Offer Lab: Why Collaboration Beats Competition in Online Business | #Sales - Ep. 67

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This is The Russell Brunson Show.

What's up everyone, welcome back. Last episode I shared with you guys the first pre-launch video from a new platform we are launching called OfferLab. I've had people say this is gonna be bigger than ClickFunnels, I've had people say all sorts of crazy stuff. Video number 2 in the pre-launch was kind of a demo, so I can't really show you that one 'cause you're listening and it would just be weird. But video number 3 is one that's kind of special. Actually, we had a whole video scripted I was gonna do and I got to go actually start filming it, I realized that like it was the wrong message. And so I told the guys, I'm like, just, just roll the cameras. We'll see what happens. And I sat there and talked for 30 minutes or so. And by the time I was done, like I was in tears. The guys in the room with me were in tears and it was, it was really powerful. And so I want you to hear this, this message. Again, hopefully you have a chance to watch this as well. It's visually beautiful too. You can see like actual footage from when we had the idea and all sorts of stuff. So anyway, but regardless, I want you to listen to this because I think it'll give you guys a glimpse behind the scenes where my brain is, what's happening, why it's important. And what I'm trying to do with the industry, what makes me sad about it today and what makes me happy about the future and the direction we're going. So I hope you guys enjoy it. Afterwards, make sure you go to offerlablaunch.com to go register. When you do that, it'll register for the event coming up this week, and then also it'll give you a free OfferLab account and a whole bunch of other really cool things. So go to offerlablaunch.com. Anyway, again, this is kind of a more personal episode. I think you'll like it. Hopefully you'll like it. Hopefully you'll feel something, and I cannot wait to continue to serve you guys. Thanks so much for everything, and Here we go, OfferLab launch video number 3.

Good morning. I couldn't fall asleep last night, so.

Same. Same?

Same. Yeah, wasn't this maybe we should've hung out.

I tried to be quiet, I tried to turn the TV on, I tried to watch Friends and Office and more Friends.

I was like, what's wrong with my brain? We flew to Atlanta to hang out with Todd. We have like, a whole bunch of really big decisions to make. Almost 3 years ago, last time I was here with Dave, we spent a week at Todd's lake house and we made a big decision to build ClickFunnels 2.0.

This is like, I feel like, one of those trips.

What's the plan?

Where are we going?

What's the future? 'Cause there's so many different directions we can go.

Do we double down?

Do we not? Do we change the model? I feel like really important decisions are being made. What's up guys? Welcome to video number 3. Typically in a product launch like this, all the videos are scripted out trying to do very certain, very important things. And we had a script for this video, and now that we're here, the script didn't feel right. And so I just wanted to talk to you guys about, honestly, why. Why did we create OfferLab? Why is this here? Why is this actually important? And I wanna tell you guys a story that's, probably a little vulnerable, probably stuff I don't typically talk about externally, but will help you guys understand why I'm so passionate about this and why we're putting so much time and energy and effort into OfferLab. The idea originally for OfferLab started about a year ago. I'd flown out to Atlanta where my business partner Todd Dickerson lives, and we were there trying to figure out like what's next for ClickFunnels. 10 years ago we launched the platform, and it's interesting, like when you look back 10 years ago. Most of you guys weren't there. You showed up at different times. Maybe you're brand new. Maybe you came 3 years ago. Maybe 5 years ago. You came different times, but like, it was different. Like, I go back in time actually to when I got started. Like, literally, I got started, if you know my story, back when I was in college. I had just met my wife. I was trying to figure out how to support her, how to pay the bills, and I started learning how to sell stuff on the internet. It was the most exciting thing. I remember every day waking up and it was just like, like I was treasure hunting. I was going out there trying to figure out what do I sell, how do I sell it. And so what I did is instead of, you know, trying to have a product and trying to force it upon people, I went out there and I found out exactly what people were searching for, and if there were a lot of people searching for it, I would create a product and sell it to them. That makes a lot of sense. I was learning about offers and about autoresponders and emails and how to drive traffic, and like, it was— every day was like Christmas, right? I was learning, and for me, it was like probably the biggest phase of growth in my life up to that point. And over time, as I learned more and more, got harder to find new things and harder to discover more. And like, I got to a spot when I was probably 27, 28 years old where I was just like, stuck again. I was just like, I was having success, I was making some money, but like I didn't— I just felt stuck, right? I was not in momentum. I didn't know what to do. And about that time is when the ClickFunnels story started, right? It's when I met Todd Dickerson and Dylan Jones. We started building this platform, ClickFunnels. With ClickFunnels launching, then I wrote my book DotCom Secrets. Then we started teaching people and doing seminars and events. We started Funnel Hacking Live where I started sharing all these ideas with people. I saw it in their eyes and the first time they got it, and they lit up and it was just like so exciting. And that was our business, that was my life for the last decade, right? ClickFunnels was software that allowed people to move quicker, software that allowed people to have success. And then the training, the education was where we gave people the ahas and gave them the ability to actually take these things they were learning and doing it with the software, it created so many success stories. I still remember the very first time we launched the Two Comma Club Award. The very first event, 79 people got it. And the next event was like 230, then 500, and like we started seeing people have success, and it was just, like it was the greatest. We built this community. We all had a name. We called ourselves Funnel Hackers. Like we were a movement, we were a people. You saw people all around the world becoming this thing. I get people messaging me, sending me pictures from everywhere in the world. Like, I was in Bali and I saw someone driving on a motorcycle with a Funnel Hacker shirt. I was over here working out in, a gym in some other place and people I knew were all sending me pictures and like we created this global movement of people and it was the most exciting thing in the world. And then over the last couple years it's shifted, right? You know, for a long time we were the only ones doing this. We were teaching, we were educating, but over time more people started learning, having success, and more people started teaching, which was great. I was like, this is so fun. Like it's not just me talking about it, there's tons of other people talking about funnels and everyone's bringing their own ideas and their own innovations and things are getting more and more exciting. My favorite things at Funnel Hacking Live is to find people, we bring them to speak, someone who like came into our world, they read a book, they learn a principle, then they would take it, they would take that one little piece, they would go super deep, and they build a whole coaching program and movement around their version of my stuff, or a version of like what they were doing inside ClickFunnels. It was like, it was the best. It made me so happy. But then over time, again, with the success we were having, people saw that and they started started copying us. They started, you know, software started popping up that was very similar to ours. People started competing against us, which is fine. That's what happens in any market, right? I love competition. I love those kind of things. But it went from like us and maybe 3 or 4 people who were doing this and talking about this to eventually, as you guys know, one of our competitors sold the white label. And instantly, overnight, we went from having 4 or 5 competitors to 100, and then 500, and then 1,000, and then 2,000, and then 3,000. And suddenly there were so many people all with similar platforms to what we have, okay? And for me, what was hard was not so much that, like, I love the competition. What's hardest for me is that so many people who we had trained, people who came on stage who got a Two Comma Club Award with tears in their eyes telling me how it changed their life, were the same ones who, you know, 6 months later were on their ads holding their Two Comma Cup, were pitching their white label version of ClickFunnels. And it like broke my heart to spot where I honestly was like, I don't even want to I don't wanna serve this audience anymore because when I do, they come in and then they take some information and then they leave. And it was really frustrating. So when I go to, a year ago, I fly out to Atlanta to spend time with Todd and with our team and figure out what's next for ClickFunnels. I was in a pretty dark spot where I didn't know, I don't know what it is. And while we're sitting there, that was the conversation, was just like, what do we do? Do we add more features? Do we try to do this? What's the biggest thing? Right now it's an arms race where everyone's trying to add more features and lower costs, and it was just like, this isn't the right answer. This is what everyone's trying to do, is just trying to make a better mousetrap. So what we teach in all of our marketing, like, don't make a better mousetrap. Like, what is the new opportunity? What's something that's gonna change the marketplace once again? What's something where the funnel hackers will rise up again and say, look, I wanna be part of this, this movement, this thing? And so a year ago, as we're sitting in Atlanta talking, the whole conversations began with like, how to make ClickFunnels better, faster, stronger, more features, more da da da, and like, And then one late night, as we're sitting there, like, what if we're looking at this wrong? Right now we're all competing against each other, everyone's fighting, it's just like this chaos. Like the marketplace that we had built up that everyone was together, working together, had literally become segmented. Where now everybody's competing against each other with very similar offers, very similar software, very similar everything, and it was just like, this is getting worse, this isn't fun anymore.

Right?

And it made me, honestly, it made me kind of shell up. A lot of people messaged me like, Russell, I haven't heard from you in a while, what's happening? Are you still with ClickFunnels? Are you still part of— what's even happening? And that night in Atlanta, as Todd and I were talking and brainstorming, we had an idea. And at first it started like, this could be a really cool feature inside of ClickFunnels. But as we kept talking about development, if it's inside of ClickFunnels, it's just a feature, everyone else will clone it and then it's just another thing. I was like, if we wanna create something special, it's gotta be something that doesn't further divide everybody. What's something we could create that would bring everyone back together? That was the thought. And we sat down and we started mapping out what would that look like. What if we had this— what if we had a centralized spot that everybody in the marketplace, everyone who had ever bought Funnel Hacker in the past, could all come back and come back into this marketplace and we could all put our offers. I don't care if you sell on GoHighLevel or on Shopify or on Patreon or wherever you're selling yourself, it doesn't even matter, right? But everybody could come together and everyone plugs their offers in. It wasn't something that was divisive where now we're trying to pull people from our software to yours or whatever. Everyone still uses whatever platform they want. It doesn't even matter to me anymore. I was like, what if we did that, we put together a spot, and instead of having it where we're all competing against each other, where we can all start working together? I don't know about your business, but my business has changed in the last 12 months, 2 years, 3 years. Like, when I got, when we launched ClickFunnels initially, it's back when Mark Zuckerberg was a good guy, right? When he was fun to work with. Like, you put up, you spend $100 in ads, you make $500. It's like, this is insane, and everyone's having success. It was so fun, it was so easy. But, you know, as tech do, they start understanding their value, they start increasing things, they start putting tracking pixels so they can help you find better audiences, but also so they know exactly what you're spending and exactly what you're making. And from that they can reverse engineer and figure out how to charge you just enough, you got enough money to keep on going, but nothing more. Right? And for me, and for most of the people I know, our margins shrunk and they shrunk and they shrunk. And because we're in these different silos, everyone's all over the place, like we're all suffering together. Right, but no one's talking about it. Right? You can admit it, I'm admitting it. It's hard. Our margins went from 50% to 40% to 30% to 20% to 10%. Now we're negative up front. Like our $10,000 offer's now the front end just to cover the ad costs and we have to create something new just to make money. Like it's insane. 'Cause Mark Zuckerberg, 'cause Facebook, 'cause Google, all the ad costs have gone up so high. And so what normally happens? For a lot of you guys, a lot of my friends, a lot of people I love and care about, Their businesses have completely collapsed, right? They're no longer successful anymore, right? They have their audience and they're doing little things, but they had to fire their employees, their teams, their staff, everything shrunk, right? Because the ad costs have gotten so high. But because we're all in these silos, we're all competing against each other, no one talks about it. What happens now, right? The whole mission we started 10 years ago, right, was to free entrepreneurs so they could change the lives of the customers they've been called to serve. Now entrepreneurs are in bondage again. They can't get free, right? They're tied to ad costs. Technical stuff we figured out, but the ads, they're stuck, right? They're alone. You always say entrepreneurship is the loneliest job in the world, right? And when we built the Funnel Hacker ClickFunnels movement, right, we changed, we brought everybody together into a spot and no longer was it lonely, right? People were doing hackathons all over the country, all over the world. These things were happening, people were talking about it, it was like the most exciting time ever. Like it was no longer weird to be an entrepreneur, it was no longer solo, like you had the chance to be around other people who think like you, who believe like you, who dream like you. Now it's different, 'cause I'm like, "Oh, I can't talk to them 'cause they're competing." We had the same thing, like, "Their offer's mine, like, my customer—" Everyone's like hoarding their customers. It's like, why are we doing that? And it's lonely again. I felt lonely. So Todd and I are sitting there a year ago, it's like, how do we create something that would actually bring people together? We create a platform that everybody could bring their offers into. And that way, we can still sell stuff on our own, right? You can still sell in whatever pla— I can sell in ClickFunnels, you can sell in— whatever you want to sell, right? But at the same time, we can take those offers, plug them into one spot where now we can start working together. And so we started thinking about, okay, that's the concept. How does it work technically? Is it possible? Is it not? And we started working on the tech and the development. And at first it was not possible. The concepts are there, but like, we can't— the technical limitations, it's impossible to actually execute on what we're trying to do. Because the question is like, how do we create a funnel where I put my product in the front end, I take someone else's product as upsell 1, someone else's product upsell 2, where it could all be in one streamlined funnel? And the money gets split instantly so that you're not waiting for people to pay you and all the other chaos that comes with traditional affiliate marketing. We're trying to figure out how to do that. Eventually we had a chance to actually message our reps at Stripe. And we've been lucky 'cause we've got such a good relationship with Stripe. The ClickFunnels platform has processed over $12 billion in Stripe sales. So we called them and we said, this is what we're trying to do. And they're like, that's not possible. I know it's not possible, but is there some way to make this work? And we went back and forth and back and forth with them, and luckily they put tons of time and energy and money into creating the platform so we could do this. So because we're the only ones that can do this, right, we're the only ones that actually have the technical capabilities to do this today. That's what's so powerful and why it's so important. So what that means for you is that you can come and you don't have to always rely on all these other things. You can leave your silo and come back together as a community once again. We can work with each other, we can serve each other, we can all grow together. That's the story behind OfferLab. That's why we created it. That's why we're so excited. And so the reason why, um, I didn't want to give you guys the video script we had written before. I want you to understand the reason, okay? A year ago, I was, I was done. I was tired. I was tired of the industry. I was tired of the separation. You know, I spent the last years gathering a community where we were all happy together, we were all building together, all growing together, and I felt like that community slipped through my fingers. Everything falling apart. And I looked at it, I realized it was my fault. Right? I was one of those being the most divisive. I was saying you have to go my way or no way. Because of that, people chose different directions. And some people stuck over here and some people left and it became the worst thing. I remember seeing a post one day, literally made me cry. Someone said, "Still a funnel hacker, just using a different tool." And I was like so broken, like, like, but the reality is if I looked at it correctly, it's like, no, it doesn't matter what tool they're using. Like, we are a community. How do I How do I create something where we can all work together? And from that is where OfferLab came. And so if you are a funnel hacker and using any tool, doesn't matter, now we can all do it here in one spot. We can plug in together and we can start working together, right? Instead of giving most of our profits to Mark Zuckerberg, we can give our profits to our friends. How much of a better way is that? It's a better way to live, it's a better way to have business, more fun, and something that's more sustainable. As we were putting together OfferLab, I, somebody had showed me a picture of the Two Comma Club Award, and they were very proud. They'd won one through ClickFunnels. They were so proud, and I remember in there in the comments, some people were talking bad about it, and I was like, why are they talking bad about it? I realized it's because they were building on a different platform. They didn't have the opportunity to win one of these awards, right, because they couldn't. So instead of like celebrating this person, celebrating a friend that they have who actually won one, they're talking trash because they don't have the ability to win one because they're using a different platform. I was like, man, if we shifted this, like how do we shift this around? I wanted to create this where now if anybody's publishing on OfferLab, you can win a 2 Comma Club Award. So you can be selling on any platform, it doesn't matter, as long as you're going through OfferLab, you're doing it through collaboration, you can also win a 2 Comma Club Award, you can also be part of this movement, okay? The Funnel Hacker, the identity, the community is encompassing of everybody who's using whatever platform, it doesn't matter. And OfferLab is how we actually work together. And that's why I'm so excited. What we've created is really unique, it's very special. And if you adopt it and play with it, it's going to change the way you do business. It's not only, I believe, going to make you more money, it's not only going to make it so that you don't spend as much money on traffic, but you're going to make some of the greatest relationships in the world, some of the greatest partnerships. Like, when you look at that, it just changes the landscape literally overnight. It goes from all of us being silos to all of us being together once, once again. And so this video is for all of you guys as entrepreneurs, as funnel hackers, as creators, as people who are trying to change the world. I want to do it together. I don't want to be my own silo. It's not worth it. It's boring out there, right? We can all make money independently, but so much more money, so much more fun to make money together. And we could all do it here on this platform. So what does that mean for you guys? Number 1, obviously get your OfferLab account. Number 2, bring your offers over. And number 3, I'm doing a live training Okay, it's probably going to be happening after this video depending when you're watching this. But jump on that training because in there, we're going to give you guys the next steps. Here's how to take these concepts, this platform, how to change everything. How to use it as a tool and an asset to dramatically grow your company. How to get more people actually selling your products on the platform. But also how to make it so you're getting more traffic into your offers and your products, right? How to find partnerships and collaborations and how to dramatically increase your businesses together. I hope you guys have enjoyed the series up to this point. The next step, obviously, get your OfferLab account, get on the live training. We're going to take you guys to the next step. And then after that, then it's all about going in there and having fun, okay? This is similar— I look at this like I have friends that are stock traders and I see them, they walk into— I walk in their office and they've got a wall with like 20 different monitors. They're trading stuff and moving things back and forth. It's like the most exciting thing in the world, right? Like that's what the OfferLab back panel is. You log in there, you see all different offers. People are messaging you to promote your contact game, and like this whole communication back and forth and back and forth, you guys can create the most amazing partnerships, right? You can launch these things very, very quickly. I can see like finding influencers and helping them build a funnel, and they launch it on their thing in, you know, 20-30 minutes now, and money coming in for you and for them. Like, there's so many opportunities in so many ways. I just picture all of us logging every morning to our Offlab account, looking at stats, looking at numbers, going to the inbox, checking things out, and then making money, making deals, finding partnerships, and finding friends. That's what OfferLab's all about. Thank you guys for being part of the series. I will see you guys on the live training, and even more importantly, I'll see you inside of the actual platform. I hope you message me, I hope that you promote one of my offers, hopefully I'll have a chance to put one of your offers inside of my funnels, and we can all win and make money together. Thank you guys so much. From me, from Todd Dickerson, from the entire OfferLab team, we're grateful for you, and we cannot wait to be working together with you once again.

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