My Plan To Build A $100M Per Year Business From Scratch

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 Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets Podcast, and oh, do I have a treat for you today. So, are you ever curious, like, what would Russell do if he was trying to build a new business to $100 million a year? What would be the step-by-step process? Well, good news is, is I've explained it 3 times in the last year. Once was at Pirate's Cove to my Category Kings and Atlas members who paid $250,000. Second time was in a deck-in day with my Inner Circle members. Who all paid $50,000 to be there, and the third time was at Funnel Hacking Live 9, I did it on stage, and the one I did at Funnel Hacking Live 9, basically we had about, it was about an hour long, and I'm not gonna give you that one, 'cause that one, you know, this podcast, my podcasts are typically 20, 30 minutes long, so, but the one I did at Deck in a Day, I kinda walked through the process, and I wanna give that to you, 'cause I think it'll help you guys to kinda see, like, what I'm doing, like why we do the linchpin, why it's so important, how we're using it to scale and grow our companies, and a whole bunch of other stuff. And so I'm gonna give you that version, but if you wanna see like the full-out, like long one from Funnel Hacking Live, there's only one way to do it, okay? We don't normally sell replays of Funnel Hacking Live and stuff like that, but coming up here in, man, a couple weeks, I'm doing a new event called Two Comma Club Live: Linchpin Edition. And the first time we did a Two Comma Club Live event was during the pandemic, and it was amazing. That, obviously, that presentation got shut down, that event got shut down when the pandemic was over, and so now we're doing a new one. It's called Two Comma Club Live: Linchpin Edition, and basically I'm taking all the core presentations from Funnel Hacking Live 9, as well as like a dozen other amazing presentations that were not at Funnel Hacking Live, and we're doing a 3-day virtual event. It's gonna be so much fun, and so if you wanna see the full long, full version of my 90-minute or 60-minute presentation teaching how I'm gonna go from $0 to $100 million, you can get the whole thing with the slides and everything there at the event. The coolest thing about this event is this is a, Some of you guys have seen me do events like this in the past and it's really cool because it's one of those things where the event is worth $300 easily, but I'm not gonna charge you guys for the event up front. In fact, all you gotta do is you gotta go to 2commaclublive.com and go sign up, put your credit card in, and then you have a chance to go through the entire event, and then when the event's over, if you like it, then you can pay. And if you don't like it, you don't have to pay anything. So it's kinda like a risk reversal 'cause I wanna make sure that you guys love it as much as I think you're gonna love it, but it gives you the chance to literally sit through 80% of Funnel Hacking Live, the last one, plus a bunch of new presentations that weren't at Funnel Hacking Live, and it's awesome. And so basically the options are, you sign up right now, you put your credit card in, $0 now, and then when the event's over, if you like it, you pay $197, $197. So you could literally go and just sign up, go through the event, and then cancel, and then you don't pay anything at all. Or you can, again, after the event's over, if you like it, you pay basically $200. Or there's also a prepay option where you save $50, for $150 you prepay and you get the whole thing and you get the replays for about a couple weeks. So anyway. It's worth going to, we got almost 1,000 people already registered for it, it's gonna be a really fun virtual event that I'm gonna be hosting. It's not just watching random videos, like I'm literally gonna be from Boise headquarters streaming live. The dates are February 7th through 9th. So yeah, I would go recommend, go get your ticket, twocommaclublive.com, T-W-O-C-O-M-M-A-C-L-U-B-L-I-V-E.com, twocommaclublive, all spelled out. This is a one-time virtual event, it's gonna be so much fun. So if you wanna understand linchpin even deeper, please come to that. With that said, you have a chance to listen to this presentation, about a 20-minute presentation of me showing how I'm using the linchpin to grow Secrets of Success, and I hope you love it, and I hope you come hang out with us to go really, really deep in the linchpin over at twocommaclublive.com. Thanks so much, and I hope you enjoy this presentation. So at the end of the Atlas Group, we had like a 2-hour window before it ended, and everyone's like, I'm like, well, we're out of stuff to do. What do you guys wanna talk about? And they're like, tell us how you're gonna launch Six Figures. And Eileen was interesting. Eileen's like, I think it's impossible to do a $100 million a year business that's not a software company. I was like, oh, that's a huge false belief. It's totally possible. And so they're like, well, show us how you're gonna do Secrets to Success. I'm like, okay, that'd be easy. So this is my model, my plan. And I think my goal is to get $100 million within 24 months. MRR, right? Or, yeah, ARR. So $100 million a year annual recurring revenue is the goal with it. So that was kind of the thought exercise. And we're trying to reverse engineer the math and numbers. I don't have it in front of me, so maybe you'll remember it better than I can. But, so, alright, should we do it? That sound like fun? You guys want to see Lynchpin at $100 million in 24 months. I don't know what you guys want. I saw it. Okay, so step number 1 then is like, what are we actually selling? And unfortunately for most of us, me specifically, is I always start with like, what's the funnel gonna be? But With this, I was like, we need to make sure the product's really, really good. Like, what's that actually gonna look like? And so, and we've, and Justin's been closing these deals like crazy. We got Napoleon Hill Foundation, we got Nightingale Conan, like we got, it's exciting. And so, first thing is like the actual membership site, right? So here's what it looks like, Secrets of Success, da da da. You guys know I love my side menus where we got different tiers. So right now we're leading with with 2 tiers of continuity, and eventually we'll be opening up a 3rd. A couple things is like, the power of software continuity is software is sticky, right? Somebody signs up and they're less likely to leave. The problem with info product continuity is like, when someone has info products, if you cancel, you, you know, it's not, there's no pain of disconnect there. That was always the biggest problem with Dan Kennedy's newsletter, was just like, there's no pain of disconnect. So I'm like, how do we create pain of disconnect inside of a continuity program? And there's a couple ways I've seen that work really well. One, which goes against my selling model, so I'm not using it, but it's like, the front end is like, you charge $500 to get into the program, then it's $97 a month, and that keeps people in, 'cause if they cancel, they gotta pay $500 to get back in, you know what I mean? But that goes against the MIFKI thing, so I don't, we're not doing that, but that's one way that I'm like, that keeps people sticking longer, because if they cancel, they gotta pay $500 to get back in, so there's like that pain of like, if I just can't come back in, it's gonna cost a lot, right? The second one is, when we're thinking through this, is like, is Audible's model, and Audible sells credits, right? So you have credits to unlock audiobooks, but if you cancel, well, in my world, it'll go away. So what'll happen is, when someone joins Secrets of Success, there's kind of two pieces here. Sorry, I wasn't prepared for this, so I'm gonna jump around a little bit. We'll edit it and put it in chronological order later. So if you follow Stu McLaren's methodology with membership sites, the most important thing you can possibly have is a success path, right? One of the mistakes that I make, that people make, is like you have a membership site, it's like, here's a billion things, you have access to everything, right? It's like paying for a library card. No one pays for a library card because you walk in and everything's there, right? So Stu's like, most powerful thing in a membership site is a success path. So first thing is you come to Secret Success and there will be a success path that takes you through these trainings that you go through, and so on and so forth. So a success path. Our plan with these trainings are to be Facilitated trainings, which, how many of you guys saw the two Linchpin events we've done so far? We're taking Garrett White's facilitated model and doing it live in two Common Club X coaching programs, and it's working insanely well. This is not gonna be done in 9 minutes. Anyway, so, we'll put a thumb in that. It's awesome. So we're gonna be doing that, right? Is these will be facilitated trainings. So someone will come in there, it's like join, like first training, get in there, they jump on, it's a 1-day event, teaching people like the core things, and they'll graduate from that one, and it'll take them to the next step, Takes them through the success path, which hopefully will take them 3, 4, 5 months to get through the whole thing, but it's the thing that's moving them through the process, right? And the goal is like getting them engaged, moving through a process while you get them to stick with the community. People join continuity for a hook, they stick for the community, right? So that's the first part, is this is the training cycle to get them connected, now we gotta get them connected to the community. And so the other piece, and because I like, me personally I like having lots of stuff, The second piece of this is gonna be a library. So when you log in, it'll appear, it'll be like home, and there's a tab that says library, and then there'll be a couple other things. So you'll see the library tab, you click on it, and it pops you over to a page. And on that page, have you seen these pages yet? I'm learning. I'll have to show you tonight, they're beautiful. Anyway, I have all my favorite authors, like Napoleon Hill, Orson Swinburne, and like all my favorite authors are here. Elise Lincoln Benedict. Anyway, all the authors we have, and then underneath there's like, oh, we have 3 Napoleon Hill courses, we got 2 from Orson Swinburne, 'Cause we have all the courses, right? And so what happens when you join the membership, each month you get 2 credits, like Audible credits, right? So it's like, you have 2 credits, go pick which courses you want. It's like, oh, I wanna go to Napoleon Hill, I wanna go listen to Maxwell Maltz. And what's cool is like, some of the stuff right now, Jenny's got a team where we're taking all these old books I've been buying, we're scanning them, and we got a team doing audiobooks of them. So you can like, these books that are unpublished or unfindable, you'll be able to log in, like get the PDF and the audiobook and listen to them. Or, a bunch of Napoleon Hill stuff, Justin closed the deal on Napoleon Hill Foundation, so they're sending us all Napoleon Hill's unpublished works, and those are going in here. All the books are available as audiobook and PDFs, so you can read and listen to those. You come here, it's just like a library of like, what do I wanna learn this month? And so you'll have 2 credits. So that gives you the ability to like, have really cool things. And what happens is you're unlocking books, but if you cancel your membership, they all disappear. And so if you wanna come back later, it's like, oh, I lost all my books. I don't wanna lose the pain and disconnect, right? Now there's pain and disconnect 'cause you're building your library, you don't wanna lose these things. And the second thing is community, how do we do community? So what's gonna happen is each month, collectively as a community, we're gonna pick one thing to go through.. If you get 2 credits each month, one, you go get like whatever one you wanna learn, but like, hey, we're all going through Brainology with Elson Lincoln Benedict this month, so buy your second credit of that one. So everyone gets the same credit, and then we have a whole book club. We come in here, and it's like we're reading the book, then we're talking about, we're doing live trainings, we're like just geeking out, and like building this community of people geeking out on a book and a topic and just having fun. So that's how, while they're going through Success Path, we build community, connection, stick, and then building something where if they lose, there's pain and disconnect. So that was the first goal, was like trying to create that site, so it's just like amazing. And so this is like mostly done right now. All Nightgale code and stuff we're getting in here. Anyway, and it'll be a growing library because we still have tons of stuff coming from them. Anyway, so there's step one is just making a really good continuity program. Okay. So that's step number one. Step number two then, we need a really, really good MIFKI. Wait till you hear about this MIFKI. That's awesome. And I don't think it— Jenny's gone, huh? We probably don't have it in here. I'll go find it. Do we, you know where it's at? Okay. So the MIFT key is like a couple things, like obviously it's like an irresistible offer that's, that you gotta have, right? And so the first thing we did is the most famous personal development book in the world is Think and Grow Rich by, what's his name again? Napoleon Hill, the man. And so we did a deal with the Napoleon Hill Foundation where they let me make my own version. So I wrote the foreword for it, I designed the COVID and the wrapper, so it's like the Russell Brunson version of Think and Grow Rich. So we get that as part of the MIFT key, so we got Think and Grow Rich. And then I'm like, well, you can buy Think and Grow Rich anywhere though, so it's kind of cool. But like, how do we make it so it's irresistible? And so there's two other Napoleon Hill things that are unpublished, nobody has access to them. One's called It'll Place You Wherever You Wish to Be Amongst Men. This is the miffkey that Napoleon Hill used for the Napoleon Hill Magazine way back in 1919. He was— back in 1919, you could buy this book from him for $50, or you get it for free when you subscribe to his magazine. And $50 back in 1919 is about $3,000 today. So he was using the same stuff where you're like, this is this book, it's $3,000, or you get it for free if you join my continuity program. Like, I'm just copying Napoleon Hill. Anyway, so that was his— so that book is— we republished that one. Lessons in Applied Psychology subtitle. And then the third one is Don Greene. He's every month— he's the guy that runs the Napoleon Hill Foundation. Ever since Justin closed the deal, every month— actually, every week I get a box from him in the mail with just random stuff. Napoleon Hill pictures and books and records and we got old movie tapes and anyway, one of them came this like, this like unpublished manuscript he wrote called The Secrets of Master Salesmanship, which he titled it Secrets, like come on. I love this guy. But it's like, it's like how to sell through, anyway, so like we got the rights and we published that. So this is the MFTI that you get this, so 2 books you can't get anywhere else on the planet and then Think and Grow Rich, which is the most popular. That is the MFTI with a bunch of other digital stuff, but That's phase number 2, so it's the Mifkey that gets people into that, right? So they'll pay free plus shipping, they get a 14-day trial of Continuity, and that's kind of the first thing. So, the pla— okay, so that's kind of the game plan right now. Mifkey, this should be done post-Funnel Hacking Live in like 2 weeks. Within 14 days of Funnel Hacking Live, Stephanie and I are racing, we're both gonna be launching something, but this will be our initial Mifkey launch that we're promoting it to. So we'll promote it, Justin's lining up the Dream 100, Trying to get as many people as possible. We're not doing like a set, like this launch is June 13th. We're trying to do like kind of a rolling launch where everyone's promoting it as soon as they can. We are building out a 2-tier affiliate program. So the goal is, I think first tier is 35%, the second tier will be 10%. So as soon as somebody promotes this thing, boom, and they get a whole bunch of people coming in, and we'll be like, who of your friends would also want this? And then introduce us, you get 10%, and we set it up. And so we'll create a whole affiliate army all promoting this like crazy., and that's kind of the goal right there. 2 minutes left. Okay, we're only through step number 2 of the thing, but that's kind of the game plan is we're all promoting here. We have an email newsletter, ours is actually gonna be a daily email newsletter that's happening to all the leads coming through, all talking about stuff inside the membership site, and there also, there will be, there's a $97 a month level and eventually we'll have a $297 a month level. Based on the math that we know, typically what happens is about, let's say you get 100 people to sign up for the $97, you get about 10% of people to upgrade there. So based on math, it was like, I think it's like 30 or 40,000 members between this and this, and then the continuity in the back end was like 2% buying the high-end Future Self coaching. I think it was 30,000 active members gets us to $100 million a year, if I remember right. 'Cause 30,000 active members at $97 a month gives us, 3,000-ish at $297 a month and gives us whatever 2% of that at $25K a year. Ends up being about $50, or sorry, about $100 million a year of ARR. Okay, so then, Mifki launch happens, it's all going well, traffic's coming in, and then the next phase in this thing called the linchpin, in my last 1 minute 4 seconds, Is then, we can, then we come through and then we're gonna start doing challenges. So we have right from the foundation Think and Grow Rich Challenge. I'm the only person in the world that can do that, so we're gonna do Think and Grow Rich Challenge, everyone will register, so all these affiliates who have been promoting the Mifki will then come back and we're like, hey guys, you're making a ton of money off this thing right now, we're doing Think and Grow Rich Challenge, you should all promote it. So then everyone promotes Think and Grow Rich Challenge, which then pushes people to the thank you page Mifki, and we get a whole bunch of people from there, and then from there, Here we sell the $297 level at higher, which gets this, you know, this is where we get the 10% of people getting the higher level. That's the Growth Challenge. That'll be month number 1. Then month number 2, we do the Mental Dynamite Challenge, or the Science of Success Challenge, or the, anyway, we just keep rotating through different challenges based on book titles from Napoleon Hill. And eventually, it could be other ones. We could do Maxwell Maltz, we could do Earl Nightingale, we could do, but it's just pulling in people that are awesome and doing a challenge based on their thing and pushing people in and then we just keep doing that forever. And then eventually we do a big huge round peg square holes virtual event that's just amazing, people come and we, my vision, what I wanna do long term is having Funnel Hacking Live and then 6 months later I do a Secret to Success event and those are my 2 events I do each year. Boom boom, back and forth. This one comes, it's all personal development, and at the end of it we sell people on the Future Self coaching. And boom, $100 million a year in 24 months. With 18 seconds to go. No, I'm 18 seconds over. What do you guys think, huh? Yeah! It's cool to see it happen before it happens, like, you know, calling your shot. Babe Ruth. But the key's obviously, it's like, this is the number, right? This metric is how many people are monthly. Was it 30,000 or was it 50,000 based on numbers? Do you remember what I shared in the thing? For what? To get to $100 million a year. 'Cause basically it was this number, 10% or $297 a month, and like 2.5%— 50,000. It was $50,000, because 50,000 members. 100,000 is the goal and 50,000 is the failure. Oh yeah, yeah. $50,000— if 50,000 members, we fail, and we can do $100 million a year. That's right, that's what it was. But it's very formulaic, very— like, when you look at the linchpin as a whole, it's very formulaic, systematic. Just like, really good continuity is sticky. MIFTI gets people in, drive a bunch of leads there, and then start doing dramatic demonstrations to fill it up. Dramatic demonstrations. And so, we just keep doing this. And then having a really good— one of my big things I talk about, category kings and Atlas Group, is like, we have to get better at creating better offers for our affiliates. It's like, we gotta make really good offers for affiliates where they will wanna promote, 'cause then it's not just us driving traffic, we got a whole army of people driving traffic as well. And that's kinda the game plan. Is the coaching continuity too, or is it like a high ticket? It'd be a high ticket, yeah. $10,000, $25,000 a year? $25,000 a year, so it's continuity, $25,000 a year, or whatever, $20,000 a year, whatever the thing is, but yeah. Yeah. When you targeted the $100K, $1.4 million? Is it just based on the $97, $297, or is that factored in? Factored in the coaching, yeah. It's basically figuring out of the members who we have here, 10% are here, I think it was 2 or 2.5% that signed up for high-end coaching. Okay, that's the stats. That was the 3 things, yeah. So this is what the box— this is not the end version, this box actually was the really crazy one, but there's the Think and Grow Rich with the foreword by Russell Brunson. How many of you guys want this? Just go to secretsosuccess.com slash, just kidding. So that's the Think and Grow Rich book. And this is like, we found a really cool artist from I think Belarus or something who did this thing. And I've had him do a design of this for every one of these authors that I'm republishing. So if you go to secretsosuccess.com and click on the authors tab, you'll see all the ones he's done. There's like 20 or something he's done. But we're getting like every, all my people done in this design. Then we can do tons of books with like, Like this is like the— our brand of each of the authors' faces and stuff, which is— I think that design just— If you have time at the end too, he read the foreword at Atlas and it's pretty cool to hear him read his foreword on TV. Oh, duh. Can I do one more thing? Sorry. Is it okay if I overdeliver? You guys okay with that? Yeah. Okay. There's— I have a thing. I think this is like the future of continuity funnels. This came out of like a whole bunch of brainstorming. It's like so simple when you think about it later, you're like, oh, of course, this is like the easiest thing in the world. But I think this is like, this is gonna, the way we structure the Mifki funnel I think is the key to a big part of this. So if you look at, okay, so there's Mifki funnel, and you guys know it's free plus shipping. Obviously we'll have some kind of order form bump. In the past when I've done continuity offers, a lot of times I'll have like, let's say it's $97 a month or $997 a year, right? And so, we're doing bi-yearly, and what typically happens, the breakdown, it's usually like 90/10, so 10% of people will pay upfront, which is great, right, helps cover ad costs and stuff like that, but I was like, the thought was like, what if instead of doing that, what if, so we only offer the trial here, right, and then if our goal is to get people yearly, how do we make that a better irresistible offer, 'cause right now it's just like, here's a continuity program, or get 2 months for free when you whatever, right, so I'm like, What if we made this offer really, really good? And so what we do instead, I don't think it's in here. Yeah, it's not in here. There's another unpublished book I got from Napoleon Hill called The Hand of Destiny. And the guy that I bought the manuscript from, he used to charge people $10,000 a day to come to his house and to read the manuscript. He sold me the manuscript for, well, initially, my initial quote was he wanted $10,000 per page of this manuscript. I negotiated down. I literally paid $5,000 per page of this manuscript. So that was the cost that I paid for this book. And so we took that entire manuscript and— do we have one here? The Hand of Destiny one? Oh, there's one in my office right under the TV. So the way we designed it— oh, sorry. The way we designed it, basically when you open the book, you'll see the left-hand side is the actual scanned copy of Napoleon Hill. It's cool because it's his notes and editing. There are pages, or like headlines he didn't like, so we'd type it on the typewriter and cut it, and then like literally glue it on top of it. It's like, it's just cool to like read through and see it. So the book, you open up the left-hand side, you see the actual manuscript of his edits, his everything. And the right-hand side, our team edited based on Napoleon Hill's edits, did it. So you can see like the original, the other one. So you can read it as you flip through, you see left-hand side, right-hand side, it's the entire book. And then we printed it in old paper, and we did it where we didn't, so back in the day, the way they would print stuff, they would print it, and they'd fold it all up, and then they would like cut the pages. But a lot of times you buy books, a lot of the old books I buy now, the pages were never cut. So you'd literally have to like rip each page apart. And so we printed this to be that way, where like the pages are like, you have to like break each page. It's really, it's just like a cool old experience. And so my plan was to sell the book for $1,000. That was the whole plan. And I was like, wait, what if that book was free if you upgraded and paid $997 for the year? I bet you, I don't know yet, like 10% of people would buy in funnel, I bet we get 30% of people to prepay with that. If we do that, the metrics are insane. We can spend, our ability to spend is off the wall. So that's what's happening in the funnel. If this works, half of what I think I do, we're gonna rebuild all the ClickFunnels things, same thing like, how to make an irresistible offer, get people to prepay for a year. And have it right there in funnel while they're most excited, most likely to buy and stick, you know? Here's the other books. Here's the Secrets of Master Salesmanship. Here's It'll Place You Wherever You Wish to Be Amongst Men, both unpublished Napoleon Hill books. So that's basically, that's the core part of the Mifkis. They'll be getting that stuff right there. Anyway. Who wants one? Who wants that? Yeah! Pre-sign up right now! Anything else there? I think that's it, yeah. We did it. It took us 20 minutes. That was close though. That was awesome. Yeah. Alright guys, I hope you guys enjoyed that. Hopefully you got the wheels in your head spinning. If you really want to go deep in this linchpin, again, you've heard me say it over and over and over again. The linchpin is the way. This is the secret. This is the future. This is what we're doing. It's the only way we're still growing and scaling in today's crazy marketplace with the cost of ads. Is by implementing linchpin, and it's something you should be part of. So 2 Comma Club Live Linchpin Edition is happening February 7th, 8th, and 9th, streaming directly into your home. It's a really cool reverse offer, it's called an invisible funnel basically, so those who have read my books, you know what an invisible funnel is, but you put your credit card in, you attend the event, and then if you like the event, after it's over you pay $200, if you don't like it, you let me know and you get billed nothing. So that's the game plan, come hang out with us, 2 Comma Club Live Linchpin Edition, we're gonna go deep into everything about the linchpin step by step, And I think you're gonna love it. So that's all I got. Thank you guys so much. I appreciate you, and we'll talk to you soon. Bye, everybody.