Dave Woodward — The Story Behind Clickfunnels And Their Biggest Promotions

Boom, boom, Boom. Boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear. What's up, everyone? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. My name is Matt Wolf.

Hello.

I'm here with Joe Fear.

That's me.

And we've also got somebody else we're going to chat with in a minute. The question for you.

Yes, sir.

Have you ever heard of a tool called Click Funnels?

Yes, of course I have.

It's actually kind of a popular tool.

Yes, it is.

We actually use it in our business. That's why you should have heard of it.

It's called. It's quite an amazing tool, and we do use it every single day.

Well, today we have Dave Woodward from ClickFunnels on the show. No. Yes, we have him on the show today.

Omg.

Omg. So we're gonna talk to him. And here's what I think is really exciting about this is I love getting the behind the scenes of big businesses. I love hearing behind the scenes. And I got to pick Dave's brain about how ClickFunnels was essentially made, how it came into being, and I thought that was really cool. What was your favorite part about talking to Dave?

You kind of freaking me out with your showman voice right now. His motions. This isn't normal, Matt. Dave was just an amazing dude in general. I love the enthusiasm with Dave.

He's all about people. I feel like at the end of the day, we get into tactics about how to create these challenges that empower people, that show them how to do things, motivate. There's all these different ways he does it through challenges. That's one of the things a 30 day challenge that ClickFunnels actually just wrapped up around the time of this recording. But they're gonna do more, so don't worry if you missed it, but these things have. They just sound amazing. He'll break it down completely, but the end result is you're gonna get really rabid. You know, evangelist type fans for whatever you have. But also, it just creates this funnel. It's a different type of funnel. So this is pretty much the newest funnel that ClickFunnels is now testing and experimenting. And they are. He actually breaks down the stats and they're pretty dang effective, I would say. Yeah.

Now, the 30 day challenge concept is awesome. We also talked to him about why they do podcasting. We talked to him about Funnel Scripts, which is another really cool tool that we use and we kind of learned about how that came to be. So wide ranging conversation, really, really cool stuff. But before we do, what do we do? Was there something you wanted to tell them?

Oh, I don't know. Well, if you don't have clickfunnels, probably should get clickfunnels because it's pretty dang good.

You can get it@evergreenprofits.com ClickFunnels Just saying.

That is a good source. And we'll give you some pointers if go through that link and ask us questions. But we also have our amazing course on audience building and traffic. Yes, that is basically our bread and butter. Everything we experiment and do and teach about how to do all the stuff traffic related, it's in that thing. I mean, it's literally a behemoth with course, community, more training updates, all that fun stuff.

And we actually have a special thing going just for listeners of the podcast. So that's you. If you're listening to this, we're going to give you a secret, super, super secret coupon code.

Don't tell anybody else.

And it's really easy to remember if you go to evergreenprofits.com traffic that's where you can learn about our traffic course. And if you use the coupon code shirt S H I R T shirt.

I like that you have to really.

Spell that word in case you don't know how to spell shirt. Use the coupon code shirt and we're gonna hook you up with a free Hustle and Flowchart or Evergreen Profits T shirt. And that's how we know that you heard it from the podcast. And we're gonna hook you up.

We got your back, literally. With a shirt.

Yes. And your front.

In the front.

Yes. All right, before we go off on some silly rant, let's go talk to Dave Woodward.

Let's do that. From clickfunnels over to Dave. Hey, Dave, we're live. Thanks for hopping on the show.

God, I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, man, we're on yours. What? About a month ago or so, Funnel Hacker Radio. It was a fun time.

Great results. Everyone loved it. So thank you so much for all the value dropped, of course.

Anytime. And yeah, I mean, just everything you guys bring to this world with clickfunnels and everything else that we probably don't even know about that you're doing. Thank you. You're welcome. Yeah, a lot of folks listening, I know reference clickfunnels all the time. So you're one of the head guys over There making big things happen.

That's fun. We have a good time.

Be cool to kind of break down your story and kind of. I don't know if that's like clickfunnels at the same time, but they're both, I'm sure, very interesting. Yeah.

I'm kind of curious how you got into the world of marketing, entrepreneurship, business, that kind of thing. And then. And I'm also curious about the click funnel story. So the whole. The whole journey. Sure.

Well, I actually started off pre med, got accepted to medical school, and a week before I was supposed to go, decided that wasn't for me. So my dad's an attorney, my mom's a nurse. Devastated, both of them. They're like, what are you going to do with your life? I'm like, I don't know, but I just don't want to do that. So I actually got involved in at the time, employee benefits. And we ended up taking a company from Texas, moved to California where I lived last 20 years. We sold that company, really through the sale of that company is where I found my love of marketing. I just, I got so excited about it. I then set up my own marketing agency, got heavily involved primarily in the direct response marketing. At the time, had clients in the health insurance industry and the fitness industry. Mortgage industry was actually making a lot of mortgage guys a ton of money. So I thought, you know what, I should just do that for myself. So I set up a mortgage company. So I've. I played the entrepreneurial type of thing. I rode the mortgage wave up, rode it crashing down, lost a ton of money, then got into flipping houses and using marketing to help sell houses. So for me, marketing has just been my passion. It's what I love. It's exciting for me. I'm kind of a nut when it comes to watching the numbers and things, trying to make sure that it all works. There's a lot of people who throw a ton of money at it and hope some of it sticks, which really isn't how we like to do things here.

We're.

If we were VC funded, maybe that would work, but we're all privately funded here at our own pocket. So I met Russell probably about 10, 12 years ago during this whole Internet thing. It was kind of funny. I was in a situation where I had a bunch of clients who again, we were doing primarily direct response marketing. This was like 2006, 2007, 2008. And I thought, gosh, there's got to be something more to this whole Internet game. And Russell and Stu McLaren actually were doing an event about affiliate marketing. I thought, I want to figure this whole thing out. So I went to that event, and I learned a long time ago, you can either work your way in or buy your way in. And I was at that event and they said, hey, you know what? If you'd like to take us out to, you know, one of us out to lunch or dinner and pick our brain, you know, sign up in the back of the room. So I raced in back of the room and I filled up every single breakfast, lunch, and dinner spot that Russell had, and we just became a lifelong friend since then. Prior to ClickFunnels, we did a whole bunch of different projects. Some of the network marketing and the fitness and the real estate and a bunch of different niches and kind of keeping our own businesses separate. And then when ClickFunnels came around, he invited me in as a partner, and the rest has been history. So that's kind of my connection to Russell.

That's cool. So with ClickFunnels, I'm curious, how did the idea for ClickFunnels happen and.

How did you get into developing it? Because I know my experience with Russell was when he was kind of more in the info space, I know he did the potato gun thing, and then there was the success, etc. Which was kind of like a daily deal site. I remember some of that kind of of stuff. How did all this kind of evolve into click funnels?

Oh, great question. So what happened was, at the time Russell was doing, as you mentioned, a whole bunch of different businesses and started to see the exact same thing happening time and time again, where it's like, okay, I've got this great idea. I want to get this to launch. But he had to deal with a graphics guy, he had to deal with the tech guy, had to deal with a coder, had to deal with. And it was like, gosh, this has taken so long. And by the time I actually get it ready to go, I've missed the opportunity. And it wasn't as big of a deal. When you're doing information, when all of a sudden you start having a warehouse full of supplements, it totally changed the game. And that's where ClickFunnels was kind of born. Out of necessity, there was a product, a neuropathy product he had at the time, and literally a warehouse full of supplements and couldn't get it sold fast enough. And we're going, this warehouse is literally costing us a ton of money. And I don't like the way the copy is. And he Couldn't go in and just change the headline, had to send it back to the graphics guy and they had to create an image and it was just like, oh, there's got to be an easier way. And so that's where Todd, who is our co founder, Todd and Russell kind of came together. Todd was doing. Todd's just a Ruby on Rails, just genius whiz, bang, self taught tech guy. Just blows my mind what he can pull off. But he literally said, you know what, let me see. It was about the same time leadpages received their first round of like 5 million funding or something. He's like, dude, I could knock that off in a night, that's no big deal.

And so Todd went to town. It was more than a night but he basically created, he goes, you can't just have a landing page. That sucks. You got to actually have something where it's a funnel, we need a funnel. And so he's created the whole thing in a couple of weeks, months. And that's really what out of necessity ClickFunnels was born. We were gonna use it primarily for ourselves at the time, but there was more people interested in the software than there were in the product. So switched gears.

Yeah, I love the fact that it was out of necessity. So a, you're going to make it as amazing as you possibly can for yourself. But also you weren't detracted or swayed by leadpages and the fact that they just got this big round of cash. They pretty much proved that this is a necessity obviously in investors minds. But for the market itself we all needed that and, and there was room for clickfunnels as well. So it's just really cool to not like ah, well they're already doing it.

Well I just remember those days too. I think the first time I ever was involved in a product Launch was around 2009 and I think it was pre any sort of page builder that was out there. So we had to go and hire a designer to create the design. And the design was literally an image file. So they made a website that was just an image file and then you had to hire a coder to go turn that image into code. And, and then like if you wanted to change a menu item then you had to change it on every page that that menu linked to and it was just a nightmare, you know. So it's like stuff like. I feel like a lot of people take things like ClickFunnels for granted today, but if you knew how you had to build websites 10 years ago in the old days.

It definitely dates us there. We've been around a long time, guys. But I think you're totally right though, because the key there is you're in a situation where people don't understand the value and so they get frustrated. Well, I can't drag and drop it as fast as I want. I'm like, you actually have the ability to drag and drop it. It's like complaining you're flying and your flight's delayed. I'm like, you're in a plane.

It's okay. Five minutes is going to be okay.

Yeah. Yeah. That's really cool. So what exciting things are happening now at ClickFunnels that you'd like to share?

Oh, my gosh. Every day is exciting. For me. This is a dream come true. It's kind of a. It's been so much fun. I think for me, honestly, the thing that excites me the most is the success of our customers. Nothing excites me more than that. I mean, yeah, we have our own internal success and that's a lot of fun, but when we start getting our applications for our 2 comma club awards, those things just thrill me to death. We've got over 411 now that have made over a million dollars inside of a sales funnel. 31 now that have done over 10 million inside of a sales funnel. So those are the things that excite me a ton. But I think the ones that excite me even more are, are those people the success stories when they made their first dollar online or their first thousand dollars? I'm like, you got it. It actually works. You can now scale that. It's proof of concept. So take that and go with it. So those are the stories that I just. I get so excited about. So read through Facebook or whatever else. It's like, yes.

Yeah, I was gonna say your Facebook group, the ClickFunnels Facebook group is just like, it's so awesome. Cause I feel like daily there's some sort of inspirational story of somebody that finally figured out how to make that first hundred dollars. And I know it's not that big to you guys, but this is world changing to me. But when I see that stuff that, that lights me up, that other people are accomplishing even that kind of thing. Because I remember what it felt like to make like a first hundred dollar day and go, holy crap, this is actually real. Like, I can actually probably stop doing this other job over here eventually.

Oh, there's not. I remember those days, that day exactly. It was like I remember calling my wife Going, look, look. She's like, how much it costs to make it? I'm like, that doesn't matter. I made it. I made $100. That's what matters.

Yeah, no, it's true. We can refine the cost later. That's okay. I made this thing happen. But it's so true because you guys have this like this platform that's just so available to anyone starting out from nothing or even a million plus dollar business, and it's as valuable as just how you apply it. And that's how we use it in different ways than I'm sure most other people that we talk to on the podcast here.

Now let's talk about the challenges that you guys are doing. You mentioned before we hit record that you guys are really excited about these, these 30 day challenge concepts. And I'm, I'm curious to kind of dive down that rabbit hole because we didn't really go deep before we hit record. So I'm kind of hearing the concept for the first time now.

So we actually, you pro. Everyone's probably seen these fitness challenges out there and they were the craziest for the longest time. And there's actually businesses built around that exact model. One of our inner circle members, Natasha Haslett, she was doing kind of a challenge like that inside of her own business and she kind of brought it to us. And so we took that and kind of refined it. And there's. So when we talk about, for us, it's a 30 day challenge and we now refer to it as it's our one funnel away challenge. And the whole idea is we are, we're just joking around as far as you're just one funnel away. You don't know which funnel that is from making that hundred dollars or that thousand or that million. But it's just one funnel. And so it's. The challenge is really to get a person started, to get them going, to get them to see action. And I look back at the whole fitness thing and for a lot of people on the fitness challenges, what most of them they're doing is literally just get out of bed and get to the gym. That's all you have to do. You don't have to work out. You just got to get to the gym and that's a success for you. So the other challenges inside of Clickfunnels work the exact same way. You don't have to build the whole funnel out in the first day. It's little tiny baby steps. And so what we've seen is.

What we ended up doing Back in early September was we did our 30days.com and what we did was we went out to 100 of our two, club award winning funnels builders and basically said if you lost everything and all you had was click funnels and your marketing knowledge, what would you do? And so they created literally a 30 day plan step by step. Day one, I would do this. Day two, I would do this. And so those 30 plans were all built out and we thought, you know, as we're building out that funnel, how could we actually, what could we do with that? It's, it's great that they did it, but how could someone who receives that, what could they do with that content to actually implement it? And that's where the birth of the challenge came was, okay, that's what they did. Now let's take what they did and have you actually implement that for the next 30 days. And so what happened then is Russell did a 10,000 foot level. Here's, this is the scope of what's going to happen over the next 30 days. Julie Stoyan, who works with us now, basically went in and said, okay, let me break down Russell's grand vision into more step by step type of things. And these are all the, all the training modules, everything else. And then Steven Larsen, who used to be Russell's funnel builder, came in and every single day he was basically kind of like the drill sergeant, actually was in the military and everything else. So it fit his personality real well. But that's what a lot of people need. It's kind of like when you hire a trainer. And I've hired a trainer this year for no other reason than just to make sure I was held accountable, to get to the gym and make me do what I'm supposed to do 100%. And that's really how the challenge works, where you have a person who's actually doing it there with you, telling you every single day, okay, this is what you got to do. And he's on, he's on live basically about 15, 20 minutes. Just kind of say, okay, this is what you got to do. And a lot of it's just for most of us, it's not the tactical stuff, it's the mindset stuff. It's like, oh, you're having, you're struggling with this. These are the things we're seeing in our Facebook. We actually use Mighty Networks for that challenge. So it's more of a community outside of Facebook and they log in and so we can see what the challenges people are having and oh, you know, I wasn't able to do it because of this or this. So we're able to address those on a daily basis. And it's really holding someone's feet to the fire for 30 days. And it was kind of fun. I'm actually trying to look here at the metrics. So in the 30days.com we ended up having 7,557 people actually bought that product. And for that product, when they signed up, they got the challenge for free. And so we had roughly 7,000 people start off, people who actually enrolled in Mighty Networks was just about 4,500. And we actually had just over 2,000 completed by the end of the 30 days. Wow. So fantastic numbers. I mean, just as far as going through the funnel. But the cool thing for me was.

As the owner of ClickFunnels type product, we were actually able to train our customers because at the end, obviously there was an upsell and opportunity for them there. But what happened was they became really dialed in on exactly what they have to do and they started having success. And the dream would be able to create $1,000 or your one comma within the first 30 days. And most of them, to be honest, most of them didn't do that. But the testimonials were huge. A couple more like, you know, I've had a ClickFunnels account for two years and I've never done anything with it. Cause I didn't know what to do or, you know, I've been sitting here just, you know, paying, and I know there's something out there. I just, I appreciated having someone just tell me every single day, just do this one thing. And those little tiny baby steps they added up to where they started having this community. And everyone inside was like holding other people accountable. So it wasn't just Steven. And it was really neat for them for us to see the success that people were having. But more important than that was the community that got built. Because at the end of 30 days, basically it's going away. And they're like, no, no, no, you can't take away our community. And so again, I would recommend to anybody at all, whether you have a physical product or information product to tie a challenge into, totally changes the dynamic. The metrics and the numbers are crazy. I can go through all the metrics numbers if you guys want to. But most importantly, what happens is that community that gets built in a challenge. You see the same thing in a gym or anything else like that, where it's a group class, camaraderie, people go just. They go just because there's someone there to hold them accountable. And when a person's especially. I think all of us as entrepreneurs have kind of gone down that road where it's lonely, you're by yourself, it's hard. No one ever tells you that part. You're in your office with the door closed, no one else is talking to you, and you're pounding on your keyboard. And so that community just. Oh, it was just crazy how it lifted everybody's spirits and the excitement, the enthusiasm was just off the charts crazy.

That's so cool. And not only are they building something great for themselves, but as clickfunnels as the one holding the challenge. And this for any listener, if they do a challenge for themselves, you're essentially training these folks to a love you because you are now their expert. You're framing yourself on this authority kind of thing. And you're also training them to kind of learn how you market, how you sell. They could become evangelists for your company, either as affiliates or just speaking about, you know, clickfunnels, which happens all the time. It's just like this rabid kind of thing you're generating through a challenge where it's just a win, win, win all around, you know.

Yeah, it was really neat for us to see that. Just the ability that people had to communicate with others because they want to talk, they want to brag about their success.

Sure.

And as you made mention, the main thing is a lot of them were trained in, you know, we don't put up with whining. You can't sit here and whine and complain. All of us have a bad day, all of us. And so we were able to kind of set the tone as far as what's acceptable in the community. Just like your trainer would if you were working out. He's gonna say, no, that's. That's not allowed in my gym. And so Stephen kind of set that bar as far as saying, yeah, I understand it's hard. These are all the hard things I've had to overcome to get to where I'm at. You're gonna have to do the same thing. And so by kind of setting that bar, it did it. Those people who didn't wanna step up, they just kind of washed out. But those who did want to step up, they appreciated someone just being totally transparent saying, yeah, it is going to be hard. It wasn't. Again, it cost them 100 bucks to get in. It wasn't a highly expensive product and we over deliver. I mean, you couldn't get Stephen on the phone every day for 30 days for a hundred bucks. But for us it was just. The key was just to over deliver on so much value that they felt that, what's the next thing I can. What do you have next? Because I'm ready to go.

Yeah. Like the completion rate you said sounded like it was just shy of 50% or so, maybe 40%, which is real for any product. I mean, even if someone's paying $1,000 for a product, I doubt the completion rate is going to be anywhere near that. True.

Yeah.

So you're just setting everyone up for success for that next thing, whatever that is.

Yeah. It's been fun to see. Garrett White's been doing one now with his Warrior Warrior book, Warrior Week, and he's crushing it. And his is the same type of thing. We took a lot of what he had, a lot of Natasha, and kind of put it together. But Garrett, Garrett J. White, he always gets mad when I forget the J. Garrett J. White.

But with Warrior, it was fun because he was able to remove himself from it. And so he had his trainers and everyone else. Again, the books are written by him and the content was provided by him. But the people didn't think they were getting Garrett for 100 bucks and they didn't think they were getting Russell for 100 bucks. The value that was there was massive. And by separating, you know, moving the guru further up the hill, it basically allows more opportunity for additional sales and things later.

Got it. So the core kind of concept of the challenge, just to make sure I've got it straight in my brain, is everybody's getting like a new piece of content every day for 30 days, like a new sort of task to follow. And then there's also a community where everybody's kind of sharing the wins based on these 30 day tasks that they're handling.

Exactly.

Right. It's exactly how it works.

And you mentioned Mighty Networks. That's actually a thing. Actually, Marky and one of our clients take on a handful of clients. He's like, you got to check out this Mighty Networks thing.

Oh, really?

I think it's coming up.

I've never heard of it until just like two weeks ago or something.

Yeah.

So I'm just curious, what are the components or what's necessary to do a challenge for someone listening here?

Yeah. So for us, I think what made it most valuable to them is they got a whole bunch of front, front end type of things. So they, they got the book or they got. There was physical things that we sent them that made them feel a little more tied to it. You could do it with just information products, but if you have a physical something you'd send them physically, it definitely. For us, it created more of a stick rate. They showed up because they had already received something from us. So I'd say if you can add that, that's a huge component to it, the actual platform itself. As far as Mighty Networks, the reason we went with that is it allowed us to message within it directly to them. They could message within each other if they wanted to, and we could control the network quite a bit. The only drawback from it is we wanted to be able to actually play the videos inside of the platform. And right now you can't. They're looking at adding that piece to it. So we did most of ours through Zoom outside. And so we'd give them a link and then the zoom, and then we'd basically bring that back in. Got it.

But.

And again, it kind of has a membership type of community and platform built into it. We already have that in Clickfunnels, so we had some of that there, but we also dovetailed that in with Mighty Network.

Got it. Yeah. That's a good leverage of both of them then. Cool. Yeah. I was curious because, I mean, we now have T shirts. Matt's wearing one of them. And we're starting to get more of these physical things around what we're doing. So everything you're saying there, we're like, yeah, we could pull something like this mentioned.

As far as the T shirt. That's what I wanted to. So we took this from. Oh, Shaun T. And gosh, what's Infomercial.

Oh, yeah. Insanity and all that.

Insanity.

Yeah.

And so for everybody who completed it, we sent them a T shirt.

Yes.

And so they saw the T shirt as kind of the thing, as an encouragement. It's amazing what people do for a T shirt. I am just shocked you're wearing one right now.

Right.

Funnel Hacker T shirt. We give them away free. We've given away tens of thousands of these T shirts just as they come in on an onboarding sequence.

Yeah, no, I remember that when we first signed up for Clickfunnels, there's like a series of six videos or something like that. And if you complete them all, then you enter your address and they send you a shirt.

It's freaking brilliant. I mean, what's that cost? It's like 10 bucks maybe to you guys probably.

Exactly.

Yeah.

But your stick rate is huge. It's huge.

Yeah. I Love it. Any little. And I hate to call them like a bribe, but it's just a gift. Any kind of sticky. It's something that is.

Well, it's almost like you guys created a tribe like the funnel hacker tribe. Right. And now I've got the T shirt so I can wear it on my chest that I'm part of this tribe. And I mean I could see how that would really increase the stickiness.

It's an inclusion thing. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's funny you mentioned that we, I think it was last month or the month before we actually had someone email support. They've done nothing with clickfunnels, mind you, but they've been paying clickfunnels every year, every dollar, every month for the last year, year and a half. And they, they asked if they could get a new T shirt because they've worn their other one out yet they haven't done anything. Yes. Your donations are greatly appreciated. We're more than happy to send you a T shirt.

That's awesome.

Just a good company. Yours looks pretty worn out too.

It is. I need a new one.

Rightly so. For you though. So is there anything on that challenge side of things that we might have missed or glossed over that you think would be helpful?

I think as you're going through the funnel to sign up. So we're looking here as far as. It became a 2 comma club award winning funnel for us in 30 days with just over 1.2 million and had. Let me see if I can get you the numbers here. It was, let's see. As far as. So we had a 17.9% opt in rate and 7,557 people basically signed up for it. The crazy thing is it allowed us to have up sales through that funnel so they could buy additional things and everyone is different. So for us it was. They could download the 30 days book as a PDF for free or if they wanted to, they could pay basically 100 bucks and we would send them out the book at a hard copy. And I know you guys can't see it who are listening to this, but it's basically a hardbound copy. It's about inch and a half, two inches thick. Holy moly.

Yeah.

Over 531 pages. So it was a. It was a big book and that's.

Like the equivalent of like a Tim Ferriss book. It looked like.

That's right. The Titans.

Yeah, the Titans.

Actually, I went with that hardcover because I love the Titan so much.

I always say it could be like a. It could Be like a weapon in a dark alley. You know, it's a self defense tool in anything. But. Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

And so we had that. We also ended up having.

They could. We had a couple of different upsells through it. Traffic Secrets is one of them. And then Funnel University and Funnel Audibles our average cart value. So the product up front was 100 bucks. Our average cart value ended up being $169.40 and our EPC was about $2.25 on it.

That's rocking. That's so cool. All built off of this challenge that someone could join for next to nothing. I love it.

Yeah.

The crazy thing is we ordered 5,000 books thinking that we would have that for more than two months and we blew through them and we were out of stock, didn't have enough, increased the demand even more. And then we started seeing after we closed it down, after the 30 days, people were. I saw one on ebay for I think 250 bucks.

So that is awesome. I hope one day that I have book that people are trying to resell on ebook for 250 bucks.

So funny.

Oh, that's awesome.

Because now that's like in the realm of like the breakthrough advertising book where you only find it for like 200 bucks.

True.

It's a good place to be.

That's so cool.

Well, all right. So something we always like to talk about since you guys have a podcast. It's awesome and it's a crucial part of the business. We're always curious how that fits into your bigger business, the funnel. Hacker Radio.

Man, that's great question. I can tell you for us it's been fascinating to see the importance of publishing.

Especially from a traffic standpoint. It's interesting and we talked to a lot of people like, you know, I'll start publishing once I hit this level of success. Then people will listen to me and like you're missing the boat. The key here is to document the journey. People are so much more interested in the journey than they are in the actual success and arrival there. If you take a look. So we have two different podcasts. Russell has his started off as marketing in your car. And this is when everything was collapsing. Pre clickfunnels one of another business he had literally collapsing, closing down, getting rid of employees and literally just ah, what am I gonna do? And he decided literally do Mark in your car. Because he was. He had about a 10 minute drive to work and literally just every day just got in there going, this sucks man. I can't Believe this is happening, and this is happening. And it was amazing to see the community that just rallied around that because they wanted to see what the next thing was. And so I'm a huge believer that as far as documenting the journey through. And again, if you're a writer, then do it in a blog. If you prefer video, then do it as a vlog. If you prefer audio like this, then do it through a podcast. But I think the key there is the whole idea is you're trying to find your voice. And I think that's the hardest part that most marketers don't understand is you're going to suck. You're just going to suck at first. It's just the reality of it. So just suck it up and realize that's how it's going to be. And I remember when I first started my podcast. Oh, my gosh. So I just finished my 300th episode, and I literally. I've never listened to one of them. Still to this day, I never listen to him afterwards.

You're like me, I'm starting to. And I'm finding I actually love my podcast now.

Don't figure you ask people questions, things you want to know.

I'm in good company.

You actually like the podcast?

I'm in good company. Dang.

So I've never listened to him, but I enjoyed the podcast, and it was interesting. My first, I think, 200, I never did one about myself. It was just the interview with somebody else. And I had some people reaching out, saying, david, what about you? And so I've done probably 30 or so in the last hundred that were about me and my journeys and my travels, and it's been interesting. So again, Russell did it. It's all his. He doesn't interview anyone else. It's just him. We decided to go the opposite direction on my podcast, for one, I just. I felt much more comfortable interviewing others than I did just talking about myself. But I think it's been fascinating as I take a look at traffic, there's people come in. You can create so many different pieces of content from a podcast, whether it's the transcript, the audio, the videos. It's just. In fact, Steve Larsen was just in here. We're just talking about. He's got a podcast sales funnel radio that he does, and he now has gone on to create a new one in the MLM niche. And it's fascinating to see literally the communities that get around a podcast. I'm just a huge believer in podcasts these days because you literally have people usually in Their most vulnerable positions, they're working out, they're sitting on the toilet, they're driving their car. They're in a place where they're typically, most people don't listen to podcasts when they're at work or doing stuff in their private. And you get this weird relationship. I'm now meeting people. People say, oh, I loved your podcast. I love this one and this one. I'm like, I don't even remember that podcast, but I'm glad that you do. But they connect with you in a way that is, it's, it's so intimate and they know so much about you and they get excited to talk to you and you get, you know, Facebook messages or wherever, post and emails just because you're touching a person's life where you never thought you were going. I never started the podcast for that reason at all. We started it really just as a way of telling the stories of our success stories. But it's been fascinating to see how people have gravitated to that. And from a traffic standpoint, I think it's a necessity these days. You have to publish.

Oh, yeah, yeah, 100%. And we always call it this invisible audience because we feel like podcasting is still this. So untapped. The thing, even though it's now generating a lot of momentum, if it's on SNL and they're making skits about it, then, you know, it's now mainstream. But still, like our minds are blown with how archaic it is, how much opportunity is really just sitting there waiting for a group of folks to just leverage the heck out of it in a really cool way.

And I mean, with podcasts, you know, one thing that a lot of people that think about podcasts and go, I don't know about that, think about this. So we do about an hour. Each of our episodes run for about 45 minutes to an hour on average. And we do twice a week. And we've got, you know, we've got regular subscribers and who cares what the number is? But those regular subscribers are listening to us for on average two hours per week. Like that is talk about the hottest potential customers, the hottest potential prospects in your business. Somebody that's spending two hours a week listening to you have conversations with other like minded entrepreneurs. I mean, you can't really get a hotter lead than that than a subscriber to your podcast.

And my totally agree. And there's that whole law of reciprocity. They've received so much value for free from you that eventually they get to the point Where I just, I have to buy something just because I feel I owe you something for having all the value you've given. And I, I think it's again, as you may mention, you have this crazy content again for two hours a week. Where else you're not gonna get someone to read two hours a week a book or your blogs or anything else. I mean, that is such crazy amount of time to spend just with you.

Yeah, it's basically a book every week, a short book. But yeah, I mean, I got a message the other day from maybe a mutual buddy, but Ori Bengal, and he's been around forever and he said he drove from San Francisco down to Mexico in nine hours straight of our podcast.

I was like, non stop listening to us.

I was kind of like, I'm sorry.

But it's amaz.

People, they do, once they get into you, they binge, they just go all in. The binge is just crazy. They're like, I've listened to every one of your episodes. I'm like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry. What a waste of your life.

See, that's my reaction, just to be funny. I'm so sorry you had to hear me that long.

But then I do the same thing for Joe Rogan. I love the Joe Rogan podcast. I just, I absolutely love it. And those are three hour episodes and I listen to like two of those a week. So I'm spending like six hours a week with him. That's true, that's true.

But yeah, so podcasting just in general, we always love to touch on that because. Cause it's fascinating. I could tell you light up about.

It real quick on that podcast. The thing that's fascinating to me is the people you can get on your podcast, even when you first get started, especially once you've got, you know, get your first 10 or 20 episodes down, other people are willing to come on a podcast that you never otherwise ever would be able to touch. They were literally untouchable to you. I mean, again, if you take a look as far as, you know, your dream 100 or your abs and C tiers, as far as people you want to network with, the ability to get other people on your podcast, you would never be able to get by an hour of their time.

So what would you suggest? Yeah. And because we agree. What are some strategies that you guys have used maybe when you were starting things out or recommending to get some of those top 100 people on your show?

I'm a huge believer. Again, Russell, in his book Dotcom Secrets, as well as expert Steve talks a ton about Dream 100. We do a lot of mailings. I'm old school, I love direct mail. So I typically reach out through Facebook messenger, private message and basically say, hey, you know, we wanted to send you a gift. What's the best address to send you something to? People usually pretty willing to respond to that. And then we try to basically give them things that are unique to them. A buddy of mine, I saw on one of his Instagram stories that he was saying, these are my favorite pretzels. These are what I love. And so we sent him three cases of these pretzels just to get his attention. And so I think it's the whole idea for me as far as Dream 100, you're trying to build a relationship with these people, and the deeper that relationship is before you get them on the podcast, the more value you're going to get out of them on that podcast. And so I'm a huge believer in just trying to reach out old school and connect them, provide them value, follow them, listen to their podcast, comment on their podcast, give them a rate, and review their podcast.

Try to provide as much value to them first before you ask for anything from them.

I think it's great advice and it's similar. We haven't done a lot of the physical mail stuff, but we're starting to. And yeah, I think that's amazing. You could take that to JVs, getting affiliates. Same kind of idea that's been applied there. Podcast in general has just been like, we had David Allen from getting things done on our podcast. I'm like, there would be no way in hell. No way we'd get that guy on here, but we got him. Yeah, and a bunch of other guys.

I mean, we just have a policy of pretty much anytime somebody comes on our show too, is when we email you to let you know that the episode is live. We're going to put a little thing in there saying, hey, do you know anybody else? That's a great fit for the podcast. So it's this sort of like automated networking process where our network just grows with each new episode because we're constantly getting new referrals to really smart people.

I love it. It's a viral network building thing. That's cool.

That's pretty much it. Yeah.

So there's another software that you guys have that we're also big fans of, that we use ourselves quite a bit. But I think it sort of gets overshadowed a little bit because ClickFunnels is such a Behemoth now, but you also have funnel scripts, and Funnel scripts is a tool that we absolutely love. So I'm kind of curious, how did you come up with that idea and how did that evolve?

Oh, that's a fantastic question. I wish we actually came up with it. It actually was brought to. Jim Edwards came up with it. He read Dotcom Secrets, and Jim Edwards, he did a ton of ebooks back in the day and became just a student of copy. Just studied copy like crazy. And so he was going through all the different scripts and things that Russell talked about inside of Dotcom Secrets and said, russell, what I'd like to do is, what if I create a software that builds those scripts for people? Would you be willing to share to promote it? He says, you build it first and then let me see it, and then we'll take a look. And so Jim went to work, built it all out, presented it, and it was just. It was insane. I mean, literally, it started it right now. I mean, it literally. As far as podcasts, it literally will create all your podcast notes. It'll create all the podcast emails out to people. I mean, he does everything as far as PowerPoint presentations can be created through their email copy headlines. And it's. It's been a fantastic tool. So we actually partnered with him. It's a 5050 deal. He creates it, we market it. Which again, is a fun little side note on that is we've seen the best way to actually get people to use it is to consume it yourself and to show people that you're consuming it. So we actually have what we refer to as Funnel Fridays. It's usually every Friday where Jim and Russell get on, and we literally set an egg timer for 30 minutes. And Russell's got to build a funnel at the same time, Jim's got to create the copy for that funnel. And we reached out to our users, said, send us some products you'd like us to build funnels on. And so we get tons of different funnels or products being sent in here. And that's one of the ways we've actually marketed funnel scripts is by showing people how to actually use it. And it's just been. It's been great just to see when you consume your own product and you show people how to consume it, they're like, oh, that's not that hard. I can do that. And they quickly buy.

Yeah. And the concept is kind of similar to almost like the old, like, Mad Libs books, where you kind of go in and you fill in, you fill in the blanks. And then when you're done, then you get the whole copy sort of spit out with all the words sort of replaced in there. And, I mean, we use it. I think our current sales page that we're promoting, we have a $300 traffic course. And I'm pretty sure that the base of it was one of the funnel scripts things. And it's.

That was the base. Yeah.

And it's converting it 6% for us right now, which we can't complain. So, you know, it's very happy.

Use the script and modify if needed.

It's so funny you mentioned that because we started targeting a lot of copywriters and, like, why you're going to take away my job? And they were like, no, this is just to get you started. And it's been amazing how many testimonies we have. Copywriters who. I was having this writer's block and I just couldn't get started. I didn't know where to go. And I just started answering the questions and boom, it came out. I'm like, oh, I can take that and I can do this with it. Some of our best testimonials actually are from copywriters using it to enhance their own copy.

I was just thinking, for some reason my brain went to, is there an AI version of funnel scripts or copywriting or something in clickfunnels that you guys can build in?

I'm sure it's not far off.

Actually, we are working on taking funnel scripts, and as soon as you create it, have it just automatically populate your funnel.

There you go.

That'd be cool.

So it's getting closer to AI. That's pretty cool.

We're getting closer. Not quite.

I mean, really, when it comes to selling, those are really kind of the two most complicated parts. You got your copy and you got your design, slash development of your website, the tech side, and you guys kind of covered them both. So pretty good marriage there.

Pretty must haves, I would say, in anything. Yeah. Well, that kind of touched everything and more than I even had in my mind.

I mean, I don't know if how much you're able to talk about or how much you're willing to talk about, but are there any, like, sort of exciting developments coming up in clickfunnels that you guys are really pumped about?

More than happy to. So we are launching actionetics md. MD stands for Multidimensional Marketing. So a lot of people, it all comes back to a person's attention. And the hardest part from a marketer is getting People's attention. And right now, you know, most humans have an attention of about six seconds where a goldfish has attention of seven. So you're competing basically with someone who's got a brain less than a goldfish when it comes to attention. And we've actually what we've seen from a lot of emails, they're not getting opened as much. I still we're huge email marketing. We've got, we built in an ESP email service provider into the platform. But more important than that is the software with Action XMD allows you to send out again multidimensional meaning you can send out Facebook messages, you can send out texts, you can send out desktop push notifications, you can do direct voicemail broadcast straight to their bypassing their ring basically and really trying to get to as many different ways of communicating with people as you possibly can. And again when you come back to kind of AI, what you'll find is you can then track and see exactly which customers are preferring which methods and you can communicate with them by their method of choice versus yours. The other thing that we're building into from the stat standpoint is to actually show because we have the funnel and.

We basically have funnel and then what we refer to as the follow up funnel all in the same software, we can then track and see exactly how much revenue each email or each message got. So you'll be able to say, you know what, my sixth email is getting $100,000, my fourth one is only getting 20,000. Let me see if I can tweak my fourth one. And so you can see in your follow up sequences where's the breakage and how then you can actually go back and fix that based on ROI per email or message or text or voicemail or whatever else you might be doing.

So, so cool.

We're super, super excited about that. We'll be rolling that out here in the next month or so. We actually been working a lot on our trying to get to live support. It's been kind of a fun thing. We just rolled out. So again kind of AI. So our support, the very first approach basically people have is through kind of a chat, a chat bot where it's done through Solvi where AI basically says well you had this, this is your question, Here's a couple of answers. Does this solve it for you? Yeah, if it doesn't. Last month we're working with directly and they basically it's a peer to peer support system to where right now it costs about $15 per support ticket to get answered and what we did with directly is we actually are paying our customers to answer our own customer support. So we did it as a, as a test last month we had 19 people who are answering the questions did over. I think it was right around 1000 to 1200 tickets. 94% satisfaction from the customers and we're paying out 4 and a half dollars to each person basically who answers the questions right for us.

Oh my God. Brilliant. That's so smart of the cost now. And it's like none of your local team.

I guess it's cool because it then takes all the burden off of our support to handle the questions that they shouldn't be messing with. They can now get to the. And again if the, the peer to peer support can't answer, they just send it directly to support. So it allows us to then get faster to a live. My ideal dream here would be to have our support people literally sitting there waiting for the phone to ring. Sure. Because we're getting board handled so much better. And then we're also looking at some additional. Gosh, we got so many. We're looking at a multi user opportunity. So where you can basically assign user tasks to people. User permissions inside of clickfunnels. We're looking at possibly rolling out an agency model next year. Some pretty cool things.

So cool.

Yeah.

My brain is still on fire from this sort of like peer to peer customer support, crowdsourcing support. I love that.

Well that's a huge part of our business. We leverage chatbots, Automations and also live chat and we do that heavily for affiliate promotions which I still haven't heard of another affiliate really going deep. And we've done this for years now and it works extremely well. And yeah, we've been told we provide better support than most of the products that we're actually selling.

I mean we're one of the few people out there that we will actually use sales reps to pitch affiliate products to people. And we give our sales reps commissions of our commission. So if we can automate more of that. Oh man, just so many ideas spinning.

So again the company is directly. It was kind of funny. So we did this test and we were actually at a partner meeting planning. We got the results. We're like we gotta just do a Facebook Live right now to our group and let them know about it. So we did that and it literally blew up their servers. They contacted saying hey, we're getting this attack. They're all coming through, you guys, what's going on?

No, not an attack.

So we Said, no, we have a very, very strong culture. And we basically told them about it. They're like, oh, my gosh. Because they set a limit of. They could only take in like 150 in an hour or something like that. And they got over 500 or some crazy thing like what's going on so directly is the company. They're great to work with.

Cool. Yeah, we'll look into them. Appreciate that. Because. Yeah. Any way we can leverage the better. Well, I think we can wrap it up then. We always love to ask what's a great book? And you don't have to mention Russell's. They've been mentioned many, many, many times.

Well, I'll mention Russell's.com secrets and expert secrets are both great books. They're both on the bookshelf somewhere.

They're a must have for sure for everyone listening. But what's a. You have some good books over there.

From copy standpoint. I love great leads. There it is. This has been a great one. Michael Masterson, Jason Ford or John Ford. And then as far as building a company, this is a book I've been studying quite a bit just recently. It's called High Growth Handbook.

Okay.

It's Elad Gill. It's basically scaling startups from 10 to 10,000 people.

Oh, wow. Okay.

So it's all about scaling a company. So that's kind of been my bible recently. The other one I don't know if I've got.

This is awesome. We're actually watching him pull books off his shelf.

Books not seeing us.

Gosh, there was one. I was just at the house. Anyways.

One of the things we were studying last year was Salesforce's beyond the Cloud. Great strategy. They literally go play by play. And it's a great. When you're looking as far as building a business. And I think that's one of the main things I get so passionate about people. You start off with a product and then once you've got your product and you're making money on the products, like, okay, how do I make a business out of this? And that's really what my whole focus is these days, is how do you take a business and scale a business to 10,000, 20,000, whatever it might be. And so for me, it's all about scaling. And that's most of the books I'm reading right now are how do you scale a business?

That's awesome. Yeah. And that's essentially where we're at in our business too. It's been so wrapped up this 2018 and it's just been amazing.

Yeah, we're looking through that book right now.

Scaling up and get a grip. There are two amazing books for doing that as well.

Awesome books.

Yeah.

Love them.

Awesome, man. Well, where do you want folks to go? Check out more of what you do and clickfunnels, all that.

They can always go to clickfunnels.com, you can always hit me up on Facebook or Instagram. Dave Woodward there. Either one.

And then Funnel Hacker Radio. Is it just funnelhackerradio.com funnel hackerradio.

Yeah. Check out Funnel Hacker Radio, the podcast.

Very cool. And we'll link our episode on there. We were there a month or two ago and it was a good time. You have a lot of cool guests on there. Yeah. Thank you, Dave. This has been fun, man.

Yeah, thanks so much.

Hey, my pleasure, guys. Loved it. Thank you so much.

All right. Have a good one. All right.

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