Mike Filsaime — How To Load Up Webinars / How To Build A Software Company

Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

What's up, everybody? You're listening to the Hustle and Flow Chart podcast with your boys, Mount Wolf and Joe Fear. What is up, everybody? Welcome back to the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. My name is Matt Wolf. I'm here with my business partner, Joe Fear.

Hey.

Now, I was going to try to make it like Snoop Dogg business pizzle, but that just sounds bad.

No, yeah, not doing that.

No, no, not doing that one. All right, anyway, so today we've got an awesome guest and he's. He's one of the OGs of Internet marketing. The Internet marketing world. One of the. He's actually the second person to ever do a million dollar day in the Internet marketing space.

And it's crazy. It's still mind blowing. And yeah, we take a little walk down memory lane and how that all happened.

Yeah, yeah. And it's a great story. You know, you get, you're going to get a little bit of a history lesson on Internet marketing in this episode Today. Our guest is the one and only Mike, Phil Same. He's the founder of webinar Jam everwebinar Kartra, the soon to come groove cart, which is gonna be like a Shopify competitor, but with a lot more features than Shopify built in. Lots and lots of cool stuff that he's done over the years. A lot of people have probably heard his name. Most likely, if you're listening to this, you probably actually bought one of his products that he's been involved in at some point. Cause he's that prolific in the Internet marketing world.

Yeah, no, definitely. And not only is there history, but there's going to be a lot of good takeaways for you. Launching products now brands now, how to actually use webinars effectively to not only get people to register and not only to get them to show up, but to actually buy and then continue to buy even after the fact. So a lot of folks have experienced some declining webinar numbers over the years, as have us. But there's some definite small tweaks that you can make. And Mike literally gives you the script both like the templates of what their pages should say and also what you should say. It's freaking. It's, it's cool.

And if that's not enough too, he pretty much teaches you how to build a software business.

Yeah.

So there's a lot we can go down because this is a longer episode. But don't let it deter you. It's amazing, it's fun and it's, it's definitely very actionable. But at the end of the day, I just wanted to reiterate to anyone that's new to the podcast that the point of these podcasts are to give you a different lens on how to look at not only your business, but your life. To start thinking a little different than the norm, than what the system, quote, unquote system has kind of led you to do, which is some of you might be in a job that's totally fine, but there is a different way. Some of you might be running this business that kind of overtook your life slowly and you didn't see it coming. But now you find yourself working late at night, not hanging out with the kids or the family as much. There's a different way. So that's the point of these podcasts is to give you this different look of how to restructure the things you're doing, how to refocus, and then how to act to create that life you really want right now. So simple as that. That's what we do at the Hustle and Flowchart podcast. And you can check more out@evergreenprofits.com and get in touch with us. Definitely.

Let's go ahead and dive in with Mr. Mike Filsaime.

Hey, Mike, how you doing, man?

Doing great. Thanks for having me, fellas.

Yeah, thanks for hopping on the show. And I think it's been. You've been one of those guys who've been wanting to get on for a bit now, and just because I know conversations just go everywhere, but they're always fascinating.

That's right.

So, yeah. So let's. For the few that are even out there that don't know you, which is maybe a little bit out of the Internet marketing space, give us a little history. Backflash of backflash. That's fire, huh? But flashback of butterfly marketing, all that stuff that you did when you first kind of came on scene there.

Yeah, Well, I spent 14 years in the car business. I started doing this in 2002 was when I bought my first domain. I got fortunate that I realized right away that.

Building a list was better than selling a product. So what I started doing was taking some resell rights products back in the early days. Those were some big things. And I created a squeeze page to give the products away for free. And then I had an upsell that would upsell 25 other resell rights products after they opted in. And if they bought or they didn't buy, I had them on my list. And then I could promote other Offers and launch other products in the future. But where it went really cool was with butterfly marketing. I realized what if I could make everybody an affiliate instantly as soon as they opted in on the squeeze page. And that was something that we pioneered. This was before WordPress, before YouTube was even.

An idea. This goes way back. But in 2003, 2004 and 2005, I started doing these quote butterfly sites where basically when you entered your name and email address, you also created a password. And I immediately created an affiliate account for you. And then after you bought the upsell or didn't buy it, I would basically tell you that, hey, we pay, you know, 50% and here's your link and here's all your promotion tools. And if you bought the product, I'll pay you 100% commission or 75% commission or whatever it was. But I didn't have to walk you through the affiliate program. There would just be a list of tools. Step one, go change your email signature in the warrior form. Step two, change your email signature in your gmail. All these different things.

That we taught people how to do. What would happen is any traffic that you would get from advertising or JV or wherever they were coming from, those people would immediately turn into viral traffic for you. And I was in the heyday between five or six different sites. I was getting 700 opt ins a day.

Back then email open rates were just better.

It was just great. So I ended up taking that idea and building a script around it. Back then we didn't do SaaS programs or software as a service. You had to install it on your own server like a WordPress. But.

I was the second person to ever do a million dollar launch. The first guy was a guy named John Reese, you've probably heard of him.

That's right.

He did Traffic Secrets in August of 2004. And this guy named Jeff Walker, you probably heard of him.

Yeah, Yep.

He wasn't famous yet, but he did do six figures in seven days. So Jeff's email to this day, I don't think he'll care because he doesn't use that one. But his email address was jeffixin7.com because back then, my God, you did $100 in seven days. Like, I mean, you know, it's still incredible now it is, but not extraordinary. But back then that was extraordinary. You've done what, you know what, what people even online would dream about and in the real world they would do in a year. And Jeff did it in seven days. So he consulted with John Reese about Doing this, John was the first guy to go high ticket. I think the most money ever done in a day somebody had posted was like 54,000. So when John did a million dollars, it was pretty big. And he wrote a report and it was called.

One man, one million, one product, one day, something like that. And he gave a lot of credit to Jeff Walker. And that report came out on August 31, 2004. And if you look in the whois of the directory, you will see that I registered the domain name Butterfly Marketing on August 31, 2004. When John said that, he said, I believe million dollar launches are going to become commonplace. And he, he equated it to Roger Bannister breaking the four minute mile. And he said, you know, now that it's done and it's true, it can be done. And I hope that this report inspired you. So I went out and I said, that's it, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do a million dollar launch. And I had so much success. The echo effect of that million dollar launch probably lasted even to this day. Right. Because it lasted me three, four, five years. But because of that I kept being able to double down and parlay it with the next launches because I was now Mike Phil, same. It really, it really helped me.

To make a name for myself in the industry. And I always equate it to this.

There's been 13 men or 11, I forget 11 or 13 men in the history of space travel to ever walk on the moon. And all of them have all been American. Now you can probably name.

Two of them.

Yeah.

Yep.

But if I would, if I was to say name the third. So I think John Glenn was the first to do the spacewalk, so Neil Armstrong was the first, Buzz Aldrin was the second. I would ask you to name anybody else after that. You guys probably can't. If you are, you're really science. But.

Well, the, the guy that was in Apollo 13, I think eventually got to walk on the moon, didn't he was the guy's.

Yeah, I can't think of his name.

Right. Yeah, I don't know him.

I think we're proving your point here.

Yeah, yeah. And we saw the movie and it's Tom.

Ha.

So what happened was John, John Reese was Neil Armstrong and I was Buzz Aldrin and then everybody else was everybody who's ever been to space and space station and all those different things. And just one last thing on that. So John did that report in August of 2004. I registered the domain name in August of 2004. I did my million dollar launch January 31st of 2006. So it took me a year and a half or anybody else after John laid out exactly how you do video one, video two, video three, high ticket product JVs and everything like that, it still took a year and a half for anybody to do it after that. And then I did and I'm being asked to speak all over the place. Armin asked me to speak at the big seminar. But right after that, Rich Sheffern does Strategic Profits, Stompernet does Stompernet. Jeff Walker does Product launch Formula and on and on and on and on and on. And it just, you know, that model became the product launch. But that's really what created for me. And from there what it was, it was a bunch of strategies around software. So I've always had a thing for software. I always thought that it has this extra done for you element that people want and it increases the conversions and the intrinsic value of what people are buying over just information products.

Yeah, and that's where, because I know Matt and I have talked about this a lot with information specifically, if you're just kind of stuck in information, at least the trend now it's much different than when you were starting out or you know, all of us really is. You know, information is becoming so freely, you know, widely just given out YouTube, you know, free reports, you can't really command, you know, a lot of money just for information alone. So you've always kind of been a step ahead with software, it seems like.

Yeah. So here's a little known thing.

I was actually a software developer. I wrote code. I cannot write a line of code on the web. But you know, I've been around a long time. I'm 50 years old. So I graduated high school in 1985, but I had my first Commodore Vic 20 in 1983 and then I had a Commodore 64 right after that. Like a month after that the 64 came out. So I started learning programming and then my mom got the IBM XT and I learned how to program in basic. And then I graduated and I went to New York Institute of Technology to study computer science with business administration and I was writing programs, actually sold a program to Lottery Players magazine. My dad used to fall asleep.

Trying to do his lottery tickets. Two games for a buck back then and he would spend $25. So he had 50 tickets that he had to check every Wednesday and every Thursday and he'd fall asleep after the fourth one came on at 10:30 news. So we always used to joke we could be millionaires, but he played the same numbers every week. So what we did is.

I put him onto a disc and he'd put it in and it would tell him if he had three in the supplementary or four or five or six, and if we were millionaires and all that. And then I wrote it for all 50 states because they were all a little different, but pretty much the same formula. I contacted Lottery Players magazine to put an ad in the paper, and the owner of it said, what. What are you doing? And, you know, computers were just brand new back then. And so. So he offered me 25 grand for the rights of it, and I sold it. And, you know, I think right there was when I realized, hey, you can make money with software. But I ended up leaving.

School, never graduated, and I went into the car business. So I was in the car business, always trying to get them to get onto computers. Computers for leasing, computerized inventory, computerized business development center. And, you know, I was the pioneer of the intern and a computerized key system. So I learned a lot about sales. Everything I know about marketing or that, you know, at that time, I was able to take online, but I wanted to always tie that back into software.

Yeah, that's interesting. We've had quite a few people on our podcast, too, who seem to have a background in either car sales or real estate. It seems like just getting that sales background is, like. Has been really big. We had James Schramko on a couple.

Months back, you know, James Story.

Yeah, yeah. He worked at BMW, became one of their top sales reps, and it was.

Mercedes Benz, I think.

Oh, sorry, yeah, Mercedes Benz.

But I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. Not to cut out. There's why I said, you know, his story. So I went to speak at World Internet Summit in Sydney, and James sees this ad that there's going to be, you know, you know, 1200 people at the Sydney Convention center. And he's like, yeah, right, this is all nonsense. And all of a sudden it says, mike, Phil, same former car dealer turned online, you know, superstar, blah, blah, blah, will be speaking. And this is 2006 or 2007, and I'm done speaking. You know, I sell my coaching package. And there's this one tall guy, very nice guy. He's just waiting for everybody to leave. And finally, when, when he's done, in his beautiful Australian accent, he says, mike, you were in the car business? And I said, yes. How do you Know that. He says, it was on the paper here. And he said, the reason why I'm here at this event is because I didn't believe any of this stuff was true. And I said, I would know when I met you if this is true. And then we were talking about the car business, and he says, so this is absolutely true, everything you're saying? I said, yes. I said, get involved in this stuff. It's going to change your life. And we became friends there. But here's the funny thing. Nine months later, nine months later, I'm at a.

Maverick Business adventures. It's Yannick Silver's thing where millionaires do these crazy trips, and we're doing a zero gravity dive with Tony Hawk, and all of a sudden, hi, Mike, how are you? I said, hey, how you doing? He goes, you don't remember me, do you? And I said, I'm sorry, you look familiar. And he goes. He goes, james Schremko. I met you in Sydney. And I said, oh, yeah? And I still did. Hit me. He goes, I worked at the Mercedes Benz dealership. And I said, oh, right. And I said, wait a second. Worked? You're a maverick. And he goes, yeah. I said, you got to be doing a million dollars a year to become a maverick. He goes, yes, I am. And this is nine months later. Hell, yeah. So James is probably the most brilliant person I know in this game, and on top of that, probably the most ethical and honorable dude I've ever met. So. Yeah. So that story is, like you said, about another guy in the car business. That's how he and I back.

Yeah, that's 100% accurate about James, too. And. And that's why it was so fascinating to have him on the podcast. He told that. Not. Not with you in there, but the whole story from. But I'll. We'll definitely share this with James and make sure he hears it.

And your Australian accent. Spot on, too.

I was mistaken for a while. Yeah.

Oh, good on you. Thank you.

Good on you, mate. Sorry, James, it was horrible, but, well, so you always had the software in mind, but you also had being really good at launches. Very, very proficient there.

Do you think you took some hustle? Like, was there something from those car days that you carried over into where you're at now?

Yeah, without a doubt. So there was, as you said, hustle. You know, that's one thing.

And the next thing is going into character. Right. So I could be talking to you guys right now or talking to my wife or, you know, or my business partners or anything. And then, you know, there's Mike Til same, and we're talking. Excuse me. And then there's the same thing you would do when a customer walked into the showroom. It would. You'd smile with your eyes, you'd put your chest back, you'd put your shoulders back and put some air in your lungs and very warm and welcoming with, you know, commanding but not overpowering, empowering voice, and say, hi, welcome to Millennium Toyota. My name is Mike. And you are. What type of car are you looking for? How can I help? So it's that same type of thing of understanding how to do that with online video, whether you're talking to your JV partners or whether you're doing an online video sales. You have to go into this character and you have to find the balance of it because you don't want to become, you know, what I would call Don lapree. The late Don lapree.

Right?

And, you know, we've all seen that. And that's when, you know, you know, you start talking like literally thousands upon thousands of dollars can be made with online marketing. And that's just. That's just cheesy. But you also want to get away from saying, and you know, the good thing about online marketing just being droning and drowning people out. So I think sales there, but also learning, influence what makes people buy. So here's a funny story. You guys have heard of the book Influence? The psychology of persuasion.

Urgency, scarcity, authority, reciprocity, all these different things. So we used to do all of those things in the car business. And there was a system, it was called the death system, and it was done by Don Rosenbraum. And every one of those seven things were in there that when I got online, I remember Jeff Walker talking about all these things before he spoke about the book. And I said, oh, my goodness, they completely ripped this off from the car business. That's how naive I was. Then I heard about the book and saw that it came out two months before this system swept across the entire country for auto sales. And I was like, oh, my goodness. Don Rosenbaum read this book and applied it to car sales. But I had a knowledge of, you know, we called it liking. I mean, Cialdini calls it liking. They called it the like affair. Establish common ground. You know, if somebody said, you know, unfortunately, these are the tricks of the trade, they sound very sleazy. But, you know, if somebody said, I want the white one, our initial reaction would be like, so does everybody else. And I think all the white ones are sold. That would just be the reaction. They would go, oh, really? Let me check for you. Hold on a second. We have a deposit on this one, but the credit didn't go through. But if we can do a deal today, I can. I can probably get you in it. So unfortunately. Right. You know, that's just sales tactics and, you know, things like that. It's the same way that we put a countdown timer on a page. Right. But learning all those things in the car business made me realize that sales copy is nothing but a bunch of paint that goes on at the end. If you have a bad offer or you don't have all of the proper elements of an offer in there and you just have, quote, good wordsmithing, you're not gonna sell. They call that putting lipstick on a pig. What I've realized is that if you get the offer down and the frame and the hook and all these things down first, then you're gonna go out of the gate with an A. And then when you wordsmith it with good copy and good structure, you can get that to an A plus.

I love it. No, that makes perfect sense. I mean, that's the thing. It's always offer. And that's where I think, like, copywriting. A lot of folks just feel like that's. I mean, it's one of the best skills you can possibly have, for sure.

I've seen a lot of software products, actually, specifically, that have some of the worst copy I've ever seen. But all they had to do was put a demonstration of their software in a video form on their website, and it does the selling for them, you know, and then at the same time, I've seen, you know, some amazing, brilliant copy written that, you know, maybe it sells a shit ton, but at the end of the day, within 30 days, 50% of those people refund on it.

Yeah, I'll give some resources, if you guys don't mind, some books that I would recommend, please.

Yeah.

For anyone listening. So.

The one for copy that you want to read, you probably got to buy it on Amazon used or on ebay or something like that. I'm not sure if it's still in print. It's called the Robert Collier letter book. Robert Collier was probably one of the best copywriters of all time. All of his every. Everything that he ever put in copy ended up being the control the ad agencies, his own ad agency, all the people underneath it could never beat it. Now, this does go back to like the 1930s and 40s, but, you know, substitute the horse and carriage. You know for modern day products and the stuff is brilliant. That is on copywriting. Okay, now for psychology, I recommend obviously Influence the Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini. I recommend two books by Dana. Really. One is called Predictably Irrational and the second one is called yes. And then the final book, just a masterpiece of a book, is called Triggers by Joe Sugarman. If anybody spends time reading those things, you know, maybe, you know, one a week for four or five weeks, you'll be a master copywriter because you'll start understanding the psychology and saying, oh, I just need to communicate this. That's all I need to do. And then you take the Robert Collier stuff and wordsmith up the structure of an offer and you'll be a hero.

Oh man, that's amazing. I'm gonna go back and I think there's a couple of those. No, I gotta get them all.

I've got Robert Collier's letter book and I've got Influence. I think those are the only two.

I have 75% of the there. So basically Triggers by Joe Sugarman is.

Its influence by Cialdini broken down a little bit better into about 14 or 15 different. What he calls triggers. The difference between Joe Sugarman and Cialdini. Cialdini is now a consultant, but Cialdini used to be a professor, so he wrote that book to warn people how you'll get taken. That's famous from it that he ended up becoming a consultant. Joe Sugarman is a copywriter. He did blue blockers, remember.

The sunglasses and that were infomercials and many, many other products.

Didn't he do the Adweek copywriting handbook too?

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

If you go to Amazon and look up Joe Sugarman while you're there, pick up all the other stuff that he's done. He's brilliant. Brilliant man, old man, but brilliant.

Yeah, that's really good. Helpful things there. We were going to ask him probably towards the end of that podcast, but that was perfect.

Yeah, we always ask for books, but now we got that out of the way.

So going into, let's dive deeper on the launch thing and we'll talk on obviously software as well in conjunction with this because I know a lot of. So I guess talk about the state of the launch. Like now if someone were to approach launching a product, call it SaaS or maybe a service or E Comm, what are some principles they should go by?

Well, the first thing to understand is that the launch industry and the, you know, the whole mentality around launches has changed. People hate them. And what I mean by that is not the customers. If a launch is done right, it's going to be successful. Getting JV partners is more and more and more and more difficult because from 2006 to 2011.

The launch was the business model for digital marketers, right? You would go out and do a launch and you put it on a calendar and you were expected to have a good product and good conversions and all that stuff for your affiliates. But assuming you did all those things right, the JV partners would line up. Something happened in 2011, 2012 and then more each year. And that's simply Facebook. Facebook advertising became so strong that people, the two, two things happened. Number one, people were responsible for their own traffic and they didn't need the JV anymore. And number two, they were paying for the traffic. They were paying four to five dollars to get an email and they didn't want to just give it up to you anymore. And you know what we would call the launch game. You were, you know, you would do a launch a year, maybe two. But that also meant that, you know, you had 26 JV partners that you had to reciprocate for. So they would mail twice a year and you were, you were hammering your list every single week. And people don't want to do that anymore as much. But there's good news to that. Since people aren't launching as much anymore, it's almost gone out of favor. What that does mean is that when you do a launch and you do it right, that there is a little less noise in the launch. Now there's still smaller marketplaces like the JVZoo markets and things like that where people are launching six, seven different people are launching a day for the $47 product and then the four upsells and six down sells. But I'm talking more about the Jeff Walker product launch where you have video one which is the proof of concept or you make you. Video one is always talking about the concept. You have to explain why would you want to get into E commerce and maybe shatter some of the myths.

Video number two is the how the how I'm doing it. And video three is kind of like the tease of the product a sneak peek behind. And then video four is the video sales letter and it's a tried and true model. But I can tell you that the last couple of launches I've done were very, very difficult to get the usual suspects promoting even if it can do well. But they were still million dollar launches and we worked harder on the conversion. So if we would have Gotten the launch partners we did in the past, we probably could have done 3 or 4x what we did in the last couple of launches.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. And that mirrors exactly what we've seen as well. If you can really hone in on Facebook and even take the launch out of it for a second, there's. It's almost like if you Compare that to JVs, you'll be spending a lot less of your investment in terms of if you're giving 50% away to JVs, as compared to just paying for traffic and honing in on it.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

But if you can layer both. Oh, my God.

Yeah. Launching is not a business model. Not a business model for making money. The most important thing about a launch that I've learned is that you launch a brand. So the biggest mistake I see with people, they come out with their $997 product and info product and they launch. And just so that they can have scarcity and urgency, they close the launch down and then say, coming soon for nine months. That's not a business.

I think that's so ridiculous when I see that.

Yeah. So what we did, starting with Webinar jam back in December 2013, January 2014, when that launched, we launched something called the Grand Open. And we said that this offer is only guaranteed through the grand opening and may change after the grand opening. And then after that, the grand opening went away. And then we either raised the price or took off some of the bonuses or both. But why lose all that traffic? Why lose a brand? I would imagine how silly that would have been. Sold out for nine months.

Yeah. With Facebook ads and Google display network ads and things like that. You are building a giant pixel as well, you know, might as well grab all that, all that pixel traffic and retarget the heck out of them as well.

Absolutely, yeah. So today I look at launching a launch for exactly what it is. It's like it's to launch a brand so that you get people talking about it. Right. What? You know, when you and I last saw each other in person, we were at a high level mastermind, you know, the Speakeasy event in San Diego. But the launch for Kartra was just going on at that point and it created the conversation where people were talking and then other people hear, oh, how is it? I gotta check that out. And that's what you wanna do. That's what a launch does. As opposed to trying to get the customers one by one. With Facebook, you wanna get everybody in that industry talking about it. If you can.

Yeah, no, I love it. And then I know you mentioned what previously is go to. You can totally get evangelists or affiliates talking about it. And Facebook groups, for instance, that's still highly engaged on Facebook, luckily not paid.

I call that getting into the conversation. As we were talking before we got on the podcast that if the people in the Reddits and the subreddits and the Facebook groups that have these incredible niches around your product, and there's an 800 pound gorilla, for instance, Gotowebinar.

And everybody's saying, hey, do you know where I can get good landing pages for GoToWebinars? Should I use click funnels or leadpages? Right. That might have been a pretty popular thing that would have been in a Facebook group if we could get into the conversation where people are like, that's why I use Webinar Jam. It has templates built in.

Then everybody that's part of that group starts seeing that. And when they start seeing it over and over, I just made the switch. I just made the switch. That social proof is so powerful. And that doesn't happen unless you have a good launch that gets people talking about it.

Yeah, no. And that's so powerful. And that's the thing is, it's, that's where we see now is, you know, you can drive traffic, you have all the retargeting, all that stuff, but really what you're doing is you're building that brand. And then if you can convert folks, I don't know if you're still doing the butterfly marketing approach with getting to become affiliates immediately or at least get evangelists.

Well, I asked Hector.

With Kartra to put that feature in for me. Just create a rule that if somebody.

Buys a product or fills out this opt in form, then make them an affiliate. But with all the new GDPR and all these different things that people need to agree to, he didn't want to do it. And legally, so because Kartra is essentially a third party affiliate program that I would be using, but the customer needs to agree to Kartra's terms of service and all these other things that have to happen when you fill out an email form. And so he just, you know, he just said, you know, basically Mike, just put it as part of a step, make him click a button and join your affiliate program after. But man, I wish that was able to be done.

Seriously. Yeah, I guess you could do stuff like, you know, our buddy Wilco with upviral, you know, is give him some incentive or some Bonus, you know, to then share it around.

Wilco. That's another genius marketer, man. He thinks outside the box.

Yeah, we've had him on the podcast and our minds were pretty blown too on the whole software stuff.

If he's been on your podcast. Well, that's two right there. I'm going to have to go download. He's on there, of course, probably everybody else you have on, you have some good people.

He's one of the most popular ones. There's a reason for it.

I know with Cartra. So just keep it on the vein of launching. Now what you guys had a dollar trial, so obviously that's going to catch some attention immediately.

Well, we did two things with Karcher that was pretty interesting. Number one, for the launch we had a separate affiliate program than the standard 30% that's there now. What I wanted to convey, and just for the record, you know, a little asterisk. I'm the co founder of Kartra, Webinar Jam and everwebinar, but I'm no longer affiliated with them. I sold the company to my partners, Hector and Andy. In fact, Frank Kern is now owner of that company with them.

Yep.

And I was hired as a consultant for the launch because I had sold it a while back. But the idea that we wanted to do with that Launch was number one.

Do a dollar trial and then pay people 100 bucks if that trial billed in 14 days. So it sounded like a CPA offer, but you know, essentially there was no risk. The person had to bill and then we paid 50% as a bonus and we call that. And as a bonus we're going to pay you 50% on payment number two. But again, the way we frame that, right, the way we make an offer to the affiliate is the same way you make an offer to a customer. You very quickly have to get off of all that complexity and then break it down. This is one of the best tips I can give you about a launch. Do not communicate to your affiliates about the affiliate program. Shameless Plug here for Groove Cart. If you go to groovecart.com jv you're going to notice that we don't talk about the percentage we're going to pay you 40% or anything like that. We focus on the EPC and we simply say based on the last launches that we've done with similar products and similar price points, we average 8 to $15 EPC for our top 20 affiliates. And then I immediately go to a whiteboard and I'll do the math and I'LL say, so that means if you send us 100 people, we'll send you a check for $800. If you send us a thousand people, we'll send you a check for 8,000. Send us a check, you know, send us 5,000 people and we'll send you a check for 40,000. Send us 10,000 clicks, we'll send you a check for $80,000. And then, you know, say something like, and that's very complimentary to what we've done for our other affiliates in the past. So if I start telling you the opposite, it I'm going to pay you 40% commission. Plus we have a, you know, an upsell for this and a down sell for this. All that is, it doesn't mean anything, right? Because how does it convert all that nonsense? But if we, you convert it down to the earnings per click. I don't even need to talk to you about the commission that I'm paying you. And I've been doing that now for the last five years. I focus solely on the EPC. They'll look at the commissions when they sign up. 40% is a pretty decent standard these days. So that was the first thing we did is that we communicated something to the customer that people that said, listen, we're gonna have a high converting product that people want. All you've got to do is get them to commit for a dollar, maybe give a bonus program. And on average, you know, you'll be making about $125 for every dollar trial. Let's do the math. That was number one. The second thing that we did, revolutionary, and I gotta give credit to Frank Kern on this one, this was just absolutely brilliant.

But I recommend anybody steal it if they're doing video one, video two and video three.

Let me give you guys an example before.

I actually give you the tip. Do you guys play any games? Xbox, PlayStation?

It's been a while, but we do when we find time.

Okay, I'll give you an example. Call of Duty, right? You can pre order the game right now, right? And it comes out in October. What the hell does that mean? Right? It means you pay for it and.

You, you know, you don't get it yet.

Yeah, I don't know if you guys use like itunes to rent or buy movies like on your Apple tv. Sure, sure, it's the same thing. You'll see, you know, the, the Avengers pre order. All that means is you're spending your money now and you get it when everybody else gets it. And you could have ordered it then, like you're really not getting anything extra for pre order.

Right.

But sometimes you do, like with the games, they maps. So that's what. What we wanted to do. Typically with a product launch, you have video one for four days, video two for three or four days, video three for three or four days. You're getting all this traffic, but the people can't buy. And you got to hope that, you know, they come around when the video sales letter opens up, you know, on the 12th day.

Right.

So what Frank did is he said, let's put request invite without explaining anything. And right underneath, you know, we're talking about this new software platform. They kind of get it. They see request invite. Everybody wants to get something like that. And immediately after they requested an invite, they got an email with a countdown timer in the email. Kartra does that and something that basically said, hey, we may, after we open the launch, these bonuses may go fast. You know, whenever you have urgency or scarcity, you always need to do a reason why. Right. And you know, it could be as silly as the guy in Slap shop, you know, and you know, and you need to order now because we can't do this all day.

You just closed that loop.

Because we can't do this all day. Which is true. Right? Yeah. So what, you know what, what we did is we, I think we said something along the lines of, look, we have every anticipation of keeping the launch open for seven to 10 days, but we may have overwhelming response because of the dollar trial that we want to be able to service all of our customers. We have a certain amount of customers we're anticipating for the launch. If it comes out better than we anticipated, we may close the launch sooner. That could even happen in the first day or the first hour. So if you want to jump the line, you have four hours to guarantee yourself a spot. Click here. And they go to a page and they actually saw the video sales letter that they'd have to wait 14 days for. And there was a countdown timer that said four hours. And after that, the page redirected and said, sorry, you're too late. You'll have to wait till the launch opens. So we were making sales right from Pre launch video 1, 2, and 3. I think if you take the internal and the JV launch, I think we did about 35% of our sales during pre launch.

Oh my God, that's freaking brilliant.

Yeah. And I think the conversion rate doubled what it was during the launch because there was a countdown timer there for four hours every day. However, the overall conversion that was a conversion. If they saw the video, the overall conversion was a little bit less because we were only getting about a third of the people to request the invite. So we didn't get everybody to see the video sales center, but it still ended up working.

And we have used for one of our businesses, the beer one with Brad Kartra, and we did a launch. It was just a little mini launch and we're freaking blown away with features like that in Kartra. And like, the countdown timer was just one of the smallest ones, but just the tracking, we're like, holy moly.

Oh, yeah. I mean, just, you know, just speaking on Kartra for a second.

It's crazy because, like, there's very few platforms where you get like that sort of granular tracking across everything.

You're doing everything from the video to the page. You can put a tag. I gotta tell you, even for me, right? You know.

The more I use it, the more I fall in love with it. I'm just, you know, every time you go in, it's always thinking ahead for you and you're like, oh, wow. Oh, look at that. That's great. Yeah, let me make sure to add that. You know, it's, it's just makes life easy for all, all marketers.

Yeah, no, it works. And, and I know it's still fresh, so it's only going to get better. Yeah, but, but, yeah, no, I mean, the launch model, I just love the fact that, that if you put, I think an ounce of effort into launches these days, you know, like you said, not everyone's doing it. People are probably scared. They just don't know how to approach it now. And they don't know the Facebook, the branding side, how you can back it up and really well.

It's almost kind of like email and direct mail, right? Like at one point, everybody was like, ah, shit. All I got in my mail today is junk mail. And nobody really wanted to check their actual real life mailbox. And then when they got that little you got mail. Like, people loved getting email. And then over time, it shifted until people were like, I'm really, really sick of getting email. And now all of a sudden, people get excited when they actually get something real in the mail. And so once again, there's like this new sort of revolution where direct mail works like crazy again, because nobody's doing it.

Yeah, exactly. It's, you know, what comes around, goes around. You know, I remember.

I'll just give you an example. You know, when you go to an event and somebody says, hey, Try this. I'm getting these insane conversions, but now everybody's doing it. It's on everybody's side. It's the same exit pop. And then it stops working.

I remember back in the day how much like Intellichat software would work, right? It would pop up and give you a coupon code. But then everybody was using it and they were bots and the artificial intelligence wasn't that good anymore. And then everybody knew that it wasn't real and that it actually would not work on the site anymore. It would hurt conversion. But I guarantee if you put that back on the site, because nobody's doing it again, it would absolutely work great.

Yeah, that's probably true. Oh, man. So, I mean, going down the vein now, so we got that you've always been a software guy, so we could probably transition into what you're doing now.

Well, I mean, there's really two kind of of rabbit holes we still want to go down with you. One of them is webinars and talking about some tips on webinars, because I know you've got some good strategies that are working well there. And the other one is just talking about the software business in general. I know that's sort of an avenue that Joe and I have always talked about traveling down, but have never really traveled down. So which one would you like to talk about first?

I guess.

Well, we can talk about webinars. Let me give a good. A good free resource for everybody that Andy and I created.

Basically what we did was we figured if we could educate people on doing webinars, they would buy Webinar jam.

Yeah.

So over@webinaruniversity.org.

There'S some videos there, some different people that we've interviewed and things like that, but basically you'll see law one, law two, law three, law four and five. And we broke it down to the five laws of a successful webinar. And it basically breaks down to the five key or KPIs, key performance indexes that you need to focus on in a webinar. And basically law number one is the law of maximum conversions. You know, on your registration page, you know, law of maximum registration. Law number two is the, you know, the law of maximum show rate. You know, it's great to get them to register for a webinar, but you got to get them to show law number three is the stick rate once they get on the webinar. How do you structure a webinar to keep people entertained, teach them properly, get them interested in what you're buying and then law number four is conversions. How do you stack and create an offer that people want to buy? And how do you transition to that? You know, many people just mess this up, and you can just see it. It's like, all right, so that's the end of the webinar. But let me talk to you about a new product I have coming up. People are like, what?

And you're like, yeah.

And so, you know, we talk about how to do that transition. Quick little tip on that. The first thing you want to do is make a really big, bold promise at the beginning of the webinar. This is. If you just stay on this webinar, you don't have to buy anything. I promise you that at the end of this webinar, you're going to learn how to do this. And the most important thing is never promise them what they're going to get if you buy your product. That's really horrible, right? You want to say, you know, over the next 45 minutes, I'm going to teach you how to double your. This, that, or whatever the case is, even if you've never done this before, right? And then you promise them a free gift to stay to the end. And then you telegraph the clothes. And then you say, and. And by the way, when we're done with the webinar, I have a new product that I would love to share with you. And I'm going to tell you right now, it's not for everyone. Probably about 15 to 20% of you are going to be very excited. But. But I would love to share it with you, but I'm only gonna do that with your permission. So I have to live up to this promise that I'm gonna show you how to double xyz. And at the end of the webinar, when I'm done, I'm gonna ask you right in the chat, did I live up to that promise? And would you like to see the offer? And if you say no, then I'm gonna be very embarrassed that I didn't give you guys good content. So, you know, I'm gonna be working really hard to give you good content. Does that sound fair? And everybody will type, yes, absolutely. Way to go. I can't believe you're being so honest. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate. And they love you for it. So at the end of the webinar, you go, guys, so that's the end of the training now. Now it's the moment of truth is here. I made you this promise that I live up to it. And that I earned the right to talk to you about my offer. Is that going to be okay? You guys excited to hear about it? Yes. Can't wait. And it just makes that so much easier. Say great, thanks. I'm glad you're excited. So let me spend five minutes to tell you about it. So in these different videos, we cover all those types of of tactics. Everything in there is free to learn. Each video is about 10 or 15 minutes. So it's really good stuff. I think everybody will appreciate that. And then law number five, which we didn't cover, is what we call the law of the echo. Most people end their webinar and then they get off the call, kind of like we will at the end of the day. Hey, how do you think it went? Yeah, I'll render down the video and if you don't mind sending a replay and then get about another 15% sales.

What we talk about is how you can actually double or even triple the sales of the first webinar by doing what we call these encores and different things like that. So all of that's in there.

Very cool.

Yeah, we'll definitely link up to that in the show notes. When it comes to webinars, maybe you've got some good tips on this too. One thing that we've run into doing our own webinars over the years is that it seems to me that it's gotten harder and harder and harder to get people to actually show up to the webinars anymore. I remember maybe three years ago, we like, if we got 60% of the people to show up, we were happy. And then it was 50% a year later, then it was 40. And nowadays it's like if we get 25% of the registrants to actually show up, we're pumped that we got that many people to show up.

Well, I'll give you a tip. I'll give you a tip. And this isn't off the top of my head. This is something that everybody, including myself, has suffered with. And here's what I did to correct it. And I get about 45% show rates, which is insane. Right? So I do a couple of things. Number one, what I have learned is.

On your registration page, the more copy that you put, the lower the conversion rate is going to be on that page. But the higher the show rate.

Hmm. Okay.

Now if you put a video, you are going to get even lower, even a very well crafted video, and even lower opt in rate or registration rate for the webinar, you're going to get an extremely high registrar show rate. Okay. Now if you eliminate a lot of that stuff, basically just have a picture of you on a whiteboard with a headline and a button that says register for this one time event. You can get registration rates as high as 40% on Facebook and 65, 75% with JVs. The problem is you're going to get horrendous 10, 15% show rates. So how do you, how do you fix it? Well, the first thing we have to do, remember law number one, regardless of anything else, we have to focus on maximum registration. So let's go with, you know, the background, you know, view on the whiteboard, it's blurred out and you're showing, you know, this stuff with a cool headline, sub headline, a picture of the host, put a bio of why they should listen to you. You know, you know, Matt and Joe are leading experts in, you know, these different things and, and then your button, you know, big button. So when they get there, basically all they're doing is like clicking and then they go and they don't know what the hell they're signing up for. But hey, you're getting, you're getting 45 to 65% show rate. So now what you do is you take your Kartra page or your ClickFunnels page.

And you use that as your thank you page and you basically reverse it. I did this consulting for John Asser. Here is where you want to put a 9 or 12 minute video teaching them what's going to be going on, telling them, make sure to add this to your calendar. Send a reminder in Siri or Hey Google and sign up. Click here to get a reminder to your Facebook. I'll send you a Facebook messenger. Enter your number so I can send you a text reminder. And remember this webinar is not optimized for a mobile device. I'm going to be texting you and you're going to get that on your phone and you're going to want to watch this on your phone, but you're not going to be able to do this. You're not going to be able to get my free downloads, you're not going to be able to get the free bonuses, you're not going to be able to see the chat. Phones aren't optimized for this experience. So make sure that when you get the link you open that email on a desktop or PC and then every transaction reminder email that I send them always has a banner. Webinar is not optimized for mobile device. Make sure to watch on desktop or PC. I always have, you know, do that because if people are on a mobile device, you know, they're going to be getting a text message and a Facebook message update and they're in and out.

And yeah, they're not going to buy.

Them on a desktop. So now on your, on that page you've got a video, you've got all the things. Step one, add to calendar. Step two, all those different things I said. And then underneath that, don't be afraid to put a lot of copy. A huge bio of you, Joe. Huge bio of you, Matt. What you're going to be teaching, you're going to learn. And you ever looked at the table of contents of a book and said, man, I need to get this book right. So you want to use.

Curiosity based bullet points. Like if I was doing it for a webinar, like here's a perfect example, I would say testimonials on your registration page, do they hurt conversions or help conversions? Find out on the webinar, right? So now I'm making you like, shit, I use testimonials on my registration page. Should I? And you find out you shouldn't. They hurt, they telegraph a sale. You want to use what I said before the topic specific bio. Talk about why you guys are experts and why they should listen to you, right? So all of, all of these little things, if you put about, you know, 15 to 25 of these things that they're going to learn, you know, like imagine it was about a Facebook webinar. You know, here's the three things you absolutely never want to do with your Facebook ads. After the latest changes, doing this might get you permanently banned forever. Oh my God, I've got to get on this webinar. So by selling the event and saying it in the video.

This is going to be a one time event. I cannot guarantee that you're going to be able to watch this event again. And I cannot guarantee that there's going to be a replay or that will even mail a replay. This stuff is very special and we need you to attend live and sell it. And just these little things are going to help increase your, your registration rate and your show rate.

I love it.

That's freaking awesome. Like that whole section that you just said there, I would definitely swipe and I'm sure we will because honestly, like no joke, we've been kind of scared of kind of doing webinars because of how Matt described it. But I could tell that we were doing it all wrong in the beginning, which I'm sure most people are too, so thanks for that. That's awesome. Got it.

I'm trying to get you guys a replay so you can give to everybody of John Assaraf's page. You can see him, you know, I helped him design his.

Yeah.

You know, after. You know. Or you just, just Google John Assaraf. What the hell does it call it? Brainathon. And just register. And you'll see the exact same thing after you register.

Nice. Yeah, he's been running that brain a thon forever, so, I mean, he's doing something right.

Yeah.

Now, software, do you want to kind of go down that rabbit hole?

Well, yeah, I mean, I was probably going to start with like the newbiest of newbie kind of questions. So Joe and I, we've talked about SaaS. That's kind of a world that we don't really. We're actually good at marketing SaaS products as affiliates, but we've never actually developed our own SaaS. And it's a path that we're considering traveling down at some point. Now, what advice would you give? Like just the very basics. What advice would you give to somebody who's considering building a SaaS?

Well, first one is the four quadrants. And I forget who said it, I apologize, but there's four quadrants if you basically make a box and put a plus sign in them. Quadrant number one is competent. I'm sorry.

Conscious competence. Box number two is conscious incompetence. Boxing number three is.

Unconscious competence, incompetence, and all four of those variations. I'm a little tired, guys. I apologize. One is competent, the other one is incompetent. The other one is conscious and incompetent. Those four variations.

Got it.

So you never want to be doing anything where you're not developing software where you have competent.

Conscious competence, meaning you're aware of every little trick that needs to be done. Basically, nobody knows this part of the industry better than you. The last one, of course, is unconscious incompetence. There are things that you don't even know that you would need to develop. Like if I asked you to go build something for, you know, for NASA, you'd be like, you know, first of all, I don't know anything about NASA, and if I study, there's still things I never learned. Yeah.

If you see an opportunity and you don't fit in that first box of conscious competence, then get away from it just because it's a great market. I hear that all the time. How many times have you guys heard friends Relatives or something, say, hey, you know what would be a great app?

We've all suffered from that. Right. But unless you have an understanding.

Like when we created Kartra or Webinar Jam, we created something that we wanted to use and we understood webinars. We used it in our business. Right. We didn't just see it as a market that we could exploit. Even developing Kartra to go after infusionsoft was a massive task. But we knew exactly what we wanted and we've developed software. We kind of knew if we were going to bite off more than we can chew. So that would be the first thing that I would tell you. But the next thing I would tell you is good news. If you know what something is supposed to do, the next thing is you just hire a developer that, that has played in that market before and just get started with it. Get with one developer, you can usually get to beta in nine months to a year. And. And then you build from there and then, you know, from there, you know, if you do it right, it's game over. And don't, don't ever think anything is too small of an idea. Take a look at Use Proof Use fomo. You guys familiar with those, right?

Yep.

I mean, those prices, what you pay, you know, I think you. I think you paid like, for like 10,000 views or something, which any good marketer is going to need is like $99 a month.

Yeah.

Just to put a pop up on the site that's more than the cost of Kartra. Yeah. Which gives you everything.

Josh and I, you know, partly we've had this conversation multiple times about how, like, there's tools like that that essentially really should just be like features of a bigger tool, but people have built a whole SaaS around them.

Yeah. I mean, look at Intercom. They started out as this, like, you know, this little chat for support, but they built, you know, they. They built an incredible company around. They went out and got money and they've turned it into something that'll probably compete with Zendesk. Right. So. So you could always, you know, grow from there. Other companies that have exploded just recently. Right. Manychat. Right. Now, I love the guys at manychat. I'm very, very good friends with Travis Stevenson over at Chatmatic.

I think that manychat is a Coke. As I was telling you guys before the call, I always think whenever there's a Coca Cola in the marketplace, there's always room for Pepsi. And if you remember who was the, who was the Coca Cola with Page builders, Lead pages.

Lead pages for sure.

Right. And Russell became the Pepsi or the bigger brew brand. Yeah, right. And before that it was optimized press and everybody said, oh, you can never take them on. They control the whole market. Don't be afraid of, of doing that. You can first compete by, you know, by price and some unique selling features that, that the competition doesn't have. You look, you look at like Chatmatic. I wouldn't go develop it because I, I don't know, I have, you know, unconscious, you know, incompetence. There, there are things that I don't even know that's needed. But if somebody knows, in other words, you're using the software, if you find yourself going to the help desk of a software number one, that means you're using the software and you have a deep understanding of it. And if you're constantly going to the help desk of the software and you're begging them for features, you just got an idea for a software platform, stop giving them the ideas and develop it yourself because you know what the software needs and you know the features that it's missing.

Yeah, no, I love that. I love, I love that thinking. Now, what's your thought on softwares that sort of play on the back of existing platforms? So for example, you know, you mentioned ManyChat and Chatmatic. Obviously those wouldn't exist if it wasn't for Facebook. And it seems like if Facebook wanted to, they could shut those down tomorrow. Right. Like there was like what, a two month period where Facebook all of a sudden decided, you know what, we're not going to let anybody have chatbots anymore. And There were like two months where ManyChat just wasn't getting any new customers because they couldn't turn on their chatbots.

Okay, so you brought up a great question, great question that we've dealt with. And this is something that remember back in the day, the Twitter slap. They basically realized we got to get people to Twitter. And in our app we opened up our API and now tweetdeck is killing us. We got to get into the ad platform. So you got, you got to be careful of that. Of course. So if you look at Webinar Jam, the way Webinar Jam came about, Andy and I were doing video Genesis in 2013 and we had 70,000 people that had registered for the pre launch and we wanted to do a webinar and guess What? We got 7,000 people registered and the only platform back then was GoToWebinar and they had a maximum of a thousand people. So we were calling all of our friends, hey, how did you do that thing where you gave everybody one number but they. They randomly piggyback to a different go webinar? And oh my God, we knew it was going to be a hassle.

Yeah.

So we were telling people, you know, on our on, I think we were using live stream or YouTube live back then.

Or, you know, that we were going to be, you know, we call them bossathons.

I remember those.

So we were telling people that we were going to be doing this, but we weren't sure how we were going to be able to, you know, to get this done because YouTube Live didn't let you share the screen. And then basically a couple of people told us, hey, why don't you guys just do Hangouts on air?

Yeah.

And I looked at hangouts and I was, okay, you can share your screen. This is pretty cool. And you can, you can, it's unlimited and you don't pay for it. The only thing is, how do I get you to register and send reminder emails that saying it's starting in an hour and all that type of stuff? And you couldn't. So immediately I got an idea and I called up Hector because we had just finished Evergreen Business System. And I said, hector, you know everything we did with Evergreen Business System with our pages and everything like that, what if everything was the same? But the only difference is instead of getting an automated video, they got dropped into the Hangout on Air URL.

Webinar Jam was born out of the need for a solution. Now, we had some pretty good things going on at that time. We didn't have to pay for bandwidth and we didn't have to create an interface to share your screen or your webcast and all that stuff. The problem was, was Andy kept saying, guys, we've got a company and if we ever go to sell it, we're built on somebody else's technology. What if they ever get rid of it? And I remember saying they're never going to get rid of it. And then all of a sudden, oh my God, they're getting rid of Google. Oh, they made a change. Oh, they changed it. And Andy said, we've got to get away from Hangouts on air. And sure enough, we started building out the olution. And about three weeks before we had it ready after six months, Google announced in two months, 60 days, they're getting rid of Hangouts on air. It's going to be just basically.

YouTube live, Hangout, something along those lines. A whole. It would have taken our company down. Yeah, so luckily we had, we got ahead of that and so then we were broadcasting with our own interface to YouTube Live. And then Andy said, what happens if Google says they don't want to do YouTube live? And then we actually created the WebRTC technology like, like, you know, like GoToWebinar has it's own. Our own technology. So it's a very good question you brought up. And it's something that you have to realize that if you're piggybacking off of a company, they could put you out of business. There was.

Do you guys remember the notification company that was put out of business by basically Apple?

Oh no. Yeah.

So they, there was a company that would give you desktop notifications, like a.

Push crew type thing.

They were called Growl, right?

Yeah, Growl. And then one day they basically announced, hey guys, we knew this day was gonna come. It's being integrated into Apple.

Yeah, right, yeah.

How, how many apps are there that were not native apps to Apple? You know, you know that Apple, you know, saw, oh, wow, that's you know, like a newsreader app or what, you know, like Flipboard, like different things like that that were paid apps. And then Apple, Apple three years later said, hey, now it's free. Kind of like Windows with the operating system when it used to be Netscape Navigator, that type of stuff. So you look at the Shopify apps, you've got a company and they've got 500,000 users and you're doing $99 a month with 30,000 people. What happens one day when Shopify decides to put that as a core app in their system? You're out of business overnight. So those are things that you have to consider. They're going to be risks about selling the company. You might be able to sell, but not get, you know, the right valuation for it because there's a lot of risk. These are things that people bring up what can disrupt this business overnight. And when you're tied into somebody's back end, that could certainly happen.

That makes perfect sense. Yeah. So I guess the whole point is, hey, get out something fairly quick if you can. Always keep it in mind. But if you have an mvp, hey, launch that sucker, build it, get some revenue and reiterate for the future.

I love the concept too of just like what things do you constantly ask for support on or integrations on that's the potential app. Because I don't know how many times Joe and I are throwing around ideas for software and then we go, no, but that already exists in this tool or no, that already exists in that tool.

Yeah, don't worry about that. I always tell people you don't market in a debate format. And basically what that means is.

You.

Know, you're not a Republican and Democrat at the podium when people are trying to buy your product.

Right.

If we're Karcher, we don't have infusion. So say, can I just add something to that? You know, Right. So all you've got to do is do what you guys know how to do already. And that's just. And everybody listening. Go, go put ads on Facebook, YouTube, Google, do some SEO on your blog, get JV partners, whatever it is, social media, and get the clip. Click. Because your competition, they may not even know about it. And if you have those unique features anyway, they're going to buy from you. You'll never get a rebuttal on your sales page by your competition.

Yeah. Now, I know this is kind of a weird question, but how do you feel about the relationship factor when it comes to developing software that maybe somebody you already have a good relationship with has already developed a competing software wear, you know, for example, like, let's say like, Russell Brunson was good buddies with Clay Collins, and then he went and built Click Funnels just as an example. You know, does. Does the relational element play a factor at all in what you decide to develop?

Don't worry about it. Don't worry about it at all. At all. And I mean, it's. Let me give you some examples, right? You know, we have Karcher pages. We had Clay Collins on our Genesis Labs episode, right? We promoted Click Funnels, and we were the number one affiliate for Click Funnels for the first year with the agreement Russell, my good buddy. And Russell and I talk every week. We said to Russell, he knew all about Karcher. We said, hey, Russell, if we promote clickfunnels, are you gonna come out with like a shopping cart, you know, and an affiliate thing or anything like that? And he said, no, no, it's just Page builder. And we put, you know, we. God, I think we made $250,000 in commissions. So next thing you know, he threw Stripe integration, right? It's kind of. But then, you know, he threw the. The affiliate backpack on top of it. And then he did the actionetics and it became a CRM.

Yeah.

And, you know, I called him and he said, he. And he said to me, like, he should, Mike, I've got customers that are asking for a solution. And I'm a businessman. I gotta, I gotta give it to him. And, and Then when, here's the thing, like, we, you know, we started developing. Kara, if you guys remember, dealguard.

Okay, so Deal Guardian was going to be called Deal Guardian Enterprise because we changed our business model. We never even launched it after we created it. And we used it to launch Video Genesis and people like Wilco, other people used it to sign up and sell their products. We immediately said, let's go after the market where we can charge people $99 a month and create all these other products with it. And then as that development was going on, Deal Guardian ended up becoming popular. I wouldn't say popular, but people were mailing their affiliates and we had, you know, thousands of uses using it. That little site, guys, was making over $2 million a year for us just in transaction fees, just to tell you what software platforms can do. So, so we said to ourselves, you know what, we can't launch this as Deal Guardian because people have a preconceived notion that, you know what Deal Guardian is. We can't just say, Deal Guardian Enterprise and people are going to be like, yeah, isn't that the jvzoo competitor? So we said, we're going to going to rebrand it as Karcher. And we bought this beautiful domain. I think it's a great name. And it actually became something completely different. There's really no memory or skeleton to Deal Guardian there. But Russell had seen the demos of Karcher and everything like that. And I remember when somebody posted into the ClickFunnels user group, somebody said, hey, Russell, how do you feel that your good buddies Mike Filsaime and Andy Jenkins saw that you had something successful and ripped you off? And in my head I'm like, do people really think we started building deal Guardian in 2011? We launched in 2018. Do people think that you could, you can just say, oh, I'm gonna go do that in four months and do something like Switch? And Russell, Russell said the perfect thing. Hey, I welcome the competition. It's good for everybody.

So nice.

You know, guys, you guys are, you know, friends with Josh Bartlett, right? Yep. You know, Karcher has a video.

A video component to it. You know, we more compete with Wistia. But, you know, obviously you couldn't get Josh to promote. Onyx and Gal couldn't promote. He always does because he has Send Lane. We had a CRM. Well, I couldn't get Russell to promote, obviously, because he had a page builder. So did. We couldn't get Omar Martin to promote because he was contracted with JVZoo. We couldn't get Brendan Burchard to promote because he's own shares in Kajabi. We couldn't get Evan Pagan to promote. He owns shares and in Entreport. You know, remember I told you all these different people we could get to promote because as you went down the line, it was all a conflict of interest. But none of them, you know, we even called Kajabi and had a phone call with them because they have a membership site platform. They were like, hey, you guys did a really, really good job. And we're like, yeah, we focus more here, you focus more there. Let's integrate. And then we added Kajabi into Karcher even though we already had membership.

So that's awesome.

So, you know, we always had an abundant mentality, you know, we're going to meet everybody at the top of the mountain, rising tide raises, all boats, boats, all that type of stuff. So I wouldn't worry about that at all.

I love it. No, I mean that's the mentality that we have. We're always there to support our buddies. And like you said, it's a business and we're all in it together anyway. And that's the beautiful thing with software is you can integrate, you know, if you talk to each other, I mean, you're only going to help the other guy with the integration.

Oh yeah. I think one of the best, the best marketing tools with software is that you go after other softwares to integrate with because. Because that's one of the ways that people discover software is I'll be in the back end of like leadpages or something, right? And I'll see the list of all the autoresponders they integrate with and I'll be like, oh, I've never heard of that one. And I go look into it.

Oh, I gotta tell you, that's like, luckily, like the guys that, you know, use proof, like they reached out to us, hey, we saw what you did. Like in the olden days, I gotta tell you, like, we would reach out to GoToWebinar or.

Or Infusionsoft and say, hey, can we integrate EverWebinar? Because they had stealth, right? Infusionsoft and can we integrate EverWebinar Webinar Jam? And everybody is like, we only do integrations when we get an overwhelming of support from the customers. So we would go to our Facebook group and our customer's base and tell them, hey, go blow up their help desk, right? Because they're not going to do an integration unless you can prove. And. And then after you Create the brand, man, they start reaching. Everybody wants to put a little. And I got to tell you the feeling for me to be able to go to websites new different companies that come out and I see integrates with Webinar Jam, everwebinar and things like that. To me that's where you know you've created that brand. Like they want to tell their customers that they work with leading software.

That's amazing. That's the best way to do it. I'm just being careful on time here because I know we're going over already but let's talk about Groove Cart since you're working on that now. That's, that's kind of a big focus and it's, I think it's addressing a lot of what we're talking about here. We can kind of wrap up conversation with this.

So. So guys, thank you and I appreciate that and I know. So I'll keep this quick. So I want to tie this back into me having no right to be in this market. Right. And I mean that humbly. I've never sold.

An E commerce tchotchke in my life. I've sold physical products, I've had my print monthly newsletters and I've delivered CDs through Konaki.

Yeah.

And things like that. Right. But merch, right. Merchandise, you know, things like that I've never, never gotten into. So I don't know the way that market works. But when I sold my company I said okay, well what are you going to do? You're going to compete with clickfunnels? No. You're going to complete compete with cartoon. I had a two year non compete that, that's over. But no, I know what it took to build that. I friggin love that software. I'm not gonna, I'll never create anything better than Kartra. It took seven years to build.

Yeah.

And the best team in the world. And if it takes me seven, where are they going to be? Right. I just think they did that. Right.

Exactly.

So the page builders done the, the digital marketing to sell for affiliates, the video, the membership site platform, everything is done. And then like I said, you've got the chatmatics and all these different things. I wanted to create something big but I wanted to find, you know, Webinar Jam. I'm not going to compete with them ever. Webinar all these different things. I said Webinar Jam was the Pepsi to go to webinar. And I said what is the Coca Cola in the marketplace that doesn't have a Pepsi. And I looked and you know, it was, it was E commerce. It was Shopify. You look at Ezra Firestone. What is he doing? Ezra. Ezra's created Zipify off of Shopify apps. Lots of people doing apps. And then you've got, got what? Woocommerce, what I would call a lot of Dr. Peppers, right? You got WooCommerce and Etsy and maybe WordPress things. But when you type in Shopify verse, maybe Magento shows up, but it's Shopify. And then I looked at the marketplace and it was so big, I think the stats are in 2017, $2.4 trillion in sales in E commerce and it's expected to be 3 trillion this year and 5 trillion by 20. They're valued at over 1.2 billion. They have 500,000 customers, etcetera, etc, etcetera. The only thing is I knew that just because it was a marketplace, there were two things I don't know how to communicate with the market. I would need a partner that at least is doing E commerce. And I found John Cornetta, my partner and he does about 100 to $150,000 a month with his E commerce store. So we can do training like when we did webinar jam, we did webinar Genesis and webinar University. Right. You need that credibility. I would have been called out on it. Phil Same never sold a physical product in his life. But if I've got the partner that's doing it, people understand I'm the frontman and I'm a very good one. That's right. And I know how to build a company and treat customers the way they want. But what about getting the software done right? Well, this software is done by one of the original founders of Prestashops, which is the world's largest open source E commerce.

You know, open source thing that you install on your own server. So he know, he knows E commerce, in my opinion, almost better than anybody. And he has his own developers and he took what he knew there and built it into a SaaS. And then you get a guy like John who knows E commerce and is still being schooled by him when he's like, no, no, no, let me show you how we do that here. And John's getting blown away that, you know, Shopify doesn't even do these things. So what our USP is number one, the price, number two is that Shopify basically wanted to become an app store. But in the sense that you see WordPress plugins, they were never, they never raped you over there. Most of them are free. Shopify people will charge you sometimes 299amonth to do a retargeting feature, and you're only paying 99amonth for your Shopify store. The average Shopify store person that's making over 10,000amonth is spending between 700 and $2,000 a month on their store and plugins. So we're gonna do something that when you pay the annual, it's gonna be, you know, less than $49 a month, at least for our grand opening. If anybody's listening later down the road, that price went up. But it's been under development for over two years. And, you know, when.

When.

When I met them in Orlando and we were talking about Kartra and they overheard me say that I sold my shares in Kartra and I was just helping them with the launch, these guys, like, tackled me in a room and were like, you know, hey, Mike, we saw what you did with Karcher. Would you want to come in and be partners with us with this? And I was like, show me the software. And I was like, you're letting me in. Thank you. Like, it was the perfect triple yin yang thing there. And I'm blessed to be with these guys. I wouldn't bring a product to the marketplace just because I know I can sell it. You know, I think as good as I'm going to sell it, this product is going to do. As happy as I was with what Kartra is, I think Matt and his did just as good a job in E commerce with this, and I can't wait to demo it and show it to the world.

That's amazing, man. Yeah, we can't wait to see it too.

Now, quick question. We actually have some notes here of questions we want to ask, and there's actually one, only one that we didn't get to, surprisingly, and that was about actually partnering. Do you have a philosophy in business that it's smart to partner with the gaps that. I'm trying to think of the right word, but you don't know how to necessarily develop online software software, and you don't necessarily know E commerce. So do you make it a point when you're going in on projects to go and partner with like, these. These gaps in your sort of.

Absolutely. Power, I guess, find the yin to your yang.

Absolutely. What. What. Whatever it takes. Sometimes two, three people can. Can bring the magic together. And.

Man, you. You'd be surprised what happens if you just ask.

Yeah.

You see a software product out there that you love and you're like, how come I never heard of it? And you can do the marketing, call the guy and ask him to become a partner. Seriously, hey, do you want to partner this? Or say, hey, do you want to sell this? You want to license it to me? You want to, can I buy the rights to sell this for five grand? You'd be surprised the different deals that can be done. I would recommend keeping that person on and partnering with them because it helped it and, you know, but I would definitely, definitely look into those opportunities.

So then real quick, what would be your philosophy on, like, if you found a really good developer that can get what you need built, would you prefer to go and partner with that developer and actually have them be an equity holder in the company, or would you prefer to just go hire them and have them develop the software, just have them be staff?

That's a fantastic question. It really is.

I would make that decision after I see the guy code.

Yeah.

And if you see talent, if you see talent, right, you know, you pick the guy up in a Laravel forum or something like that. And you know, and I don't mean this the wrong way, and what I mean by he communicates good is that his English is good because that guy might be in Romania or the Ukraine or India or something along those lines. And I'm not saying, you know, to do demo videos. I'm saying that he just gets what you're saying or she gets what you're saying. If you start communicating well with people and they don't mind working the hours that it takes to work with you and they've got it all. And what I mean, they got it all. They understand CSS and user interface and user experience and they, and they've been in this industry and they say to you this is something they've always wanted to develop, but they don't when they know it that well. And then they tell you they've got two other guys that you don't want to come along later. Yeah, lock them up, you know, tell them, look, don't take any more jobs, I can't pay you anymore, but I'm going to give you X percent of the business. And that might be 5, 10, 15%. You want to be stringy with how much you give away. It's a little bit easy to just start giving away and giving away and giving away and give it away. But, you know, start. It started 10%, you know, 10% owner in a company and man, that person, they're not going to work for you anymore. They're going to work for themselves. They're going to work 18 hours a day, seven days a week.

I love it, man. I mean that's, that's exactly it. And I love the fact that you said, hey, go look for. I mean, there's so many distressed assets out there.

That's right, exactly.

And yeah, we're just like, okay, flip that house. How about flip that software, you know?

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

I mean, really. And we have the marketing talents. I mean, it'd be a no brainer to just start doing that, find some gaps.

Yeah. Let me just give you the last thing on why software is so easy to be made these days with GitHub, Laravel forums code.

There's another software pairing company my wife just used, I forget the name of it now, where they basically source the perfect coder for you.

Oh yeah, there's a few of those. But places like CodeCanyon, CodePen, IO.

Laravel, forums and Laravel. You always want to have somebody develop on Laravel. That's what I would do. It's a framework for PHP because it forces them to write a certain way. And if they ever have to leave the project, you can go get anybody else to come on board and they'll think they wrote the code. That's why you want to do something like that. You never want to coder with his own framework. Then you get the thing of like, well, let me get a new coder. And that guy's going to be like, this is shit. You might as well let me rewrite it from scratch.

What?

Three years development here. Oh, I can get it done in 30 days.

Never listen to any of that. Yeah, but those things I just mentioned. CodePen, CodeCanyon, GitHub, CodeIgniter forums. There is so much stuff out there where you want to pull something that does a date and time script or basically all code is written already. Everything. Stripe has written all of the E commerce for you. And you get a good developer that understands this and he works with frameworks.

He could go to.

ThemeForest and download an admin panel and you can have the shell of a gorgeous looking company. You're gonna be like, I can't believe this is done. And then the other 20% is what takes 80% of the time. That's all the little ninja features that you want to get done. But getting the skeleton of a site up with login, lost password, all that stuff is just done by drag and drop code that's already been written.

Yeah.

Now this has blown our minds a little bit because this is a world that we've wanted to travel down, and we've. We've often thought it was too hard or that, you know, we didn't want to burn bridges with other people that have similar software or, you know, the software that we wanted to do already existed, so what's the point? You know, things like that. But I think you sort of, like, shattered all of those sort of limiting beliefs around software, so just awesome stuff.

Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, I wouldn't worry too much about that. In fact, in fact, DealGuardian was originally Deal Hacker. I don't know if you remember that name, but that was a project.

I do, because I bought dealhacker.net when I heard about that.

Yeah.

Because originally, I think Josh Bartlett was involved in some way, and he told me the name was going to be Deal Hacker. So I was like, oh, the Net is available.

Yeah, there you go. Josh is a software developer. He was tied up a little bit too much in Odello, and we couldn't get the project off the ground. And I had just finished up a green business system with Hector, and I asked Josh very politely, hey, would it be okay if I move the project over to somebody else that's ready to go with it? And he was like, like, yeah, I apologize. I'm really busy. I said, no, no, don't, don't. But even that Josh, you know, a good friend, you know, he wasn't upset that, you know, we had an idea that we were going to work on together, that I went with somebody else, and I ended up becoming Kartra. I mean, just look at how, you know, just. It's a blessing that Josh was even a part of that conversation, that it led to that. And then we did a test on the name, and everybody said, that's the worst name ever. And we changed it to Deal Guardian.

Yeah.

I love it. No, this is just. It's amazing to hear the history, but then, like, to know. Okay, yeah, there's all these connecting pieces, and, I mean, there's. It's a cool space. It's always fun. It's always something new we can expand on.

Absolutely.

So to wrap it up, you already named a bunch of books, so I appreciate that we won't rehash that. But what's the best place for people to go find more about you? Obviously, we got Groove Cart, too.

Yeah. In fact, I got to put it on the front of that page. I'm going to give you. So they can go to mikefilsame.com I'm sure they're seeing somewhere in the podcast how to spell my name. And they could learn all about Kartra, Webinar Jam, EverWebinar, my affiliate programs, my webinar product called Webinar Control. If they want more advanced stuff than what we share at Webinar University. And of course groovecart.com, which I'll be putting@mikefulsim.com as well.

Awesome.

Appreciate it. Well, thanks so much for spending the time with us and going a little over the top and a little extra time and, and it's been great stuff. It's been a nice little trip down memory lane with a lot of the stories and learned about webinars and software and just amazing stuff. So thanks so much for taking the.

Time the whole rigmarole. Today we went from life story all the way through everything and I had a lot of fun, guys. Hey, thanks for all the shameless plugs. Can I get one more in there?

It's you.

It's the one that makes me no money, but it's the thing I'm one of the things I'm most passionate about.

Are you opening a new car lot or something?

Hey, come to nobody down.

$99 a month.

I'd love to see you guys on there as well. The Marketer's Cruise. Just go to marketers cruise.com we take a vacation with 400 to 450 entrepreneurs and their family every January this year or you know, this coming January 2019, we're going to be setting sail out of Long Beach, California, doing the Mexican Riviera, Rock Poco and Cabo and all that good stuff. I think it's a seven day cruise. We don't mark it up. It's Carnival's prices. I think it starts at like 1100 bucks. All your meals, everything are included and you get to take a vacation with a lot of really cool people. So thanks for letting me get that one in.

Yeah, man, I've neglected not going on one of those things, but I've only heard amazing stories, so damn it, this next year, making this happen because I love Cruise, man.

I'm telling you. So I know we're running long and so I'll make this in 30 seconds. You know when you go to an event and you meet so many people and you get back and you're exhausted, right? And you have a bunch of business cards and you're like, oh man, I don't even. I've lost so much time from work, I don't even know that I can call these People and, but the two, the people that you do connect with, you're either missing a speaker or you're talking outside the room and somebody's coming up and say, hey guys, can you get back in the room? The next speaker started, you're like, hey, can I get your business card? And. And you get, you don't really make relationships. You make these tiny connections.

Right?

On the cruise. We don't have any speakers. There's no selling in the back of the room. We have these sessions from 10 to 1 the days that we're at sea. And then, you know, other than that, it's your vacation. Bring the spouse, bring the kids, bring the parents, all that stuff. It's your vacation and you're vacationing with other people and you create lasting friendships. No joke. There are people that got married on the cruise. People that, you know, had their inception, you know, their baby on the cruise. Nate Anderson, that's what he had told us. And I can't tell you, you take a look at guys like Alan Cutts and Chip Cooper, they met on the cruise and they have a multimillion dollar company. There's dozens of those things where people meet connections on the cruise that John Cornetta, my current partner, we met on the Marketers cruise and that's when we became friends. He's been doing it for seven years. So things that you trace back to when you came can. You can be at a beach for four or five hours talking with somebody and their wife and their kids. You create connections that you don't do at an event. And I always say you work hard, you're entitled to a vacation. You're gonna take a vacation, why not take it with, you know, other like minded people?

That's right, man. Business is not there for you to sleeve over. It serves you right. So there it is, man. Marketers cruise. No, it's amazing. And yeah, I'm looking it up. So I'm gonna get my wife on board. Matt, you're going, Damn it. All right, Mike, good times with you.

Thanks. Appreciate it.

Bye.

Bye, everyone.

Bye. All right, thank you. And I hope you just enjoyed this episode you just listened to. Now right now, before we sign off, I have a few things I would love for you to do. So the very first thing is to go find our guest on Facebook and tell them that you loved their episode with us. That's going to help them just feel good about themselves, but also it's going to spread the word a little bit more for us. Go find them on Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook and go say that you love their episode. And maybe one cool thing that you learn there. The second thing is to go to itunes and subscribe to our podcast. Just look up Hustle and Flowchart and hit the subscribe button. And the very last thing, the third thing is to leave us a review on itunes or wherever you're listening to this podcast and help us spread the word more. That's how more people are going to get this awesome knowledge, this, this cool podcast training, and a whole bunch of other cool, free training that we give out@evergreen profits.com so that's about it. Go find them on Facebook, go subscribe on itunes, and leave us a review. You would be amazing if you did that, but you're always amazing. So thanks for listening and we'll catch you in the next episode.

You're awesome.