Why I Love/Hate Product Launches

Good morning everybody, it is product launch day. 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. Hey everyone, welcome to Marketing in Your Car, and today is product launch day. Yes, you heard me right, uh, today ClickFunnels 2.0 is going live, which means it's 6 in the morning and I'm driving to the office. I was up last night until after 1:30. I want to talk about a couple things. First off, product launches, I forget how hard they are. The last time I did a— well, let me rewind. My business for a long time, for probably 5 years or so, was based off of a product launch model, which was horrible. I don't think I realized how horrible it was until I moved to one that's It's not product launch. I was like, wow, that's way better. So like, this was our old model, is every quarter we had a launch of product, right? So we get as many people as possible to promote for us, we get them all on board, then they all promote, we make a bunch of money, we get a whole bunch of people to join our list, and then for the next 3 months we would just, we'd have to then repay favors to everyone who promoted for us. So we'd promote all these other things, repay favors. By the end of the 3 months our list was kind of dead for promoting other people's stuff. And then lo and behold, we had another product launch, and everyone that we had promoted, oldest favorites that they promoted, and that was the cycle. So 4 times a year we'd do a product launch, and I forgot how much work it is. I forgot the stress and the headaches and all the little things. And obviously that was pre-ClickFunnels, so now it's way easier, but back then it was like, I don't know how we survived it, but we did somehow, luckily. And we survived it, we thrived through it, and now we're here, right? Anyway, it's kind of interesting to me and I'm so grateful to not be in a typical product launch business. We did a product launch earlier this year with my book and then we're doing this one for ClickFunnels 2.0, which is 2 in a year, which is way too much. I think I'm retiring from the product launch biz, business, bidness, how do you say that? I'm going to be focusing on growing a company the good old-fashioned way instead. But we're doing this because we can and we think it'll be fun and it'll give us a big surge of energy and customers and excitement and kind of, it's kind of interesting like at our live event, we promoted the Dream Car Contest, which is exciting, then we promoted Action X and backpacks, so in that little room of 600 people, like everyone was going nuts, right? But then like the rest of the world has no idea what's happening, so it's kind of like, we needed to like make some noise and get everybody else excited too. And so that's kinda what this is about. And so this obviously, like I said, isn't like a typical product launch. It's not just us doing a new product. It's ClickFunnels, but now we're also releasing Backpack and Actionetics inside of it, and it's exciting. So that's kinda what's happening today. And one secret I learned from product launches is never have your product launch go live like at 9 AM. I used to do that all the time, which meant we'd pull all-nighters, 9 AM and go live, and there'd always be issues. So we set it for 4 Eastern, that way I've got till 2 AM 2 o'clock my time, so I'd go crazy past lunch, and then we opened it all up. So I've learned that, and hopefully you guys, if you ever do product launches, that'll be a good little tip for you as well. Okay, so dang, I had something really cool to share with you. I'm trying to remember what it is now. Well, I think it had to do with really kind of like the transitioning of a company from a product launch over to a sustainable business I was listening to a podcast with Ryan Lee. Ryan's just one of the coolest dudes. I don't think I've ever really told him that, but I really just like him. Anyway, he launched this podcast called The Freedom Show and it's really good. It's like 10-minute little— it's kind of like Marking Your Car, it's like little 10-minute things and Ryan's just fun. I like him a lot. One of his guests he had on there was one of my friends, Mike Lovett. Mike was talking about a concept that I thought was kind of cool. He said that when he launched his business, he was out there trying to hustle and nobody ever promoted him. Ryan, I guess, was the first person that ever promoted him. So Ryan promoted him, he made some money, and he's like, that was like house money now. You know, like, he made $2,000 or $3,000, he's like, now it's the house money I'm gambling with. And he said, then I went out and I learned how to buy ads, do media, and all these other, all the other things that kinda go with that, right? But that was his big secret. I think about that like, you know, like, the main reason that I like product launches is 'cause of like this increased excitement and energy and surge of people caring about about what you're doing, right? And it's still probably one of the best ways to kind of launch a business. It's hard initially, 'cause a lot of times you don't have partners, you don't have things like that, it's hard. But you can really launch it, do an initial product launch with one person. If you find one person who believes in what you're doing, pay them 100% commission or 200% or whatever it takes to get them engaged and get them involved and do this initial push, right? Which causes momentum. Now momentum is good because even if it's like a little bit of momentum, like one dude buys your thing, that's momentum. That's like, oh my gosh, things are moving forward. Now we can start running instead of walking, right? There's all this momentum that starts going forward. I think a lot of times it's that initial surge and then when you do start making money from that, the key— and this is the hard part for a lot of us entrepreneurs who like to spend money on dumb things— you gotta reinvest that money. There's a point that you can take money out but it's not at first. I look at our supplement business. It's funny, people are always like, "Oh, I wish I was in the supplement business. You were making like $20,000 a day." I'm like, "Yeah, but—" We didn't pull money out of that business for like a year and a half because every penny we made went back into either inventory or ads. It was kind of interesting, like a business like that, you have to scale it and the time you start making a lot of money is when you start— is almost when the business dies. It's not necessarily that way. We built this one better, but the first time I remember ever seeing that, these guys were selling a website on Flippa. It was back in the açaí berry days. It was free plus shipping. Scammy acai offer. And they were explaining their metrics and they were like, yeah, the way it works is, you know, we scaled up, we got to the point where we were doing $100,000 a month or $500,000 a month or whatever it was. And he's like, we're buying media and we're not making any money. And then we stopped buying media and we just live off the recurring as it dwindles down to nothing. And that was the whole model. And then at that point they sold on Flippa. So they were kind of showing— and they'd done the cycle over and over and over again. Where basically that's what they were doing is that, you know, they got to the point where they were making half a million a month but we're not making any money and then they stop buying ads and then that recurring of half a million dollars a month comes in and then next month it's $300,000 and $200,000 and $100,000 and zero and they only make their money when the business is dying, which kinda sucks, right? Like we won't make money until we decide to kill our business. But that's how a lot of those guys work and NurCell wasn't that way. We were profitable earlier but it still took a while. We weren't able to pull money out until we decided to stop growing, if that makes sense. We got to the point where we were doing about half a million dollars a month and then we stopped growing it because we wanted to take some money out and so we sat there. We would have kept growing it, but then we would have kept reinvesting the profits in inventory and advertising. I hate businesses like that where you grow when you stop— or you profit when you stop growing, which isn't much fun. I don't know why I went on that rant. It's probably because I had like 3 hours of sleep last night. It's been like thing after thing. Anyway, the moral of that story was when you do a business and you do a product launch and you get that momentum is reinvest that money, reinvest it back in, and get to the point now where you can pull profits out. If you make a little money and you pull it out, you just killed the goose that could lay golden eggs. Alright, now I remember what my moral of the story was, kind of. I think some smart dude, I don't know which guy it was, it was either Pareto or Ockham or some dude who said something famous. I would probably know this like 3 hours from now, but this early I have no idea. But he said something, and I'm sure someone out there is just shaking their head thinking, "Russell, you should know this guy's name." Anyway, he basically said that like when you have a task, right, or you have a deadline, that somehow magically all of the— like the amount of work will grow to expand to fill that task up. Fill that a lot of time up. And it's funny 'cause we've been working on this product launch forever. We had all these things pre-done like months in advance. And it's just crazy, no matter what you do, at least in my experience, maybe other people are better than me, no matter what you do though, you're always, like all the stuff you have to get done for this product launch does not get done until the second it goes live. Like it's insane how that works. It's really like literally insane how that works. We spent so much time and effort testing everything and then now still we're up till 1 o'clock last night I'm up this morning at 5, you know, and we're testing and trying and everyone's gonna be up and then, and what's interesting, and this is what's kind of cool, is that as you get closer and closer to the deadline, you always have this list of all the stuff you want to get done and as you look at the clock, you're like, okay, there's 3 hours left, okay, there's 2 hours left, there's 1 hour left, there's 30 minutes left, there's 5 minutes left, like you start cutting things. And you're like, well, that can't happen, that's impossible, that's impossible, eventually come out with what's left, which is like the little pieces that Basically, you usually start trimming off all the nice-to-haves and you end up left with the have-to-haves. And after the launch starts, you go back to adding all the other things to try to get it finalized. But what's interesting is that like, that's one of my favorite reasons to have a launch is it forces you to get done all the must-haves, right? And to trim out all the should-haves or wanna-haves or whatever you wanna call them. You know, most people, most entrepreneurs, they never get their thing live because they spend years trying to get it perfect. Like I said, if you don't have a deadline, you don't have something happening, somehow magically all time will get filled up with stuff that you need to get done and it just never gets done. And so that's one nice thing about a deadline like this is just like it's do or die. You don't have any choice because in 4 hours from now people are promoting whether it's live or not. And if it's not live, then they don't promote. We just lost out on huge opportunities, hundreds of millions, or hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. And so, yeah, so anyway, hopefully you guys got a little value out of today. If not, I apologize. It's the lack of sleep and everything that we got from the circumstances. But regardless, I hope that from this you got the fact that having a product launch business model is no fun. But having a product launch to force you to get stuff done and to give you initial momentum which then can be turned into cash flow and everything else you need to be able to start scaling your company in an actual growth-type business as opposed to a product launch business is good. There's a time and a place. Thank you, Jeff Walker, for giving us the product launch. Everyone who thinks that's a business, you're not listening to Jeff. Anyway, I'm at the office, guys. Appreciate you all. So have an awesome day. Hopefully when you watch this, ClickFunnels will be live and we will be bug-free, or at least as close to that as humanly possible. Love you guys. Thanks everybody. Have an awesome day and we'll talk to you soon.