ClickFunnels Employee Interview: Danny Walsh - Customer Communication Lead

What's up, everyone? My name is Austin Dorman, and I'm a certified funnel builder and Click Funnels ambassador. And today we got a special guest here with us that we're gonna interview and we're gonna get to know, and here is the Danny Walsh. What is up, Danny?

Hey, how you doing? The. The intros, like, got me excited, man. That's. That's, like, super energizing. Right? It's exciting to be here. Great to see, great to be on the show. Excited. Let's go.

Yeah. Thanks for. Thanks for joining us today. So, first of all, I'd like to have you introduce yourself so maybe share a little bit about your background, what you currently do. I know you work at ClickFunnels, so if you could share your role and a little bit about that as well.

Yeah. So my official title is customer communication lead at ClickFunnels, and I started my journey with ClickFunnels as a customer almost 10 years ago. Right. So I've always been in. In Russell Brunson's world, always using clickfunnels, building, growing, scaling my own crazy ideas and ventures using ClickFunnels, and if you ask me, it's the best platform for. For doing that. A couple of years ago, I was a little bit frustrated with some of the things that I was seeing regularly inside of, like, the Facebook group, and I actually reached out to. To Russell and the team and said, hey, can I help with this thing? Can I actually come and offer some of my skills and expertise to see what we could do in this Facebook group and see if we can improve engagement and see if we can get more. More of the good stuff in there and get rid of some of the. The crazy things that. That were going on. And. And I got a yes. It was like, hey, let's go in there and do this. And over the last couple of years of. Introduced the ambassador program, which, Austin, you're an ambassador, and, you know, we're super grateful for everything that you do. All of our other ambassadors, we've worked on things like how do we get people who might have frustrations or problems from our communities into support so we can, you know, if somebody's got an issue or. Or the. They're running into some kind of problem that we can. We can pick those guys up early and then get them into our support queue without them necessarily needing to open a ticket. So we've done a lot of. Around, if you think of that, like a triage process, we've done a lot of stuff with events. Some people Might have come to our Click Funnels Connect event or seen us at Funnel Hacking Live, and we've got a lot more planned. You've seen Click Funnels Connect being announced at Funnel Hacking Live by Russell kind of involved in that. So all things communication, all things community, and there's a lot of other exciting stuff that you don't even know about yet. That I might be able to share some Easter eggs. Maybe I can. Maybe we will. But yeah, my role is all about people connecting people, empowering people and getting more people to use Click Funnels. Right. Because if you're not using Click Funnels, you. You're crazy.

Yeah. What are you doing if you're not using Click Man?

It's like anyway. But yeah, that's. That's kind of a little bit about me. And like I said, I've been doing this for a long time. I was fortunate enough to win to comma club with one of my businesses as well, which was in. In fishing and fishing tackle and, and all of the things, a hobby, interest, niche. So. So I'm very much aware of the struggles that business owners go through when it comes to actually getting funnels that work and doing things like this. You know, it's a pleasure. So thank you for having me.

Oh, that's awesome. Yeah. And that's a fantastic introduction. I love how you explained how you were a customer of ClickFunnels 10 years ago, and then you saw, you identified a problem that ClickFunnels had and you reached out. So it's almost kind of this thing of kind of like what Russell Brunson talks about, about serving and giving back and especially giving back to the ClickFunnels community, which eventually led to a job working at ClickFunnels, which I thought was.

So awesome, would you believe it? And we've got an amazing team at ClickFunnels who literally pour their heart and soul into improving the software, improving education, improving the community. As a customer, I was frustrated about the way that, you know, certain people were behaving in certain way inside of the Facebook group predominantly and appointed some of these things out. And obviously Russell's listened and some of the leadership team have listened and I started to do live videos in there. We started to answer questions, do Q&As, put on, you know, weird and wonderful live shows, trying to, you know, fill a gap that we knew that community needed and it needed that gap filling. And fast forward almost two years now pretty much to the day. We've got live shows three, four times a week. We've got our ambassador program. We've got so much good stuff going on in there, and we're very proactive in banning anybody that might be spamming or trying to share, like, crazy stuff. You know, the one thing that you want when you're a customer of a software or any kind of company is you don't want those spammers and, and scammers going into groups sharing whatever they want. Right. And we've managed to develop some really good systems to keep that at bay and really empower the community through, like, our ambassador program through our events, so that more people using click funnels can get more from that. So it's. It's exciting. It's. It's a great opportunity. Something that I love doing, the team loves doing. You know, clearly Russell and Todd and everyone behind the scenes, we love this stuff. We love doing this. And it is a calling, it is a mission. So how can I serve, I guess, is the. Is the question to you?

Yeah. Yeah. That's fantastic. What maybe the first question I like to ask is how important is having a good community and good structure inside of a community? And I want to kind of emphasize this for all the listeners and viewers as well, because the ClickFunnels Facebook group, there's almost 300,000 members. You know, it's like, how do you still sustain and like, build that good culture, that good community, where it's not spammy, there's, you know, good content, people are serving and helping. How do you. How do you manage that? And how do you. How do you create it and. And keep it going?

So I think the first point. How important is community? If you look at any successful business out there at all, you would be able to also talk about their community. And if you think about ClickFunnels, we've. We've built up this identity of being a funnel hacker, right? So it's the funnel hacker community, Funnel hackers in there building funnels, figuring out, you know, maybe doing custom cod or maybe they're doing funnel builds or, or whatever it is. People excited about using click funnels to grow their business, to grow their customers businesses. And that's where that community really sort of built its name and built its reputation many years ago. And I mentioned the. The 2 comma club, right? So I was sort of 20, 16, 17. I was the guy in the ClickFunnels group that everybody would tag. They needed a funnel. They'd be like, oh, Danny Walsh will build your funnel. And I help lots and lots of people around that time to build the Funnel. And. And when ClickFunnels classic was really just emerging, I was doing a lot with the ClickFunnels affiliate program personally, as. As a customer. And I realized I got to a point that, man, I need to actually have my own business to bear some of this stuff on, right? So I took a decision to step away from teaching people and traveling around and doing the affiliate thing to go and build my own business. And the community was vibrant. It was so exciting. So many great minds in there sharing things without wanting anything in return. And this is a big thing about community is people need to give more than they take. Does that make sense? It's like if everybody in the community was all giving and everyone was sharing without, hey, come and DM me or, you know, download my thing or click my link. It's about sharing. It's about everybody giving. So this. This was all amazing. I went away for three or four years, and I was like, right, you know, Corvid came and we had a couple of little kids, and I was like, right, I'm going to take everything that I've learned. We're going to close this fishing business down. The supply chain and getting goods from China and the cost of goods and all of the things was. Was insane. And we just wanted to, like, come back to. To the funnel world. And it was almost like Dorothy returning to us. Have you seen the two wizard of Oz movies over the. Over the years? The first one's all happy, happy, joy, joy, you know, dancing and singing. The second movie is, like, horrific if you remember that, like, Return to Oz movie and Dorothy comes back and all of the yellow brick roads broken up. That's how I always tell this story. And I literally came back to that community. I'm like, man, what has happened here? Because the things that were once there were no longer there. People didn't seem to be sharing. Everybody had a link, Everybody wanted you in the dms and people were inboxing you and all this crazy stuff. And that's when I was like, man, I would love to try and help install some of the things that I know a community needs in order to be successful. One of those things is being very, very intentional with the rules, making sure that people can't just come and do whatever they want, making sure that we're only adding the right members to the group, improving the quality. And so we've got an ambassador program. We do lives. We are very, again, intentional of the things that we put in there, the content that we share. Working closely with our social media team, and, and all the different departments and clickfunnels. You'll start to see now, more from our engineering team, more of our engineers getting involved. We're doing regular programming to show you the new features. Lots of things that members actually need and want. Making sure that people stick to the rules and they've got a safe space to actually share, talk about clickfunnels, talk about what they're doing right now and on their 2 comma club journey. Right? So it's. To have a community is super important. To manage the community in the way that actually helps people to achieve their goals is even more important. And you've got to get the balance right. 300,000 people, man. Unfortunately, we've banned a bunch of people from there just because they can't stick to the rules. And that's fine. You've got to be willing and able to police your group and, and make sure that people who come there know that it's about whatever topic. They know the ground rules, they know where the content is, they know how to get help and support and they've kind of got guide rails to help them when it comes to making and sharing their own content. If they don't like it and they don't want to adhere to it, unfortunately, they could go to another group. Right, that's, that's how I've always looked at it. And to build a really good, positive, vibrant community takes time. I think that we've got there now with, with clickfunnels and if anybody's watching this who's like, oh, yeah, I remember back in the day, well, it's no longer the case. Right? This is where we are now. It's the future. Come back to the group, check it out and you'll see that it is vibrant, it's welcoming, we've got lots of good content, we've got lots of amazing people sharing without expectation. So if you can get that culture instilled into your community, then you will be very successful. But I don't know of any companies out there that don't have a community around them. So think about that. Think how you can make it engaging, fun, how you can get people sharing with that expectation. There's some ingredients for success and make sure you've got somebody managing your community who's got that experience. That's hopefully some insight and, and the cool stuff for you.

Yeah, that's definitely a lot of cool and interesting stuff right there. I love how you talked about how you have so much stuff and how you go live. I attend feature Fridays, where you drop all the new features, all the live streams as well. There's other ambassadors, including myself, that produce content as well, where I typically stick with YouTube videos, doing new features and also existing features inside ClickFunnels. I know other people focus more on the personal development side as well, and that's been such a cool experience, not only as a user, but also as a ClickFunnels ambassador as well. I remember back in 2021, that's when I first joined the ClickFunnels Facebook group. And I remember there was a point in time where it's like, man, I don't know if I wanna be in this group because there's just so much spam and it wasn't a great culture, so to speak. And so super grateful for you and for your team and all the work for cleaning that up and make it a positive experience as well. I know you mentioned ClickFunnels classic and maybe for the viewers or listeners, they may not know what exactly happened, especially recently where the whole rebrand and stuff. Can you just talk a little bit about that? What's the difference between ClickFunnels Classic, ClickFunnels 2.0 and now we have ClickFunnels. What's kind of all the, the, the difference between them?

It's dead simple. Clickfunnels Classic, you know, this, this is the first ever version of ClickFunnels that did launch literally 10 years ago. Russell Brunson, Todd Dickerson, they brought this to market and funnel hacking, modeling what works and being able to drag and drop your pages so you could effectively go into clickfunnels and drag and drop, put a video, a headline, you know, all the things that you need to build a successful landing page, sales funnel, webinar funnel, all of the things that was revolutionary in the market. And at the time, it was the cutting edge, right? So Everybody was using ClickFunnels. It saved my business on more than one occasion just by the very speed that you could develop, build, launch and, and scale a funnel. And ClickFunnels classic is still there, it's still fully supported, and there's lots of people who've got funnels that they've had for, you know, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 years working in Classic. Why would they need to change that? It's optimized, it's working, it's. It's all doing exactly what it wants. It makes money every single day. They're happy, they're in classic. Recently, two or three years ago, we introduced ClickFunnels 2.0. Which is now just known as ClickFunnels. So we've got ClickFunnels, which is 2.0, we've got ClickFunnels, we've got ClickFunnels classic and the new ClickFunnels, the ClickFunnels that you will probably know and love from today, it's got more functionality and it's simpler than Classic. It's almost like we've taken everything we learned from ClickFunnels classic and improved it, made it faster, made it more streamlined and added more features to it in a way that's suitable for the next 10 years. Right? So it's just like any, any software, any company, they make changes, they do upgrades, they make developments. We decided to leave Classic as it. As it is and work on developing the 2.0, the ClickFunnels version for the future. And people can use both, they could have a choice. It's entirely, it's entirely up to people, what they, what they do to what they need and what's right for their business. So click funnels, as it is, I was like, oh man, I'm never going to leave Classic, I'm never going to use this new thing. And there's a big resistance to it. And I finally made the switch a little over a year ago personally, to be, to be fair. And when I did that, I've honestly never looked back. The new click funnels is. It might seem a little bit more complex because we do have more things in there, but if you just think about it as just get a funnel working inside of ClickFunnels, the funnels are faster, the smarter, the easier to build. You've got things called frameworks which are effectively whole templates. If you think of like share funnels that we used to have in ClickFunnels Classic, you could build a funnel, give somebody a link and share like the funnel in a link. A framework is not just the funnel, it's the workflows, the emails, the automations, all of the things that build that business. You can give that to somebody in a link. So framework, I refer to it as like share funnels on, on steroids or Share funnels are a lot more advanced. This is a game changer, not just for business owners, but for our affiliates as well. So we've got so many things that we could never do in the classic platform just because of the way that it was built, the way that it was architected that we've built into Clickfunnels right now. That just means that, that it is a platform for Today and for the future. Whereas Classic, if you're using that, that's great. And it's, it's still supported, it's stable, it does all of the things. The very way that the, the platform was built limited what we could do. So the new version gives you a lot more flexibility and it's a lot more scalable where we can actually add new apps. For example, we've got the Affiliate center app, we've got our Appointments app, we've got our Opportunities app. All of these little apps can plug into the new version of ClickFunnels and make sure that it's, it's expandable. That's super exciting. And we could also do things like open up the API. So if you are a developer or you've got an amazing team around, you understand this stuff, you can call your customer data in lots of weird and wonderful ways that you just couldn't quite do in Classic. So all of those just couldn't quite. We've got those fixed and we've got those in clickfunnels as it stands now. And if you are in Classic, you can keep your Classic account, you can put it into maintenance mode and then you can build inside of ClickFunnels and get the best of both worlds. If anybody's stuck with that, you reach out to Austin. Right. So it'll, it'll help you on your journey and we are here to support you as well. 100%.

Fantastic. Yeah. And I'll put a link to the ClickFunnels website where they could start their free trial in the description section. Definitely. Highly recommend checking it out. I love ClickFunnels. I love the new ClickFunnels. I guess now it's not 2.0, it's just ClickFunnels now. Yeah. So definitely love it. Well, I'd like to ask you two more questions if that's okay with you before we end. So this first question, it might kind of be multiple questions in one, but I love to hear why you love working at ClickFunnels. What makes it kind of, kind of different and unique compared to other companies? And then also too, if there's, if there's anything that you could share in terms of like, what you're currently working on, that'll be awesome as well.

Yeah, so the, the whole, like, working with the people of ClickFunnels is one of the, the biggest motivators for me. Obviously, I've always used the software, but it's more than just the software. Right. So it's the software. It's the education, it's the community, and it's the impact that we can have on, on people's lives, right? Because if somebody gets a 2 comma club award or even just a 1 comma award, they make $1,000 online. If you think of two commas, it's the two commas in the, in the million, right? If you don't know what I'm talking about. But if you can get somebody to unlock their potential to build a funnel, launch that funnel and start seeing additional revenue coming into the, the household, into the home, you can change people's lives, right? So it's not about money, it's not about software, it's not about community and all these things. It's literally about the people and it's the people that we serve, the impact that we have, the people that they serve and the impact that they have, right? Think, think about that knock on effect. Russell and Todd and Andrew and the team at ClickFunnels have got this vision to share click funnels with the world, share this ethos with the world, and empower as many entrepreneurs as possible.

Right?

When you first come into this world, you might not necessarily know that you are an entrepreneur, but if you imagine you see a video or you learn something, you launch a funnel, you get into this journey next year, you decide, mom, being an entrepreneur for me, I get it, I see it, I'm doing it. You live in a better quality of life. You're impacting the lives of many, many people. That means your impact becomes a legacy. And that's what this is all about. It's about the people. It is about the community. Software enables all of this stuff to happen. We've got amazing education behind the scenes. So there's the people that we serve, there's also the people behind the scenes, the people who I actually work with day in, day out. I've never worked for an organization or with an organization that's so passionate about that impact and about that mission and about changing people's lives. So it's like, hey, we're going to change your life. You're like, oh, what does that look like? This is changing it for the better. And this is changing it for you, for your children, for future generations of your family as well, just by unlocking these skills and knowledge that otherwise it might be in a book that you never read, it might be on a video that you never watched. So it's so much of an important mission, especially when people do face financial hardship and they do struggle with the bills and, and the day to day living. You know, life's hard, right? If you learned how to build a funnel and you learned how to build a business in clickfunnels, you literally are one funnel away from the life that you want. That's a big thing. And we've got the amazing people behind the scenes who strive every single day to make that happen for, for me, for you, for everybody that we serve. And man, there's definitely worse places to work, right? This is amazing. These people are amazing. And the community that we serve, so many amazing people. You come to our events and you get to hang out. Maybe you've got masterminds or different things. So much potential to make such a big impact that I don't want to be anywhere else. So this, this is my people, what I love the most. And being able to do things like this, it's, it's fun. But knowing that you can literally open up clickfunnels and launch something that can make an impact on somebody else's life and make money in the process, it could be seen as. It sounds like magic, right? But it's true, it's real. And check it out, watch the videos, get plugged in. Check us out on YouTube. Join the community. All of the things you are, one funnel away. And I believe that with, with all of my, my being. So yes, do the thing, check it out, sign up.

I love that. It's a win, win, change your life and make money at the same time.

Yeah. I think the impact is a ripple effect of one funnel that you launch. Maybe thinking, oh man, I need to make some money, I need to understand business. But your customers, they then get the benefit of that. And your customers, that is lifechanging for them. When we did the, the fishing business, a guy came to us and said, if it wasn't for you, I would have killed myself. Think about the impact, right? Because he'd never had any friends he didn't know, like anyone to go fishing with. He had medical complaints. So he was nervous about going out himself. And because we launched a funnel and we launched a business that connected him with other people and he was finally able to go fishing with all of the things he'd been buying. And he had that conversation, he said, if it wasn't for this, I would have killed myself. Now that obviously didn't come true and I'm glad it didn't. There will be lots of people like that in your community. If it wasn't for you, their life would have gone in a different direction. So it's important that if you do have a dream, you do have an idea, you do have a calling or a mission that you at least try. ClickFunnels gives you all of the tools to publish your message and get your message out there to the world. Right? So you can put your videos on a page, you can get that out fast without needing to spend hundreds of thousands in development. The barriers to getting your message out there are removed and that's probably one of the most exciting things to me. It's all about the impact.

Yeah, I love that and I just want to share my own experience as well. I went to Funnel Hacking Live last month in February in Las Vegas and it's, it's honestly so crazy how tangible the energy and just the whole like atmosphere of the event is. It's, it's high energy. You're with like minded individuals. The ClickFunnels team, Russell, Todd, Andrew and everyone, they do a really good job with setting the tone and the message in Funnel Hacking Live. And I think that's really important where you have that top down leadership of saying, hey, this is what we stand for, this is our mission, this is our purpose to serve entrepreneurs, to help them change their lives and then change the lives of the customers as well. And I know Russell Brunson, he always talks about that one Funnel Away. It's like you're just one phone away from whether it's the impact, the change, maybe monetary success as well. And that's just been so awesome to see over the years. My first Funnel Hacking Live was actually in, it was in fall of 22, that's where it was in Orlando, Florida. And then I went to Funnel hacking live 2023 where I met you. And then they did a Funnel Hacking Live International. So that was a virtual one. And then funnel hacking live 10 which was in 2025. So hopefully they'll bring that back. That'll be kind of like another story. We'll kind of see what happens there. But, but yeah, I definitely love what you said. You know, establishing first identifying your mission and your calling and then finding who you're called to serve, developing and creating that community. Make sure it's, make sure it's a good community and not, you know what we talked about where it's, it doesn't like there doesn't bring value to like the people in it and stuff like that. So that's all good stuff. And we could probably even do like another segment about missions and callings and stuff like that.

And, and look, you know, if you're building a If you're building your dream and you're impacting the life of people, you don't want just another Facebook group and just another, like, what everybody else is getting, right? You want to add your own flavor to that. You want to add your own flare, and you want to make sure that when people come to you, that it's part of the journey. You kind of got to understand that customer's journey. And that's kind of like if you think funnels are not just the pages that you build in clickfunnels, like, everything's a funnel. And that mentality, that mindset of understanding your customer's journey and how you move them from A to B and how you interact with them along that, that process, the Facebook groups or internal communities, whatever you build, all of that stuff is part of your funnel. You just turning up and coming to work in the morning is part of your funnel, right? All is. Everything's a funnel. And you've got to look at it as. Through that sort of like, funnel mindset, funnel vision. And if you just get a little piece of this and start implementing a little piece of this in your business, we've got the software, the education, the community, everything that it takes to sort of get you over the line and allow you to share that vision, share that message. It could be hobbies, interests, faith, whatever. Whatever it is that you're empowered to do. But I know we've. We've worked with so many entrepreneurs now, so many people having success. It's just. It's just a pleasure to be part of. It really is.

Yeah. That's awesome. And for the last question, this is more related to funnels. So it's going to be more of kind of your. Your. Your background, experience and whatnot. But I'm developing this idea and concept called funnel engineering. So we know funnel building, which is you. You build the actual funnel and then funnel engineering. I like to think of it as more the analytical side, the optimization side of it. And so I would like to ask you if. If you were able to share just one funnel engineering tip. One tip to help the. The viewers, the listeners, to help optimize their funnel. What. What would that be?

I think it comes back to your mindset again, right? And funnel engineering sounds like continual evolve, evolving, continual improvement, continual development of something that you have created. And if you come back to the previous point, everything's a funnel. You don't just want to build it. You want to keep it in the best shape possible. And you want to make sure that every. Every Opportunity that that funnel represents is, is thought about, taken care of, and that you're actually making sure that your customers are on the right path, they're on the right journey. So if you just build something and leave it, it is what it is. It's stuck in time. But if you build something and you care for it, it's kind of like a garden, right? So you, you plant your garden and then you start to prune and you start to plan and you add more different bits and pieces to your garden that could become an amazing garden. Same with the funnel, right? It might not start out amazing, but it'll get there if you engineer it and you care for it and you, and you look after it. So it is a mindset thing. It does tie back into. Everything's a funnel. I think from all of my experience, you would be somewhat crazy just to build something or put something out there and then just leave it. Everybody's who's successful in, in, in funnels, in entrepreneurship, in, in business, they're continually testing and tweaking and optimizing and changing things to get the most out of the opportunity for them, for the people they serve, and also make sure that, that things are not just stuck in time. So funnel engineering, I'm, I'm all for it. I'm sure there's a link. Check it out. Reach out to Austin. I would love to learn more about this as well. So let's, let's get you on one of our lives, one of our podcasts. Sounds like you, you've got something there and it'd be interesting. Like I said, another segment. I know we're probably over time, but where we can discuss this in more detail. Because that concept is really exciting to me and it just shows the, the power of our community as well, where people are taking concepts, taking learning, and they're not allowing that those things to stand still. You're developing them, you're honing them, you're making them your own. And that's again, super exciting. It's one of the coolest things about this is, is the people and what the people are doing with this knowledge, with this education, with this software. Let's go.

Yeah, let's go. Yeah, it's definitely, it's. It's so interesting where it always kind of boils down to the people, you know, either the people that you work with or the people that you interact with. And that's what makes Clickfunnels so special, in my opinion, is the people, the clickfunnels employees, the people inside the community, which is so awesome.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's been a pleasure.

Yeah. Thank you so much, Danny, for joining us today. Like I mentioned, I'm gonna put a link to the ClickFunnels website where people could could check out and start their free trial of ClickFunnels. If anything, check out what ClickFunnels is all about because it's so awesome. I know. Danny mentioned, he talked about all these different apps. I have YouTube videos walking through the apps as well, where you could create appointments, you could create surveys, you could have an affiliate center as well. So really super awesome and powerful tools inside ClickFunnels. So thank you again, Danny, for joining us today. My name is Austin Dorman, and we'll see you all next time.