BP LIVE: How Fund Launch Went From $0-$40m in Revenue

Welcome on to today. We're going to talk about how Funnel Launch went from $0 to $40 million of revenue in seemingly a few years, how we just hit the Inc. 5000, and lessons I have learned from building now multiple 8-figure companies. A few things that have worked for me. Welcome in. We're doing this as a live stream. I feel a little under the weather today, so forgive me, but give me a like, comment, say hello in the chat if you guys are live. Let's do this. Let's just get right into it. So Funnel Launch going from $0 to $40 million. I have 4, maybe as a bonus, if you guys are good, we'll give off 5 main principles that helped us move extremely fast when building Funnel Launch. So, oh shoot, we're dropping stuff around here. Hold on. All right, here we go. We're going to need to get into it quick. I'm dropping pencils. I'm throwing stuff around. We're going to have some fun. All right, let's get into the first principle here. First principle that helped us move extremely fast. And if you're looking to build a business like we've built, we did this bootstrapped. Me and Mason were in college when we built Funnel Launch. So seemingly, how did 2 college kids go and build a multimillion-dollar business in COVID in college? First principle that absolutely changed our life was this: fail fast and fail cheap. Now there's 2— I forgot to put fast on there. Fail fast and fail cheap. Fail fast and fail cheap. We tested products immensely. If you know, my first 2 years of college, me and Mason launched 6 different businesses our first years of college, and we failed fast and failed cheap. We didn't have business ideas. We actually went and launched businesses. If you're sitting there, at least for us, we said, instead of being a wantrepreneur, let's actually be an entrepreneur and go build stuff. How this actually worked for us, I'm gonna give some like sub-points here. Many people, Have ideas for businesses. I'm guessing everybody watching this is like, oh, I have an idea for a business. It could be a fund. I know we talk a lot about funds on here, but it could be other businesses as well. Speed and time to deployment is massive. Most people sit on their couch on Thursday nights and they watch TV and they go, wow, maybe one day I'll build that little business. Fail fast, fail cheap. Start going. If you can, I had a great professor in college tell me, go sell as quickly as possible. Yeah. And he had a student in the class. This guy had sold multiple businesses for hundreds of millions of dollars, very successful entrepreneur. Then he just comes and he taught a class or two at BYU, which is really cool. His name is Corbin Church. Shout out to Corbin if you're seeing this. He was like, go sell as quickly as possible. And someone would raise their hand, well, Corbin, I've got to, you know, I'm trying to make this new product. We got to go to China and get prototypes, and then we got to bring it back to the United States, and that's a 3-month thing, and I need, $5,000 to order prototypes to then sell my product. He goes, no, you don't. You don't need to go to China and source a product. He goes, go sell right now. Like, what do you mean? He goes, go and sell preorders. Go just see if people even want what you have. With AI right now, you can go make mockups. Make mockups, make a one-off, use a 3D printer, just make one prototype. If you're in physical products, if you're in service business, it's a lot easier. Just go sell before you have the lawnmower and the equipping it. Like, you don't need a lawnmower if you're doing a landscaping business and all the stuff. Just go sell and see if people will buy. And if the best validate— everyone wants to get validation on their business. The best validation is if someone pulls out their credit card and actually buys. I made this mistake so many times. I spent— 6 to 8 months building a business, and then I went and deployed the business and no one wanted my business. They were like, you suck. And I'm like, no, this is amazing. I spent 8 months building this. They're like, dude, this sucks. And so finally I said, okay, I got to get enough more swings at the bat. Sell as quickly as possible. So with Funnel Launch, we applied this principle. This is a true principle that we actually use. So I'll write it in green right here with fail fast and fail cheap. We said in— so, Funnel Launch, at the beginning, we wanted to do a course around investment funds. So, we were like, we could go get some incredible people that ran investment funds. Bridger, I had run an investment fund. We were going to build videos and content to go launch this course. Most people would have gone and filmed videos, rented a studio, edited the videos, built a course, built a Kajabi website, built a ClickFunnels thing, got Google Ads set up. We said, no, let's fail fast and fail cheap. I want to see if people even want this course thing that we're doing. So what we did, we, we set a budget. The budget was $500, and we said, let's just see if people buy. We made on my iPhone— excuse me, my voice is getting crazy. I'm a little sick today, but we're still going. We made a— we made it. We got my, my iPhone and we made about 15 ads, just selfie-style videos. Talking about what we were going to sell. We then built a landing page on— I think it was on ClickFunnels at the time, which is like $97 a month. There's a 14-day free trial. The landing page took us 2 days to build. We filmed all the ads in 1 day. By day 3, we were ready to launch. We sent traffic And we spent about $5,000. We parsed our ad spend out, but we spent, so we spent, I think it was like $50 a day, maybe $75 a day on ads to just see if we could drive clicks. What our landing page did, we wanted to see if people would opt in, meaning put their email in. So, we built a landing page that said, hey, we're doing a free training on funds. We are doing X, Y, and Z. Put your email in to register. What we found was actually a lot of people registered. The problem was we didn't have a training because we hadn't built it yet. We're only 3 days into this business idea. So the next page after they registered, I just wanted to see if we had validation. They had put their email in. We said, hey, sorry, the training isn't live yet. It's coming out. We hope it'll come out soon. We have a product that we're looking to build. It's $47. It's a mini— it's called the Mini Vault. on investment funds. We built a page and we sold this $47 product. Again, the product was not built. So what happened was people came, they registered, they came, they— some people bought, which we were shocked. I was like, people bought. And then after they bought, guess what we said? We had another page that said, hey, okay, this thing isn't built yet. We're going to refund you your money. So we would offer them a refund and we'd come clean. We'd say, hey, we were testing to see if anybody would buy this. We're going to give you a refund or you can stick around and we're actually, if it goes well, we might build this over the next couple of weeks, 4 to 8 weeks. Does that make sense? In 3, most people would have spent 8 months building this course idea. We built it and we built and tested it in 3 weeks. 3 days, the ads and marketing, people registered. We actually sold a number of mini vaults our first weekend. I think we turned that $500 into $1,800. I'll move it right here, into $1,800. And we were like, dang, people want this. Now we refunded some people, but actually most people stuck around. We email, and I would email everybody personally. I was like, hey, this is Bridger, you know, you bought our thing, we want to send you a refund, or you can stick around. They said, nah dude, Stick around. I'm curious what you guys build. It's only $47. We said, okay, well, great. Can you give us some feedback on what we're building? And so now we had customers. I think we had, I don't know, 30 to 50 people that had bought that actually signed up and they wanted to be essentially beta test users. And we said, okay, great. Can you give us feedback? So, we started to build with them. We put them in a small Facebook group. We started to talk to them and go live to them and ask them what they wanted inside of this product. And we built the product with customers, built with customers. Over the next, we then about 3 to 4 weeks later, we launched a small beta test version and we kept deploying this strategy and this took off. We did about $80,000 of revenue in the next month and a half and we spent just about $79,000 in ads. Isn't that crazy? We had a perfect breakeven funnel. Now you're like, Bridger, you didn't make much money. That's totally fine. We had a big now list of buyers who loved what we were doing, and we were going live with them, talking with them, emailing them. We were pushing this. And then we went out and launched what we called at the time the mastermind product to this list of buyers. We built a bigger product. We asked them what they wanted. We brought people in and we, And you can get the end of the story there. This led us in our first about 12 to 18 months, we did about $2.5 million in revenue at Funnel Launch as 2 college kids. I mean, we just took off out of the gate. We didn't spend 8 months building it before we launched. We launched in about 3 days and we built the product with the customers over the next 8 months. See the difference? Fail fast and fail cheap. That helped us a ton. You guys can get pre-orders, mock-ups. If anybody's starting a business right now, that's what I would say to do. Start building with the customer. Oh man, my voice is going crazy. You guys still— can you listen to me okay? Hopefully it's not too bad. Let me get a drink here. Next one, I want to talk about levels of our business. So, uh, there's concepts in this of all different books, but I'm gonna give you the Bridger version concepts. There are different levels and stages of business, I believe, at the amount of revenue you're doing. So I'm going to actually, I'm going to go down a little bit further. Give myself some more space. So if you're doing between $0 and $100,000 a year in revenue, and even more, this could be up to $1 million depending on the product type. Really, to do that amount of scale of a business, you're doing, to do $100 grand, you're doing $9 grand a month. Really, all you really need is sales. You need to be just good at selling. One person, the founder, CEO, you can just sell and make that kind of money by selling, whether it's window washing or you're going to do like, let's call it a service-based business, landscaping, lawn care, etc. Just, just understanding the skill of sales. If you're going to go a little bit bigger than this, you need to understand sales and marketing with a good product that you can push. That'll get you to, and I'll put up to here, a million a year in revenue. I have a million right there. Now, for us at least, once we hit about a million a year in revenue and we were trying to go to $5 million, our business had to change quite a bit. And this is per year. This is per year of revenue. And it was interesting, the same things that worked going in phase 1 didn't work in phase 2. Let's see, I'm gonna put phase 2 and phase 1 here. What we found was this. We had to figure out other ways. We did sales and marketing well. We had a good product, but we had to get more. I'm gonna use blue here. LTV, lifetime value, more out per customer. And so we launched now multiple product lines. We had at the time, I think, 2 or 3 products. We introduced Black Card at the time, which was a much higher ticket product that allowed more customers to spend more with us. The same sales, the same marketing, but now we had upsells. This took us from $1 million to about $5 million per year, okay? Let me move this out of the way. Okay, now when we went from the phase 3 here, going from $5 million a year to about $10 to $12 million a year, Just adding more LTV didn't work. We had to underwrite and really rebuild our business. This phase for us was building second-tier and third-tier management. This is when we had to actually hire people that could train and hire other people. If we just kept increasing LTV for at least our business, we were not going to scale to $10 million a year. Having second-tier and third-tier management we had to build out, which is a hard thing to do. I had to grow as an entrepreneur. I couldn't just work on sales, marketing, the product anymore. I had to actually work on people and hiring and scaling and working with teams and having problems with employees. And they have sick days and they want to take vacation and they want to, you know, I don't know, they don't want to work very hard and they don't like your ideas anymore. And they, you know, That's the that's we had to work on here, and I love and that's still something I'm we're working on trying to increase the people we work with, the level of people that we work with. There's a great quote from Steve Jobs that I've been just I've been actually studying a lot of these old found like not old but famous amazing entrepreneurs Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Christian Von Koenigsegg. I mean different guys like this, and I love this quote. From Steve Jobs. You've all heard the term of A players, hire A players, right? For us, we were like, yeah, let's hire A players. And we thought a lot of guys, everyone we hired, we thought was an A player. Oh yeah, they're an A player. And over time, you figure out if people are A players, B players, or C players. And over time, I just think being a seasoned operator, you get a higher bar of what is an A player. Years ago, I hired people that I thought were A players, and it turned out they really weren't A players at all. They were B players, but it was the best I could get. Because to be frank, when you're hiring people at this phase of your business, you're hiring, obviously, you're going out to everyone you know and you're trying to hire the smartest, brightest, best people you can on a limited budget because you're a business. You're— and this is all for bootstrap founders here. It's different if you have a big seed round or something, but for bootstrap founders, you're like, hey, You know, I can't pay you $300,000 a year. Will you take $100,000 a year and I'll give you some upside? And it's, you're trying to get the best you can. Now, as you get, and we're now hitting this phase 4, we've actually been able to pay for better talent. But we really didn't, weren't able to do this. But again, back to this quote from Steve Jobs. And by the way, we found A-players at different price levels. We found A-players at $60,000 a year. and $200,000 a year. But A players hiring A players, A players hire A players. This is a Steve Jobs quote. B players hire C players. To unpack this briefly, people who are A players want to work with other amazing A players. It's probably you. You're the founder. You're like, yo, I'm an A player. I want to work with absolute ballers. I do not care if someone looks better than me. I want them to be better than me. B players are funny. B players know they're B players. They're trying to hide. And so they hire C players, players that really aren't that good so that they look better than their peers. Isn't that interesting? I didn't realize this. I've heard this before years ago, and it didn't stick with me until really this last 18 months of just hiring and working with people on our teams. of like, this concept is so true. And as we have grown and we have more money and more optionality, I have had a much lower bar for B players. And we have an interesting test we do. We stole this from Netflix. It's this test. And again, this is all around people because this is this 3rd tier of people management. Netflix did a thing called the keeper's test. This was an interesting thing that they put across all their company. Now, a lot of companies have adopted this. I don't know. Maybe they came up with it. Maybe they didn't. I just heard it from Netflix first. The 2 tests are, number one, knowing everything you know now about a person, let's say you're evaluating your current company, knowing everything you know now, would you hire this person again? Not again, but today. Excuse me, today. If they were knowing everything you know now, if they came and interviewed for the same job they have today, would you hire them again today? That's the first question. Second question, if this person quit today, would you be begging to keep them? Or would you be, you know what? That's actually good that they quit because I didn't want to fire them. If your answer to either one of these questions is a no, this is again Netflix Keepers Test. If it's a no or a no on people that you're evaluating, you should actually fire that person immediately. That's kind of interesting, huh? As an executive team, we do this about every quarter, maybe every 6 months. We do a keeper's test. And over the course of Funnel Launch, we've had certain moments where we've actually let go of quite a few people. It's like, yeah, they're really nice. I like them. But knowing everything I know today, I would not hire this person again for the role. And if they quit today, man, I would not beg to keep them. And so, the answer then is you should fire that person immediately. And we actually have followed this pretty well to a T. Isn't that interesting? So, that's what's helped us. grow from $5 million a year to $10 to $12 million a year. Now, as a company right now, so we've done about $40 million in revenue. We've hit the Inc. 5000 for fast-growing companies. We now are trying to go from about $12 million a year to about $100 million a year and beyond. This is how at least I'm currently— maybe I'll make a video about this in a year or two to see how we did. This is what we are currently doing. as a team. What we've done in the past will not work to get us to $100 million. We, traditionally, Fund Launch has been a service coaching/incubator type of business. We incubate and help people launch funds. So people come and join our incubator black card. We have pitch deck designers. We have law firms. We have partners that come in and think tank and launch someone's fund. It's been a very good product. We've helped thousands of people launch funds. It's done. We do about I don't know, $10 to $12 million a year. But service-based businesses like ours rarely scale to $100 million a year, even the best ones in the industry. We believe we need to revamp how our products are delivered. The problem with our products currently, it's very service-based. You have to— we have coaches and myself. We do office hours. We have lawyers. It's very manual. Someone comes to our process and they, hop on the phone call or on Zoom to build their fund, which has been good. It's a good thing. But if we really want to do $100 million a year, we need to automate and make much more scalable, scalable products. And if I've talked about this a few times, but we are right now building, and we're almost ready to deploy Fund Launch AI. We are ripping apart our whole platform to move to an AI-first business with coaches as supplements after that. Now, I don't want to give you the whole spiel because we'll be coming out probably the next month or 2. You'll see this more publicly. But we are reinventing our whole business and process around building funds for people. And can we agentically help people launch investment funds? As you know, maybe this is business point, I don't know, 3.5 or whatever. There are only 4 levers in business. Only 4. Make sure your business has one of these if you want to build a big business. Only 4 points of leverage in a business, and they briefly are: number 1, finance, meaning capital. Capital gives you a lot of leverage in business. Raising dollars gives you leverage. Okay? Number 2 is labor, people. Think of like MLMs or network marketing where you have a huge labor force that goes out and recruits and gives you lots of leverage, meaning, you know, it's not constrained by just one person, Bridger. You have a huge workforce that goes out and builds this. The second one, or excuse me, the third one is media. Media gives you a lot of leverage in business. Think of social media. Kim Kardashian has immense amount of leverage in business. She can make one post and millions of people see this. Back in the day, it was newspapers. It was then news outlets. Now it's social media. Media gives you massive amounts of leverage. Labor gives you massive amounts of leverage. And finance/capital gives you immense amounts of leverage. The last one is somewhat new to the last century, but is technology. Tech and/or some would say code. You can write a piece of code and it can be reprinted or duplicated a million times. They wrote the Instagram algorithm app. Let's just, on a simplistic version, once, and all of us can download it on our phone and it can be replicated over and over again. It's an immense amount of leverage in a business. When building businesses now, I make sure we have one, if not two, if not all 4 of these levers in our businesses. And I'll just give you an example. Finance capital. We just built Fund Launch Partners. We raised $32 million of capital in a private equity firm. Wow. To go and leverage capital to do more. This is why hedge funds and venture capital funds, private equity funds are the best vehicle on earth because of the leverage it gives you. Secondly, labor. The amount of people you have. We've been a little bit lighter on this. We haven't built some huge sales force or whatever, but we've been a little bit lighter. Media. I've done quite a bit on social media, as you can see right now. We are right now venturing into tech. We've hired a full amazing CTO all in right behind my wall right here. We have a whole awesome team of devs all in-house building, and we should be launching this pretty soon. We believe this could help take us to $100 million a year because of the leverage it gives us. Now, we'll be coming back to this soon, but again, back to business principles, I think these are massive. All right, is this useful so far? Drop a— I don't know, like, comment, whatever. I have 2 more things and then we're gonna wrap this video up. So to review, we talked about Fail fast, fail cheap. Number 2, different tiers of business. $0 to $100,000, $1 million to $5 million, $5 million to $10 million, and then $10 million to $100 million and different tiers and the 4 levers in business. Now, if I zoom down here, the last 2, they're going to be quick. This is what helped Fund Launch move extremely fast. This is why Fund Launch, I believe, took off and my 5 other businesses didn't really take off in college. You guys know my story. And that's why Funnel Launch took off and then Ugly Unicorn took off and then Funnel Launch Partners took off. And we've had pretty much every business we've launched since then has done extremely well. It comes down to principles. And one of the things that I took away was this. Learn from people who have gone before. Mentors. I actively pay for education in this space. I did back then. I still do now. Me and Mason bought a course in college. It was $15,000. Then we joined another one that was $24,000. I think the following year, the following year after that, we joined another one that was $30,000. The following year after that, we joined another one that was $150,000 for 1 year. Each one of those tiers had a mentor, someone that we really admired, looked up to in a space that could condense 10 years of business into— 2 years. Maybe a month or two. Don't be naive enough to think you're just gonna wake up one day and crush it in entrepreneurship. Go stand on the shoulders of people that have gone before you. Duh, Izzy. Like, this makes sense, but very few people do it. I'm gonna hit the last one here 'cause I think all of you know that. Learn from mentors, build a good circle around you. The last one here that has been immense for Funnel Launch, and I think for a lot of people potentially in the world of entrepreneurship, Have this get rich quick, screw everybody, I'm going to do my own thing, middle finger to the world type of mentality. I've never seen a great entrepreneur do any of those things. Yet you see that mentality from a lot of young entrepreneurs. My point here is we had this mentality from the beginning. Don't— we use the word cycle. Cycle as an entrepreneur. It was funny. I'll tell you a quick story. I was at my— at our Funnel Launch Live event. We had 2,000 people there. One of the speakers was backstage with us, successful individual. And he, like a lot of people you see online, this guy was an online face and figure. He's like, man, you know, they always have, I made a bunch of money, then I lost it all and I burned it to the ground. Then I made a bunch of money again, then I burned it to the ground. And he was talking to me and Mason backstage. He's like, man, if you two, he goes, you guys are brilliant. If you could figure out how not to cycle as an entrepreneur, meaning just keep it going. Don't do this big up and then big down and then big up and then big down. Don't cycle as an entrepreneur. And for us, we took that down and said, how do we play the long game? As much as we're impatient and move fast and break things, I get that whole concept. But also, a core principle that me, Mason, Lincoln, our core founding team has held is play the long game with each other, with spouses, with employees, with people around you. Understand the longevity of the game we're in. Right now, I am 30 years old. I started my— these first businesses at 22, 21 years old. That was 9 years ago, which is crazy. I'm 30. At 30 years old, I at minimum have 20 to 30 more years in the business field. If you go to Warren Buffett, I mean, Warren Buffett's 90s. What is he? 95, 94? That's 70 more years or sorry, 60 more years. 64 more years. That's a long time. 64 more years. Warren Buffett made 99% of his net worth after the age of 65 years old. Play the long game. Reputation, how you treat people, who you work with, your business partners, just by being in the game is immense. I'll tell you one story from a a friend, mentor of mine. He was sharing with me, he's like, Bridger, during the dot-com bubble, we had a computer technology business. And if you remember 2001, you know, there was this big dot-com burst. A lot of dot-coms were going out of business. And he goes, we were tempted to close our doors as well. We had made lots of money. We're like, ah, let's just close up. He goes, and I'm going to give you rough math, I'm not going to say I'm right, but he's like, you know, local to, you know, in our competitive field, before 2001, there were 80 to 90 competing businesses nearby us. After 2001, there were 3. And he goes, we just stayed in the game. And yeah, we had some bad years, but we just stayed in the game. And it, by being in the game, it immensely helped us just by staying. He's done extremely well since then. I love this quote from my dad. He's just, he drilled this into my brain my whole life. He's like, Bridger, most wars, most wars are won through attrition. Who can just survive the longest? It really wasn't who had the biggest army, who had the big old, you know, best tanks or the best warships. It was actually who could just survive, have enough food, supplies, materials just to survive. Who could outlast? The other one. I think the same thing's true in business. And so, my, you know, we say this all the time, let's play the long game. We're young. We got plenty of time. Let's set building blocks like Fund Launch Partners. We just raised $32 million. We're looking to raise $75 million next year. We're kind of penciling out a Fund 2 right now. This is a long-term investment, very long-term. I mean, Fund 1 is an 8 to 12-year investment. Fund 2 will also be about 8 to 12 years. This is a long-term game. This is a decade-plus investment. Yeah. But done well, we can do extremely well. If we can play longer-term cycles, we can do extremely well. Don't cycle in business. Don't blow up on a business partner. Don't sue and, you know, just screw everybody. And they, you know, sometimes, yes, there's little points of friction. Work on them. Work with your partners on them. Work with your spouse on them. Play the long game. Play the long game. Work through stuff. Like keep building. Think in five, ten, fifteen-year increments. I've been studying Jeff Bezos a lot recently. Jeff Bezos, from his earliest share letter hold share letters shareholder letters there we go. He wrote back in the nineties every quarter a letter to the shareholders, and they're really interesting if you go back and read all these. They're some of the best business advice you'll ever read. But he talked from the beginning. He goes Amazon's going to be a long-term place, the best place for inventors in the world. We will win because we can stick to things much longer than others can stick to them. Most people would give up in 2 to 3 years where we will hold out for 7, 8, 10 years. I believe in, in his shareholder letter, and I might get the date wrong. It was, I think it was 2004. They had prototypes for what he called the Amazon Puck with a P. Amazon Puck. He writes down the prototype. It's a countertop. It looks like a hockey puck that you can talk to, order groceries from, and it sits in your kitchen counter. He had this idea in 2004. Now, as you know, a decade or so later, they launched this with the Amazon Alexa and all the products with that. They had thought about this for a decade prior. And he just said, we can stay in the game much longer than other people can stay. My last business advice is don't cycle as an entrepreneur. And I tell myself this all the time, Bridger, just don't cycle. Just keep going. There's power in just staying in business, playing the long game. Simon Sinek would call this the infinite game. There's finite games, like a basketball game has a scoreboard. Business is an infinite game. You don't really win at business. You just— the goal of business is to stay in business. You don't win at marriage. The goal of marriage is to stay married. You don't, you know, you don't eat so much that you never have to eat again or sleep so much you never have to sleep again. Those are finite games. The infinite game is, can you stay in shape and have a healthy body your entire life? That's an infinite game. Business is an infinite game. Play the long term. Treat people well. Even if someone's not the right fit today, They might be the right fit tomorrow. Don't cycle as an entrepreneur. All right, y'all, that's how we— principles that helped Fund Launch go from $0 to $40 million. Hope that was useful. If it is, send this to a friend or family member that's maybe starting a business with you. These are at least lessons that helped us immensely when building our business, and we will see Fund Launch AI hopefully will be coming out here in the next about 6 to 8 weeks. We're going to start teasing it. We're going to have beta test users on it and start refining with our customers in the next few weeks. So, With that, y'all are amazing. Please comment, like down below. We'll see you in the next video. Bye-bye. Bye.