Before You Do ANYTHING Else... FUNNELHACK!

Welcome to the Marketing Secrets Podcast. My name is Russell Brunson, and I'm what you call a serial entrepreneur, but with a twist. You see, 50% of my time, I'm the CEO of ClickFunnels, helping over 100,000 brands to grow their companies with funnels, and the other 50% of my time, I'm actually in the trenches using ClickFunnels to grow the startups I believe in. During this podcast, I'll take you behind the scenes and show you how we are bootstrapping ClickFunnels and my other businesses from startup to 9 figures and beyond. Welcome to the show. What's up everybody, this is Russell. Welcome back to Marketing Secrets Podcast. Hope you guys are having a great day, week, month, year, wherever you are at right now. I wanna jump in here because I wanna go back to the basics for a few minutes. And the reason why is because obviously the ClickFunnels team has grown. We have, I don't even know, 300, 400 employees, contractors, all kinda stuff, and anyway, and there's a million different things that we're doing, right? From building funnels, writing copy, driving traffic, doing customer support, doing like a million things, right? And it's interesting 'cause like obviously it's physically impossible for me to jump into every department and look at what everyone's doing and all that kind of stuff, but like whenever I do go into whatever section or department or thing, it's fascinating to me that like the same thing is the answer to almost every single problem. And the answer is funnel hacking. Which is funny 'cause most people think funnel hacking is just to build funnels, but I wanna talk about like the concept of what funnel hacking is. 'Cause I think this is what a lot of people are missing. And so I wanna give this to you because this will hopefully help shortcut everything in your life, okay? So what is funnel hacking? The concept came about because back in the day when I was trying to figure out how to do funnels and we're creating these things, like I would never sit down at a blank page and be like, what should I do on the first page? What should the second page be, right? Like what I would do is I'd go and I'd look for inspiration. In fact, I remember when we were building ClickFunnels, one night it was Todd, Dylan Jones, and me, we're in Boise working on something, and Todd was programming ClickFunnels, Dylan was designing the UI and the editor and that kind of stuff, and I was writing the copy. And it was, you know, man, it was probably 2 or 3 in the morning, we were working all night long, and so I was working on copy and for some sales letter VSL or something that we were doing, And I was like, literally I spent 4 or 5 hours, I was just looking at thousands, not thousands, hundreds of different video sales letters. I'm looking at them, I'm watching them, I'm listening to them, and it's interesting because I think that, you know, we were a small office, we were all sitting together, and probably 3 or 4 hours in, Dylan walked over to me and he's like, I've been like watching or hearing your process for the last couple hours, he's like, it's so fascinating 'cause your process is the same as my process. I'm like, what do you mean? You're designing code and UI and stuff like that. And he's like, you know, for me when I do UI, he's like, I don't just sit down and make up UI and it comes out the top of my head. He's like, I go to sites like dribbble.com and different places and he's like, I'll look at 1,000 people who've designed different UIs for this app or for that or for that and I look at them and then I go to different software, different things, I look at 1,000 things to create the ideas that I'm gonna have. I was like, that's just like me. I'm like, I don't just write a sales letter. Like, I sit there and I listen to 10,000 sales letters and I transcribe them and I outline them. Like, what was the structure? What was the this and the that? And then boom, boom, boom, and all the different things, right? And I take all that and then from there, then I go and I create my version, right? And what I think people think funnel hacking is, unfortunately, they look at one of my funnels, they look at it and they copy it. Like, that's not funnel hacking. Funnel hacking is like looking at all of the inspiration out there and looking at it closely and What do they say, someone said this once, like if you copy from one person it's plagiarism, if you copy from a lot of people it's creativity, or something, I don't know, some version of that, but that's the key is like looking at a whole bunch of stuff. So what funnel hacking is, is like, let's say I'm gonna go launch a book, what I don't do is I don't look at Russell's book funnel, copy it. What I do is I go try and find 50 book funnels, and I literally do this every time we launch a new funnel. First step, step number 1 is funnel hacking. We literally go and say, oh, we're doing a webinar funnel, we're doing this, even though I've done a million webinar funnels, We go down and we go and find all the webinar funnels that are active right now, all the ones we see people running ads to, all the ones that look like they're working. We make a Trello board, we throw them all in there, and we look at them all, and we look at the hooks and the angles and the colors and the layout, the design, the copy, like all the stuff. And from all that research, then we create ours, right? It's interesting, we've been hiring, you know, people help on our social media team, both on YouTube and Instagram and things like that, and they're doing a great job, but a lot of times they're coming in and they're trying to just think through and be creative, right? And like writing their own scripts, writing their own things. I'm like, ah, this is good. But like, step number 1, if I'm gonna do Instagram, if I'm gonna write, if I'm gonna do reels, like I'm gonna go look at 50, 100, 200 different people's reels, look at all of it, and then from there create something amazing. What most people are doing right now is they go and they see Hermosi, uh, who's killing it on Instagram, and they copy him, right? Everyone's just copying Hermosi, right? Or they go see someone else and they just copy it. It's like, yeah, like funnel hacking is so much more than that. It's looking at all the things. Same thing, like we were putting in ManyChat, like putting a new ManyChat thing and I think the default was people were like, okay, I'm gonna sit down, I'm gonna write a ManyChat sequence. And they wrote it and sent it to me, I'm like, this is good, but the way to make it great is like, how many people did you funnel? How many ManyChat follow-up sequences did you look at? Was it 10, 20, 50, 100? Like how many did you look at before you started writing the first one? Like that's what people are missing, right? Customer support, it's like, I don't know how to do this customer support thing. It's like, okay, well, You know, how many people did you look at? How many other, like, I don't know, like every department, every single thing, like that's the key, right? How do I become good at podcasts? How do I become good at videos? How do I become good at, like, any role? Like, the key is coming back and saying, is understanding like, to be successful, the first step is funnel hacking. It's the 8 hours of me looking at every book funnel known to man before I start my book funnel. That's where success comes from. It's the 8 to 10 hours of me looking at video scripts and copy and going through swipe files and reading headlines and looking at the highest converting ads. Before I write my first ad. That's the secret, right? That's what most people are missing. Most people look at one person, they copy it, or they just try to be creative off the top of their head, or whatever the thing might be, and they're missing the rest of it, right? And so that's what I wanted to just kind of bring back to you today, is just like this concept of funnel hacking. Before you do anything, before you write an ad, before an email, before you do anything, the first step is never to start writing or start designing or start coloring or start whatever your thing is, right? The first step is spend that first 8 hours And 8 hours may be like an over-exaggeration, but it might also be an under-exaggeration. It might be 2 or 3 days. Like right now, I've been working out on my Secrets to Success book literally for 4 years, I think I signed the contract with it. It's still not done. I keep writing it and rewriting it and tweaking it, and it just hasn't become good yet. And then last night, I was talking to Annie Grace and Aileen Wilder, and we're talking, we have a Voxer group where we talk about just nerdy stuff that gets us all excited. And we start talking about my book again and like I looked at like the way I wrote the DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets, and Traffic Secrets book were one very, was like there's a style how I wrote 'em. But I think I've been struggling with this new book 'cause I've been trying to write my new book in that style. And I was like, what are the books that sell the most? And we were talking about this and I had an idea. I was like, I bet if I structure it like this, like the books that I've heard of this, how they structured it. And then Eileen went out there and started funnel hacking. She pulled back like 50 of the bestselling books of all time. They all follow that structure. And Annie jumped on and she's like, Hey, did you notice how I did my book here? And she's like, notice how Rachel Hollis did it in Girl, Wash Your Face. Notice how Jordan Peterson did it here. And she was showing me the structure of the books in this one, that one, that one. And I was like, oh my gosh. And so I spent the last 24 hours funnel hacking how to structure the layout of my book, the content, the ideas, the stories. And from that process, Annie was able to plot 3 or 4 different frameworks I'd never heard of before. I literally took Girl, Wash Your Face and Girl, Stop Apologizing, Rachel Hollis's 2 books, Girl, Wash Your Face sold like 10 million copies, one of the best-selling books of all time. Like, what did she do to make it such a best-selling book? And so I put on Audible on 4x speed, and I had the book, and I put play, and I started speed reading. And I sped read the introduction and the first 3 or 4 chapters, and I did the same thing with her other book. And all of a sudden I was like, oh, I got it. That's what she did. That's how she structured it. Like, I missed it every single time. But now because I'm doing it back to back to back, I looked at Jordan Peterson's 2 books, same thing. I started looking at, I started funnel hacking all these different authors. And I realized that like, the way to make a best-selling book in this genre is different. And it was fascinating. And so, yeah, that's just kind of what I wanted to bring to you guys is just this concept of funnel hacking. That it's not just for building funnels, it's for everything in your business, in your life, in all the things, right? Find out who's successful. Find out the, you know, the 10, 20, 30, 50, as many people as you can find and spend 8 to 10 to 12 to 24 or 48 hours, whatever that is, ahead of time And then you go, you start writing, then you go and start structuring, right? I'm just like, one little thing I learned from Girl, Wash Your Face and Girl, Stop Apologizing, I just like, one little nugget was like, the structure of the entire book was based on one principle, one, or maybe one theory, like one theory. And the introduction like, like introduces that theory, hands it on a silver platter, and the rest of the book is trying to prove that one thing. And it's like, oh, that's so cool. That is so cool to see, to see that pattern. I would have missed because I'm just writing a book like everybody else, right? Looking for the patterns. That's what funnel hacking is about, looking for the patterns. And then also part of it's like looking for the patterns you can model, but then the other side I think is like looking outside of your, especially funnel hacking, like I'm looking outside of my specific market to find ideas, right? Like everyone in the internet marketing space has kind of copied my book funnel, so it's like, There's not a lot of new creativity, it's just like somebody ever copies it. I go to the health space, I go to some other spaces, and I start seeing what they're doing, and they're bringing unique things that aren't being done other places, and so I can take those ideas and innovate by moving them from one industry to another. Does that make sense? So anyway, funnel hacking 101, maybe this is funnel hacking 201, I don't even know, but it's there in every aspect of your business, everything you're doing. Train yourself, train your teams, train your people. I'm gonna do another training with my entire team, going a little deeper on this concept of funnel hacking and helping them to understand it. 'Cause I think now that we've grown to this many people, you know, there's people that, I don't know, when you first build a company, like, you know, every employee, every hire, and then eventually it gets to a point where like, you know, you don't know the people who hire the people who hire the people because it's grown so big and it's like, so I wanna come back and I'm gonna plan on, with our team next month, is going deep into this with everybody and getting everyone from every department thinking about what they do through this lens of funnel hacking. So I wanna share with you guys today, Hope this helps. Go out there, funnel hack whatever you're doing. Pause what you're doing if you're stuck with what you're doing right now, like pause, go out and funnel hack, which means again, find 10, 20, 30, 50 people who are already successfully doing what you're doing, look at it, get ideas, get inspiration from there, then step back into your work and you'll see the results of what you're creating dramatically magnified because you did the funnel hacking process prior to the execution of the thing you're creating. Hope that helps you guys, appreciate you all, and we'll talk to you all again next week. Bye, everybody.