How To Outspend EVERYONE Profitably

So the big question is this. How are entrepreneurs like us who didn't cheat and take on venture capital, were spending money from our own pockets? How do we market in a way that lets us get our products and our services and the things that we believe in out to the world and yet still remain profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to Marketing Secrets. What's up, everybody? Hey. I want to welcome you to today, the very first day of the official Marketing Secrets podcast. I am so insanely excited. This is something. I've honestly wanted to change this for a long time. So for those who are just tuning in for the first time ever, for the last, I don't even know now, four or five years, my podcast has been called Marketing youg Car, which I record while I'm haha in my car. And it's been really, really nice. And I've always kinda liked it. Had the idea almost 15 years ago, probably when I bought the domain, maybe less, maybe 12. I don't. And then like. And then that's when podcasts first came out. And then I didn't launch the podcast. And then a few years later, I finally did launch a podcast and I was like, why are you. Oh. And I had a friend, Paul Colligan, who's like one of the podcast dudes, and he had this guy write a jingle for me. And it was kind of a cheesy jingle. If you listen to episodes one through 100 or so, you heard it over and over and over again. But I was launching it, so I was like, I'm just gonna do it and we're just gonna use that one because why not? I got nothing else. So that's how the whole thing began. And the episodes had that cheesy song. And it was while I was in my car driving the office every single day. And then in that time, a lot of stuff's happened. We had this idea for clickfunnels. We launched it and I documented a lot of that story behind the scenes, which was kind of fun, and how we basically went from zero to a million to 10 million to 30 million to. I didn't know we're up to now, but it's a lot. In fact, I think this year we'll pass $100 million collected through ClickFunnels since it began two and a half years ago, which, excuse me, is pretty, pretty exciting for me and for everybody. And you guys have had a chance to see that whole progression and documentation of that which is cool. And then again, after about episode 100, everyone kept telling me how much they hated the theme song, but I didn't have another one. So I just really quickly changed it just by myself, which was kind of annoying. I changed it just to make it better, but it was still kind of. I didn't really love it. So episode like hundred, maybe 250 was another one. And then that time we were launching Funnel Hacker tv, which is our online reality show, which by the way, if you're not listening, go to Funnelhacker TV and you can watch all the episodes. It's something I'm really proud of. Anyway, so I tried to match the theme song to that one and it kind of was okay, but wasn't as good anyway, so I've had a long time and desire to change it, even though, like, right now we're in the top 10 podcasts in business all the time. And it's called marketing your car. But still, people are like, oh, you're that marketing your car thing, right? Like, yeah, but it's bigger than that. It's awesome. So anyway, a little while ago, John Reese I saw on Facebook posted He was selling marketingsecrets.com and I was like, oh, that is it. I was like, what? That is the name of the podcast. I can't rebrand to something stupid. If I'm gonna rebrand, it's gotta be something amazing. And then when I saw that, I was like, that's it. So we were able to get the domain name and now we're rebranding it. And then last week I wrote a pitch for the intro, and then I loved it. And then Steven. And then we recorded our sound booth and Steven went to all this audio editing. And then I had Brandon make some video trailers and bumpers for it. And now it's all done and they turned out really, really cool. In fact, you guys probably heard it today, if you're listening, if you're on YouTube, we're also posting these on YouTube. In fact, I'm videotaping this right now. I've actually on my rear view mirror, I hooked my camera. It's kind of like Jimmy rigged hooked on there. So that way I'm gonna have video and audio version of each one just. Cause I thought it would be kind of. So that's what we're doing. But anyway, it's turned out really, really good and I'm proud of it. Now. A couple things, if you listen to the intro, you notice one thing is I kind of made fun of As I often do people that take on money in their business. That's what I actually want to talk about on Today. Secret number one. So I've been listening to a lot of Gary Vaynerchuk lately, and it's interesting because he's always talking about all these businesses and entrepreneurs and you're taking capital and what to do and what not to do. And then last night it was funny because he actually even said himself, he's like, I never took on money in my businesses. I made. And it's funny, I've had other people who tried to convince me to take on money. And then as I talk to them later, they're like, well, I would never do it for my own company. I'm like, exactly. So the interesting thing is I feel like people that take on money are cheating. I'm potentially going to be doing a keynote at a big famous university later on this year. I'm not sure. It hasn't been finalized, so I'm going to kind of hold off the details until it is. But I just started writing the presentation because I got so excited. In fact, if I write a book number four, which I think I might, this will be the topic of the book probably, unless I change it. I don't know somebody has anything in book number four. Russell, you only have two books right now. So we've got Dotcom Secrets, which is book number one, then Expert Secrets, which launch ended last night. We are almost 50,000 books sold. We're probably past that today, which is insane, especially when you put it in perspective like New York Times. Most people sell about 10,000 copies to get on New York Times best selling list. We sold 50,000 and we're not on the New York Times list. Why? Because they're punks. To be completely honest. Their reporting stuff's all jacked up. I tried to get on the list with the Dotcom Secrets book and we sold about three times more than we needed to and we still need it on the list. So they're against people like me, people who like to sell books. Weird New York Times best seller. Anyway, whatever. In fact, if you go to russellbrunson.com, the first post, I'm kind of documenting my journey from zero to a million books there. And I tell the story about New York Times there. Anyway, I digress. So book number three, if I decide to write a third book, which I think I will, I think this will be the trilogy and then the series will be done. But we have obviously Dotcom Secrets, Expert Secrets, and then I recently bought Traffic Secrets.com from John Reese, and that'll probably be the third book in the trilogy. And then it'll be done. And then from a separate standpoint, I want to write a book about this. And again, this would be the keynote speech I give at this famous university, if I'm able to. And the title is going to be Stop Cheating. Stop Cheating. And it's going to be like how we went from zero to $100 million in two. And again, I don't know exactly the date's going to be yet. We haven't crossed it yet. Two years, 200 days, nine hours, whatever it is. $300 million without taking on venture capitalists Adventure Cash. Because I think that taking on cash is cheating. Think about this. If you were in a bodybuilding competition and everyone's competing, working their butts off, and then you came in and shot up steroids into your arms and your veins and your everything, and you went out there, they would disqualify you for cheating. If you're in the Olympics and everyone's competing as athletes, they're all hard, lifting weights, training, and you come in and you're doped up on steroids, you're doing blood doping, all these other things, guess what they're going to do? They're going to kick you out for cheating. So that is the equivalent of what I feel taking venture capital is. Okay? Like, it's. You're an entrepreneur. You're out there trying to build a company, and if you go and you just get a bunch of cash, then guess what you didn't do. You didn't freaking build a company. You cheated. Somebody gave you steroids. That's not real. It's not legitimate. It's all fake. Okay? And I want you guys to understand that. Like, it's a big deal. Like, it's like, I have friends who play the lotto. Some for some reason here, I know they have the lottery, and I have friends who play the lottery, right? I think it's a cool thing. And they're like, you know, someday I'll win the lotto, and then I'll be rich and famous like you. I'm like, you will never be rich and famous. Do you wanna know why? Because if you win the lottery, you cheated. Nobody cares. That story's not interesting. Like, you didn't earn it, you didn't deserve it. Like, just because you got it does not mean it's actually yours. You cheated. And so that's like, that's cheating, right? And so the same way you don't win the lotto the same way you don't do steroids, the same way you don't do all these kind of things is the same way you should be taking out venture capital cash for your company. You should build a fricking company. You should bootstrap. You should do it the right way. And anyway, there's my rant for the day. And anyone who's trying to think otherwise is just stupid. And a couple reasons why. Because, number one, you're taking on money, right? So it means you're cheating. So anything you actually accomplish doesn't really count. That's my opinion. Number two, if you decide to take on money, it's not real. I'm looking at some of my competitors. One of them took on like, 43 million bucks in funding. The other's taking on over $100 million in funding. Something like that. If you look at both of those right now, the people take on 43 million. Like the venture capitalists. What do they want? They're not just giving you money because they think it's a cool thing to do. They want their money back and a bunch more. We had a bunch of VCs try to give us money, and they all want, like a 10x return within, like, five to eight years. Okay, so they give you 43 million, means they want $430 million back. That's insane. That is insane. Like, I don't even know what to do. And so as soon as they write you that check, it's sitting in your pocket. And now you have to stress about that, knowing you owe someone $430 million until you pay that back, like, anyway, it's ridiculous. It's the stupidest way I've ever heard to grow a business. The reaper always comes just, like, in, like, someday it's gonna catch up to you. It always does this karma. And so if you're trying to cheat your grow company, that's it. So that's why I talked about it in the intro of this podcast. I want people understanding, like, we build companies smart, intelligently. That's the whole reason why we have funnels, the first venture capitalists who try to give us money. And they must not listen to podcasts, because I tease them a lot. But anyway, we have five or six now. They've come in and tried to give money for click funnels. All of them say the same thing, like, you guys are like, unicorn. We don't understand it. We just want to give you guys a piece of that. And I keep trying to Help. I keep trying to understand, like, okay, so if I give you. If you give me 50 million bucks, what I have to give you back? And they're like, oh, well, you know we're gonna do this. I know you're gonna do it. What I have to give you back because this is a debt, right? You're not just giving me 50 million bucks to be nice. Like, well, we expect 10x on our money in the next 8 to 10 years, whatever that is. Like, okay, so now I owe you $500 million. Second, I cash that check every night. I'm stressing and thinking about how much money I owe you. I don't know about you. That's not a game I want to play. Anyway, so I'm sitting at lunch with these guys and they're trying to figure things out. One of the questions was like, how much money does it cost for you to acquire a customer? Which is a very good question. Right? That's what they want to know. So it's a good question for all of us. If you watch Shark Tank, they always ask, what's your cost to acquire a customer? And so I kind of smile as I'm explaining because I know I'm not going to get it. In fact, I did an episode on Marketing youg Card a while ago called how to confuse the VCs. And that's what this is all about, right? And I was like, okay, well we were spending about $120 to get a free trial in click funnels. And they're like, oh, cool, okay, that's the number we can work with. It falls within the acceptable whatever. If we give you $50 million now, you can acquire blah customers, whatever that is, right? And I was like, okay, well that's cool now. But we actually turned off those ads and they're like, why did you turn it off? And I was like, okay, let me explain. Do you have funnels work? Right? Which is our world? Me and you understand this. They don't. And I showed them, I said, look, right now we create front end funnels, things that get somebody into our world that indoctrinates them into the things they need to understand to be able to actually use our tool. And then we offer them a tool and we're actually profitable, acquiring that customer up front. So for example, the Expert Secrets book launch, so we just sold almost 50,000 copies of the book in the last 30 days. From those 50,000 copies, we ended up, I don't know the exact numbers, but it was like 1.4, almost $1.5 million collected cash into our pocket to get 50,000 new buyers and like 120,000 opt ins. Okay? So I got all those leads, we got cash into our pocket and now this week we're doing training and stuff to introduce them into click funnels. So these 50,000 new buyers, I'll be like, oh, here's this thing called click funnels. But I already got $1.5 million in cash to collect those customers. Okay. I didn't pay 1.5 million to get them. If I was going to spend or if I was going to try to acquire 50,000 customers at let's just say 10 bucks a piece. Is that right? Yeah, it cost me half a million dollars. But instead we got paid one and a half million dollars to collect those customers. Now we have them and that's just the customers. That's not counting the opt ins. Like 120,000 new opt ins came in. So those are now people that we can also sell in the click funnels. Because they didn't buy the book doesn't mean they're not going to buy click funnels or other products and services. Right? So we got paid up front. And I try to explain, look, the way it works in our business is we have these different front end offers. Somebody comes through and they buy the thing and we're profitable. So we cost us 10 to $12 to acquire a book customer. But on average, we make, I think, the average cart value. Before affiliates went crazy and jacked up our average cart value. But when it was like it was stable, we averaged about $34 per book. So $12 in, 34 out. So we were making $22 cash on every single customer that we brought into our world. That cash went to our pocket. Now we had a customer introduced into click funnels and I explained that to him four or five times. The guy's like, I don't get it. He's like, so. And after four or five times, I think like the light bulb went off his head and he said, if that's true, if that really happens, he said, that would change business today as we know it. And I kind of smiled. I said, I know that's what we're doing. That's what we're talking about. That's why we're a unicorn. Not because I'm smarter than anybody else, because I understand front end funnels. If you read the first dotcom secrets book, that's all I talked about. The person who can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. Done. That's it? I can spend more money than LeadPages to acquire a customer. I can spend more money than infusionsoft. I can spend more money than all of my competitors. Kajabi, anybody you may look at as a competitor, I can outspend every single one of them. Every one of them. There's not one person in my market that can outspend me. And that's why we're destroying everybody else right now. Do you understand that? Like, that is the key. So understanding front end funnels is the key to mastering this. So read the Dotcom Secrets book. It'll help you understand this whole concept of whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. After you know that, then you got to know a couple things. Okay, well, how does the funnel work? How does the value ladder work? How do all these pieces tie in together? And after you understand those pieces, you're like, okay, cool. So I have a front end funnel that brings in customers profitably. Then I've got a value ladder that sends them up through the different things I'm trying to do, ultimately to whatever my main goal is. After I've ascended people up to my main goal. Then the second book, which is almost, I think, a prequel, but the Expert Secrets book is now, how do you communicate with that audience? How do you tell stories? How do you sell? How do you convert? How do you do all those pieces? How do you make all these pages in the funnel actually work? Because there's a whole bunch of people with crappy funnels out there that aren't profitable. There are so many people who are kind of understanding our world a little bit. I'm seeing some of these companies trying things out now and they're putting up opt in funnels and things. And oh, some of them are so painful. I saw one from one of our confusing competitors and it was like, download our free white paper about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then the opt in form had like 30 fields. And I'm just like, you guys are so stupid. Nobody wants a white paper that's not sexy. Guess what's sexy? Free book, free script. But like, you gotta find something and crank up the sexy on it if you want people to give you money for it. Like, it's not. That's Expert Secrets is about how do you position yourself in the right way, how do you make things desirable? How do you create desire and belief in somebody's mind? Like, those are all the pieces you have to understand. And so it's funny, while they call clickfunnels a Unicorn. It's nothing magic, you guys. It's the stuff we talk about in the books, okay? And you have the books. They're there. Dotcom secrets, expert secrets. Like, that's the stuff. If you've been listening to this podcast over the last couple of years or if you just got introduced today, that's fine. Go back and listen. Like, all these things are foundational principles we're tying in there, but it's all stuff you can do, okay? So if I can say anything else, it's this. Don't cheat. You don't need to cheat, okay? You can be successful without taking on venture capital, without taking on money, without taking on funding, without needing any of that crap. You don't need to have $100,000 to start your company. All you have to have is a brain between your ears, ability to read two books, read them both, and understand some core principles and create a good offer. That's it. It's really not that hard. And I don't know what else I can do. I've been trying for years to make this simpler and simpler and simpler. Between the dot com secrets and the expert secrets book, it's simple. I don't want you to understand that. Hopefully this gives you guys some ideas and tools to be able to use. With that said, I'm at the office now. This podcast is probably a little longer than normal. Usually they're about five to ten minutes long. I have no idea how long I've gone on this one. But the plan moving forward with Marketing Secrets podcast is this. Each day I'm going to give you guys a secret. Like one marketing secret you can use. If you understand it all weighs down upon the same foundation that we started on episode number one here. The foundation is simple. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. That is how you beat your competitors. That is how you beat the venture capitalists. That's how you can grow your company. That's the foundation of everything. When you understand that, it becomes easy. And yeah, you can go out there and you can do social media and build a big following and all those things organically, but it takes time, it takes effort, it takes stamina. It takes a lot of those kind of things. It's been fun because I have been geeking out on Gary Vaynerchuk, Vary Vaynerchuk, Gary Vaynerchuk, recently. I really enjoy him. I like him a lot. He's got some really, really good things. I think that what he does in his business is probably better than what he says I think right now he's the best in the world. Like, conversation, domination, how to dominate. All different platforms and be relevant, all of them. I love watching and studying him and doing that, and we're modeling a lot of that from him. But, you know, he's got this one. One of his books is what is it? Jab, jab, jab, right hook. And it's all about, like, you can be jabbing, jabbing, jabbing, and then eventually you're gonna do a big right hook. And I kind of agree with that. Like, I agree putting out content, putting out good stuff. Like, I'm doing those things as well. But at the same time, like, for that to really work, you've got to be really, really. I mean, really good. Takes a long time and consistent effort over and over and over again, you know, and for a lot of us, that's hard to do. And someone asked me about that. They said, russell, your philosophy is so different than Gary's. He's talking about jab, jab, jab, right hook. And I said, well, you know, the difference is that I'm a wrestler. He said, have you ever seen a wrestler in a boxer in a fight? I've never seen a boxer win, ever. The boxers always lose to the wrestlers and the jiu Jitsu guys. I'm like, in wrestling, Jiu Jitsu, what do we do different? We look at the guy. Instead of like, jabbing, jabbing, jabbing, waiting for the hook and the right hooking, we look at him, we look for a vulnerability, and boom. We power double take him down and we choke him out. Okay? I'd much rather have power double take him down, choke him out than jab, jab, jab, right hook. Okay, now there's times to jab and things like that. Those things are good. But I want you to understand, like. Like, this concept of winning and scaling and growth quickly is about the concept I mentioned, like, 10 times. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. And how do you do that? You don't do that by jabbing forever. Like, for a lot of you guys, you're going to try to build up an instagram following of 100,000 people. That's going to take time and energy and money. In fact, my Instagram account got shut down this morning, so you don't have to do all the work. It could disappear anyway, which is insane. And so it comes down to focusing on creating a really good funnel you can drive paid money into to acquire a customer for free or profitably, or at least break even, and then send them up the value ladder. That's the game, you guys. That's the game we're playing. So with that said, I'm in the office. I'm gonna go get to work. Hope you guys enjoyed Marketing Secrets Number one. If you like this podcast, please go rate it on itunes. Please tell your friends, family members, everyone you know share it and appreciate you guys, and we'll talk to you guys again tomorrow. Bye, everybody. Would you like to see behind the scenes of what we're actually doing each day to grow our company? If so, then go subscribe to our free behind the scenes reality TV show at www.funnelhacker.tv.