Mikael Dia - The Momentum Engine To Grow Your Business

I kept running into the same problem over and over in the agency. I kept finding this weird disconnect between what I present to my client in terms of, here's what we're going to build you as in a funnel. And then how do I measure this thing? How do I actually show you the performance of the thing that I sold you? I would be stuck looking at Google Analytics. So I hired a data analyst to try to tell me. And they could never really figure it out because the funnel that I drew was not linear and there were different touch points and all this stuff. And I was like, man, wouldn't it be cool if I could just draw my funnel on a canvas and then just overlay all my data just like I would on a whiteboard? And that's how funnel lakes came to be.

This is an intro. Intro, intro, intro.

Hustle and Flowchart with your boy, my boy, Matt Wolf and Joe Fear. Hey, welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast.

We're here and we're ready for an episode in our new studio.

Yeah. This is live, not live, pre recorded from Flowchart Studios. Name pending.

Maybe, I don't know, we'll see.

I kind of like Flowchart Studios.

Flowchart Studios is cool. I like it more than Hustle Studio.

Yeah. Cause we're not the hustle.

I don't wanna really hustle, but it's always gonna be part of the thing. So. Yeah, man. Today we are talking to Mikel Dia of. He's the CEO of Funnellytics.

Yes.

And you probably, or you might have heard of it or used it. It's been around since I think 2017. He said.

Yes.

It's an amazing way to basically build out Flowcharts and basically friggin map out a funnel or map out a funnel maybe that you want to build and maybe present to a client or run yourself and then you can actually see the data overlaid by it. You could do projections and all this cool stuff. I mean, it's crazy.

Well, just that mapping version that you're talking about, where you flowchart out the business, that's the free version.

It's like a lucid chart for marketing, basically.

Exactly. And so we're gonna dive into the story behind why software got made, the struggles in building the software.

There's no struggles in software development. What are you talking about? It's the easiest model ever.

We're going to talk about retention, how to actually retain your members, onboarding, all of that kind of stuff. He breaks down a few really cool frameworks for validating ideas and also for getting your first handful of customers. We cover a lot of ground in this one with Mikhail.

Yeah, make sure to stick around for his frameworks. They're a little later in. But throughout this whole. We touch on so much in this one and it's something for everyone here. So it's good times. Go check out Funnel analytics, funnellytics IO. It is a free for the flowchart, you know, mapping tool thing. Go try it out. Funneltics IO it is sick. And. And Matt even showed off to Mikel that he is still using a legal pad for some of his flowcharting and we all shunned him. I was.

I was shunned. I was asked to leave the room.

Leave the room, sir. Leave your own podcast.

Yes, it's true. And go grab the action guide for this because like we said, we cover a lot of ground on this one and you're going to want that action guide. So if you go to flowchart group.com, join the Facebook group, give us your email address in the process of joining the group and we will hook you up with the notes for this episode or whatever episode came live within the last two weeks. So go to flowchart group.com hooking you up.

All right, let's get into it. We're live. Mikhail. Hey man, thanks for joining us today. Where are you at?

Oh, I'm happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Of course. Are you out in Toronto?

I believe I am. Yep. I'm in Toronto at home right now. Like, this is my basement office. I stole the sign from our actual physical offices when Covid hit. And I just mounted it right here.

So you gotta do it, my man.

Yeah, we went the opposite direction. We were working out of the house and when Covid hit, we got out of the house.

That's probably the smart move.

A baby during COVID So now I've got a nine month old and a four year old upstairs. So it's probably smarter to go the other way. But you know what?

It's tough.

It is what it is. Yeah.

Well, congrats. That's. Yeah. These quarantine babies, man.

Yeah, exactly. Covid for the rest of his life. Oh, 2020. Oh, boy.

You're one of those babies that's a scratcher. Yeah, well, dude, I mean, you have a. So we were telling you beforehand, we have a lot of folks in our community that use your funneltics, your tool, your software and just all these other tools, but yours is just so clear to map Something out and actually see the data and know what the heck to do with it. Or at least have a decent idea of what to do with it. So we knew that we gotta bring you on here. Cause obviously you engineered this thing. I mean, I heard you were an engineer as well.

So maybe I was an engineer for a total of like six, six weeks.

So let's be counts, man.

I studied engineer, I graduated as an engineer and I worked as an engineer for maybe six weeks. And then I said, screw this, I'm not doing this.

That's a much longer engineer career than either of us have had. So.

That's right, that's fair, that's fair.

What was the thing? I mean, you went, what, you got the degree and everything, right? So what was the whole like, okay, ain't for me.

Yeah, interesting. So as I mentioned, I live in Toronto and when I graduated university.

I still live downtown Toronto and I got a job which was just on the outskirts of the city. And if you know anything about Toronto, traffic is just as bad as LA traffic.

I've heard terrible.

It's horrible. So I would commute for an hour and a half in traffic to go to my job. I would sit in front of my computer all day long doing AutoCAD drawings. I don't know if you guys know AutoCAD, drawing bridges and literally all day long for eight hours a day. And then I would commute back for an hour and a half because I would be stuck in traffic. And after kind of six weeks, I was like, man.

I don't really want to do this. Right? And an engineer is one of those things where it's a 20 year profession if you really want to start making a lot of money and you want to grow a career, because if you're responsible for building a bridge, you don't want that bridge to fall over. So it's just a long career path. And I was like, I don't want to do that. And then simultaneously, around the same time, I stumbled around a bunch of these make money online offers. And they're like, do you want to make money from a beach? I'm like, yes, I do. I do want money from a beach. I don't want to be an engineer. So it was just kind of this weird transition of like, do I still want to do this or do I want to try something else? So I pivoted from there.

And you're smart. Yeah, you're much smarter than probably most that just try to hack it out for a while. You're like, I spent all this time to get this degree and. Nah, man.

Spent a lot of money. Spent a lot of time. But you know what? Life is short.

That's right. I was about to say that same thing, man. But I know you got into your own business, so what was the transition? I know you started, I think it was a T shirt company. Right after that or soon after, right?

Yeah. So while I was in university and just right around graduation, I started a T shirt company. And I say company, but like I always say, it wasn't a company. We just had T shirts. We had, like, graphic designs on T shirts. And what drew me into this rabbit hole of online business was we printed off a bunch of these T shirts and we sold them to our friends, our family. We were straight out of university. It was me and my two buddies, so we had a pretty good network of friends. And then we sold out, and we decided to print way too many T shirts because we thought we knew what we were doing.

What's too many?

Like, oh, this business stuff is easy, man. We're gonna make money hand over fist with these T shirts. And literally, boxes to the ceiling, we just stacked boxes of T shirts. And then turns out that, yeah, our friends, family just didn't want any more T shirts. They were happy with the T shirts that they got. They didn't want another pair. And I was like, okay, how do we sell T shirts to strangers? Like, how do we. And that's what really kind of started. That's how I actually got into this whole, like, I googled, how do you sell online? And then, sure enough, that drew me into this rabbit hole of make money online and, like, all these different sales pages and offers and affiliate marketing and all that stuff.

And.

And I just. Again, I. Because I was working as an engineer, I just went down the rabbit hole. I was like, okay. And something happened as well to my dad. He got a pretty bad accident. Where. Well, not really an accident, but he had a brain aneurysm. And he was in the hospital for a while, and, you know, we almost lost him. And it was one of those things that was like, man, like, literally overnight, in the middle of the night, he had a brain aneurysm. And it's like, just like that. Like, no warning signs, no nothing. It just. It just happened. And he was in the hospital for a while. So I was like, man, life's too short. Like, there's no way I'm gonna stay as an engineer and. And then, you know, make money online, you know, so I'm like, let's figure this thing out. Because if there's all these other people doing it, I can figure it out. So I started going down that path, man.

Yeah. So I mean, that's a. It could be a good path or it could be a dangerous path for some folks, for sure.

I tried. I tried a lot of things, man. I tried. It started off with a. So first of all, we set up our website for the. The T shirt company. It turns out it's really not that easy to sell. Build a brand around shirts.

We've tried as well. We failed.

Yeah, that's a whole story. Like in general. But simultaneously I was like, okay. I learned about affiliate marketing. My first website in the kind of make money online space was a survival knife website. My roommate at the time had all these survival knives. So I was like. And this was probably around 2010, maybe near the end of 2010. And if you guys remember, like in 2012, the Mayan calendar was supposed to end. The world was supposed to be happen. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna get on on this ahead of time. And people are gonna be searching for survival knives for sure by 2012. So I'm just gonna take. And my roommate at the time had all these different survival knives. So I just took pictures and I learned how to write articles that would rank on Google. And based on affiliate links and all that stuff, it took me like, oh man, I would say probably a good two full months of me like learning, implementing. I've never built a website before, never done any of that stuff, and going through all these courses on how to do this. And then I was like, all right, so when am I going to start making money? Now my website's up. It's not 2012 yet. I guess I gotta wait now. So I ended up buying another course on.

How to do Google Ads. I was like, okay, well, if I can't actually like wait for this traffic to come to me through SEO and all that stuff, let me go down the Google Ads path. So I set up a hundred dollar, I put $100 into a budget, into a campaign, and I got my first affiliate sale through that, which was amazing. Like, it was the most amazing moment of my life. I was like, what? A random person has bought a knife for me? My commission was $5.23.

Hell yeah.

I. I got an email and I was like, you sold the knife $5.23? I'm like, yes. And then I log into Google and Google spent $99 in some odd cents.

I'm like, typical. Google, this doesn't work.

I can't trade $100 for $5. This is bad math. This is not going to work. I don't have that much dollars.

But it got me that kind of, that first win, that first little bit of hope that like, oh man, this, this can work. Like, I can, I can build a website and get a random stranger to click on this thing and buy. I just, I'm clearly missing something because nobody in their right mind would be, you know, boasting about making $10,000 if they're spending 100,000 to make that.

Something was there. And I just kept going.

Nice. Yeah, we share that kind of story. With the first affiliate sale, it was like supplement products. Yeah, yeah. And we got the sale, got the email, I think I was at a construction job. So that's kind of why I know that AutoCAD stuff. And I called you up, I was like, holy shit, someone bought this Gatorade CPA offer thing.

Yeah, we're rich, dude scale now.

I called my wife and she's the one that did it because she felt so fucking bad for us.

She saw us like building this stuff out for weeks and weeks and running advertising and not getting anywhere. So she went and bought the first product and she didn't want to tell us. She wanted to let us think that it was just some random person.

But.

But it was.

She's not very good with secrets though.

Not at all. But she confirmed, like you said, she confirmed that like for us, we're like, holy shit, okay, we can make money. We just gotta figure out the right people to buy that thing now. So.

Yeah, exactly. I gotta figure out how it's not going to be my wife.

Exactly.

Yeah. At least we know now that if there's a transaction, the money will come to us. So, like, there's proof that this can work.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. We've tested it now.

I mean, obviously. Yeah, it's a tough. So you did a bunch of paid traffic, it sounds like. And I know that morphed into. Yeah. What did it morph into? An agency eventually. Right, so you actually.

Yeah, so. So yeah, let me kind of walk you guys through a little bit of the journey. So I did that survival knife website. I had my, you know, my T shirt company and I had my now non existent engineering job, but I had kind of my degree and all that stuff and I, I didn't know what to do next. I had no clue. I started researching other potential affiliate things. Like, you know, what do I like? I like basketball. I like Music, so like beat making software and all this stuff. And I was like, I never went down anywhere. But.

I figured, okay, well, if I can't, if I don't want to be an engineer, I certainly don't want to work as an engineer. What if I go back to school and do an mba, take out another loan from the bank and basically just go and leave the country? So my girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, she had moved to London to the UK and she works in hotels. And I decided, okay, I'm going to apply for this one school to do an MBA degree, at least learn a little bit about business if I can't figure it out. And sure enough, at least I'm gonna have enough free time to keep going down this rabbit hole of building my own online business. So at least I'm not working 9 to 5 and then doing this on the side. I can just skip class if I want, if I want to and just, you know, and I've got money from the bank, so that's what I did. And I just kept learning about digital marketing, everything. Like I. That's where I discovered Russell Brunson. And.

At the time, he didn't have click funnels. It was just. He was just teaching people funnels and all that stuff. And he talked about, you know, you have to collect a lead. And that was the first time I had a real epiphany in this game was before I just thought like, oh, people come to your website and buy, right? And they just. That's what affiliate marketing is like, they rank some articles and all that stuff. And I remember watching a video for Russell Brunson's. The offer was called.com Secrets X at the time. And it was like, again, 2011ish. And in there he talked about this concept of a funnel. And what you want to do is you want to capture people's email addresses. Because for everybody on your email list, it's worth about a dollar per month for you. And you can send them out emails, you can follow up with them, you can send them offers. And that was like, that's it. That was the missing. That's what I'm missing in this. Sure enough, there's a lot more to it than that. But I just had that kind of epiphany and I kept going down this hole. And because I was so into marketing and I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, I ended up connecting with somebody during my MBA who was also an entrepreneur, randomly enough, also from Toronto, even though we were both In London in the uk and he had built and sold a currency brokerage firm. And to me, I was like, man.

You'Ve made it. You're one of those guys, right? Amazing. You've sold it for millions of dollars, man. That's what I'm trying to do. So we connected really well. And then eventually, near the end of the year, he came to me. He's like, mikel, I've got an idea. It's a bit random, but I want to know if you want to go in with me. I want to start a Mandarin language school. Like, yo, dude, do you realize that I don't speak Mandarin? I've never, ever been to China. I know nothing. Like, do you realize that? And I'm like, look at you. Like, no, sorry.

What are you talking about?

And he's like, okay, look, I can license a curriculum from a school in China, and I'll do the operations. You just figure out the website and the marketing side. I know you love that stuff, so you figure that out. I'll do this. We can make it work. I was like, all right, you know what? I don't want a job, so let's do it. So we started this Mandarin language school. We ended up growing it pretty quickly. We exited in eight months. The school in China that we licensed the curriculum from bought it back from us and bought the school in London. So that was the first proof that I figured all of these pieces of learning Google Ads and understanding capturing somebody's email and following up with them and driving people to the right landing pages and understanding how this all fits together. That was my first real application of it. And it started to work. We started to grow the school. People are coming. We were making sales where things were happening. I'm like, okay, this works. I figured something out here. So I started. After we exited that school, I started consulting a lot of different businesses on this stuff, on mostly funnels, because most people don't think about marketing that way. They think about it from social media standpoint. They think about it from a maybe write blog posts standpoint. They don't think about it as a funnel, as a customer journey, in a sense. So I started consulting people on it. Turns out I knew what I was talking about and I figured this out. So I moved back to Toronto in 2015. 14. I got married, and I started my marketing agency. It was called White Coat Digital. All we did was sales funnels, and we grew it. We struggled the first 18 months. It was interesting. I couldn't figure out how to get clients from My own business, I could do it really well for other people. I just couldn't figure it out for myself. But then after kind of continuously thinking about what is the funnel that's going to bring people to us, I finally figured it out. And we grew from basically making about five grand a month to making over 150,000amonth in 18 months just from that funnel. Just from that one funnel, figuring out how do we attract people in the right context and the right mindset. So once we figured out that funnel, we grew the agency and I kept running into the same problem over and over in the agency, and that's what led me to funneltics. So as I was serving clients and I was helping them, I kept finding this weird disconnect between what I present to my client in terms of, here's what we're going to build you as in a funnel. I would draw it in with icons and all that in a PowerPoint document, and they would see it as a flowchart almost. And then how do I measure this thing? How do I actually show you the performance of the thing that I sold you? I would be stuck looking at Google Analytics. And I. I hate Google Analytics to its core. So I hired a data analyst to try to tell me. And they could never really figure it out because the. The funnel that I drew was not linear and there were different touch points and all this stuff. And I was like, man, wouldn't it be cool if I could just draw my funnel on a. On a canvas and then just overlay all my data just like I would on a whiteboard? And that's how funnel came to be.

Yeah, man. And that's because we used it, what, Right when it's kind of launched. And I think it was more of a. Just a mapping tool at first. Right. And I think it was free for a bit or something like that, but it's still free.

The mapping tool is still free.

Oh, is the mapping nice? That's great. I mean, because now it's evolved tremendously. Like you said, it overlays the data and all these different KPIs that you should probably be paying attention to that most people aren't.

Yeah. Back when we were doing, like, some client work, I was, I was using it because we were trying to explain to clients, here's what we're gonna go build for you. But we were doing the same thing. I was, you know, grabbing a yellow notepad like this and trying to sketch stuff out, going, it'll look like this, and then you'll do this, oh wait, I forgot to put this over here and show you this. And then next thing you know it. In fact, here's actually right there.

You gotta get back.

I don't think you really tell it, but there's like all sorts of sketches and crap on this yellow note had still. And so I actually started using funneltics for that exact purpose to just go tell clients like, here's what I'm building. And it just looked clean.

Yeah, man, there you go.

Yeah. And that was the idea behind Funnel Analytics. And yeah, it's evolved significantly. It's made me figure out what it takes to build a software company especially. You know, it's funny, I always look back and joke with my team. It's like we had to choose data software. Like we had to go down that rabbit hole of like the hardest type of software that you could build because the engineers cost the most. And it's like, oh man. But it's a great problem to solve and we're enjoying it.

I'm curious about the software journey because we've tried to dabble in software a little bit and it's probably one of the most difficult business models that we've ever tried to dabble in. We've had info businesses, we're big time affiliate marketers. That's kind of our core. We've, we've had memberships, we've done e commerce stuff, we've done agency work, we've kind of done it all. Out of everything we've played around with, software has been the hardest nut to crack for us. Just finding good developers, the sort of upfront cost and time commitments that go into it, it's just a grind. So I'm kind of curious what sort of roadblocks have you run into with developing the software? And then maybe after that we'll get into how you sort of got around those roadblocks.

Sure, sure. Yeah. I mean, lots, man, lots. You're right. Developing software is really complicated. Right. And the key is not that finding developers is not that difficult, especially if you decide to outsource. There's lots of developers, right. It's translating a product vision into an actual usable tool that relays back a job that my customer has to do.

Right.

So that's the tricky part. Like it's easy to sit down, you know, sketch out like, oh, I think this tool would be cool if it did this. And then like, hey, here's what it should do. And then somebody builds it and it's like, now you've got to get people to use It, Right. And that's where it becomes really tricky. Understanding Churn and why people aren't onboarding. And what's the difference? Like what are the challenges in terms of using this tool? Is it actually solving the pain that they thought it was going to solve? Are you overselling it, underselling it?

And that's really what creates a challenge. It's also, as software evolves, you start to realize that unlike info or E Commerce.

As software gets bigger, as you add more features, it becomes bloated. It becomes there's a lot of code in there that makes it, we call it technical debt and it basically just starts stacking up and now it makes it really, really hard to release another feature or you release another feature and it breaks this other thing over here that you didn't think about and it just becomes this really bloated thing that you're continuously building upon. Now you need other engineers to come in and clean it up and look at it. So you're right, there's so many upfront costs associated to software, you don't see the value until that software is actually built. So it's not like info where I can pre sell it. And I mean you technically can if you want to, but it's not the same, right? I can't be like, hey, I'm gonna do a training next week on this and this is the value you're gonna get, so buy today. And then if I get somebody to buy it, then I just go and do the training.

I'll create it then.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Now it's like, well no, I've got to have something to show you physically because like you, you think you have to think of it like a car in a sense, right? It's like I can't sell you the car if you can't look at the car, right? Like you can maybe see the picture of the car and like, oh, that seems fancy. Like unless you're Elon Musk and Tesla, it's like pre order this and they'll come in three years from now. But like for most of small entrepreneurs, like I need to see the car now, like if it's gonna really solve this problem and help me go from point A to point B, like show it to me, demo it to me. Like, does it do this, does it do that? And, and then the, the biggest thing that you realize, or at least that I've realized with running funnel analytics is.

Because people come in for different, with different perceptions or different mindsets as to how do I use this tool. Like you guys use it for the mapping aspect, right? It's like, so you get all sorts of feedback from all different types of businesses who are using it for all different contexts. Right. Again, if you think of it from a jobs to be done standpoint, this person's coming in for where their job is. I just want to visualize a funnel so I can present it to a client and put it in a proposal so I can sell them. That's my job that I'm trying to do. The other person's coming in. It's like, I want to map out my funnel and I want to forecast whether or not it's going to make me money if I hit these conversion metrics. Right. Another person is like, I want to actually see the data and I want to run simulations or see the conversion rates across the thing. So I understand what to optimize next. So there's always these different jobs to be done that people are coming in for. So you get all of this feedback. Now you got to make decisions, estimate. What do I listen to? Where is this product really going? It's like, man, I got this big, big vision for this thing. Except.

What are the steps to get there? Like, do I build this feature first or do I build this one? It's like, I know that in five years from now, it's gonna have all these features and it's gonna do all these cool things, but, like, what is it gonna do today? And then what are we working on next in order to keep evolving and keep growing it? When all of these people are giving you all sorts of different feedback and all sorts of different opinions around it. So that's the challenging part about software. And yes, having a technical co founder is also very, very important.

That helps. That's not you then.

Yeah, no, no, that's. That is not me by any means. I understand the customer very well. I understand the jobs to be done that the customer is trying to do. However, I can translate that into a product vision. But you need somebody to be able to be like, okay, in order for us to do this, we're going to need these types of databases to store the data. And we're going to. They're going to have to interact like this together and. Exactly. And I'm like, I don't know what the hell you're talking about. As long as I click on this, I see this and it works. That's all I care about.

That's what I want.

Yeah, I want to go back to the validation aspect of it. So you Mentioned that you kind of got to build the thing out before you can ever launch it. It's very hard to pre sell. Was there any ways that you sort of validated the idea before investing all the time and the money? I know you had your own struggles and you were scratching your own itch, but beyond that, was there any sort of additional validation you did before, sort of going down the path?

Yeah. So I never validated the mapping tool. The mapping tool, I built it now luckily enough I used, interestingly enough, it's coming back to bite us in the ass now actually. But we used a very simple open source library where you can just like just a diagramming tool, right. So you know most.

Code and most software has been built before, right. And there's usually something that you can leverage to kind of just kind of replicate what you want to replicate. So we use this open source library where you can like it was already a diagramming tool, it just wasn't used. It was just a. Think of it like a lucid chart, right? So it's, I can add shapes and it's on a canvas and I can drag and drop. And so we shortcut that by using this kind of open source library. And the interesting thing is like now that we've evolved the product.

That actual library that we use is actually holding us back now and we've got to rebuild it. And so, you know, those are all some challenges with software. But so I kind of took that shortcut.

To validate that people cared about this mapping tool. So all I did was I took this pre existing diagramming tool that you could leverage. I just sent to my developer, look, instead of squares and circles and shapes, I want you to put three types of icons. I want a traffic source icon, I want a page icon, and I want an action based icon for like a purchase or something like that. And that's the things that I want people to be able to drag and drop, use the same technology to link them together and all that stuff. And sure enough, that's what he did. And it took him a couple of weeks, right. It didn't take very, very long for him to build that first prototype. So what we did in order to start getting some traction and start seeing some results is I knew that the next stage was okay. All I want now is to display the data of people who hit a specific page. I want to say, okay, this icon represents this URL and if somebody moves to this next stage, it represents this URL. And I just want to see over the line how many People went from this stage to this stage or this step to this step. I gave him that very broad spec. It wasn't defined any further than that. That's all I wanted to see on the canvas at that stage. Which in hindsight again, building a product in those iterative stages is great for validation stuff, terrible for understanding, like, where are you trying to go? Because we wouldn't have built it the same way if we knew that we were going to collect all different types of data and all that stuff. So while he was building that, just that first prototype of the analytics, to be able to just display page to page conversion like that, I needed to do something. I didn't know what to do. So all I did is I said, okay, I'm going to give away this mapping tool for free. See if people like it, see if people care about it. When they sign up for the mapping tool, I'm going to put them into a Facebook group. And if I put them into a Facebook group, at least I can communicate with them. I can understand who these people are that are signing up, what are their challenges. Maybe I can give them some more value through my knowledge and, you know, through info, and sell them some courses. All while my developer figures out how to display that page to page conversion requirement that I, I asked for. So we did that for about two months and over the course of those two months, that's all that's about. That's how I validated. So we launched the mapping tool on December 7, 2017, and on February 7, literally two months to the day, 2018, is when that first prototype version of the analytics was ready to sell, or at least for people to start using, right? So over the course of those two months, I didn't know what to do. Like, I literally was like, I don't know, what am I supposed to do right now? So I drove traffic to the free mapping tool, pushed all these people into a Facebook group, and every single day I just asked questions and I just gave value and I gave them sneak peeks of what Funnellytics is really trying to achieve. Right? We gave you this free mapping tool, but that's not what we're trying to do here, right? We're trying to show you this data and all this stuff. And I started to see, man, that's really cool. I can't wait for that to come out. When is that coming out? And like, oh, is it going to do this? Is it going to be able to do that? And it's like, okay, I'm starting to understand, like, what these people would like. So I validated that way to some degree. It's still not pure validation. You know, it doesn't mean somebody will adopt the tool and use it or buy, or buy, et cetera. But it gave me some validation. Then we launched on February 7th. I basically said, hey, we've got a hundred spots open for Beta Group. I'm going to sell it as a lifetime license. You guys are going to be our founding members. We only have 100 spots open, and we're going to sell it for $600. You guys get access to it. I thought it would take me about a week or so to get 100 people. I thought we got 300 people. In 48 hours, we made $207,000 in collected cash. And I was like, okay, that's some validation right there. Yeah, there's some validation. But the interesting thing is that's validation on the proposition, right? It's validation on, people want the vision that I'm selling them. They want the thing that I'm putting out from a message standpoint, like, this thing is meant to help you do this and show your clients and report and all this stuff. It's not validation. This is where software becomes challenging. It's not validation on adoption. Are they actually going to use it? It's easy for somebody to pull out their credit card, give you money off of a proposition. It's a different story to get them to actually use it every single day and understand that, okay, this is the feedback that they're giving us and this is the roadblocks, right? We found out that as soon as people got in, they're like, okay, how do I set this up? And it's like, well, we didn't think about that. Just wanted to show the numbers on here. And it's like, okay, now I got to figure out, how do I onboard you properly into this tool? And we started realizing that most of these small marketers aren't technical enough to display the data the way that we built it in order to ingest the data. So now it's like, oh, crap. Like, they like the proposition. However, adoption is really, really difficult because they're not technical enough to set it up in order for it to display the data on the canvas. So that's where software becomes really, really challenging. It's that adoption and that retention. Right? So, yeah, I don't even know what the first question was, but you nailed.

A bunch of points there that are super important, though. And I know we can keep going down even on the adoption side. And usability and retention of a customer with software. I mean, there's so many things, but there was a lot of good lessons there for anyone in software, I would say.

Yeah, well, yeah, I just want to touch on the retention thing, and this can be the last thing we talk about on this topic, and then we'll kind of shift focus. But I'm curious what sort of things you did in the beginning to sort of encourage the retention, to keep people sticking around and actually using it, actually onboarding them. Because I know that's. That's a big problem with a lot of the softwares that we've messed around with in the past is you can get people to buy and then they never get in and use it. And then two weeks later they're sending you an email saying, you know what? I just never had time to try it out. And then, you know, they're out before the free trial's over or, you know, before their first month rebuilds or whatever.

Yeah, this is a, this is something I struggled with a lot personally. And looking back, you know, after, after three years plus of running Funnel Analytics, I can, I can confident look confidently look back on it and say, this is probably one of the mistakes that I made is I was so caught up into my vision as to what this thing should be and where this thing should go that I didn't really focus on the customer as much as I should have. Now, I did focus at the very beginning. I answered all of the support tickets in order to understand what feedback the customer was saying. However, my own ego to some degree said, okay, well, this is my vision for this product. I already know what I want this product to be able to do. So here's. I'm gonna define the product roadmap based on what I want, right? Based on what I feel this product should evolve to in order to reach our vision. Meanwhile, the customers are giving me all this feedback. Like, I'm listening to it and I'm taking it into account and maybe it'll affect my decisions, but it's not gonna change my mind in terms of this is what I want to see next in this. So by the time I, you know, we started with just page to page conversions, I already had in my mind that I want to be able to track actions on a page and how far people can scroll and what videos they watch and all of these things, I already had this all defined. However, nobody was asking for it, right? Nobody wanted that. All they're. Most people were like, how can I pull in my revenue Data. And I'm like, we'll get to that later. Like, I know at first I've already got this roadmap. Like, it'll get there, it'll get there, right? But, like, I can't use it because I just want to see my revenue data on there. And it's like, you know, and I think I made a mistake of like, you know, looking back now, it kind of. It worked out because we pull in revenue data and all that stuff. However, I probably could have gotten to product market fit much faster by just paying attention to my customers, what they really wanted to use the tool for, as opposed to, you know, having my own ego and assuming that I knew what I wanted the tool for, and therefore I'm going to build it for me. Hey, that's what got me so far. We made 200,000. Because I built it for me. It was all me. And it's like, no, that's where I think most software companies fail. They just don't build the jobs to be done. Again, going back to that concept of jobs to be done, they don't understand the jobs that their customers really want to do, and they don't build for those jobs to be done. They live in their own brains of like, this is what I want the software to do. This is my vision, and it's this, this is what's happening with it.

Right?

So number one advice, I would say, is like, get your ego out of the way and just, you know, you might have an idea. You can keep having your vision, right, that you're going towards. However, just make sure that it's the customers who are using the tool who are moving towards that vision. Right. Like, you can't just build for your own vision just because you want this tool to be out there. Right. And otherwise you miss all of these things.

I think the vision thing is huge, man. Because it's hard. Like, sometimes people just build something without a vision, then you're really screwed, you know, and then you're just being directed by other people. But yeah, it's this kind of blend of two, you know, of the two, you have your North Star, which ideally is something that's, you know, it's probably going to shift a little bit. But yeah, you use that as maybe a filter for bringing the customer interactions or feedback in. Right. And then totally. Yeah. And then you keep evolving. Probably, you know, it's one of these things that's just going to kind of get there and maybe it'll be different.

Yeah. And you, you also have to really Understand who you're building it for, right? Like you can't listen to every. Because every customer will tell you something different, right? Like right now we work a lot with, we're moving a lot more towards mid market companies, companies that have a lot more traffic and instantly it's, it's instantly different what they care about, right? Like they don't, they don't care about being able to see, they want the most accurate possible data. They don't mind complex setup. They don't care about necessarily one click integrations because they have the resources, they have the money, they usually have the talent in their marketing team from a development standpoint or at least a technical standpoint to set this up. As long as it's showing me very accurate data and I can compare it to my Stripe account or my HubSpot or whatever it is and I see the same numbers, I don't mind versus if I'm working with a small market. It's like I don't have the technical skills in order to set this up. So what I want is a one click button integration so that I can connect my clickfunnels account and I can see my data from clickfunnels right there. But I want it as a one click integration. Meanwhile, the bigger businesses are like, we don't use clickfunnels, you know, we're using HubSpot, we're using Salesforce or using, you know, Shopify plus, et cetera. And it's like, who are you building it for? Right? Who's your actual customer that you're attracting, that you're, you're closing, that you're, you're delivering value to?

Yeah, man, yeah. No, that's, that's huge. And I know we were talking about this earlier, the momentum engine framework that you have, would that kind of relate with this? Because it seems like it's, it's, you know, it's very customer centric. You were saying earlier.

Totally 100%. Right. So the momentum engine is just a term. Whatever. Everybody has their own way of thinking about this. I think about this as the four phases and you need to be thinking about it from a customer standpoint. There's two things that need to happen in order for you to grow a business. You need to understand who you're bringing in and what are you delivering value to. If you think of a customer as before and after, right. In marketing, 101, you know, who are they today and who do they want to be in the future, right. Who is this one customer? Their pains, their Desires. And then if they achieve those things, who are they on this side? Your job is to bridge that gap, right? Your job is, your solution is here to help them go from where they are today based on their specific pain points to where they want to go. So what you need to understand is in order to bridge that gap, there's four phases that you're going to take your customer through. You're going to take them through the attract phase, right? So you need to attract them. You need to get a random stranger that fits this profile to raise their hand and say, hey, I'm interested in like solving this problem that I have. So how do I attract that person? Usually this is where funnels come in, right? This is a webinar or, you know, a Facebook ad. Going to a landing page to an opt in. What is the thing that's going to.

Allow me to know that I've attracted that person? And you need to think about it as one metric. What is that one metric that indicates that I've attracted that person and I've moved that person to the next phase, which is the close phase. So for example, if I'm selling a software, a mid market software, and I'm not doing it through an order form, I've got to get on the phone with somebody. Well, that attract phase, the KPI that I'm looking for is a demo booked, right? A demo scheduled. So now that's this one random person who's raised their hand and said, I'm interested in solving this particular problem. And the action that I'm doing is booking a demo to understand whether or not what you guys offer is going to help me solve that problem, right? So now that person has moved into the close phase. So the close phase is obviously getting them to pull out their credit card, right? Getting them to say, I'm committed to this particular solution. Here it is. This is marketing, right? This is where everybody talks about, right? It's like, let's generate some leads, let's close them. Hey, I made $100,000 this month. That's all they're talking about, right? That's it. However, there's two more phases, which is the next one is deliver value. Like deliver. You just sold them something, right? You just got them to pull out their credit card and you promised them something. Can you get them to the deliver stage? What is that KPI, that one action that they take that signifies that they've gotten value from the thing that you close them on, right? So once I deliver value, Good, I sold you on this Thing you've gotten value from this thing. However, I don't want you to leave because it's cost me a lot of money to get you from attract to close to deliver value. I had to pay in order to get you through that stage. So I've got to retain you, right? And this is where I'm either getting you to pay me. There's three ways to retain three things that you can think about. From a retention standpoint, it's either I'm getting you to pay ongoing payments for the thing that I'm delivering value. So you're just going to keep getting the same value over and over and over again. I can upsell you, right? So upsell payments, meaning I can go and actually.

Basically like get you. Best way to think about upsells is it's separate value for the same customer, right? So I'm giving you something separate and giving you something different of value. Or I can expand your payments. So expansion revenue. Expansion revenue, meaning I'm going to give you the same value but at a higher level. So for example, in software, more seats, right? More users. So same value, but because you're adding more users, I'm charging you more money so that more people can come in. Or traffic volume, like us at Funnellytics, it's how much volume do you have on your website? So I'm giving you a lot of value, which means that you're learning about your business, you can drive more traffic, you can plug the holes now because you have more traffic, we're charging you more money because we, you know, so you've got to remember that you're taking these people through these four phases and you're always thinking about being customer centric. So here's the interesting thing. The minute you change your customer, how you attract them, how you close them, how you deliver and how you retain changes. Not every step of the way necessarily changes, but some steps do, right? So you're always thinking about how can I move a customer from top all the way down to the bottom? And this is where a lot of people fail. A lot of people real stop thinking about it from a customer standpoint. They're just thinking about it from a marketing and sales standpoint. However, if I have a small business and I have a large enterprise business, how I'm going to attract you is going to be very different.

Wildly different.

Yeah, wildly different. How I'm going to close you, the tactics in order to close you, the time it takes to close you. Wildly different. Even if deliver value is the exact same Chances are though, it's going to have to be different because I'm going to have to hold your hand a lot more. So I'm going to have to have processes around that and I'm going to have to have people around that. This one might be a little bit more self serve. So how I'm going to deliver value is very different.

So once you start to understand that, you start to realize that the more I expand my customer base, the harder it is to move people through, attract, close, deliver, retain. The more narrow my customer base is or that profile of that customer, the more tight it is, the easier it becomes to keep moving and systemizing. Attract, close, deliver, retain and moving people through that funnel. Right. Because then you have to go and build a new funnel. A new funnel. It's like building an assembly line. If you go and say I've got five different customers, I basically got to build five different assembly lines. Yeah.

And it's like, yeah, it's perfect sense. And those assembly lines. Yeah, the funnels and you know, there's different traffic sources, ways to get that attention into the funnel. And then of course, yeah, the funnel itself gets complicated, you know, if you have different markets. Absolutely, for sure.

Absolutely.

Yeah. No, it's interesting. So funneltics, I mean, I'm kind of curious is with this, is there a funnel that you would go to from the data that you've collected, your experience and all the customers you have? Is there a funnel that you would recommend to start with or a framework for this Momentum engine framework, Something that's at least like, all right, this is a good test run for you.

Mvf.

Yeah, I like it.

Mvf. Yeah. I mean, again, it goes back to who you're going after and what is the value, the solution that you're getting them? Because think of it this way.

What if I'm selling a physical supplement where deliver value in delivery phase is literally like, you've taken this supplement, you've gotten value from it, you feel like it's delivered what you promised. Well, because I'm getting you to that deliver value and it's a supplement that you're getting the funnel for Attract is going to be very different than if I'm selling you from a deliver value standpoint, a personal coach. So you need to understand those two pieces. How am I delivering value in what format and what that is, and then who am I trying to get to that deliver value stage? Then that's where I can now start to say, okay, now we can start thinking about funnels to attract that Person in order to get that person to as close to that deliver value stage. You can't just have a blanket funnel that says, well, I'm trying to target Fortune 100 companies and I want to speak to the CEO of the company. I'm sorry, your Facebook funnel is not going to work. Right. Versus, like now maybe you have to have a slightly different attraction method. Maybe you have to send them personal notes. Maybe you have to freaking show up every single day. And that's the funnel. Like, how many CEOs can I walk in front of and interrupt at the front door of their office? And that's, that's like how I attract them. I'm not saying you should do that by any means. But you know what my point?

Right. Yeah.

So if you give me an example of a type of customer or a type of actual value, then I can probably give you some examples of minimal viable funnels. However, you have to identify those things first.

No, I think what you said is key. Yeah. And it's bridging the gap there. But it's definitely the attraction phase is different depending on, you know, like coaches. There's a lot of coaches coaching businesses. So I mean, maybe, maybe you could run through something like that. So if, you know. Because I know there are a lot of consultants and coaches listening. So maybe. Yeah, some ideas around that and the attraction phase and, you know, passing through.

Yep. So again, it depends on here. Here's an interesting thing that I always say to people that most people.

Don'T realize when I think about the momentum engine, again, these four phases that I'm moving people through. Your job is to think of it in 1 3, 10, and I call it kind of the 1 3, 10 scaling method. And your job number one thing that you've got to be doing is get one person through, attract, close, deliver, and hopefully retain. Right. Retain's the last piece. Because you're not really selling people on retain, you're selling people on deliver. So at least attract, close, deliver one person. If I were to say to you, okay, you've got a challenge right now. All you need to do is get one person through a track, close, deliver, retain. Would you go and build a Facebook funnel?

Hell, no.

One person. I don't want you to get two. I just want you to get one person through those three things. Oh, right. Now you ask yourself, okay, well, what tactics would I implement or do and execute on in order to get that one person right? Probably my network. How I would close them is I would just speak to them on the phone. Try to close them at whatever price. And then how I would deliver value to them is by actually working one on one with them through that process. Okay. Now I go and say, okay, can you do that three times? Can you get three people? Because what you're going to realize is the first time you get somebody through, there's things that you didn't think about. They're gonna ask you questions, right? Can I get three people through? Okay, now same thing, like, maybe I can still stick with my network as the attraction phase. What I'm gonna realize is when I get three people through is most likely those three people aren't the same. They may all be coaches, but they're gonna have different pain points. They're gonna have different. They're gonna be different stages in their coaching.

Careers or whatever it is. They're going to have different questions. Maybe they're different types of coaches. So they're going to want different examples or different case studies that you didn't think about. So if you go and build an entire online program where you spent all this time creating PowerPoints and all that stuff, you're going to realize that one of the coaches is getting value from it. The other two aren't because you didn't think about them. Right? So 1, 3, and then 10, right? Because now what you're going to see after 10 is you're going to start to see patterns. Right? Once you have 10, you're going to start to see, okay, the ones that I'm really getting real value for that it was really easy to sell are these seven, because they all look very, very similar. Now I've got a very clear understanding of how do I attract that person, how do I close and how do I deliver. Now once you get 1, 3, 10 for the first time, now it's about velocity. Now it's about, can I get 10 people per quarter? Can I get 10 people per month through a track close? Does the tactic that I'm using right now, referrals or whatever that tactic is to get people, will it allow me to get 10 people through? No. Then you need to change your attraction tactic. Will my closed tactic allow me to get people 10 people through per month, per week, per day? Right. If the answer is no, now you got to make adjustments. So if you're the only salesperson, then now you've got a problem. If you figured out a really good funnel for Facebook, and that's allowing me to get 10 people through per month, meaning I'm getting a bunch of people raising their hand. But I'm the only salesperson and I only have the capacity to close three people per month. That would be pretty bad, but you know what I mean? Yeah, it's like, okay, well now you've got to change your tactic on a close. It means that you have to get somebody else in place. You got to train them. There's got to be a process in place in order for that capacity to be able to handle 10 people per month. You get it. So if you think of it in that sequence, start with 1, move people through that phase. Understand, am I getting them value? Then go to three. Another way to think about it is, can I get one person to give me a case study? Can I get three people to give me a case study? And are those case studies the exact same? Are they seeing the exact same thing in those case studies? Hey, I worked with Matt and Joe and we got this like, we were struggling as a coach and then they helped me systemize my business and now we're making a lot more money. Are all three case studies the same or is the other person saying, hey, I was struggling as a leader and now I worked with Joe and Matt and they helped me become a better leader. That's a different deliver value, right? Two different things. Two different. So if you think of it in case studies, like, can I get 10 case studies to be the exact same case studies, then I can go out and say, okay, I want to get 10 per month. I want to go out and get 10 per week. Now I'm going to get 10 per day.

It's such a simple framework paired up with the momentum engine framework that you said as well. The one three, five. It's just stair stepping into this thing. One, three, ten. Sorry. I want to go big, but it's great because it is recognizing patterns. And I think that's, I mean, that goes into funnels as well and identifying. Okay, so KPIs, you can see the key metrics you should be looking at and improving. And yeah, as you scale, maybe you bring team in. So now you know the patterns, you can communicate that to scale further. So that's a cool model. I like that one through 10.

Yeah. Well, before we wrap up, I want to talk a little bit about Funneltics. With Funnelytics, is there any, like, are there any features that you don't feel get talked about enough that you're really excited about, that you think are like something really cool in funnellytics? So just for anybody listening, this sort of big idea of funnellytics is you've Got the kind of funnel mapping, which is the free thing. Right. You can kind of build like a. I don't know a better way to describe it, but flowchart of like a funnel. Right. And then the more premium version actually tracks everything in that flowchart and visualizes the data for you right on top of that flowchart. Right. Would that be kind of an accurate description? So is there anything that's really cool inside of Funnellytics that you wish more people would talk about, that you're really pumped about?

Yeah, I think the thing that makes Funnel super unique and extremely powerful that most people don't realize, and I think that's on us for not explaining it properly as the product has evolved.

At the core of what Funnellytics allows you to do is it's tracking people. Right? So you're tracking individual people who come to your website. First, they're anonymous user, abc, X, Y, Z. Eventually they put in their name and email. They become an identified person, and we're tracking all the steps that that person is taking through the lifetime of them interacting with your business. The interesting thing about what you can do when you're tracking people and not tracking a click or a page view when it's tied to an actual person's profile, is that you can start creating segments. So one of the things that we can do with funnel analytics is you can actually create segments. I can say I can ask this same exact funnel flow, for example, I can ask Funnellytics and say, hey, I want to look at the data of this funnel flow for people who came from Facebook, and I want to compare it for people who came from Google, for example, I want to see how the numbers across the entire funnel compared to each other. From that standpoint or because we're tracking people, I want to look at the people who completed a survey and said that they're a marketing service provider, and I want to compare that to the people who said that they're a software company. And I want to see what is the difference? Right. And how. Where are the breakpoints? Are they getting to my purchase? If they're a marketing company, I can do the same thing with any action that that person takes. I want to see how people who watch 100% of this video flow through the funnel compared to the people who only watch the first 30 seconds of this video. What is the difference? How does that compare? Then the next level above that, which is where Funnellytics is headed with Funneltics 2.0, is I can now start running more simulations. What If I were to turn off this Facebook ad, meaning I want to hide all of the people who have ever clicked on this Facebook ad, how much money would I have made versus the cost that it cost me for this Facebook ad? How would that now compare if I were to turn off this particular traffic source or if I were to eliminate this blog post from my website, I want to basically hide all of the people that ever interacted with that blog post. And funnelx recalculate all of my data based on the people who never touched that blog post. How does that impact my revenue, how does that impact my conversions, etc. Right. So this people feature in this segment is where things become extremely powerful. I can run simulations, I can run scenario and say, what if I were able to increase my conversion by 20%? How does that impact things? So a lot of people just look at it as page to page conversions, but it's so much more powerful than that when you actually dive under the hood. Which is precisely why we stopped doing self serve because too many people are like, this is too complicated to set up and they bounce. They don't understand the full power of it. Now we work with bigger companies and we actually help them implement it and they're like, oh, this is what this thing can do.

Are the simulations and all that active right now in funnel analytics?

Only forecasting. So you can't run simulations of like, let me turn off this segment or this segment, not yet, that's coming soon. But you can run forecast and say, well, if I were to increase this conversion, that's my current conversion is 20% between this page to this page. I can see all the way, the numbers all the way through. What if I were to increase that conversion by 25 to 25%, how much money would I have made if I, you know, so I can run forecasts and compare in that sense.

Damn, that's cool. I mean that's just. There's no other. I can't think. I mean it's just tough to get any of that kind of data, let alone real data piping through this, you know, through your integrations and all these. I think you've, I mean it's very clear that, you know, data is reported differently on all these different areas. So if you can have a centralized hub, like fun analytics right there and then run simul or you know, at least forecast Jesus. I mean, then you can figure out the whole like, you know, the 1310 almost, you can start to run some math that way and layer that stuff on top. I Dig it, man. So cool.

Yeah. Soon we'll be pulling in offline data and stuff that happens not on your website. So you can. If it happens in your CRM and stuff like that or you tag somebody, it's like, cool. This is now. So we're getting there. It's evolving. I can't wait for finally 2.0. It'll be sometime later this year, but it's exciting.

Yeah. Don't put a date out there because developers, you never know. We know that mistake.

I learned that mistake. I've been hesitant to even say anything about funnel 2.0, but we're getting closer now and. And I'm like, okay. I can confidently say that this is going to happen this year. However.

It'S like musicians and artists, right? It's like, yeah, yeah, the album's dropping this year when you'll find out.

We're creatives, man.

Exactly. Don't hurt the creative process. Come on, don't force me, man.

Well, speaking of that, you mentioned beats earlier because we dabbled with some beats and all that. Do you still. Do you make music?

No, no, no, man. I know when I was trying to figure out, like, what I wanted to do, like, people were like, what are you passionate about? I'm like, I don't know. I just came out of university. I don't know what I'm passionate about. I like music. Beat making. Software maybe, but no, that's the extent of it.

That's cool. Yeah. I just had to throw it out there, dude. I mean, this is fun. Anything? Any other questions, Matt? I mean, well, fun analytics, obviously. Is that the best place for them to go? Funnelytics.com or is there.

Yeah, fun.

Analy.

Funnellytics. IO is the. I think.com also redirects to IO. Anyways, so, yeah, go to funnelytics IO. Sign up for a free account. If you want to learn more about me, you can find me on LinkedIn. I post a bunch of videos on there as well. Right on, brother.

Cool. There you go. Good times, my man. Well, thank you very much for your time. And I want to dig back into Funnel. Use some of these features now because I don't even know.

Sounds good, guys.

Appreciate you, brother.

Yeah, good time.

Appreciate it.

That was a good one.

It was good.

I think I say that at the beginning of, like every.

I do. I'm like, is there ever a bad one in your mind?

Well, that one sucked. No.

Hey, now, what do you really think?

I'm trying to think. Have there any before we were doing outros Are there any where you would be like, well, that one sucked.

I'm not going to name any.

Yeah, is.

I don't know. I don't think that's the case.

Well, we had that one where we interviewed Elon Musk and we were just like, yeah, we couldn't. We couldn't release that one.

There's been a few like that. You know, Richard Branson. Yeah, we had Oprah.

Oprah, Yeah. I mean, she was horrible. Like you would have.

I mean, I love her, but for some reason, the podcast just. It didn't translate. Yeah, well, I don't know. Well, one day maybe we'll release those in B roll or something or for.

Or have them back and do a redo.

Let's just do a redo with them. Yeah, we'll do a redo with them. We'll get that lined up.

Yeah. So this was legitimately the first podcast that we recorded in a. Our new flowchart Studios.

Flowchart Studio.

I don't know if that's what the.

Studio is called, but we'll put a cool name on it. Yeah. And it's really cool because, like, the people in this office building that we are in have no damn clue what the hell we do. No. And they've just seen certain equipment coming through, and it's kind of precarious, I guess.

Like, the first days that we were moving in, for example, we moved in camera equipment, lighting equipment, and a couch. So that. Yeah, they saw us moving those things in. They're like, what do you guys do exactly?

We podcast.

And when Joe runs Only Fans out of Here. Casting couch.

That's Joe Kearns, not me. You can hear Joe's mixed up again.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, what's an outro without an Only Fans reference?

Always. That couch is gonna be a good napping spot. Yes.

Hasn't been used for one yet, though.

Well, we haven't really used the authors much yet.

That's true. This is only our second day actively doing work in this space.

I gotta credit the idea of having a nice couch. Aaron Fletcher.

Yeah, his napping couch.

Remember that? We went to Aaron's studio. It was his office in Encinitas when he lived here. And we recorded our podcast. And he was like, yeah, it's my napping couch. It's like every day, do a little webinar, teach a little. Couple things.

And yeah, I think he also said he has other things on the couch, but we don't need to go there.

Let's bring him back on the podcast and let him Tell we've been trying.

Aaron, if you hear this, we want you back on the podcast.

And if you know Aaron, just bug him and say, Joe and Matt just want you back on the show. We are friends with him, but he's a busy man. He's a very big fan. But. All right, so moving on, let's talk about Mikhail and Funneltics in this conversation because this was really cool.

Yeah, yeah. I mean you were starting to talk about it right before we hit record and you're like, I should save that for the outro.

Yeah, I was just saying, I mean, the framework. So, you know, towards the end of the episode, we went into a couple of the frameworks, you know, his momentum engine, which is that four step, attract, close, deliver, retain. And you know, it's very customer centric. But you know, most people are listening, are thinking about how do I attract, you know, people and not always the right people. It could be a broad market and then like close them conversions. But it's like, yeah, that's kind of where the focus stops a lot. And yeah, there's marketing's just a factor. You still gotta do all the systems and things after the fact to retain them. But specifically I thought the 1, 3, 5 thing. 1, 3, 10, not 5.

I do that.

Can you hear the tapping?

Doesn't matter. 1, 3, 10.

No.

If you think about it, it's just really cool because like I was like, I wish I knew that when I was at a video marketing agency.

Yes, you did.

And I definitely was not scaling it at that time, you know, because I wasn't thinking like this. But I was able to close one and three and be like each month, but never thought of like, okay, so if I went up another to 10.

Yeah.

And what would that take? What are the patterns? What are the systems? All that shit. I was like, that would be really. That's what I'm just saying, like anyone listening? I'm like, if you're struggling for sales. And he made a really good point. He's like, would you run Facebook ads to go get one person sale? Like, no, you would just talk with them and do manual stuff.

Well, Noah Kagan has this training on like how to get your first hundred email subscribers or something like that. And I remember going like, I don't know if it was a PDF or a video. I don't even remember how I consumed it. But I remember he had this, this concept about like, don't even bother running ads. Don't like do all the marketing tactical stuff that people talk about, like you know, if you're trying to get your first hundred leads on your mailing list, you probably know a hundred people, like, email your friends, email your family, like, use your social media accounts, your Facebook, your Twitter, your LinkedIn, like, use all the free platforms, get, like a bunch of free people on your list first. And you should be able to get to your first 100 through just tapping your existing network and then asking your network to refer. Refer people. Yeah. And it's just like, I think so many people get so hung up on these tactics of like Facebook ads, Google Ads, SEO, you know, content marketing, like all of this kind of stuff where to just get started. You can really, really, like, simplify back. And I feel like there's a big overlap with just like the 1, 3, 10 thing that he was saying. It's kind of like conceptually similar and that, like, just figure out how to get that one. Okay, now the system you used to get that one, can you duplicate that for three? Okay, now that you've duplicated it for three, can you duplicate that system to get 10 now?

Right.

And it's just such a simplification that makes you think of, like, the very basic ways that you could get somebody on a list.

Yeah.

Or into your product.

Yeah, yeah. And then you start to identify the patterns. And that's where I thought it was. Was interesting as well, is. Yeah, you can, you know, it's. Obviously, you're helping scale and you're bringing in revenue in the process, but then you start to realize, okay, so who kind of. What kind of people am I serving? Am I serving them properly with this whole, you know, with the flows, like that Momentum Engine framework he shared and, like, is this the right market? You know, like, because I don't know, it just seems like when you do figure that out and, you know, you create a funnel around that, then you can really start scaling.

Yeah.

But, yeah, it's very easy to get caught up in. Yeah. What's the latest way to drive traffic? And it's like, well, hold on, let's have some context first. Let's figure out the patterns and who and where and who. We actually want to drive through these flows and then approach those tactics. Yeah, it's very, very cool.

And speaking into Funnellytics specifically, we mentioned it on the actual interview portion, but we were using Funneltics, I think probably around 2017 when it came out, just like the free version where you, you can, you know, it's like a flow charting tool, but it has all of the sort of marketing kind of templates in there, like opt in page and sales page and webinar registration and application and, you know, like the Facebook ads, Google Ads, like all the various sources and things like that. And we did use it for some visualizations in the past, but I think that's all we ever really played around with. I don't know if we ever went premium on it or not, but it sounds like it's evolved so damn much since then. And.

I mean, some of the stuff he was saying at the end there sounds pretty damn cool of like, okay, if I was not to. Over the last two months, if I wasn't to have had this blog post live, what would my sales have looked like? Okay. You know, it only dropped my sales by like 2%. So is this blogging stuff really that impactful for my business specifically?

Right.

Like, you can really sort of drill down into. All right, this stuff is a waste of time. Is actually driving sales and lead or isn't driving sales and leads? This stuff is the high impact stuff. Like, oh, man, like 90% of our sales came from, like, these two Facebook ads. Scale those up. Cut everything else back, dude.

And think of all the. Yeah, you're not guessing anymore. And a lot of us are guessing in our marketing and our systems, and that's what funneltics solves. But then the fact that, yeah, like, let's do some forecasting. And I know his scenarios are, you know, the what, the simulations. That's a later feature that's not out yet, but the forecasting is. And you could still kind of do that thing. It's like, okay, well, what if we cut that and let's see, what, what, what do the numbers look like? Or what would they shake out to be and shit, man? Like, you could cut out. Maybe there's a big expense around a certain type of content or a way you're driving traffic. Like, maybe Facebook ads is just sucking it.

Yeah.

And so it's like, well, don't do Facebook ads. Even if you think, I gotta get Facebook ads to work, it's like, maybe.

That'S not the thing.

If it's not profitable, you don't need to.

Maybe you just do retargeting instead of cold ads for a cold audience. Maybe your cold is actually your email list or something. Or content marketing, podcasting, who knows? Yeah, yeah, yeah, man. It just. Yeah. If you can eliminate more stuff, I feel like. Because it's very easy to bolt on more things. I think that was the thing. It's like, identify the patterns with 1, 3, 10, you know, his Scaling method. There's. And then figure out what you actually need. Because it's very easy to just do a lot of stuff and hear a lot of stuff on this podcast. I mean, we're guilty as well. And it's like, gotta try that. Ooh, that's cool.

We've gotten better about that.

We have.

Now we can sit through interviews and go, ooh, that's a really cool tactic. I love that idea. And then after it go, that was cool. I mean, we're not doing it, but that was cool.

It is.

Yeah.

And I'm just thinking back, you know, years prior on our. You know, for us, it's. It's easy to get sucked into all the different strategies out there, but it's really having a foundation here and knowing what you need to do for sure.

I like it. Good stuff. It was a great conversation. Funnelytics IO that was actually our first conversation we've ever had with him too. We hadn't met him prior and really, really good dude. I liked him a lot.

He was on our dream 100. He was. And I feel bad because I forgot who introduced us. Maybe I'll look that up. As we were doing the outro here, it was actually someone I don't think I even knew, and I was like, that is really cool.

Yeah.

Power of the Dream 100 strategy. Y' all get connected to people that you want to get connected with.

Yeah.

Having said what I just said about, like, we listen to people and go, that's cool. We're probably not going to do that. Mikael's not one of those. Mikael's one of them. I listened to and went, we need to do that. We need to add that sort of tracking and that visual funnel mapping and stuff. Oh, man, we need to be doing that.

Well, we were literally just talking about this yesterday.

Yeah.

Joe Kearns, listen to this episode. I mean, if you're here, you've listened to. To it already, but listen to it. Let us know if you think Funnellytics is something we should be adding into that marketing mix.

Yeah, I mean, we defer those decisions to you now. So you just didn't know until now.

He's our marketing automation dude these days.

Master. But yeah, I mean, that actually solves. Funnellytics will solve a lot of the things that we were just talking about yesterday and how we are optimizing what we're currently doing and ideally probably cutting some stuff out, but at least we're optimizing and, you know, putting the flows more in place. The systems in Place the hustle's in Place the hustle's in place. All that. Yeah. But yeah, I think it's just. It's good timing.

So.

And that one three, five thing.

One, three ten.

I keep saying one, three, five. I think it's like a workout pattern, like a crossfitty thing. So there was somebody else stuck in my head.

That's why we've had somebody on the show who was breaking down a formula that was like a 1, 3, 5. In fact, I think. I think it was Travis Houston. No, his was his. I don't know. We've had a lot of people break down formulas that are like numbers that are like three numbers.

I keep jacking it up, but 1, 3, 10. But that's a. I would say that's more like a principle or like a thing you can just try for any new campaign or new product or offer you're putting out. There is. That's the way you test the grounds and see if it's even worthy and viable. And if you want to scale it, if it's scalable.

Yeah.

So everybody go check out Funnelytics. IO should we spell that out? Probably. F, U, N, N, E, L, Y, T, I, C, S, dot, I, O. Correcto.

Moondo.

That's the letter I, not the word.

I. Yeah, that'd be interesting. I, O. One day maybe they'll create those extensions.

Yeah, an extension that's like E, Y, E, O, H, I, O.

The longest extension. Well, no, that's not true. There are some long extensions.

No, there's like academy, online clubhouse, all sorts of. Well, I don't know about clubhouse. Maybe not. I'm thinking dot club actually. Yeah, there's not a dot clubhouse yet.

Didn't we.

That I know of.

No, we didn't get it. Maybe we should.

Eh.

I don't know. I don't know.

I own Matt Club. Actually. I don't. I wish I did.

What the.

Why do you say it then?

I don't know.

You just trying to be cool in your own cool club. The Matt Cool club. Well, I just made that cool because it doesn't even freaking exist. Yeah, well, Jesus.

I mean, I am the head of the Matt Wolf fan club. Also the only member.

There's a lot of Matt Wolf's on Google, I've learned.

Yeah, no, I'm referring to the golfer, not myself.

If you Google Matt Wolf, he's difficult to find.

This.

This Matt Wolf.

There's a golfer, a musician, a real estate agent. There's also one who's a board game. Designer. Because somebody on Twitter got me really.

Gone down the rabbit hole.

No, no. Somebody on Twitter DM'd me and was like, hey, are you the Matt Wolf who designed this board game? And I would like, no, I'm not. And then I went and actually tweeted at that Matt Wolf and went, hey, I just realized there's a Matt Wolf that develops board games. And then him and I got a Twitter conversation going. That's pretty cool. Like, bro, I want to introduce you.

To the guy that I that thought I was you. Yeah, but I don't do that stuff. That's cool.

Anyway, referring random story. Random true story. Some of my stories of this haven't been true, but that one was.

That one we can hang a hat on. All right, good stuff all around. So Funalytics, IO, go get it. And go check out Mikel's. He has a lot of cool stuff in the blog too. So check it out. You know, if you dig what you heard here. Easy Webinar. I want to give them a good old shout out.

All right.

And stop. That was too loud. In studio audience.

Yes. Everybody, quiet down. We're trying to do a podcast here.

Hey, hey, hey. Don't. Don't throw shade at me.

Hey, now they're laughing at us. Okay, I'm done playing with the soundboard now. All right, all right.

We really need to update our sound effects. We do. Was there a joke? No, it's just getting bad. We really need to update these. All right. Easy Webinar. These guys have been loyal sponsors of the podcast for very long. Casey and the crew. Well, if you think about it, works perfect with the funnel lytics. Think about it.

So I'm thinking about it.

Are you thinking about it?

Yeah.

So what do you like about Easy Webinar? Let's say webinars and like, during a funnel, like, you've done a lot of webinars, let's say. I mean, we've done a lot. You did a lot of webinars in your blogging business?

I did learn to blog was mostly sold through automated webinars. Yeah, we did. The way we did them was we did one live webinar per month, and that was sort of designed to test new slides. Like, we might tweak the pitch a little bit, add to the content, remove from the content. We were trying to constantly beat the control with once a month, live webinars. And then we had a daily automated webinar. So you came in through a Facebook ad. You would opt in for the automated webinar and then that automated webinar was always whatever was the highest performing live webinar that we've done. So every time we did it live, we were trying to beat the control. And whichever one was the current winning control was what was going into the automated webinar. And the cool thing about easy webinar is it does both. You could do the live ones and you could do the automated. So you can literally do your monthly. If you wanted to follow that model, you could literally do your live webinar once a month. And then in easy webinar, whenever you get one that beats the control, flip it to the automated webinar. Boom, it's a few clicks.

That's freaking cool. Well, there you go. Got a strategy. There you go. So if you're doing webinars, you want to, well, swipe that strategy because it did work. It did work very well. Yeah.

And we might even play around with it with Pod Hacker at some point.

I mean, I don't think it'd be a bad idea. So all that stays easy Webinar does that doesn't do the recording for you. You have to still come up with the content. But that's why you're the expert.

Yeah, yeah. It's not gonna make your presentation for you or speak live for you.

You know, AI is getting better by the day.

You could use conversion AI and have like a fully automated webinar.

I'm just saying do that.

We'll talk about that later.

What's that tool? Polly. There's a tool called Polly by Amazon which will actually like read text for you in a fairly. It's pretty good convincing sounding voice. So you could legit use conversion AI. Use poly to read it for you. You'd probably still have to like hire the slides or something.

That's like the only part. There's some. Shoot, I'm blanking on a name. But there is an AI slide tool as well. It's probably not that great yet, but I mean, dude. Well, we talked about this in the Mastermind the other day, but you folks, AI is going to be a big ass thing like five years. Yeah, give it five. It's just going to give everywhere.

I mean, we're already starting to feel it. I mean especially inside of the advertising world. Like you're seeing a lot of AI inside of Facebook ads and Google Ads and more and more. The copywriting AI is getting better and better. But yeah, you could theoretically use this for your webinars and load them into easy webinar and have a Fully automated system.

I like how we just workshop that idea out of nowhere, but I could see that actually potentially working.

It all hinges on getting easy webinars.

So easywebinar.com hustle, they are hooking you up. That is, we didn't do anything. We're just talking to him on mic. So, yeah, go to EasyWebinar.com hustle and those guys are hooking you up with a fat. With a ph discount fat. I'm not going to tell you how much you just got to go there. So easywebinar.com hustle, it's worth it. Go get it.

Definitely go get that for your webinar platform. And thanks for listening to this episode. If you want the notes for this episode, we do have action guides. Go to Florida. Flowchart Group.com Flowchart Group.com is where you can join our Facebook group. One of the questions when you join the group is to give us your email. If you give us your email, we will send you those action guides. We'll send you the most recent two weeks action guide. So you got to be kind of quick do it. But you'll get access to our group. You'll get access to the action guides. And if you specifically wanted this action guide and you do it after two weeks, just, you know, it's kind of lame. But if you contact our support, we'll probably still hook you up with it.

Because let us know.

Sometimes, sometimes we'll 50, 50 chance. Email us and say, I want that Mikel dia action guide. 5050 chance will be like, screw you. Go away. Versus here you go. Today I'm in a good mood. And you got lucky.

Well, it helps if you're a subscriber. So, you know, if you, if you want to ask for a little, little bonus hookup there, just, just hit the subscribe button wherever you're at, you know, and if there's no subscribe button, leave a comment. Review. I don't know.

Yeah. At least make sure you're in the group.

Spread the word. There you go. Flowchartgroup.com, make sure you're in there too, because you'll get hooked up with way more stuff, too.

Yes, ma'. Am.

All right, till next time. Peace out, y'. All. Bye bye.

Thanks, everybody, for listening to this episode of the Hustle and Flowchart podcast, for taking the time to listen. We want to give you something a little bit special. Every single episode that we do, we actually have somebody on our team take notes. We basically have a Cliffs Notes version of every episode where you can go and find all of the tips and tactics that they laid out, all of the resources that they laid out, all the good stuff from this episode. We actually have a nice simple notes version that you can find on our website. So go to evergreenprofits.com find this episode that you just listened to and give us your email address and we'll send you the notes. Thanks for listening.

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