How We Went From $0 To $100,000,000 Using Growth Hacking And Sales Funnels

What's up, everybody? It's Russell Brunson. Welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Now, I still am planning on giving you guys a huge recap of the viral video event, bubble Soccer, everything else that went down at the event because some crazy stuff happened. Also, trying to get permission from Gary Vee. Let me share some of his presentation with you guys here. So that's the game plan, if I may do that. You'll see it soon and you'll see my recap soon as well. But this week I've got my inner circle here, so I'm in there locked away. So what I didn't want to do is I got the video clip from my presentation at the event where I.

Talked about how to go from zero.

To to $100 million in sales. How we did that by using sales.

Funnels and growth hacking.

And it was a shorter presentation, but.

I think it was really, really cool.

I'm sure I talked really, really fast. I was also really tired. I had only slept one hour the night before. So if it doesn't make any sense, that's kind of the context of why. But hopefully it'll give you guys some ideas about how to scale a company. You know, you hear me talk about the Dot Com Secrets book a lot, like, whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins.

And. And sometimes when you hear that, it's.

Kind of depressing, like, well, I don't have a lot of money, so I'm not going to win. And that's how I felt, especially when we launched ClickFunnels and we're competing against.

Two companies, one that had like $40.

Million in funding, one that had over 100 million.

How do you do that?

And this presentation shows you how we did it. So after we do the little marketing Secret intro here, I'm going to pick right up with my presentation from the event.

I hope you love it.

Thanks so much and we'll talk to you soon.

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 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 answer.

My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to Marketing Secrets.

I put together this presentation because, like, the biggest question I get, especially from people that are building their own companies, is like, how in the world have you grown click funnels so fast or without having any money, any capital, any outside funding at all. And so I put together this presentation this morning. I said I had one hour sleep last night and then got up and I started this presentation. So but to kind of walk you through what we did and some of the mindset shifts that I think are different that hopefully will help you guys as you're growing and scaling everything you guys are doing. So title my presentation is how we use growth hacking and sales funnels to go from zero to $100 million in less than three years. We're a week away without taking on any outside funding. So kind of the first thing I wanna go over really quickly, just for those in the room who didn't know what I was talking about earlier, I'm gonna go over what a funnel is really quick. So what is a funnel? So if you look at. Actually let me step back. So the reason why I wanna talk about this is it's been interesting like I've been doing this Internet marketing game for 15 years now. This is my 15th year in the business, selling all sorts of stuff. And it's interesting because recently there's been a whole bunch of books coming out on growth hacking. Here's all these cool new ways to growth hack. And it's funny cause we get the growth hacking books and read em. It's like that's all the Internet marketing stuff we've been doing for the last now. It's like real businesses are catching on and figuring out these things are really, really cool. So that's kind of why, that's kind of my thought behind this presentation is showing that all these funnel things, this is the growth hacking, this is the movement, this is where things are going that we keep talking about. So what's a funnel? So to explain a funnel, I think the easiest way to begin with is to show you what a funnel is not. So this is like a traditional style website, right? This is what clickfunnels is kind of going against all the time. And most people have a traditional website, they got all sorts of ads, they're paying for Facebook, YouTube, Google, all these things. And they're driving it into these websites and it's literally like slamming a whole bunch of people in their brick wall. And I know that cause this is how I got started. I was trying this thing and it did not work. And I always say that a traditional website's kinda like having a really bad salesperson who's shy and all they do is they hand out brochures and then pray the person comes back. That's a traditional website. What a funnel is is basically having the best salesperson on planet earth come and meet the person at the front door, find out their name, and walk them through the process, Find what they want, how they want it, and give them exactly what they want. So that's kind of what a sales funnel is. Now, my whole philosophy in business, kind of like I told you guys in the last presentation, like when we started Click Funnels three years ago, we had two major competitors that we were looking at. Number one, had just gotten $43 million in funding, and number two had just had over $100 million in funding. Now I'm coming in with me and Todd, and we're bankrolling it with our big old credit cards. And we're like, okay, we're going against these huge giants that have hundreds of millions of dollars. How are we gonna win? And one of my first mentors, Dan Kennedy, he used to say this all the time. He said, whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. And so I'm looking at these companies that have hundreds of millions of dollars in funding. I'm like, I'm screwed. I'm not gonna be able to win. These guys can outspend me every single day. And I started looking at this more and more, and I didn't get it at first. It took me a couple years before I understood this concept of whoever can spend the most money to acquire customer wins. And like I told you guys before, I went to college here at Boise State and I wrestled here. And I used to carry my buddies on my back up and down these up and down the football stadium every single day before practice. And like, this is my hometown. So here in Boise, one thing we're famous for, those who are not from Idaho, is we're famous for potatoes. And the very first product I ever put together was a DVD teaching people how to make potato gun. And you've probably heard me tell the story before, but it was a dvd. How to make potato guns. I set it up online. I was learning about Internet marketing. It was really simple. I had a one page website and I had Google Ads. That's all that we did back in the day. So I went to Google, I started buying ads. I was spending about $10 a day on Google Ads, and I was selling a $37 DVD on how to make potato guns. So I'd spend $10 a day on ads, and I usually average about one sale per day. So Russell, as a college kid, was making a whopping $27 per day profit I was putting into my pocket, which was pretty awesome. And that was kind of my beginning. And then what happened is a little while into this whole game, Google shifted how everything worked. And I got in big, big trouble. And all of a sudden, literally overnight, my website was the same. But I went from spending $10 a day in ads to $50 a day overnight. And so I sent him $50 a day, sent it to the exact same website, but I was only making one sale, the same thing now. I was losing $13 a day. And my beautiful wife, after about three or four days of that, said, you have to stop. This is not a good business. This is really, really bad. And so we stopped and eventually had to cut up our credit cards. And I thought, I missed the bubble. I'm like, dang it, we missed it. And those are actually real pictures of us cutting up our credit card back in our first home. About that time, I had a friend who was also in the business. And he came back. He said, russell, I think I figured this out. He said, my little website, he had the same problem. Google raised the prices, algorithms changed. And like. And a bunch of my friends all got out of business. One of my friends came back. He's like, I figured it out. He's like, I started adding in these things. He called them OTOs, which stands for one time offer, but basically an upsell. He started sharing upsells to my products, and I started making more money from every customer. And now I'm able to afford my ads again. I turn my ads back on. I was like, that's cool, but I don't know how. How can I do that? I don't know how to do that. I was like, well, I have a potato gun dvd. What should I do? And he's like, well, people that buy potato gun DVDs, what else do they need? How else can you serve them? And I was like, well, we could buy them. Like, the next piece is they have to buy potato gun kits. Like to buy pipes and the barbecue gun, all these other pieces, right? And so he's like, well, you should sell a kit. I'm like, I don't want to make kits. That would be really not cool. And he's like, well, see if you can find someone. So I ended up finding a guy in Northern Idaho who actually was drop shipping potato gun kits. Did a partnership with him, and I made my very first funnel. This is my funnel transition. So people would buy my DVD and they'd upsell a $200 potato gun kit. And we sent it out in the mail. Now what was cool, I turned the Google Ads back on back in the day and what happened was I still was paying about $50 a day, but then one out of three people would start buying the potato gun kit. So if you do the math on that, one out of three people means I was averaging about $65 in additional sales from every DVD I got that I sold, which meant I was spending about $50 a day in ads. And now I was making $102 in ads. And all of a sudden it worked again. That was magic. Literally, when I made that shift, I went from losing money today to now I was making $52 a day profit. And I was like, this is it. This is the biggest thing in the world. Now for me, obviously potato guns is a very small market and I didn't stay there long. But the concept of that rang through my head. I was like, this is how it works. And my moral that I kind of learned from this whole experience was that websites, excuse me, the funnels make me money, Websites make me broke. And so my obsession for the last decade of my life has been this. A lot of you guys have been to my events for the last decade teaching this concept and showing kids like this is the key. And so when I started doing this and started realizing it, that message I heard from my mentor kept coming back to my head saying, whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. That was the key. Whoever can spend the most money to acquire a customer wins. And so as we came into this game of click funnels and I'm looking at these people with hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital behind them, I'm like, how in the world do we compete with that? I was like, I can't do it. Head for head. They can all outspend me. But if I can build a funnel, that's right, I can change everything. And if you look at the reason why we have grown as fast as we can is cause we can literally outspend everyone we get, man, probably three or four times a week, different people trying to put money into click funnels. And most of them we just tell them no. But a couple we've entertained just cause it's interest, curious, like what they think we're worth. And it's really fun. So we're at lunch this day with this group and the guy, I'm talking to the guy and he's going through everything and he asked the question they always ask on Shark Tank. He's like, well, how much does it cost to acquire a customer? And I was like, I hate when people ask me this question because he's not gonna get what I'm gonna tell him. And I was like, well, when we were running Facebook ads to the homepage, we're spending about $120 to acquire a free trial member. And he was like, oh, that's amazing. He's like, based on that, he's like, what I can do is I can go and we can put in $50 million in cash. We can get this many all stuff. And I was like, whoa, whoa, real quick. We actually off. He's like, you turn those ads off. I'm like, yeah, I gotta pay for this out of my own pocket. I don't wanna lose 120 bucks to every customer. He's like, well, how are you guys growing so fast? I said, well, the reason why is because we have funnels. And I explained to him some of our front end funnels, like my book funnels, some other funnels. I said, look, for every single person that comes in one of my funnels, if they buy one of my books, we spend on average about 10 to $12 on Facebook ads or other ad platforms to sell a book. But then through that funnel, we average about $32. So I said, what happens is that we spend $12, we get someone to buy one of our books, we make net $20 of cash we put in our pocket, and then we introduce them to click funnels. So every single customer, before we tell them about clickfunnels, actually pay us money and we put money in our pocket. He's like, that doesn't make any sense. And I explained it again. He said, it didn't make sense. I explained it three or four times. Then he stopped. He said, if what you're saying is true, he said, that'll change business forever. I was like, that's my whole message. That's what we do. That's what funnels are all about. So I'll walk you guys really quick through this and then we'll have Gary come up here in a minute. But one of the key concepts you guys need to understand, this is a concept we call a break even funnel. Those, my inner circle members who are here, we spend a lot of time on this. But the breakeven funnel is a funnel where you break even so you can literally get customers for free. When you have that, you can grow your company as quick, as big, as fast as you want. Okay? So we spend a lot of time in that. So this is what a break even funnel where I can put a dollar in advertising in and get at least a dollar back out. And if I'm good at it, I can get two or three dollars back out. Now I've got a customer, I've got some cash. Now we can put them into what we into the other things that we have a couple examples of some of our break even funnels. I grabbed these from some slides this morning. Show you examples. So this is my dot com secrets book. This is a couple months ago stats. We got about 5,400 leads. We sold 2,395 books. Average cart value during that time was $30.81. So we spent $45,000 in ads. We made $52,000 in sales. So our profit was $7,763. Now most people, if you look at a company that our size, you'd be like, that's like you just wasted a lot of. You made seven grand. That's not that big of a deal, right? But that was to get customers. We got 5,400 people that then the next week we would say, hey, by the way, this is this really cool thing called click funnels. And I got paid $7,000 to get those 5,400 people into my list. Okay, that was one of our front end products. This is a split testing book. Same kind of thing. We have 2000 leads came last month, 1300 books sold. Average car value is $12. Ad spend is 4000, sales 18,000. So we made $13,000. But we got 2000 people that now we can introduce the click funnels. So I got paid to get all these customers. One more example is perfect webinar. Same kind of thing, leads, sales. I'll go through this quickly, but same thing, made $4000, got 1600 customers. We introduced into click funnels. Now if you walk through those three funnels alone and we have about a dozen or so front end funnels we use in different platforms and things. Last month from this, basically our front end revenue is $96,000. Our ad cost was 81,000. So we netted a whopping $14,000. Most people think, man, Russell, with a company with 120 employees, like you're gonna go broke fast, right? But what's amazing about that is that that brought in literally like 30 or 40,000 new people into our world who then we took them through the rest of our sequence. They're introduced to us and now we can go and we can build a relationship with them, we can talk to them. We can serve them. We can help them understand what we do, what we believe, and then introduce them into our other products and our services. And for us, obviously, that is clickfunnels. And so if you look at that, what that means for us is that we literally get almost 1,000 new trials for free every single day, like clockwork. That comes back we talked about before. That's how we're able to grow so fast is cause we can literally, we can outspend everybody in our market. There's nobody else that we can do that. And what's cool that for you guys, whatever business you're in, like, that's the key, okay? Remember, whoever can spend the most money to acquire customer wins. And when you figure that out, it makes it. You can grow really, really quickly. Any kind of business, any kind of venture, anything you want to do. And so that, you guys, is how we use growth hacking and sales funnels to go from zero to $100 million in just three years without taking on any outside funding. Thank you. 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.