What To Do When Someone Rips You Off

Good morning everybody, this is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing in Your Car. Welcome to the Marketing in Your Car podcast where you can increase your traffic, conversions, and sales in just 10 minutes a day. And now here's your host, Russell Brunson. Alright everybody, hope that you are having an amazing day today so far. I wanted to have some fun on today's podcast. I had like 4 or 5 ideas we could talk about, but I think this would be the most fun because it's one that gets— it's one that drives us as producers crazy, yet it's— when all is said and done, it's really not that big of a deal, but it still drives us crazy. So this morning I was listening to Garrett J. White's podcast about how they can— I can't remember the title, but somehow they can copy your— they can copy you, but they can't clone your fire. They can't copy your fire or something like that. He was talking about some other friends who in his In his mind, he just kind of knocked them off or they kind of knocked him off. He was talking about how you can copy the marketing style, you can copy the message, you can copy all those kind of things, but you can't copy your fire. I thought that was really, really cool. It was interesting because last month we were doing our hackathon. We had all the ClickFunnels team out here and that was one of the concerns we have is like, "Hey, do we have all developers move in-house so we can have tighter controls on our code so nobody can steal the code?" all these different things. What was interesting is that, and this is me as the outside marketing guy being nervous, like, "Oh, I don't want people to copy us," or like, "What if somebody got our code and then they had ClickFunnels and then they're competing with us?" It's this fear mentality mindset. The developers kind of laughed and they're like, "You know, half the stuff we're doing is open source and we're open sourcing it. We're giving it to the community so that people can build on it too." All these kind of things. If someone wanted to steal the code, it wouldn't really matter because most of it's out there Anyway, I don't know how the whole open source thing is, but apparently we're donating most of our code to open source for other developers to develop on and make cooler things and all these things. I'm just like, it's so weird to me because it just seems backwards, right? But one thing that I can't remember if it was Todd or Ryan or somebody said, it was just like, this is the deal. Somebody could go and they could copy our code or parts of our code or whatever that might be, but there's intangibles that they can't copy. Similar to what Gary was talking about, they can't copy your fire. They can't copy our message and our community and our work ethic and our team and our vision and all the other pieces that go into growing an empire. They can clone things, but they can't do all the rest of it. It was funny, I was reading an article last week. I had like 10 people tag me on Facebook. But it was about this company in the UK who basically, they just knock off every big hit. Amazon came out, they knocked off Amazon. Groupon came out, they knocked off Groupon over in the UK. And they knock them off. They build them up really fast. And they just like, they straight just rip everything. Like if you look at the sites, color scheme is the same, layout is the same. Everywhere the menu is at is in the same spot. Everything is just identical. And they were saying they have teams of people, all they do is they monitor all these sites daily. And if Amazon shifts the menu 1 pixel to the right, they shift their menu 1 pixel to the right because they are assuming that Amazon is doing all sorts of crazy testing. And so they just straight just rip them off. And then their whole model is after they just rip these guys off is then come back to the original companies and sell them. And they've done that. They sold their Groupon clone to Groupon. They've done it to others. And these guys made over a billion dollars with a B just ripping people off. And so it's like you see things like that and you're just like, "Oh, I don't want to be ripped off." It's funny because I see people all the time my stuff's up for sale on eBay. I see like the pirate sites where as soon as I create a course, it's for free on the pirate sites. The other day I was looking for one of my logos. I couldn't find my logo file, so I just Google imaged it and I found like the original logo file to my design. I'm like, wow, who has this on their site? How cool is that? I can't even find it on my own computer and they have the original. So I went to the site and I went to it and on the site there was like this thing where it's like, hey, here's Russell Brunson's course. I'm going to buy it, but everyone's got to pony up some money. There's like 100 people that all ponied up $50 to be able to buy my course so they could all just rip it off and share it together. It's just ridiculous. It's funny because there's a time in my life where I had so much fear behind that. I was just like, oh, well, if they rip it off, then this and that and all these kind of things. I've had people come to me who, you know, like, we're an eBay company. We'll just police eBay. We'll knock off anyone who steals your stuff and posts it. We're going to block it and all these kind of things. In fact, we had a— There's this guy, oh, I probably shouldn't name names, but I have to name names for the story to be funny. So his name was Cody Moya, and he used to clone everything we did. Like we created a product, like I would announce like, hey, like we've been spending like 3 months on this project, right? We would announce that we were launching it, and that same day he would send an email launching his version of what we did, and he'd somehow just put it together really quick, and he'd have like the identical product to us. It was crazy. And so we used to call him Cloney Moya, 'cause he would just clone everything that any of us did, It was so interesting. And then, this is the funny part of the story, Joel Comm, Joel Comm, he bought a copy machine in his office, a big huge copy machine, and he like took off, like the tag was like the Copy Master 2000 or whatever, and he broke the tag off and he put his own tag on it, it was called the Cloney Moya. And so he used to do photocopies on the Cloney Moya. Anyway, it was so funny because, you know, and that guy had some success for a little while, but then like, has anyone heard of him since then? No, like it's because you can copy the sales process, You can copy the content, you can copy whatever, but like Gary said, you can't copy the fire. I thought that was really kind of a powerful message for me today. And it's funny, I had a guy that we published for a little while, and I asked him about his journey, like how did you get successful online? And he said, you know what's interesting? He said, I used to go to, I can't remember the name of the pirate website, some pirate website in the internet marketing space where you can get pretty much everybody's product for free, right? He said, I used to go to that thing and I would download everyone's products and I'd listen to them and he said, It was weird seeing like I had all this information in my head, all these things, but he's like, I was never successful. He's like, one day I realized I was straight ripping everybody off and I'm trying to go out there and provide value to the world and trying to like, trying to help, you know, to sell my own products. He's like, there's some weird thing with the universe where if you're ripping other people off, like, you know, you're stealing their intellectual property, other people aren't going to pay you for theirs. He's like, one day he's like, I just got sick of it. So he's like, I canceled, I canceled my account. And so I went to some of the products that had the biggest impact on me that I'd stolen. And I went and I bought them just to pay the authors for those things. He's like, when I did that, everything changed. Suddenly my products started selling and just everything good came after he had done that. I thought how interesting that was. Like, and so like, I'm not too concerned when people rip off my stuff anymore just because they're not the kind of person I want to serve anyway. Like, the dude who's okay going and ripping a product and consuming it and can sleep well at night is not the kind of person I want in my coaching programs using my software. Like, I'm not okay with that kind of a person. Like, and so like, if they want to do it, that's cool, and hopefully someday they'll see the light, but I'm not concerned about that kind of person. The customers I want are the customers who are gonna pay me because they know the value I provide to them, right? In fact, if you look at my business now, almost everything we sell is free, you know what I mean? Like, all of our best stuff is free plus shipping, and we do have upgrades where you get more upsells and stuff like that, but for the most part, it's all free. I give all my stuff away for free. People always ask me for my perfect webinar script, like, how much is it gonna cost? I'm like, oh, just go get it for free. It's $5, we ship it to you, like, just go get it. And they're like, well, no, I'll pay for it, man. I'm like, no, like, just take it. And they're like, why did you do that? I'm like, because if you actually implement the Perfect Webinar, guess what's gonna happen? You are gonna make a crap ton of money and then you're gonna come and give me $25,000. Like, that's so much more valuable to me than getting $97 from you today, right? Like, and so for me, like, I'm all about like giving away all this stuff so that people can consume it, get a ton of value, and then they'll want more. They will come back if what you give away is amazing. And just kind of a side note, I never had heard of Dan Kennedy. This is back in the day and I was on eBay and some dude ripped off Dan Kennedy and I didn't know, but it was like this marketing thing. I'm like, sweet, I like marketing. So I bought these like Dan Kennedy CDs for like $100 and turns out it was like a $1,000 course, but I didn't know that. And so I was listening to this course and it was awesome. I got so much good stuff. And so because of that, in the product, he kept talking about his his Platinum Groups. I was like, I wanna be in a Platinum Group. So this whole course kept indoctrinating me and I eventually called up GKIC and I begged them to let me in and I paid them $25,000 to be in the Platinum Group. I was in that group for 6 years. They made, what, $150 Gs off me? Plus I spoke at their events, I sold their products. I'd say they conservatively made $3 or $4 million off me during that time. And I came into their world because somebody else ripped them off. And I remember Bill at the time was like all freaking out about about the pirates stealing his stuff. I'm like, dude, do you understand that like I am in your world today because some pirate ripped you off and unbeknownst to me was selling your crap on eBay and I bought it and now I'm here and you know, you've gotten $5 or $6 million from it. Was that worth it? Yeah, let the pirates have fun. They want to go do that stuff, they're spreading your message, they're spreading your word. Just don't deal with it because a couple of things. First off, the right people will pay. The people who stumble upon that stuff, if your stuff is awesome, they will come back for more. It's the drug dealer close, right? They give them the first one for free and they gotta come back. That's how I feel. I wanna make my content so addictive that when they have it, they gotta have more. Anyway, I don't know if that helps at all, but the biggest thing is don't stress out about people knocking off your stuff. I don't put password-protected stuff on my download pages because I don't care. Again, people who are gonna rip me off, they can rip me off. People who wanna buy, Buyers, and buyers will continue to buy, and those are the ones who I'm catering towards and to, and that's all that really matters for me. So there you go. If you are still in stuff right now, knock it off because it's probably keeping you from where you want to be. As weird as that might sound, I don't know how or why, but for some reason that's just how it all works. So there you go. Alright guys, I'm at the office. I'm gonna go create some cool stuff, hopefully change the world, and Hope that something comes out today that's going to help you guys. So appreciate y'all. Have an amazing day, and I will talk to you guys all again soon. Bye!