How I Built a 10M Business

So today I actually want to share something pretty cool with you guys. This is a live call I did with a friend of mine that was looking to launch an online business. So I actually walked him through the entire step-by-step process that we launched Funnel Launch to now almost a $20 million revenue company in just a matter of about 3 and a half years. So in this video, I kind of pull back the curtain and show the exact way we launched our product, how we found product-market fit, how we actually approached this game. We actually launched a course prior that Failed and what we learned from that failure and how people that want to go build courses, this is how we created one of the top courses in the entire world in our niche and it's a pretty fun video. So, I recorded this and after I said, man, that's pretty good. I'd love to share with my YouTube channel. So, this is kind of you guys getting inside peek to a live coaching call I did with a friend of mine. There's this allure and I got the same thing of like, I'll just launch the course. Like, courses sound so easy. I'll just launch a little course. I'll sell it for a couple hundred bucks. I'll just make passive income on it. It'll be so amazing and I'll make like 5 grand a month or 10 or 50 or 100 grand a month passively with my course. And at least in my experience, and I work with a lot of people that run courses, is it's like not the case at all. Like courses are very hard to run and be successful with. There's a reason most courses never ever sell a dollar or less than $1,000. And it takes a lot of work. So I was telling Sam, like, it's to run a fund or to run a course is like the same amount of work. It takes like everything you got. And so just be aware of that going in. I launched a course 5 or 6 years ago on real estate, and I had that premise like, oh, we're going to launch it. We'll just do a couple of little webinars, it'll run. And we spent 8 months. I probably spent $12,000, $10,000 to $12,000 in development, like filming video guys and like ads and like running these webinars. And we literally sold like 3 people on our course at $1,000 apiece, like $3,000. And it was so depressing. And finally we were like, huh, there's also about 100 other real estate courses out there. There's Dean Graziosi. There's all these other people that run real estate courses. Like we just assumed we'd launch a course in this space that was a little bit different and it ended up flopping way hard. We, since then, we went and bought a bunch of stuff. So I was telling Sam this, we've spent about a quarter million dollars in courses and communities teaching us how to do this. We bought Steve Larsen's course for $15,000. We joined Russell Brunson's group, $150,000. We bought Clients Community for $10,000, another YouTube course for like $12,000. We just keep buying stuff. And so we've learned quite a bit. And now that we launched, we launched, now we have 3 courses. We have a coaching group and another coaching group. We've done about $20 million in sales. On those because we've kind of figured some stuff out on how to launch these. This is where I think this is what I did wrong is a lot of people just assume that people will love their course even if they make— I have people that have come to me that have really good content, like a really good course, like it's solid, but no one cares and no one buys because they didn't figure out how to do a really good job of creating great hooks with a story that then drive customers over to your offer. Have you guys heard the term, like this concept of hook, story, offer before? Everything, I'll just give you a quick overview. Everything I do and everything online marketers do or everything is all goes into this. So this is actually a really easy framework that helps me like when making a video or a podcast or a channel or an email or whatever, I always think hook, story, offer. So the hook, this is your first, you know, 1 to 5 seconds. This is the top of your landing page. This is your email subject line. This is the first thing you see. It's kind of obvious, like your hook, like what hooks in the audience. You'll see online, if you start setting ads, you'll see a bunch of great hooks. Like Tai Lopez back in the day was like, hey, I'm in my garage with my library and my Lambos, right? That was his hook. And it pulled a lot of people in. Next on that hook is some kind of story that will draw the person in and kind of warm them up. So like, for example, when I do stuff, I'm like, hey, have you ever wanted to go buy— like a question— have you ever wanted to go buy like a bunch of businesses and pull them together? And that hook, by the way, resonates with some people. It doesn't resonate with some people. I— the people that that resonates with, though, are my dream clients that resonate with that hook. I've done other hooks where I'm like, hey, did you know I'm in Las Vegas? Like, that half of these buildings are all owned by the same company. That's an interesting hook. Like, people don't know that fact, whatever the hook is. Then I go into a story, my— and I'll go into my— sometimes my story, like, hey, my name is Bridger Pennington. I'm the founder of 3 funds. My dad is actually the co-founder of a $48 billion family of real estate funds. I pitched my dad for money. My dad still never invests in any of my funds, but he's been a great mentor and coached me, helped me launch my own funds. And now we're helping hundreds of other people around the world launch their funds as Well, if you want to learn about what even a fund is, how this thing works, we have— and then down below we have an offer. So we have a bunch of offers like a webinar. Hey, we have a free training for 90 minutes on, you know, how funds work. We have a free— we actually give away a free course. So we have like a 40+ video course for free. You guys can join. We can hop on a free call and help you with your whatever. We have a group that you can join, whatever the offer is that resonates with that hook and story. So, and by the way, we just take a super shotgun approach to this. So I film, we publish, I don't know, 30 to 50 ads a week on— maybe that's a little bit much, but maybe it's more like 20 to 30 ads a week. But we test out different hooks and stories and offers over and over and over again until they hit. And like for us, like 1 out of every 50 ads have just for whatever reason just hit. And then we spend like $500,000 on that ad or $1 million on that ad. And the other ones we all just, we just kill. Like I'll film a video in my studio and I'll film 5 different hooks for the same video, and then we just edit it and we plug in the same story and the same offer, or maybe some different offers. So I film essentially one video, but I filmed a couple different hooks, a couple different offers. Now it's like 20 variations of that. Does that make sense? You can A/B test what works. So that concept I just brought up, A/B testing, is massive. I'm sure you guys already know what that means, but you'll go and test little variations of things. So you'll test like the same— sometimes the ad, let's just call it ad 1. You'll test it, ad 1 and ad 1 of both markets, but you just do it to a different audience.

Maybe this is audience of just men.

Maybe this an audience of just women and you see which one performs better. And then you learn, you have data that comes back to you and you go, okay, well, we found out that we've got more women buyers than men. Maybe we tweak for ad 2. Let's make it more towards women. Let's see how it performs. Or let's switch up the hooks and we just do A/B testing. You test one thing at a time. You don't test 10 things at a time. You test one thing at a time. You see what works and what doesn't work. This is the same for landing pages. We, we use ClickFunnels. We love using ClickFunnels because they allow you to A/B test very easily. So we'll build a landing page that has like, you know, our website, whatever it looks like, and then we will build an exact duplicate copy, landing page 2, but we change, you know, the color of the button text or we change the headline and that's all we change. And then we run traffic, we send 100 leads here and we send another 100 leads to the landing page 2 and we see which one performs or converts better. And I'm telling you, tell you, crazy enough, like we have seen massive differences, like a headline on landing page 2 versus 1. We like landing page 1, let's say we get like an 8% opt-in rate. We change the landing page headline, just the one, just the text on the headline, and that Comes from 8% to 16%. We're like, holy crap! Like that's freaking amazing. So then what we do is we then say, okay, landing page two is our control. Landing page two here. Let's try to even beat it even more. So we'll leave that one. Then we then we make a new one called landing page three. We keep the maybe we keep the headline, but then we change the video down below. And ta-da! Like we run it and landing page three. Let's say ah God man it dropped. We went back to 12% opt-in rate. See what you do is you do A/B testing back and forth. This one's still at 16%. So okay, we're gonna keep landing page two and then we go.

All right.

Landing page is still the winner. Let's now try it against landing page 4. And landing page 4, we come up with a new headline and it knocks it out of the park and we're actually at 32% opt-in rates. Like, holy crap, it like doubled us. Okay. Landing page 4 is now the new winner. We will then keep testing. So like our current funnel, I think we're on variation like 85. Like we've tested 85 variables on that landing page to make sure it's the most optimized landing page we can have. And by the way, we— I think we're around a 30% opt-in rate. On that, that's our control. We can't beat it. We like keep trying new landing pages. We just can't beat it. Like it's so good. So we'll do the same thing with with ads, with emails, with webinars. All run. I'm not sure if you guys are familiar with the webinar model, but like you hop on a training. I teach something, then we'll like we'll like pitch. Usually we'll pitch our course, or maybe we'll just say, "Hey, hop on a call or join our group." Whatever the offer is, and we test that thing like crazy. We watch how many people joined, how many people like dropped off. What was you know? We A/B test the whole thing back and forth. Any questions? Sorry, I'm just throwing info at you, but any questions so far? Is this helpful?

I mean, I've been just thinking off the top of my head, like, as we get started with our— with having a low budget and not— I guess, like, can you A/B test with a lower budget? And is it a bet— is it a good idea to start by looking at someone like Rob Built's landing page and being like, hey, he's probably gone through all these tests, why don't we just build a page that looks exactly like his? Like, is that a good way to start? I know those are like 3 different questions in one, but—

Yes. So to the last one, yes, go copy what's already working. Go hack the best person in your industry. Just cop— they've already spent the millions of dollars testing, so just copy their landing page. I 100% agree with that. I'll actually tell you, we launched Funnel Launch on a $500 budget and we've never put more money in than that, which is kind of cool. Now we've done over $20 million, about $20 million in sales and all this cool stuff. This is how we did it. I'll kind of break it down. So every business that I like to start, I like to give myself a timeline and a budget because some businesses, like you run them for like 6 months and 8 months and like, oh, we'll put some more money in. Like, you never know when to stop or when to go. Anyways, I really like timelines and budgets for any course. I'm going to tell you right up, you guys should set the timeline of 3 weeks and $500. You've got to just be decided like on or off the pot in 3 weeks from today. and you only have $500 to do it. This will force you to make decisions. Too many businesses, they, oh, let's have a meeting. Let's go to lunch. Let's think about it. We'll whiteboard. Like, dude, it takes a year when really, if you just sat down for a weekend, you could build it and do it all in a weekend, especially an online course. So this is what we did. Me and my partner Mason, we're like, hey, we got this idea for this thing called Funnel Launch. We got 3 weeks, $500. What are we gonna do? And so we said, okay, let's test. So we went on TubeBuddy. We found out a bunch of topics that we thought were good. We then went and built. So I'll kind of draw out what we built here. We built about 16 ads. So I'll draw them as boxes right here. 16 ads that were different. Like I got my iPhone, I filmed like, hey, do you want to start a trading fund? Like to go trade cryptocurrency? Do you want to start a fund to like do X? Or we tried all these hooks. So these were all just hooks that we were trying out. These then 16 ads, it took me like a, you know, couple hours to film those. Again, 3 weeks, right? We then built out 2 landing pages. Okay, here's our landing pages. I think we built a few more, but I think at the start we only built 2. We might have built 3, but I'll just call it 2 for now. This one we had whatever we had on it, and this one we were totally different. We built 2 totally different landing pages just to see which one performed, and then we were going to A/B test after that. The landing pages were a webinar opt-in. So it was like, hey, we're throwing a live training. You can come learn about funds on Thursday, like sign up and you can come join whatever. That was, that was the premise. That was the offer on the webinar. Then what would happen? We built the page. The next page was the thank you page, but we said we didn't have a webinar. I hadn't built a webinar yet or a product or anything. And so on the thank you page, what we did was we wanted to test to see if people would opt in. We would say, hey, sorry, the webinar is full and we're not doing any more. So sorry about that. But we've actually made a really cool offer for you. We've built out this what we call it. We call it the mini vault at the time. And I had a video here. And it was explaining what was in the mini vault. Hey, we've got 10+ videos. We've got an Excel spreadsheet, a workbook. We had it. We built a whole value stack. We can talk about how we build those stacks. Typically, you don't want to just make a course like, hey, there's just 10 videos. It doesn't sound very sexy. Hey, we have 10 videos, but also we have a workbook. We have a Facebook group. We have like an Excel downloadable spreadsheet that you can use and like play with all these little tools that you can add in, make your offer sound way more stacked up. It's called offer stack. So we offered this here and this was for $40. $7. We sold this thing.

Okay.

And on the bottom, we also added, hey, if you want to hop on a one-on-one call with Bridger, we just threw it in there. It's $500. I think it was $250 at the time, but I'll say $250. I think we raised to $500. It was $250. So we, we launched this page.

Okay.

And by the way, we didn't have anything built. So what we did, if someone purchased this, what we would do on the next page is say, hey, we actually have— I have a video right there like, hey, we actually haven't built the course. We actually will send your money back. I just wanted to test to see if you'd buy it. But, but if you want to stay, we're going to build this course in a couple of weeks. If you want to stay with us, great. We'll give you the course. And by the way, we'll actually work with you. You can actually help us build the course out. It'd be amazing. If not, though, I'm totally fine. I will hit refund right now. Just let me know what you want to do. So we were really upfront with people because the whole purpose of this funnel for us, I wanted to test out again. I only had 3 weeks and $500. I wanted to test out if someone would actually pull out their credit card and Buy. I wanted to test if someone would actually buy this thing. And so we ran this, we had a $500 ad budget. We ran these ads to these landing pages. The first weekend we spent about— well, we were— we started doing well. We spent about $500 on ads. We made back about— I'll call it the first week. We made back about $1,200 on our first week. And we were like, whoa, like, this is freaking amazing. Like, people like this. And we got a ton of data on which hooks did better than some did. You know, some didn't do very well, which landing page did better. And some, you know, one of the landing pages didn't do very well. And we had a— we had, I think, 1 or 2 people get refunds. But most of the people emailed in and was like, dude, no, this sounds awesome. I'm with you. Like, we'll wait a couple of weeks and we'd love to have the product. And we were like, cool. So now we're getting money. And what we did, by the way, we took the $1,200 and we put it back into ads and we kept— and then I filmed some more ads and all of a sudden we were super motivated. We're like, okay, this is working. Like there's actually sales coming out.

So let's do this.

So we put the money back into ads. I then spent the whole weekend. We filmed, I think, 15 videos in about 3 days and we edited them in my house. Like we built the entire course in about 3 days. We uploaded it to a cool— like we— I think we use ClickFunnels at the time. We upload this cool backend course and then we started letting people join inside of this community. We also had a Facebook group. So I started going live in the Facebook every day. I'd go live. Hey, what's up? Brand new people that are live. Hey, what do you guys like about the course? What's missing? Like, and what they were doing, they started building the course with me. Oh, Bridger, I wish we had a video on X. And I was like, okay, maybe I'll go film a video on X. We'd go film a video on X and all these people started to buy and join and build this, this thing with us. Additionally, we actually captured all the emails right here and started building a list. And the list is massive. And it was for a lot of reasons. So to wrap this story up, we ran this for the next— let's, I think let's call it about 45 days. We spent on Facebook ads about $79,000 on Facebook ads because we just would roll the money back in. We were just like, okay, we'll just roll it back in, roll it, roll it, roll it. We made just about $80,000. So we essentially broke even in 45 days, which was freaking amazing though, because we had about 1,000 buyers that had bought our thing and we now had a community that was telling us what kind of videos they wanted, what kind of course they wanted, like all this kind of stuff. And we, I think we generated like 6,000 emails from this. And a lot of people were asking for like the next thing. And so then from there, we now had like a community. We had an audience, like a little group. And so then we started teasing this thing that we called— it's currently called the Academy. And we're like, hey, this Academy is going to be awesome. We started— and then I went out and filmed all these big fund managers, brought them together. We built— I think at the time it was about an 80-video course, 80 videos. We've got Excel templates, videos. We had 12 mentors come in and we kind of teased it. We followed the Jeff Walker PL— if you guys don't know who Jeff Walker is, I'd highly recommend that book. So Jeff Walker Launch, he runs through the PLF style formula launch of like an online business. So Launch by Jeff Walker, like you should, that should be your Bible. We followed that book to a T. We launched our course. We made in 2 and a half days, we made $144,000 in about 2 and a half, 3 days launching this course. We sold it for $1,997 and that was all cash and all profit. $144,000 profit to me and Mason. Right to our pockets because we had already built the list. We already had buyers. We had a self-liquidating offer on the bottom. We launched a $2,000 course. We made $144,000 within 7 months. We'd already made $1 million on that course within 12, about 11 months. We made $2.5 million on that course because we had a list. Our leads were for free essentially because we were self-liquidating our leads because we had a $47 product at the bottom that had liquidated all of our leads. And we just kept testing. And by the way, we didn't take all that home. We just kept throwing it back in the business and building and getting more leads and hiring people. And now we've done somewhere near about $20 million in sales. We had an event, just barely 2,500 people. We had— we rented out the Miami Convention Center. We had Ed Mylett fly in. Like, we do these huge things now, all because we did that, which is kind of fun.