Secret #40: Recap From The Viral Video Launch Party

What's up, everybody? This is Russell. I want to welcome you guys to Marketing Secrets. I'm finally giving you a chance here behind the scenes. What happened with the viral video launch, the bubble soccer party, everything that's happening on today's episode of Marketing Secrets. So the big question is, 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? The question in this podcast will give you the answer. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to Marketing Secrets. All right, everybody, welcome back. Hope you guys have been doing amazing this whole week. I've been in inner circle meetings, so I've been dropping some cool stuff in the podcast. Hope you've been enjoying it. If you're watching the audio version, listening to the audio version, I gave you guys a really cool call from Frank Kern, which was awesome. Sent you part of my presentation, how I went from zero to hundred million dollars without taking on any outside capital, which was cool. Hopefully, like that. And now I'm finally having a chance to tell you guys behind the scenes. So it's been a fun week afterwards. And whenever something like this happens, we have no idea what to expect or what. You know what I mean? It's like, what happens if we launch this video and gets 500 million views? What if we launch it and gets 10 views and you have kind of no idea what's going to happen? And so for me, it's always like, I think sometimes people get so invested in the outcome that they miss the fun and the joy of what you're doing. Right. I know that I've had times in my life where I do that as well. And so consciously with this, as well as any launch, I set big goals and big dreams, stuff like that. But as they get closer and closer and closer, I start caring. I start. I don't know the right words. I delete the outcome goal in my head. I just. I don't know what's gonna be. And if I set one and I don't hit it, I'm gonna be sad. If I set one and I surpass it, I'll be happy. But I don't want that. Like, I did the work no matter what, and I want to be able to celebrate and enjoy it. So I try to, like, just get rid of the. The outcome in my head. So, like, going into it, I didn't have an outcome, really. And so again, I always look at things like what's the worst case scenario? So for us in clickfunnels worst case scenario, a lot of you guys know we spent a lot of money. Harmon Brothers charge about half a million dollars for a video. Plus we threw a big party. We hired influencers to come. Like you're all said and done. I haven't looked at the numbers yet. It's been a whirlwind week. But I would say probably all. In this whole party promotion, we were probably in close to a million dollars, which is kind of crazy. I think I told you guys before, it's the first time I've ever just kind of put everything on black or everything on red or however you say that. I don't know the terminology, the gambling thing, but just kind of rolling it. Typically with any kind of marketing, we're very direct response driven where it's like we test small, put a dollar in and get $2 back out. And then if that works and we scale right, that's how we've grown our company. That's how everything I believe is based on that. So this is the biggest thing. We're like, we're putting a lot in without knowing ahead of time. But it's okay because we're looking at what's the worst case scenarios. Worst case scenario, average clickfunnels member lifetime average right now, something like 1200 bucks or something like that. Maybe higher. Actually, I'm sure it is higher. We just have only been in business. In fact, tomorrow's our three year birthday, so we have a lot of people bounced three years. So that number keeps growing over time. But it's four. As we know now it's over 1200 bucks a person. So worst case scenario, if this video brings us an extra thousand customers, it broke even, which is awesome. So that's really good. But the bigger win on my side. Well, there's a couple big wins. One of it is we knew that when this video went done, like when it went live, we needed to simplify our process, right? The signup process, the onboarding, like all sorts of stuff like that. It's because of that. I'm not sure if you guys logged into ClickFunnels recently, but there's a bunch of new stuff. There's a ClickFunnels game, there's a new onboarding, there's things we call show me hows or little walkthroughs that have video and written out explanation on how to do every single thing. We set up A way to get custom domains. We click a button and you get a custom domain. We in fact give everybody the first custom domain for free. Like, we had to figure out all these things to simplify the onboarding process so when this new onslaught of people came, they'd be prepared for it. And so one of the biggest things is like, that's something we've known we need to do for probably two years. We just haven't had the time or energy to do it. And this forced us to spend that time and energy. But a lot of times we focus on stuff that's urgent but not important. What is something that's super important. But it was never urgent, so we never got it done. So by doing this and calling our shot and making this big video, it forced us to focus on the important that's not urgent. And it became urgent for us. And so we as a team killed ourselves. As you probably saw the week prior, we were here all night last week, our whole tech team and dev team, design team, and everyone was here just killing ourselves to get prepared for it. And a lot of valuations. If we ever wanted to sell click funnels in the future. One of the big things to look at is churn rate. And so we knew what our churn numbers were at. For us, it was like, if we could lower our churn by 2%, that alone would be worth, man, tens, if not in the future, hundreds of millions of dollars, but tens within the next 12 months. And so that was our goal, was to try to lower, reduce churn by two points. So we, we were, it was a week ago today, the viral video went live, so we're about a week. So obviously stats aren't perfect now. We don't know the numbers, but based on like the first, like, hey, it's been live a week. What's it trending towards? I don't know if it's gonna hold, so I don't wanna like tie an outcome to it yet. But based on like the first seven days, our churn in the window and everything has dropped by more than 2%, which is amazing. Especially, yeah, it was more than 2%. So I'm hoping that over the next 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, that sticks. But if it does, like, that alone is worth more money than I could ever have dreamt of. So excuse me. So that's, that's, in fact, the thing is, like right now, I can talk about this for a long time to explain it all, but basically where we're at right now, as we've Grown. We just passed 50,000 members last week. Actually a week ago yesterday. 50,000 members, but. But as soon as we get to about 60,000 members, the new members we bring in and people we lose each day become about the same. So it gets really hard to scale past about 60,000 members. If we drop our churn by 2 percentage points, our next peak is at 100. So almost instantly we get to about 100,000 members. So that alone is like a big reason. Another big reason why we did the viral video is unification, if that's the right word. Connection, Tribe building. Bringing people within the culture closer together and building that bond. I mean, we had hundreds of people throwing viral video launch parties at their homes. We had Julia Stoin, who threw a launch party and invited the whole Internet and she had people driving four or five hours to her house come watch it with her. We had a whole bunch and like, it just brought our tribe as a whole together. We streamed live presentations. For me from the Harmon brothers and Gary Vaynerchuk. Last minute is like, oh yes, I stream my stuff too. So we streamed his and we had like 20,000 people live between YouTube and Facebook that watch this whole event go down. I think how that does for like community tribe culture building with our audience, which was amazing. So that was another big thing is like, how does this become a bigger win for us as a community? Second is how does this make clickfunnels even more fun? Like, we're a software product. We're competing with all these boring software products that are faceless, nameless and boring. Where now it's like, we are interesting to talk about. This video is something that people can talk about, they can share, they can show their friends, their family and people come there. It's like, oh, that's kind of what clickfunnels does. It gave us the ability and the timeliness to rebuild our sales funnel, which was kind of typically, I don't like, just like, here's a brand new funnel. But we kind of had to. So it gave us a chance to sit back and really kind of retweak things and built things really differently. You've probably seen some of it. And again, it's only weekend, so I don't know super good conversion numbers, but as a whole conversion and EPCs and dollars in are up dramatically. So like doing this thing wasn't just like, how many times has the video been shared? How much viral, like, is it actually working? Like. But it's all these other pieces that are more important to us that it forced us to do. And so I just want to put that out there. It was funny. I was watching people's Facebook the next day. I think we had like 300,000 views the first day. And people were like, oh, this didn't go viral. ClickFunnels burned their money and all these things. I'm just like on my side laughing. Cause I'm like, you guys don't get it. Like, you're missing, like, people see what they understand, but they're missing the rest of it. And so that's my goal with this podcast always is to, like, let you see the magician's hands. Like, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? Like, why was that important? Why was I willing to gamble and risk that much money on something that was that big of a risk? Because it forced us to take the important and make it urgent, which is most businesses don't ever do that, and that's why they die. Kind of like your. Kind of like my wife's business if you've just seen the video. Anyway, sorry, I buried next to my first wife's business and my first wife. If you haven't watched the video, go to clickfunnels.com watch the video that way that joke makes more sense. Along with the nude squirrels and everything else. Other good things it did for us internally, we've always struggled as we recruited talent. People know ClickFunnels, which is the majority of our team come in. But developers and things that. That's hard. Where now it's like they see the video and it's like, oh, cool. That's the company. That's the culture. That's what I want to be part of. It's helping us already recruit talent. On the other side, it's bringing in customers at an incredible rate. So prior to this launch, depending on the ad set and landing page, stuff like that, first you can do clickfunnels. Member on the low end was probably $60. Higher end, 120, $130 to get a free trial. That's kind of been the window we played with. And goes up and down and bounces all around. That's kind of in the window. Right now the video is getting new customers at under $40 a piece of the paid side. But don't forget, there's also the free side that's just bringing tons of free people. So if you take the free and the paid and mix them together, our cost to acquire customer right now from the video is probably. I don't know. Again, this is pulling out of my head. I'd say probably 15 to 20 bucks, which is insane. Insane. Most SaaS in our world are like 120, 150 bucks. So. Yeah. So there's ton of cool things. We also, as of today, should I check it? We were almost at a million views. So a million people have seen our sales video and now are aware clickfunnels, which is crazy. Pulling up the actual thing to see, we were thinking, say, we may pass a million views, but it's gonna be a tight one. I don't think we've done it by now, but by tonight, hopefully, we will have done that. Yeah. We are at 927,000 views, so we're getting close to a million. And this thing will continue to drive leads, drive traffic, drive sales today, tomorrow, for forever. We knew with launching this, it wasn't going to be like a poo pourri or squatty potty viral this, right? Like, to explain what clickfunnels is. Takes more. In fact, they were kind of stressed out first. Like, this is the longest video we've done. Cause I think it's four minutes and it's almost five minutes long. And I was like, yeah, but it's okay because I'd rather have less people. But the people who watch it understand we are. And then they come in and they actually become customers and they stick. So it was funny people that. It's just funny to me. I see all the trolls that are in common, like, oh, like videos too long. That's why it's not going viral. I'm like, dude, I don't need it to go viral. That was the campaign we did to unite the community, get people excited so that people cared when this came out. All the other things is why we did it and why it's already. I get paid for itself within the first 30 hours. That part was done. Now it's like this tool and this asset that's becoming huge for us. Okay. So that's why I want people to understand, like, in case they don't. Because I know a lot of people don't quite get all the pieces, so hopefully this kind of helps. Excuse me. Sorry. I'm watching the video again. So fun. All right, so what else? What else I was gonna share with you guys? So that's some of the core things. Again, a lot of people been asking me about it and, like, that. The last thing I'm gonna talk about is it gave us the ability to throw a party. Why do they like throwing parties? Because we're marketers and we should make an event out of everything, we had inner circle last week, James Malinchek. Who. If you know who James are, if you Google Secret Millionaire, he was on Secret Millionaire. This is like seven or eight years ago. And remember, he was on Secret Millionaire. Like most people, like, you're on tv, it's like, hey, I'm on tv. And that's it. But James is really strategic about it and he actually threw a big party in his house. He invited me and a bunch of other people out to the house and then did a whole launch around it. He had what's his name from Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Robin Leach, come to it and he had like all these. And threw a big event around it and made it fun for people like me to come and come to it and talk to it and share it and like, and made me become friends with James and connect with him and like, care about him and his mission because he threw this big event around it. That's what we did this as well. It's like it gave us the ability to throw at an event that people, whether they could come to Boise or not, could watch it streaming live and see me and see Gary and see all these people and just so many cool. So many cool. Again, tribe building, culture building things that came from it. So anyway, throw an event. Like I tell people, if you're like, launch a Facebook ad. Like, throw an event around it. If it's going to be good, invite 10 other influencers come to your house, launch the event together, launch the ad, set together, whatever it is, and make a party out of it. And I was like, they have vested interest in your success. They're going to watch, they're going to talk, they're going to. All those amazing things kind of come from it. So my office is out clapping. We got some weird people over there. Anyway, sorry, what's happening out there? So anyway, so I hope that helps you guys because everyone keeps asking me like, what happened? Has it been good for you? Has been bad for you? And I just want to kind of give you a recap. It's been freaking amazing for us. Again, it forced the important to become urgent. It's reduced our churn, it's increased our. It's dropped our cost to acquire customer, increased our conversions, increase our average cart sales. So many good things to come from it. We built some amazing relationships. People who would never know what clickfunnels were sat in a room for five hours with us and played bubble soccer with us. We won the Guinness Book of World Record playing bubble soccer. We built connection, community, relationships. So many good things came from this thing, and it's been amazing. So, yes, it was good financially as well as all the other things, and it keeps continuing to grow. I don't know how many software companies have a sales video that has been seen a million times in the first seven days. That's rare. And it was a sales video that pitched the product really, really hard. So you know what I mean? Like, sometimes they have these ones that are like, fancy videos. Like. Like, I don't know if you remember Grasshopper, they had a really cool viral video about being entrepreneurs, big entrepreneurial thing. They realized, like, Grasshopper, and that was it. And like, yeah, that did that but didn't sell the product. Like, I. I was like, what's grasshopper? Grasshopper.com like, oh, it's like phone systems for entrepreneurs. I didn't know that. This one is like a million people watched it and it's pitching our product. You know what I mean? Like, we have 5,397 shares, 19,000 emojis. Tell me comments anyway. 1870 comments. Like, it's all good from a lot of different angles, so hope that helps. Hopefully give you some visibility on what we did and why we did it. One of the big reasons why we do launch, as much as I hate them and the stress that goes into them, is again, it forces the important to become urgent. So I recommend for you guys to look at what are the important things you have that you need to do that you're like, I know I need to do that. And how do you make it urgent? How do you tie a launch or something or an event or something that forces the important that, you know you need to do to become urgent. You know, for us, it's like the urgent. Always launch a new funnel, Launch a new thing like drive more subway. Those things were urgent, so we're always doing them. But it was like, if I can reduce churn by 2 percentage points, that's worth more than 10,000 new customers to me. So it's like. But I never did it because it wasn't urgent. Wasn't like, in front of my face all the time, right? So as soon as I made the important become urgent through this process, it became urgent. And it's been huge since then. So there you guys go. It's been seven days. Like I said, I'll probably do another recap here in 30 days or so and kind of keep giving you more stats as I get clear numbers on things. I said I've been inner circled last four days. So today's my first day back and half the team's gone. So I'll get deeper in the numbers and stuff and share more as we keep going on but hope it helps. Appreciate you all. Thanks again for watching the video. If you haven't watched it, go watch it, go share it, go comment, Go like have some fun because that's what we do. And tomorrow by the time you guys listen to this, it'll be ClickFunnels third birthday. Yes. We've only been in business three years. We passed 50,000 members. We're changing the world thanks to you guys. So thank you for everything. Hope this helped. Appreciate you guys and we'll talk soon. 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.