends that want to talk about marketing with me, this is so fun.
And so we had all these people coming over and then, but the problem was that like every two weeks they want to get paid. And so we weren’t selling anything.
So I’d go walk myself in the back room and I’m like, don’t bug me, you guys. And make money so we can all hang out again. So I closed the door and I started working and I’d be working and I’d be selling stuff and then they’d be out there like, dude, can we help you? Like, shut up. Like if you talk to me, I can’t make monies to pay you. So just like go away. And they’re like, we really feel bad that we want to help you, Russell, Mike, I don’t have time to train you because otherwise, we can’t make money to pay payroll. And so they just kind of, and that was like this thing.
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And what’s interesting is this is one of my, one of my first lessons in an entrepreneur that was tough, right? And so I had, I don’t remember, I had five or six people at the time.
We hired this video guy that was so many sides to it. I can’t tell you all of them. He was an Indian guy who had shorts on up to here and he had a braid that went past his shorts cause he told me in interviews like I’m a video guy, Michael, you can’t move.
You can do videos and he’s like, yeah, I got all sorts of video stuff. So we hired him and then turned out he didn’t know anything about video at all. But I didn’t dare to fire him cause I’d never fired anyone. I was so scared. And like every day we’re like, Oh, we’re just like, you just quit.
I don’t know what air to fire. Like I don’t know what to do. Like it was, it was just all these weird learning things. Right. And so this went on for a while. I was launching something like every week trying to make money to cover payroll and it’s just this huge thing.
And it became horribly, not fun for a long time. And it kept going worse and worse and worse until the point where it was December, it was the beginning of December. It was freezing cold and I was looking at everything and like every penny, I’d ever made was gone.
Every idea I had for like how I could hustle and like sell things to different markets like was gone. And I was just like, Oh, just drain.
Like I don’t really know what to do and it was Christmas time I was outside and I started going to go hang up lights around my house and I had this little, somebody send me like an iPod nano and Stu McLaren had actually done an event.
I don’t know if Stephen knows this and he had sent me the links to this. I download the link to this event on this iPod plug into my ears and start hanging up Christmas lights, which I had never done before as a horrible job. Turns out you can hire people for really cheap to do that and the lights look really straight.
Mine was like like it was really bad and I kept stapling through the wire, which would then kill the lights and it was bad and my fingers were so numb. I had this little light coat on.
I remember like, Oh my fingers are so numb and I couldn’t have my gloves off to be able to like squeeze the thing. It’s like they put him back in and get warm. Then he’d go back in and, and I didn’t really want to go inside get warm cause I just sort of pressed, cause I knew that like the next payroll was coming up like a week or so.
And I was like, I don’t have money. Like I don’t know what to do. And like tomorrow I need to go in and tell these guys. Otherwise, they’re gonna like it’s gonna be really awkward when your payroll does come into my God. Sorry guys. So I’m like, tomorrow I have to go tell everybody this. And so I stayed outside in the cold so I didn’t want to go in and I just was trying to think. And some stapling these Christmas lights around the house, some listening to this audio and in the audio, there are two different speakers talking about different business models.
Back then, no one, none of us called these things funnels, but they talked about these different business models, what they were doing. And one of them was a, was an offline guy. His name’s John [inaudible] and this one, you guys have heard me talk about him, he’s a guy taught me about attractive character and he said that he’s like, I have this thing that I’ve been doing where I create these CDs and then I tell everyone it’s so controversial that I can’t put it on the internet, which is like the funniest thing ever.
It’s like, so because that you gotta pay me $5 that we’ll ship you the CD. And he said, what happens that I shipped in the CD, but then that customer financed me putting a set, like sending them a sales letter.
I was like, that is like brilliant am I, we gotta do that. And I remember I had filmed the CD like two years earlier or a DVD and I was like, we could do that, we could burn that DVD and we can start sending that out. So that was the first, the first presentation was John Holland says, the next presentation was this guy named Matt Barack, who’s become a close friend since then.
And now he’s talking about his business model. He said, what I do is I send out CDs and the people that buy the CDs, I call him on the phone and we sell them coaching.
I was like, you can call people on the phone as I had never, I’m an internet nerd. I’m like, wait, you pick, you’re like, I was super scared but I knew that there was a guy that worked for me at the time, one of those my five or six friends who had, who had sold things on the phone before.
And also when I was like, Oh my gosh, like what if we figured out something we could do where we could like save this thing? Like it might actually be possible. I struggled more Simon Haim Christmas lights and listening stuff and I’m just like, Oh my gosh, this, this plan, this like funnel. What’s going through my head? And I’m like, okay. I think I’ve figured out like a blend of what these two guys were saying could actually work. And so by the time I got to hang up Christmas lights, I texted all of them like you guys, you don’t know this yet, but we’re about to go bankrupt.
But I got an idea that I think can save it. Let’s meet tomorrow morning early on. Gonna walk you through what I think could actually save this business send and they’re all like texting back like what they got and we’re going through a bankruptcy like Oh yeah, we’re about to, and luckily it’s okay, let’s all come in. So they all came in the next day and I was like, you guys, I think I’ve got a model. This is what we’re going to do. I was like, remember that DVD I did like two years ago and take that, it’s going to be free. DVD can be so controversial. Can’t sell on the internet.
We’ll charge, I think it was four 95 shipping and handling and we’ll send this DVD out to them. And then inside the DVD we’re going to have a sales letter where we’re going to sell a $5,000 actually was $5,500 I don’t know why.
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We said that price, it’s $5,500 all cool. What do we sell? $5,500 I’m like, I don’t know. What do you guys want to sell? All right. So then we had our whiteboard on a whiteboard, right?
Well, somebody gave us $5,500 like we have to be something amazing. Like what if we did this? And we were like, Melissa, what if we do that? And we made this huge list for like two hours of like all the amazingness. I was like, that would be awesome, but I’m not willing to do half of that stuff. So I’m okay. We’re not gonna have him sleep in my house. We’re not going to have them do that.
We kind of crossed out all these things. Right. Okay. And right. Okay. I’d actually be willing to sell this. I think people would actually buy that. That, that’d be insane. And so we took that and then at the same time we added a newsletter.
So somebody bought, see, they joined a newsletter that was $37 a month. So they came from here and they joined a newsletter, $37 a month and that was the funnel back then would have click funnels.
So luckily we had one or two nerds still working for us who were able to kind of put these pieces together and we had this really rudimentary like a horrible-looking funnel, but it was live within a day.
We said, okay, let’s try it and talking about a little tiny email list. This is pre-Facebook pre is that my space day?
So back then we push some traffic to this and we ended up selling a couple hundred of these CDs and, in the CD we shipped out to them inside the game of sales letters talking about this and then it put people on a continuity program. And then we called everybody about the CD and said, Hey you buy the CD, how would like to come to Boise and we’re going to give you this and this is our hail Mary pass.
Like please let this work. And so we did that. We focused on it, we drove traffic to it, and when all of a sudden done over the next like two week period of time, we’ve got 800 people to get our free CD. From that way we used to do is everybody was on continuity and we just, we had 800 people that were on the $ 37-month continuity, but it’s free for a month.
So we didn’t make any money here, but with 800 people’s phone numbers we were able to call and start calling him and we didn’t know anything about phone sales or anything.
We were just like, Hey man, you bought the CD, you want to come and hang out with Russell? They’re like, yeah. And in that, in that two week period of time, we sold 10 people at $5,500 a piece. We’re sending it being the 55 K in that funnel saved Christmas
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I was able to pay all of our payrolls, we had some money left over. It was awesome. And the coolest thing is 30 days later than this call started and all these people aren’t continuity and suddenly we had a business. This is where I learned the power of continuity.
David Fry, who’s one of my favorite people in the whole world, he’s in the audience here somewhere I think I used to always say is I can tell you of continuity. You don’t have a business. And I never understood that till this. There’s David smiling over there. I love that guy.
And now I’ve found out how some of these people in there, so what happened, I don’t know what the math, 800 times 37 a month. It’s like 25 K a month. And we knew like we have continuity now every single day we have 25 K that means I can pay for employees, I can, I realize like you don’t hire employees before for you have continuity.
But now we continuity. Now we actually had people covered and we could actually focus and think and that was the first funnel that really kind of saved things and turned it around for us. Now the pros and the cons of this, the pros is this was really, really awesome and I was like, is getting good entrepreneurial? I’m like, Hey, what’s the book?
Nail it then scale it as we nailed it, right? K let’s scale this thing. And so then I probably shouldn’t in some of this stuff. But we got excited and I was like, well, if this worked here we should hire more people.
And we started growing this and we went from this little thing with five or six of us to two years later we had about a hundred people operation where this is the model we were doing CDs, calling them on the phone, selling, coaching, having continuity.
And it grew really, really big. And during the time there were some really positive things that came from it, some negative things, some ups, and downs, and I’ll share kind of a lot of those things.
One cool thing is that while this was happening and it was going really well, my name kind of got out there, so I got a chance to go speak a lot, which was cool. And I had seen other people speaking from the stage, and this is where I’ve told you guys a story had gone, anyone’s gone through the perfect webinar. I spent about two and a half, three years on the road going to seminars, standing for manipulating this, talking and trying to sell something, and then nothing happening.
It was really horrible feeling, Hey, we did that before. In my first presentation I was on stage, I just probably had 300 people in the room. I did a presentation, I tried to like do what speakers do and like close and then hopefully every runs the back and like nobody budged and the guy forgot to turn the music on and it was just like crickets.
And then I was just like awkwardly like walking off the stage, Oh this is awkward. And then running, you know? And then I remember the first, I was so embarrassed because usually, we have like, those events are all like multi-speaker events and all the speakers are selling difference, bragging about their numbers. And they, and I knew that. I don’t want them to ask me my numbers. I totally didn’t.
Not one person signed up so in hid my hotel room and I remember ordering coconut shrimp and hog dice ice cream for every meal for the next two days while I hit in the room eating it, watching movies.
I’m like, I’m gonna going back downstairs and I just, it was really bad and awesome at the same time because coconut shrimp and Haagen DAAs is awesome, but I did that and I learned like how not to sell and then I started learning from some amazing speakers and people and I started learning the process of how it works and all the stuff we talked about, the perfect webinar, all this stuff we talked about day one about creating belief and breaking belief pattern, all those kinds of things I learned like on the road in front of people on stage like it was, it was scary, but it’s such a good time for me to learn and understand that part of the process as we started to grow and make sure I cover all the cool things, we had a bunch of different offers.
We came out with one of the ones that were more successful for us was a front end offer like this called micro continuity. How many guys remember micro continuity? Yeah, that is awesome. So this is when we probably started, you know, eight years ago now.
We put it on an MP, three-player from Hong Kong, and had like six hours of this training and that was a funnel we put through and we just kept creating new front-end funnels to get people into this, this program. And it worked awesomely.
And we grew the company from nothing to three or $4 million a year as you’re awesome. And then at a time I started looking at other people in my industry and this is hopefully will help, one of you guys is going to get a good idea for this one. But I had this funnel, we talk about the value ladder, right?
Like, I had this really cool value ladder happening here and I was sending people up and I realized that I was the only person in the market that had a real value add or everyone else was kind of doing stuff down here and that was it.
And I was the only person selling really expensive stuff. I started calling my friends, I call it like my Filsaime and I came in like so all of our customers were calling me. So I’m like these $5,000 things and lots of people buy that like you should do that. He’s like, ah, I don’t want to call center dah, dah, dah.
I’m like, well do you want us to call your customers and sell it? He’s like, yeah. So we hooked up with Mike and we became Mike’s back in, they call it Frank Kern, same thing. We came to Frank Kerns back in for a little while.
We started calling them a whole bunch of people and then we started becoming the back end. So all these people now had front end funnels. We became the back end for a lot of them. And that’s how we took the company from three or $4 million to $10 million and it became really, really big. And I was gonna say big and fun, but I don’t think I would say that at all. It became really, really big. We had a hundred employees and we had 60 people on phones and Vicki’s call center.
We had 20 people doing coaching for all the things we’re selling. And then we had about 20 people who are driving leads and customers and stuff like that. And he got really big, and I don’t know if you guys noticed this, but like I’m really good at like selling and those things really bad at like the management of stuff.
And I was not good at managing all these people and it just, it kinda started just getting too big. And this is about the time that I was telling you guys, if you’ve read the.com secrets book that I started waking up and I was just like, God, I did not like what I created. I got so excited that I started building the thing and then one day I woke up and I was like, huh, I really want to do this.
I think half of the conversations have inner circle members and they first come in, is this like you really want to build that business? Yes, that would work, but sometimes it’s horrible when you get there, like thinking through like what do I actually want to do? Who would I really want to become? What or who do I want to be when I grow up?
And luckily or during that time, it was probably one of the most painful times in my life, but looking back now, it was probably one of the most important times in my life. We had this huge operation, everything was working and then one day it was in January, literally 1130 in the morning, one of my sales guys came in and said, Hey, I’m trying to run a credit card but it’s not working. I’m not sure what’s wrong. I’m like, Oh, that’s weird.
Well, do you know, trying to do their merchant accounts, maybe that maybe there’s something there and then some else came in, Hey, I’m all the continuity orders are failing. I’m not sure why. And then the three or four people came, me, Mike, what’s happening? I logged in to the backend system and like not as 1137 or something of that. Every sales stop, just stop, no sales.
I was like, what is happening? And so I’m kind of freaking out. So I call our merchant account company. There’s a busy signal and calling again, busy calling in a busy like I can’t get hold of anybody. All of a sudden I start hearing from friends like, dude, everything got shut down.
Like you still able to process and like knowing what’s happening. And everyone started, I don’t know. I don’t know. And, and as soon as I found out that it wasn’t me, it was like and eventually found it’s like three or 400 people at the same time.
All anybody who was doing any kind of like continuity-based stuff, the merchant accounts base came in and said, look, we think that what you’re doing might be illegal and so we’re shutting all of you guys down and you’re basically guilty until proven innocent.
I was like, what? I’ve got a hundred people, I’m feeding a hundred people in their families. Like it turns into like hundreds of people. I was like, you can’t stop processing. Finally, after like an hour, I get through somebody and the lady on the phone says, yep, we shut you down. Good luck ever getting a merchant account again. I gotta go boom and hung up on me and I was like, what? Do you know?
At the time I thought I was, I thought I had diversity. Like I had a, we had nine merchant accounts all through one company and so I thought that meant, but they were all through different cans, but all through one bank and I found out that the equipment having one, which is why I’m a very big believer now having multiple merchant accounts in multiple different banks, which is the lesson hopefully for everybody. If you don’t know Alex Roy yet, I don’t know.
Alex isn’t here, but meet Alex and he’s the Madigan. Get you hooked up with lots of merchant accounts. Like he’s done that for us. Yes, he’s amazing.
But we, we, it was bad. And so finally got ahold these guys and I’m trying to figure some things out and basically said, okay, well you gotta prove that you are a good guy. And I said, okay. So we went through, took us two weeks for them to go through all our stuff, look at our documentation, look at all our stuff, these two weeks, and they came back. So okay, you’re right, you’re doing everything clean, everything’s above board.
We’ll turn your merchant accounts back on and you’re good to go. I’m like, sweet. So we turn it back on. And that time when there’s that kind of instability like sales guys are freaking out, they can handle any kind of stability and they’re leaving like crazy people walking out the door.
And it’s like, and I was like freaking out. And we had, we had all this payroll but no money coming in. And so like I’m painting out of my own pocket, like everything, just like keep things afloat. And as I’m going through this process, it’s getting scary and scary and find the sake of things.
Merge counsel back on. You’re, you’re, you’re a good guy. I’m like, sweet. So you guys, we got to do a launch real quick to make a bunch of money. So we do this, put this together, this huge launch thing. We pushed it out to our customer lists and on a weekend we made $250,000 and I was like, thank you. So great. I say Monday, we should get the money, we can pay payroll. I’m telling everyone like, just tell your wives and your kids. We’ll have money soon. It’s coming.
I promise he’s in the bank. It’s just to be here any day now. And my income mining comes Monday, didn’t come Tuesday, didn’t come Wednesday, didn’t come by Thursday. I might call him like, where’s our money dude? Like we need this money and at least the guy looks at camp.
Oh a, it’s definitely in there. I’m like, wait, when’s that coming to our bank? He’s like, well, it’s not going to come to your bank. Like why not? He said, Oh, well you’re on a 100% reserve so we keep 100% of your money. I was like, what? Like that’s not good for me or for anybody who wants this to be in business. I got people to pay.
He’s like, yeah, well that’s just how it works. He’s like, but the good news is that it looks like you are a legitimate company. No one’s charging back or refund his money.
We’ve collected so far. So what we’ll do is we’re dropping down to a 10% reserve. I’m like, Oh, thank heavens. And they said, but the 250,000 are you collected last week.
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We’re keeping that for the next six months just as collateral. Make sure nothing bad happens. I’m like, are you kidding me? Like so I’m like, okay, who here came to the funnel quick? So we’re putting that in your thing, push it out there, make some money, and we start paying payroll for whatever we can. But it like everything’s collapsing around me.
And so I start in January and desperate happening at the same time. We’re trying to find other merchant accounts at other banks and all these other banks are like, Oh yeah, we’re cool. Come in, we’ll give you a merchant account. And they’re like, okay, this is how it works. Like you would make $100,000 a month.
I’m like, cool, we’re gonna do that like two days. So I need like four merchant accounts because this is like, we can make money. We just need you to be able to give it to us after we make it. And like, Oh yeah, we’re cool. We’re good at that. Don’t worry. It’s like, okay, cool. So we get a merchant account, get all set up, drove a bunch of traffic and twice we made over a hundred thousand dollars a month.
We were allowed within like a day, day and a half. And then they froze our accounts and they said, Oh, you made too much money too fast. We’re freezing your accounts. We’ll get this money back to you in six months. I’m like, six months. Like please stop doing this to me. Like we end up like four or $500,000 lock of the merchant accounts and he’s getting worse and worse and worse as his whole, his whole year was like, Oh, like the hardest year of my life.
And it just kept going down. And like every single day I’m like laying off friends and family members of people whose families I like, people that I just love and I care about and I’m coming out. I’m like, I don’t want to do man. I’m so sorry.
Like I gotta let you go and this letting, and it was just like such a dark time in my life and just over F thing after thing, after thing. And, and I wish I could say from there, I got better. So that was an entire year.
The next January started and one of my friends is doing an event in Vegas and I was like, I’m gonna go out there and to see what everybody, I like, I gotta re out my whole business, everything’s completely collapsed at the time. By the way, we were in this big huge office we had rented in or that we were releasing and he was like 20,000 square feet, cause we’d all call center and stuff.
And I went to the landlord, I’m like, Hey man, like I can’t, I can’t afford to pay you anymore. And he’s like, okay, well we’ve got a three-year contract. If you don’t pay me, I’m going to Sue you and you’re probably gonna end up in jail. I was like, are you kidding me?
Do like I’m trying like would not work with me at all. I had all this fear behind that. So I’m in Vegas a year later trying to ask friends what’s happening? What do you guys do in your business?
And they’re trying to tell me their stories. I’m just like, Oh this is, I don’t know what to do. And then that Madigan email on my phone for my dad and open this email. It was like a shot in the gut, like, probably the worst second of my life as I read that and the email said, Hey Russell, I’m so sorry my dad is helping the books the time.
But we had a bookkeeper in the office. He said and the bookkeeper, I mean she was, she was tried her best but she didn’t know, she knew we were struggling and she didn’t want to stress me out so she didn’t tell me how much we were struggling and turns out what she’d been doing is she had been paying the bills she could and then the one she couldn’t, she was trying to like not to pay him and delay him and hide it from my, from my dad and from everybody else.
She was, she was saying in QuickBooks that you paid bills but then like not actually paying them. So it looked like it was clear and he’d gone through and actually audit and found out that she hadn’t paid payroll taxes and almost a year and email. My dad said, Hey, just so you know, payroll taxes aren’t like something where they find you.
Like if you don’t pay payroll taxes, you’re going to go to jail. And it was over $150,000 you on payroll taxes. And I was like, in the end, it had been an entire year. Every penny I’ve ever earned was gone. All my people, my team’s like, it just had all fallen apart and I’m sitting there like, I don’t what to do.
So the next morning get on a flight from Vegas back to boys, you were fly back to boys. I get to Boise and I walk in and the call center is empty. All the guys are gone and there are two people that are laughing. They said, Hey, just, you know, the call center across the road just recruited us and we all just left in, we’re out, see ya. And they walked out. I was like, Oh, I look government $150,000 I have nobody who’s helped me sell like everything.
Like I don’t know what to do and I want to quit. Like so bad, I want to quit. But if I quit, I go to jail. It all also a lot of coaching to people I cared about. If I quit all these people about coaching from me like I can’t help them cause that’s not right. That’s not the right thing to do. I was like, I don’t want you to, I want your bankruptcy lawyer. I’m like, how’s this workman?
Like, I don’t know what to do. Like I gotta, I gotta figure this out. And he’s like, well, and I explain the whole process and I told him that my lease, I’m, I get, he’s the landlord that are coming after me, like the government’s gonna come after me like I don’t know what to do. And he’s like, well, the best thing to do is I should come with you to your landlord just explained you’re going bankrupt, maybe they’ll be nice to you.
So I’m like, all right. He’s like, do you have any money? I’m like, no. He’s like, what do you get in your pocket? I was like, I like a hundred bucks. He’s like, cool, give me 100 bucks. I’ll come and I’ll tell the landlord, you’re going bankrupt. Like, all right man, here you go.
So he comes with me. It was actually the best hundred bucks cyber spends. So he comes with me to the landlord and he’s like, Russell screwed man, he’s going through bankruptcy. He just hired me. He’s like, he can’t pay you as you can come after him. But he is like, and he got his old man, he’s just like, yeah, he’s done like Oh so bad. Like so much money the government’s coming after him like, Oh you’re screwed. Don’t even try it.
And basically convinced our landlord that like it was a useless cause slam. And I was like, all right, be out by Friday. And we had a big space with office cubicles and phones, all sorts of just craziness. Right. So I’m okay to be out by Friday, but 90% of my team was gone. This point went from a hundred employees down to about seven or eight. The few people that stuck by me, people like Bronco Peters who go like, it’s love that guy to death.
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Brent and John and some other people. Back then, I mean Brent had taken a pay cut at 50% pay cut and never, it’s amazing people
So the few of us who were left, we went and we packing up stuff. We put up ads on Craig’s. It’s like we got tons of computers and crap come and buy it and things. We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars for, we were selling for hundreds of dollars, and just to get out of it, we made, I don’t know, maybe five or six grand of all of our crap getting ripped.
We had huge dumpsters just throwing away everything we’d ever created because we had to downsize and trying to figure out do we get into a smaller building and how do we keep the people we have to have to be able to fulfill on coaching, but we have to meet, we have to just cut everything else that we have. And so we were downsizing everything going out and the night we were moving, like that Friday, which was about midnight or whatever, whatever it was, I was sitting in the office and the desks were gone.
Everything was gone. All I had left was my laptop and I was sitting there. I remember I had my socks on, I had some Levi’s and had no money and I was like, I have to make some money or else we can’t even like move into and I don’t know how to do anything.
And so I sent an email to my list. I had at the time had a bunch of people registered for a webinar and I was sitting there in a chair with my laptop on my, on my lap doing a webinar, praying that something would happen. And that webinar saved us. Like that webinar, we did make $150,000 in sales over the next three or four days. And that webinar, which gave me the money I needed to pay everyone to like not to leave, get to know the office, move it gets moved in and get us like sustainability.
So we could actually breathe for a few minutes and figure out, Hey, what’s the next step? Like what do we want to be when you grow up? And so we downsized from 20,000 square feet to like 2000 square feet and we had this really cool moment where it’s like what do we, what do we want to do when we grow up? Like what do we want to be? And as painful as that process was like it was one of the coolest things ever because we didn’t have to keep going on this path.
We could, we could pick anything. This is why I start thinking like who’s our dream customer? Like who do we really want to serve? Like what fires us up, what gets us excited? And we started thinking through that and, and during this process like we started just creating again and start having some fun.
We’re like, well what should we do? I had a friend at the time who had this little website is making him my two or $3,000 a month and he got in some trouble and I had a couple of things making a little money at the time and he’s like, I need to go to the site, can you, can you pay me some money? So I came $20,000 he gave me a little website, it was a little machine that zaps it gets rid of cold sores and the autopay was making two or $3,000 a month. And I was like, Oh, this is so cool.
So we have this little thing. I’m like, that little business just kinda runs like, what if we had another one? So we started creating other ones. We did one in the couponing market, we set it up, we’ve got a guru in there in a certain run that started making money.
The right call here with no one. We didn’t win the weight loss and another, and in a year period of time, we launched 12 different companies. Each was making different amounts of money during the times when we’ll launch neuron cell, our supplement companies, all these things were happening and it was starting to get exciting and like we were creating, we were doing, we were like doing the business instead of teaching the business again, which was like so much fun for us to do and to learn and see like why does this stuff work in this market but not this market.
One of the things that drive me crazy about teachers and my industry is that they come in and act like the marketing techniques that work in one space work everywhere. And I learned during that two or three-year period of time that’s not true.
Like everything’s different. There are intricacies that are different in couponing versus business versus weight loss versus diet versus supplements. Like there are differences in, and I came to respect that because we had a chance to do it in so many different businesses and so many different things.
And we spent the next two or three years creating stuff and during that process, one of the really cool things is that I used to go to flippa.com all the time and try to find cool websites we could buy and like turn to. And there’s a website called champions sound.com that was for sale and it was this little like email, text message autoresponder for for for bands. And I was like, I’m going to buy that. And then we’re going to take it in like Nicha for every market will make email autoresponders and text message responders forward dentists.
And for Cairo, I was so excited. It was 20 grand. We didn’t have that much money, but I was like, this is the future of our company. We have to do is, so we ended up buying this, this website from these guys. I’ll flip it, we get the website and then try and transfer it over to our servers after we paid them the $20,000 and as they’re trying to transfer it, they’re like, Oh, you can’t have, this is the nerd talk.
You can’t have a Linux server. You need a Ruby server. I’m like, what does that mean? And they’re like, it means that this is not coded in PHP is coded in Ruby on rails. So you have to have a different kind of server. I’m like, what does that mean? Means you have to go over here and pay like 800 bucks a month for the new server.
I’m like, you kidding me? Like 800 bucks a month for a server. But we just bought this thing. So we did and they installed it and it didn’t really work. Am I gonna know what to do? And none of my tech guys that ever use Ruby on rails. And so like I went to Odessa, hire some guys and they couldn’t fix it and I tried like five or six guys and finally like wasted 20 grand.
I was so upset and so frustrated cause I didn’t have that money and on the way out of the office one day I was like, I wonder what if anybody on my list and those Ruby on rails like shot in the dark, I have no idea. So I send an email out to my little list of the time I was like a subject on is like Ruby on rails looking for a partner. If you know Ruby on rails, I’m looking for a partner and I said basically the story is told you guys by the scene can’t make it work.
If you know Ruby on rails, my partner will make much money this thing together, send the email out. About an hour later I get an email from this guy in Georgia named Todd Dickerson
And Todd’s like, Hey man, I know Ruby. I’m like, you do? And then I look at his picture, I was like, you don’t look like a nerd. I don’t think you do. And then I went to like Facebook and my Facebook friends were actually six years ago last week or something. Facebook friend. And I’m like, he’s got a beautiful wife, he’s got a daughter. I’m like, I don’t think he’s a coder. Like I don’t know if I believe that. He’s like, yeah man, shoot me the login. I’ll fix it. I was like, whatever.
I had like eight guys try to fix it for the last like four or five months. No, we can do it, but like whatever. Here’s the login. So he logs it in and then like an hour later he’s like, Hey Don, it’s fixed. I was like, what? Do you think I’ve got to fix it?
I just did blah blah blah, and I work to make dude, how did you do that? It’s like, Oh, I just love Ruby on rails. I’m amazing. He didn’t say that, but he’s super humble. But I was like, dude, this guy’s amazing. And I was like, okay, well I have these others around me, these other things. And so Todd came and we start working on another project. We ended up out on a different auto webinar. Todd built out this, the software behind the scenes, which is like click funnels version. Oh, I pre-everything. And he built this webinar, auto webinars software because Mike Filsaime had been talking to a lot of webinars, rich Schefren to put a webinar report, a couple of guys that had talked to auto webinars and we had done, one was really doing them. So Todd custom-built his whole platform so we could do them.
We launched an auto webinar through that and in that, in that auto webinar we made $1 million in 90 days and the first thing I did from now on, I need the first standard of not a million dollars. I took the money and we paid off the IRS and I was like, I’m free, I’m free, I’m not going to jail. IRS has paid off, all the fines are paid off.
And that auto webinar funnel literally saved me, literally gave me freedom make up to that point every night when I went to bed at night, I was just like, they could come to knock on my door like I have not paid payroll taxes in that long. And that webinar freed us and we kept doing thing after thing. And what was fun is with Todd and Dylan used to design half of these things. He says they contract you design these pages than dot Todd or take them and code them up, make these funnels.
He did funnel after funnel after funnel. We probably had, we had 15 different companies within those companies, two or three funnels affiliate, like 40 funnels we built over after thing after thing after thing after thing.
In the last one that we actually built the old school way was the neuro cell funnel and that’s one of the ones that blew up really, really big. It’s started making tons of sales. We’re having a bunch of fun with it and about that time is when Todd was like, Hey, we should really create something set on to keep making websites for you every single day.
And, and that was where the idea came for click funnels. And so we started that project in front of the whiteboard like we talked about yesterday. We mapped out this whole thing and Todd went to work to build click funnels. Then we partnered with Dillon to build the editor and the UI and, and then fast forward seven or eight months later we came and we were like, this thing is going to change the world.
And I was so excited. I was like, we’re going to do a free trial. And I think the very first month our goal was to get 10,000 members the first month. I’m like, Oh, like this is gonna be the greatest thing in the world. So put out there, created the first funnel, had all the stuff in there. It was a free trial. We had a bunch of people all lined up to promote it. We launched it, it was like crickets. People came and they left. I was like, dude, just don’t understand what I’m giving you. Like, like I made that page you’re looking at like, it’s really good. Like, and like they, nobody got it. I was like, why do they get it? I’m like, there’s something wrong with my messaging. So we changed the funnel again and we launched it again. Like a few of you guys signed up.
But that was it. Like most of like a hit, it and they left my call and I tried again. We tried it again. We rebuild that funnel not once or twice or three times or four times or five times, six times. It took us before the ClickFunnels funnel worked and the six-time was because one of my friends, Mike Filsaime, invited me out to his event and he’s like, Hey Russell, I want you to come and sell click funnels. I think it’s awesome.
Was like, dude, Mike, nobody’s buying click funnels. Like we gotta figure out our next deal. I forgot something cause it’s not working. He’s like, no dude, my people need it and he comes to speak on it, but y’all sell for $1,000 I’m like, yeah, now it’s the free trial. Nobody even wants it. All right. And so Mike’s event was happening that weekend and I was literally sitting in my office watching a streaming event streaming as I saw it on him.
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I started writing my webinar and I had my slides open and I was following the perfect webinar script that I had been working on for like 10 years. I started filling in the blank, started making this webinar true to the perfect webinar script. I literally, this is like watching it, adding the things in while I’m watching. Mike’s event happened that day. I finished the slides.
The next morning I jumped on a plane. I flew there, we got to California, I think it California with the event that got there. Put the slides up on the thing and I’m like, okay, here we go. And I started it and the title slide was, my weirdness funnel is currently making $17,947 per day talking about neuro cell funnel and how you can ethically knock it off in less than 10 minutes show the first slide I started going through and when we got to the end and we got to the stack and the close we did it and 30% of the room jumped up and ran to the back, jumping over the tables, fighting to get back there.
I was like, we did it. That was the message. That was the key. Now I know how to sell click funnels. We took that message, went back, and there are a lot of you guys know, especially in a circle, members starting webinars every single day. Some today, one time I did three in a day, which was really hard over and over and over again. I did that webinar live over 70 times over the next year and a half. And we went from being a startup with no members two years after the end of last year to over 10,000 members. After this year we have over 30,000 members as can you to grow and grow and grow. And it was that one funnel that changed everything for me.
So this process for all of this, you guys are, is an up and a down like it’s always happening and all of you guys are somewhere in this wave right now, right? Some of you guys are at the top riding it. Some of you guys are at the bottom and the crashing is there somewhere in between and then always going up and down.
But if nothing else, this event, like I wanted you guys to all understand that no matter where you are, there’s hope. Okay. It might not be this funnel in my mind, I can tell you how many funnels flopped. I guarantee I have failed at more funnels than anybody else in this room because we tried over and over and over and over again. Because of that, we found out what worked and the only way to do that is do it over and over and over again, and it’s a lot easier now.
I promise you, so much easier than what we used to do when poor Todd and Dylan had a custom code, every single thing, every single time, like now you guys can test things really, really fast. The first time I met Trey first call, I said, Russell, I’m going to launch a funnel a week, every single week, and I watched the CD launched a funnel and another funnel and another funnel, another funnel, and he had some marginal success, little success, more success, more success, more success.
I saw him launch a funnel last year, one funnel boom, and within 90 days became the biggest selling funnel in the history of the world. I was talking to some guys at affiliate, some of them said there’s never been a funnel that’s made more money in a shorter period of time than one a tres funnels. I’m not privy to share all his numbers and the stats, but it was insane and it came from doing a funnel a day or funnel week, funnel week till he hits the one that just explodes. You don’t know what that’s going to be is important. That’s why this tool is so important because you can do that. You can test, you can try over and over and over again.
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