ClickFunnels State of the Union with Russell Brunson & Todd Dickerson

Oh, how fun. I got my inner circle here in the room. This makes it so much easier. More fun. So fun. We got 10,000 of you guys all around the world hanging out with us. It's gonna be. It's gonna be insane. I'm so excited for the next. The next four days, three and a half days, whatever it ends up being, it's gonna be amazing. And, man, I was sitting backstage as Devon was talking, showing Funnel Hacking Live at the very beginning, which is crazy. It was 10 years ago, was the very first Funnel Hacking Live here in Las Vegas. It was something we were going to do once and once only. We had no plan of making this, like, an annual event. It was just like we launched clickfunnels. And I remember the presentation I used to launch. It was called Funnel Hacking. We're teaching how to funnel hack and stuff like that. And people inside of the Facebook group started calling themselves Funnel Hackers. And I was like, that's kind of cool. This is the thing. It's catching on. We're Funnel Hackers. And then they started doing these meetups around the country, like, hey, we're all going to meet over in Austin. Who wants to come here? Being in San Diego, who wants to come? And I was like, this is happening whether we're doing it or not. Maybe we should. We should do an event and, like, call some. Call something. Like, what should we call it? I said, well, we're funnel hackers. We're Funnel hacking. Let's call Funnel Hacking Live. And that was the whole initial idea. We rented a space in Las Vegas that held. Was it 600?

800.

800 people. And we told people about it, and 800 people showed up. And I remember I was so scared. I had done an event four or five years earlier where we'd sold a bunch of tickets to the event, and we showed up to the hotel, got everything ready, and then we opened the. We opened the. The stage, and we walked out. And I think we had, like, three. It was set by three or 400 people, and there's like 60 in the room. I walked in, everything's empty. And I was like, this is going to be really painful. And for three days, I did an event, and it was horrible, all the empty seats. And I was like, I will never do an event again. And that was the plan in Funnel Hacking Live. We decided to do that. And I remember sitting backstage being so scared, like, what if. What if nobody shows up? No one's here. I remember looking through the curtain, that little curtain that Devon showed just Looking through the curtain, I was like, oh, there's people here. Okay, this is fantastic. People showed up and we did the first one, and I remember the very end of the first one, like, should we do this again? That was kind of fun. People showed up like, okay, let's do it again. And. And now we are on Funnel Hacking Live. This is nine and a half, which I don't know if you guys know that our next Funnel Hacking live, which is 10, which is the big gonna be the big show, is here in Vegas again and it's happening in February. In fact, it's during Valentine's Day. So you need to bring your wives and your sweethearts, your husband, whoever it is, bring them to the party because we're on Valentine's Day in Las Vegas next year, which is where we're doing funnel hacking live 10. And it's going to be the biggest, the craziest. It's going to be amazing. So I don't want any of you guys to miss that event. It's going to be insane. And so a lot of people are like, well, what's this one right here? This is last year was nine, that one's ten. What is this? And it's changed a couple times. At first I was like, well, we. When prior to Covid and those things happening, we were doing Fun Hockey Live the very first quarter of the year. And I loved it. It was like New Year's resolutions were kicking this thing off and have a lot of fun. And then the whole pandemic happened. Everything shifted around and we ended up shifting the event till September, which was great, except that's when all of our kids go back to school and all sorts of things. And it was just this weird timing where it was really, really hard to do in September. And we did three or four years in a row. And then two years ago, like, let's see if we can get it back to the first quarter of the year.

And.

And so that was the shift to move it to the first quarter of the year. But then there was an 18 month gap between funnel hacking live 9 and 10. And 18 months is a long time to not hang out with my friends. And so I was like, what if we did a little one in between called nine and a half? And we did it virtually and we rented Eric's studio, which is this insane studio, you guys who are here. It's insane. So that was the vision and now we're. I can't believe we're here. And so this is Funnel Hackathon 9 1/2 Funnel Hacking Live International and, and in six months from now, during Valentine's Day, we'll be doing it in person again. So for everyone, especially everyone who's at home watching now, like, I would set a goal for you guys. Like I would love to have you guys at funnel hacking 10 for the big show. Because it's 10 years. Like we're. This is our 10 year birthday. It's 10 years of clickfunnels being around and it's been an incredibly insane ride and it's been a lot of fun. So that's some of the backstory. A couple things we're gonna do new this time, because it is virtual, I want to do something fun. We tested this two or three weeks ago at an event we did for my office and it turned out to be a really like smashing success because we had some people that were virtual. It's like, how do we, how do we network when we're not in person? Like, obviously all the inner circle, you guys are all going to have so much fun the next four days. We're all in networking, hanging out, but everyone else, I know you guys are kind of remote and I don't want you to lose the networking experience. So what we decided to do is we set up a group inside of school and I'll tell you why we did a lot of you guys, like, why would you in school? I'll explain that in a little bit. We set up a group inside of school where right now everyone's coming and we're between each session we're setting up a new thread for everyone to come and comment and drop their aha's. In fact, if you were on the pre show last night, I showed it yesterday and I asked everyone like, what was the number one thing you're trying to get from Funnel Hacking Live this year? And we had over a thousand comments in the last like 12 hours since I posted that in a group, which is kind of cool. So what's gonna happen is each session before we go live, we're gonna open up a new thread in that group and then want all you guys who are home to open it separately in another thing. And as you're hearing me or the other speakers talking about whatever it is when you have in the aha and somebody comes in, drop in that thing and we wanna see how many comments, how many ahas things that you pull out of the presentations in that one group, which is a lot of fun. So this is where to go if you go to hangoutwithrussell.com at home. If you go to that site right there, it'll take you to our school group that we set up. If you're not in there already, you might have to go ask for access to it. But my team's in there approving people as fast as possible. So we'll approve things as fast as possible. And then the very top, there'll be a pinned comment that basically has whatever the session is. So right now there's probably a pinned comment, I'm assuming from my team that says like, comment on Russell's presentation. So over the next hour or so that I'm up here, as you guys are getting aha's or insights or anything, drop them in there. I want to see if we can get a couple thousand comments for every single session. And then what's cool about this for the speakers when they're on stage and they get done, they'll have a chance to go back into the comments and see what you guys said about their presentation. So feel free to also, if you're talking to them specifically, like, tell them your favorite thing, what you loved about them, about their story. And as a speaker, it feels really good afterwards to get good feedback from people.

So.

So that sound fair? You guys good with that? So hangoutwithrustle.com okay. All right. With that said, I got a couple fun things I want to talk about before I bring Todd out here to share some really fun things that are happening inside the clickfunnels world right now. But I want to start with something that happened last month that was a turning point for me in my life. August 17, 2014. So this is 20 years ago last month, something crazy happened. This guy right here on the picture, this is John Reese, thanks to Tony Robbins. And 20 years ago, I had just gotten into this world. I was still in college. I had just married my wife. We didn't have any kids yet. We're trying to figure out this whole business thing. I was trying to figure out how to make money on the Internet and I was on a bunch of different people's email lists. And I remember one day I started getting all these different emails from people talking about this product coming out. It's called Traffic Secrets. It's so cool. Every single buy it. I remember going to the page, it was a thousand dollar course. I'm like, I don't have a thousand dollars. That looks awesome. And then that kind of happened. And then a couple hours later, in fact, I think I have a picture of this, this library right here. This is A library that's on the Utah, Idaho board. There's a little lake called Bear Lake, which my family goes every single year. And we were at Bear Lake when this whole thing was happening. And this is before we had cell phones, before we had Internet, before like WI fi was everywhere. So if you wanted to get on the Internet at Bear Lake, you had to go to this library. And so I remember after the day was over, I jumped in my bike or my car or something, we drove to the library, got in there. And do you guys remember this back in the day when you had the Internet? So there's like, there's two computers in the library and there's a line of people. Everyone's waiting to check their email. It's so weird now because none of us would do that, right? So I'm standing in line waiting to check my email. First person gets down there, second person, third person. I finally get in line, I sit down, I put my email up, it pops open and there's an email from John Reese. And at the top of the email it says, we did it, or something like that. I'm like, we did what? So I opened the email and I started reading it. And John basically announced that they had launched this course called Traffic Secrets earlier that morning. And in the first 18 hours, it was a thousand dollar course. They sold a thousand copies of this course and they'd made a million dollar. They'd sold a million dollars of this course in 18 hours. So again, 20 years ago, I'm sitting there, young kid at the time, I'm 40 or 20, what, 44 now. So I was 20, 24 years old, just gotten married. I'm sitting there at the library. I remember sitting back in my chair and just thinking. I was like, I can't believe there's a human being just like any of us who made a million dollars in a day. When I got started entrepreneurship, I thought I had a big vision. I was like, oh, if I could make, I'm become a millionaire someday, the next 20 years, I'll become a millionaire. Thinking that was like this big thing. And I saw a dude who made a million dollars in a day. I remember I probably sat there for like two or three minutes just like, I can't even, like my whole world, my whole paradigm just shifted that what was even possible? And I remember thinking like, okay, that guy can make a million dollars a day. What if I, like, it's not even possible. Maybe I can make a million dollars. Like not in my lifetime. What if I did a million Dollars in a year or. I don't know, like all these things started shifting my head and started having more and more belief. What's crazy is I didn't realize at the time, but I started talking to a lot of my other friends, and for them, it was the same thing. Like, they saw this happen. It was just like, oh, my gosh, if he can do it, I can do it. How many guys have been around long enough you remember this experience? Anyone here in the room who was a handful of you guys remember this, right? It was a turning point for so many of us. And I remember thinking that. I said, okay, this guy, John Reese, he had a 2 comma club in just 24 hours. And I remember thinking that. And I was just like. I was like, if that's true, if he really did this, like, I'm going to go, like, I'm going to focus 100% of my time and energy effort figuring out how in the world he did this, right? I said, that's true. I'm going to drop everything else and just focus on this. And when I was making these slides and I wrote that down, I started thinking about a movie that had a similar experience. How many of you guys have ever seen this movie? Right here. So, okay, there's a scene from this movie I want to share, but actually I got some street credit from some young kids that are friends of my friends. We were talking to a bunch of them about what we do, and they're like, what do you do for a living? And I was kind of telling him, like, oh, yeah, I know a guy kind of like, his name's Jordan Belfort. You ever heard of him? I was like, actually, I was on his podcast. Like, what? What, you run Jordan Belfort's podcast? I'm like, yeah. So I got some street cred, the kids because of that, which is cool. But anyway, so this is a clip from Wolf of Wall street, which kind of sums up how I felt after John Reese did the Million Dollar Day. Excuse me. Is that your car in the lot? Yeah. That's a nice ride. Thanks, man. Donnie Azoff. Hey.

Jordan Belfort. Nice to meet you.

Hey, what do you do, bro? Honey, put anything in. What do I do for work?

What do you do? I'm a stock broker.

Stockbroker?

Yeah.

You make a lot of money?

Yeah, I do all right for myself, but.

How much money you make?

I don't know, 70,000 last month.

I'm serious. I tell you what, you show me a pay stub for $72,000 on it, I quit my job right now and.

I work for you.

Hey, Paulie, what's up? No, yeah, you know, everything's fine. Hey, listen, I quit. So that's, that's what I feel. I watch you, John, reset Mike, this is true. If he actually did that, like nothing else matters to me right now. I'm gonna stop everything I'm doing and focus on figuring out how in the world he did that. Because if a human being just like me, he do a million dollars in a day, what could I do a million dollars in a year? I don't even know what's possible. But I was like, I have to figure this out, whatever it takes. Now I started looking like, what was John doing? This is me, the Young Funnel Hacker, 24 year old Russell, who didn't know what funnel hacking was. This is something we talked about. But I was like, what did he do? I got to reverse engineer this, right? I Remember Going and trafficsecrets.com at the time and it wasn't like a traditional website like I was used to. It was a funnel. It was a two page funnel. It had a long form sales letter. It was like a 150 page sales letter if anyone ever remembers seeing it. It was not short at all. I remember printing it out and it was like this fat. I'm like, this is insane. People actually read this stuff. Blew my mind. 150 page sales letter with an order form. And that was the very first thing I was like, this looks different than what I've seen before. This is not how people make money on the Internet. This is the weirdest thing in the world. I'm like, this is what he did. So if that's how it worked, I wonder if I could do it. I remember thinking, if he could create a funnel, if he could do that, could I do the same thing? What would it look like? How do I model that, right? I remember wondering if I could create a funnel could get me into the 2 comma club. So start thinking again. Reverse engineering, funnel hacking. I was, okay, how did John do it? Well, John had a thousand dollars course, he sold a thousand copies. That's a million dollars. I was like, just math, right? Thousand, thousand dollars course thousand copies, it's a million dollars. I was like, I don't think I can do a million dollars in a day. That, that like my brain wasn't ready to comprehend that. But I was like, if I did a million dollars in a year, what does that look like? I was like, well, a thousand dollars course, if I sold Three a day that gets me over a million dollars. I'm like, how? Okay, can I create a thousand dollar course? Can I sell three a day? Like what would that look like? How would I get traffic? I didn't know the answers to these questions, but these questions started giving me like the desire to figure things out. Like how does this work? How do I find traffic? How do I get enough traffic to sell three a day of a thousand dollar course? And so I did exactly what I teach you guys to do all the time is funnel hacking. So John had a thousand dollar course first in my head is like, cool, I got to make a thousand dollar course. So I made my very first thousand dollars course and it was called the Dotcom Secrets home study course. This is way before there was ever a book called Dotcom Secrets. I bought the domain name way back in the day. I thought it was cool. A lot of my friends have made fun of me about the name. But still for me, it means a lot to me. So I still keep it. But it was the Dot Com Secrets home study course. I went and we rented a hotel room. We filmed us teaching this whole course. Put it on deep. Because John's course was basically a seminar he had done. Took the DVDs, made it workbook. So I did like a model exactly like he did. He had like I think 12 sessions or eight sessions. I had 12. I had the exact same amount of sessions. He had different handouts, had the same handout. Like I tried to model as close as I could because that dude made a million dollars a day selling the course. I'm going to just model it as close as I can and just do what he did and I'm going to be successful. So I went out there, we made a thousand on our course, we launched it. And how many of you guys think I made a thousand sales? Unfortunately, I didn't. But I'll tell you what we did here in a second. I forgot that's the next slide. So I did. I went back to the funnel again. This is what John's funnel look like. I thought it was awesome. So I built the same thing. I modeled it. Modeled the look, the fill, the layout as close as I could. Model the price point as close as we could. I did my big launch, thousand hour course and I sold. I didn't actually sell a thousand. I launched it. I did this big huge core day launch. I model the way that John had done his. And during the launch I had a really good idea that turned out to be a really bad idea. You guys ever do that? I was like, if I launch this on New Year's Day, it means the first day of the year. I'll make a million dollars before January 1st is over. This will be insane. So I did this whole coordinated product launch. And I remember I called John ahead of time, and he's like, so you're gonna launch this on New Year's Eve? I'm like, at midnight, we're gonna launch it.

He.

He's like, do you think people are going to buy it at New Year's Eve? I'm like, oh, yeah. They're all going to be sitting around waiting on a computer for me to launch so they can buy my new course. Right? He's like, I know you're Mormon and stuff, and you don't drink and things like that, but usually on New Year's Eve, that's not what people are doing. I was like, no, dude, you have no idea. You're wrong. So New Year's Eve, we launched this course. I know Brent was there in the room. We were all excited, like, waiting for sales to come in. And there were a couple people who were waiting to buy, but not very many. And during the entire launch sequence, seven days, whatever, we ended up selling a whopping 21 copies of the course, which is awesome. Awesome.

Yeah.

Only problem is, back then, to build a course like this, just so you know that because I was convinced I was selling a thousand copies, we had to print DVDs, workbooks, papers. And so my cost to print a thousand copies of my home study course was a lot more than $21,000. So when all is said and done, we didn't make a million dollars. I made negative dollars. But I did it right. I funnel hacked it, went out there, did the process, tried it out, and that was kind of the thought. I was like, don't. Okay? Now, what a lot of people do at this point is they think John Reese is a scam. Russell Brunson's a scam. These Internet gurus are all scam, right? And they just quit. But I want to share with you the message that Satema Gali spoke at Funnel Hacking Live in San Diego the very first time. And he shared a message from the stage that meant so much to me. He said, everyone, you have to learn how to stop stopping. So many people hit an obstacle, and then they stop. He's like, if you want to be successful at anything in life, you have to stop stopping. You have to keep moving forward. And so I was thinking about that. I was like, okay, it didn't work. Doesn't mean it doesn't work. It means I didn't do it right or I didn't figure the right process or I picked the right product or something. I got to stop stopping. What's the next phase? What's the next step? What's the next step? We started going back right now for a lot of you guys who may have been. May at home have tried some. How many of you guys, by the way, have launched at least one funnel so far that has not worked? I'm curious. Okay, Everyone in this room here has done a lot back home. Back. I don't see his hands going up. Haven't you guys back home, have you guys done at least one funnel that hasn't worked? Okay, well, you guys are still here, which is good. Most people stop, though. You guys stop stopping. But Russell, you said that I was just one funnel away. I did a funnel. Like, why am I not rich yet? Okay, the reality is it's not the first funnel. I never said you're one. I never said, like, your first funnel away. Like, you're a funnel away. Right. But we don't know which one it's going to be. And I know which one's going to be. Like, I did funnel after funnel after funnel after funnel. I didn't pull the slide up here, but in the past, I have a slide that's showing every one of my funnels, like, find in the past. And it's like 150 funnels that I had successfully launched, not successfully made money, but successfully launched before we had the click funnels. Funnel. That's from everything from graphic design, product creation, sales, letter traffic, all this stuff. 150 funnels we had done over that period of time before we launched clickfunnels. And so just gonna say you're one funnel away doesn't mean, like, that's the end, right? It's the beginning. You do the first funnel and you keep trying. A lot of you guys know my favorite. My favorite author is Napoleon Hill, and he's got a quote that I love, and there's two parts to this quote. I'm going to share both of them here because I think sometimes we miss the second part. So this is the quote. Napoleon Hill says there's one quality which one must possess to win, and that is definiteness of purpose and the knowledge of what one wants and a burning desire to possess it. Okay, the first thing is definiteness of purpose. If you study Napoleon Hill, it doesn't matter which one of his books you read, you read Think and grow rich. You read Laws of success, you read how to raise your own salary. If you read any of his books, the first law of basically everything he talks about is definiteness of purpose, right? That's knowing exactly what it is you want. Okay? Now, most of the guys who, especially I know the inner circle here in the room, like you guys pretty much all have a very clear path. Like, I know exactly what I want, what I'm going for, right? For people who are not having success yet, this is one of the biggest problems you find is that they don't have definite purpose. They don't know what they're going for. Remember when I first got started in this business, I didn't know I was going for, like, I got online, I was like, I'm going to make some money on the Internet. That was my definite purpose, right? And I was just like wandering around like, hoping I could figure this out. Hopefully I bump into something and I was. I didn't know what I was doing for two or three years. I look back during that window before, before the whole John Reese incident where I saw what someone was doing. Like I was selling stuff on ebay and I was like, I was trying to sell this and I was just trying a bunch of things, but I didn't have a definite purpose. I was just kind of wandering, right? And then August 17, 20 years ago last month, John Reesets the million dollar day. I'm sitting in that chair in the library looking at it. I was like, that, that's what I want to do. But that guy just, I want to do that. I know exactly what it is. I had a definite purpose. It shifted from like, I'm gonna try to make some money to like, no, I want that. I'm gonna build a course. It's a thousand dollar course. I'm trying to sell figure how to sell a thousand copies. And I had a definite purpose. I shifted from being this like wandering around, just kind of like, you know, just bumping into things to like having a direction, having a target, having something I was moving towards, right? It shifted everything. For me, that's the very first step. Okay. I think about other areas of my life where I've had success and, and probably the best one for me, I mean, outside of business, the other thing I've had really had success with my life was wrestling. And I remember when I first started wrestling, I went initially because my dad forced me to go because that's how most good things happen. My dad forced me to go wrestling practice I didn't want to be a wrestler. And I went to, I started liking a little bit, having some fun. And then my dad took me to the state tournament that year. And I remember there were two guys on my team who, who had made it to the state finals. And I kind of knew them because they were in the room. They were the cool guys in the room. So I remember seeing like, oh, those are the good guys. And so I went to the state tournament to watch them compete. And I remember there was our 100 and I think 120 pounder, something like that. A little tiny guy. His name was Matt Woods. He'd won state title two years in a row and this was his senior year. He went out there, wrestled the match. He won, beat the guy. And I remember seeing him get his hand raised and I don't know what it was. I feel like I'm sitting in this huge, like this huge stadium arena. There's a bunch of wrestling match, all these matches happening. I saw Matt woods get his hand raised. I remember sitting there like everything got quiet and I was like that, that thing that he just experienced, like, I want that more than I want more than I want air, more than I want anything. I want to feel that feeling. And like that became like the definite purpose. I want to, I want to be a state champ. I remember going home, like telling everyone, I'm going to be a state champ, I'm going to be a state champ. And they laughed at me because I was not very good. They're like, okay, cool, you lost your, your match last week to the guy like, that was 12 string and you want to be. Yeah, good, good luck with that. And they teased me, they made fun of me, but didn't matter because like, I knew exactly what it was. I had a definite purpose. I wasn't just going to practice like dinking around. It's like, I'm going to be a state champ. I got to work out like a state champ. I got to train like a state champ. I got to figure things out. And I had a definite purpose and gave me something to move towards hard and fast. Okay, so that's the first half of this quote, right? One must one quality which one must possess to win is definite as purpose. Right? The second half, this is where most people miss it. The second half is you also have to have a burning desire to possess it. I want to talk about burning desire for a minute because I think this is where a lot of people miss it. When I was wrestling, I remember going to school every day And I barely. Like, I struggled in school, it was hard to pay attention and I thought I was dumb. But the reality is, the reason why I struggled in school so much is cause all I could think about was wrestling. That was it. If you look at my notebooks back in the day, I was drawing pictures of wrestling mats. There's a circle in the square. I couldn't draw a wrestler. I'm a really bad drawer. But I was like, wrestling mats. And then I would think about it. And I remember if you're a wrestler, you cut a lot of weight. So I was cutting weight every week. So I remember sitting in classes, my teachers were talking, I was making a list of the foods I wanted to eat after weigh inside. Like, I want this. And so I'd sit there for an eight hour day at school writing out every single food I could dream about eating next time I could eat. And then what I would do is, each day as I got closer and closer to weigh ins, I look at that list, I would narrow it down, I would narrow it down, I would narrow it down. And the night before weighins, my mom would take me to the grocery store and I'd pick like, of all the things I've been dreaming about this week, these are the three things I want to eat the most. And we buy those three things and after weigh ins, I eat them, right? And they're sitting there. Like, if I would lose a match, I would think about it, I would watch the video. I was just like all consuming. How do I beat that person? Right? It practiced. If somebody beat me or someone did something like, it was, it became almost obsessive compulsive, right? That's the level of desire I had. I wanted this goal so bad. So bad, so bad. Okay. Same thing happened when I got into business. I saw John Reese do that. A lot of people saw that. A lot of people are like, oh, that guy made a million dollars. This is insane. A lot of people saw that. I think the difference between me and a lot of people was like, I became obsessed with it. It wasn't just like, okay, I'm gonna dabble and try to make some more money. I was like, no, this is my definite purpose. And I had a burning desire. I was going through everything. Like, I mean, people have asked me, russell, how did you write all these books? How do you understand how funnels work so good? It's like I went through every funnel on the Internet. I could find every single person. I bought their price. I went through a funnel, hack them. I was like calling people like, what'd you do on your funnel? How did it work? What were the conversions? I became obsessed. I was like this little annoying kid who was just watching everyone, studying, trying to figure out what was happening. I would go to marketing events, kind of like this one. And I remember somebody's heard this story before, but I bet most of our at home audience hasn't heard this. I would go to these, these big seminars, right? And there'd be thousands of people in the room. I'd be learning from all the speakers. And after the seminar gets done, everyone goes down to the bars and networks. You guys know about this, how it works? So I'd never been to a bar before. I'm like, I'm this Mormon kid. I don't drink. This is gonna be awkward. I want people to think I'm drinking. So I'd go down the bars afterwards and everyone's down there. And so I would order milk from the bartender so that nobody would think I was not drinking. And I have this big old cup of milk and everyone's like, brunson, are you drinking milk? Like, yeah. They're like, why? I'm like, cause like the Sprite looks like vodka.

I don't know.

I don't want people like, oh, Brunson's drink. So I have a glass of milk while I'm down there in a bar. And what's crazy is the more people drink, the more they start to sharing their best ideas and the better stuff can come out and coming out and like, the more drunk they are. And I'm the only sober one in the room. I'm like, I can't believe they're sharing this, taking notes like crazy. It was insane, right? But it wasn't just like, I wanted to become better at building funnels. I didn't want to make, you know, start a business. Like, I was obsessed with it. It was a burning desire. Like, it all consumed me day and night till I figured out I had to figure out how to figure it out, how to figure out, like, that's the kind of like passion that you have to have to be successful in anything in life, right? And I know I'm preaching to the choir because you guys are in the room here, you guys are at home. Like, you're the ones who are obsessed with this. But I want you to understand, to be successful in anything in life, it takes a little bit of like, weirdness, a little bit of obsession a lot of times. How many of you guys have friends, family members, spouses who are like, you're mildly obsessed over here, and it's freaking me out. Anyone here have that? Okay, just so you know, you're in a good crowd, right? To be successful in most things in life, like, you gotta be a little crazy. You gotta be mildly obsessed. There are times in your life, like, everything good in my life has come during times of radical imbalance. I get this question a lot on podcasts, Russell, how do you have such a balanced life? What are you talking about? In theory, that sounds really, really nice. But I was like, nothing in my life great. Came from times of balance, right? Think about wrestling. When I became obsessed with wrestling, everything else got completely out of balance. Radically imbalanced for a season. When I was focusing on wrestling, I was not a 4.0 student. Even close. My graduating, my cumulative GPA was 2.3. So I was a 2.3 student. So I barely passed all my classes because I was not focused on my classes, focused on this dream. I did the least possible. I had to do every other area of life so I could consume and be successful. This dream, okay, same name. When I met my wife, Colette, I met Colette, right? I fell in love with her. I was like, she's amazing. Now if I just kind of dabble and I build a relationship, it's not going to happen. My life became radically imbalanced. I was pursuing her, trying to make her fall in love with me, and eventually she said, yes, but is amazing. Yay, Colette. So she rolls her eyes. I love it.

All right.

Same thing with True in business, right? I came in business. My life was not balanced. It was radically imbalanced. I remember when Bone and Down, our twins were born, man, they were 18 years, almost 19 years old. No. So 19 years old, they're born. We're in the NICU for two weeks because they were preemies super early. And I remember sitting there in the nicu. Club's out cold. We take turns. We take shifts. So she was, like, sleeping. I was down with the babies. Four in the morning and I got the babies. I'm rocking with my laptop and I'm writing copy. Kid you not. I remember I write copy for a product called Link Brander while I was in the NSU with the kids. It's a really good copy. I like. Anyway, I was really proud of it. But that's what I was doing back then. Radical imbalance. Anything good life comes during times of radical imbalance, right? It comes back to like. Again, there's one quality which one must possess to win. That's definite a purpose. So number one, you gotta know exactly what you want. And number two, right? Having the knowledge what you want and then having a burden, desire to possess it, right? I think that if you're struggling like that, a lot of times the thing like, there has to become an obsession. People tell me all the time, like, I still have time to build a business. I don't have the energy to build. I'm like, are you kidding me? You don't have the time? They go, I have a job. I work eight hours a day. I'm like, there are 24 hours in a day.

There's not eight, right?

And then while you're working, are you literally thinking about what you're working? Like, thinking about, like, your brain can think about whatever it wants. Nobody knows, right? During this time, like, I've been to school, I was not thinking about school at all. I was thinking about wrestling. I was in business. I was like, it becomes all consuming. So if you want to be successful in anything in life, it comes during times of radical imbalance. Having the burning desire to do it, Becoming mildly obsessed for a season now. What's nice about it is it's not forever. I'm not saying to burn the bridges, ruin your families and things like that. It's time. Everything's moving different places. But if you want to do something great, it takes time to radical imbalance. If you're wondering, how do you deal with the family, you talk to the family and, hey, this is what I'm pursuing. This is the goals. Colette knew what my goals were, and she's like, okay, I understand. There's times you have to be doing these crazy things. When we were building click funnels, you think it was easy for Todd and me and our wives, Ashley and Colette? Like, there were times when Todd would fly out to Boise. We spent three weeks working on the platform before launch. It was like three weeks of us pulling all nighters night after night after night after night. And then we'd fly back home. There were times, like, I'd be working all day and I'd get done working at 2 or 3 in the morning when Todd be waking up east coast time at 4 or 5 in the morning, he'd be working and we'd be talking in between. Then I'd pass out. He'd be working all day, and I'd come back in radical. Times have been balanced to create something amazing that comes down to knowing exactly what you want and having a burning desire to possess it. So for you guys, I Want you to think about, like, what is it you want? Like, you're here at Funnel Hacking Life for a purpose. Like, what is your reason? If it's just like, I'm here to, like, hang out, hopefully I get something. Like, that's not what I'm talking about. That's this drifting thing, right? If you're here saying, I'm at this event because I got to figure out this one thing, I got to figure out how to do this. I'm trying to figure out how to get to comma club, how to fix my funnel. My company's struggling right now, how to. How do I get it back on track. Okay, My funnel's not converting. No one's coming to my site. I have no traffic. What is the problem? Everything you're looking for is here. Over the next four days, I promise you that we've curated the greatest speakers to come here to give you guys very specific things to help you in different parts of your journey. And everybody's journey is different, right? That's why we had a creative event that kind of touches on a lot of different things. But I promise you, if you are struggling with something right now, the answer is here. And it'll be here in the next three and a half days. But only if you show up. Because maybe the thing that you've been waiting for, the thing that's gonna give you the key that unlocks the next door for you if you miss it. Cause I took that session off, or I went to the grocery store or whatever that thing might be, like, do not miss it. Everything here is created and curated for you guys on purpose. The speakers we have for the next couple days, it's gonna be really fun. And I just know on my side, the presentations I've been working on, I'm so excited to share with you guys some of the stuff that I have not talked about before. A lot of new stuff, a lot of cool things. I'm gonna show you guys behind the scenes, some of our funnels. And anyway, today's gonna be really fun. Okay, couple more things I'm gonna jump into. So my one funnel way story, after watching John's thing, launching it, not making enough money to cover, I was like, hey, what else is there? Like, launching funnel after funnel after funnel after funnel after funnel. We kept doing this, right, obsession. I gotta figure this out. Try this one, Try this one. Try this niche, Try this market. Try it over and over and over again. And then I remember on October 1, 2007, I launched this product, and this product's interesting. There's a guy that wrote a book called the 12 Month Millionaire. Anyone here ever read the book? It's like as fat as a phone book. It's amazing. I have the rights here. I should put it somewhere cool for you guys to be able to read. Anyway, I read this book and it's about a guy named Vince James. He sold supplements through direct mail and in 18 months he built a company that did $100 million in sales. I remember reading this book. I was like, this is crazy. This is the beginning of my journey. Before I'd ever made a million dollars or anything. And I remember reading this book. I was like, this is the coolest thing in the world. And so I called him, I was like, can I interview? And some reason he picked up the phone, he's like, sure, that'd be great. And so we set up an interview. And I remember it was on a Saturday and I went through the entire book. I took the outline of the book and I had questions for every single chapter. Interviewed him for three hours. When three hours are done, we're only halfway through the book, he's like, you wanna do it again next Saturday and ask the rest of the questions? I was like, that'd be amazing. So interview him for another three hours next Saturday. It was six hour audio of me just picking his brain, asking questions about how he built this company. And it was never meant to be a product. It was just like, I don't know, I just interviewed him and I had this thing and it sat on my hard drive for like a year and a half, two years. I never did anything with it. And I'm launching funnel after funnel after funnel. I was like, I wonder if anyone would buy the interview I did with Vince James. And that was the thought. I said, let's try it out. So we took that October 1st, we launched it as a product. And I remember this was the very first time that we'd ever used video in a funnel. So what happened is you come to the site and you bought the interview. It could interview in the transcripts for $37. And then you come to the next page. This is pre click funnels. This is pre one click upsell. You guys know back in the day we couldn't do one click upsells. So what we'd have to do is that you'd go put your credit card in. You go next page. You want this too? Yeah. Cool. Put your whole credit card in again. So they have to re put in their whole credit card again. It was A nightmare. One click upsells, like, the greatest thing in the world. Anyway, but back in the day, we didn't have that, so people put credit cards in again. This is when YouTube just first came out. You can tell because the video's square and I had a shaved head. And we bought the rights to be able to sell Vince's book for 300 bucks. And so this video. I should have found the video. I didn't. I probably have it. I should have found it. Anyway, it's me sitting at our desk, like, hey, guys, thanks for buying my interview with Vince James. If you like the interview, you might want the book, too. This book's huge. I kind of talked about the book. Do you remember this office? That's the one. Anyway, it's like our first actual office we had back in the day. So me pitching the book and there's a video. I remember people messaging me. They're like, dude, we saw your funnel. That was insane. You had a video upsell like no one had ever seen it before. I was like, I. I was one of the first ones ever to do it. It converted, like, crazy $297 for the book. And then we had a membership site where people would get all the interviews and all the stuff like that. Launched it on October 1, 2007. And October 16, 2007, is when I officially joined the 2 comma Club with this funnel. So. It was the first time that one of my funnels had ever done that. And it was the craziest thing. It was the smallest things. Like, I had launched so many funnels. It was funnel after funnel after funnel. It's funny because I had this mantra, you guys probably heard me say it before, that you're one funnel away. I share that mantra. And it's funny because, like, all the funnel hackers, like, yes, this is amazing. But there are people online who hate me because of it. They rip me apart. Like, it's so funny and aggravating a bunch of stuff. But they're like, russell says, you're just one funnel away. And it's like, this is why. That's not. Anyway, I get a lot of crap because of it, but I'm like, man, for me, this was the thing. I launched a dozen funnels prior to that, and then for some reason, that was the one that hit. It was just like, that changed my whole life. Everything was different. I was like, oh, my gosh, a million dollars in one funnel in, what, 16, 17 days? And it was like, how do we make a better funnel? And A better funnel. Right? And then for the last. How many years ago is that? 18 years? 17 years? I haven't many years since then. We've launched hundreds of funnels. But this was the very first one for me that ever did it. And it was awesome. How many of you guys, especially guys in the room, how many of you guys remember the very first funnel you had that crossed seven figures in sales? It's like, special, right? You know exactly which one it is. In fact, the very first two Comma club I ever ordered, because we were getting it tested, and I was talking to Dave. Dave, he's like, what? We're printing a sample. He's like, what product name do you want on it? I'm like, 12 month Internet millionaire. That was the very first product. So the very first two Comic Club board ever printed. Had this for myself. And then I went through the archives, like, what funnels have I done that made a million dollars? We found all of them. And I printed an award for myself for every funnel I'd ever created that did a million dollars. So the real reason why the 2 comic book award is literally just for me. And then I let you guys participate in it because I thought it was a cool award. And it's. Anyway, so there you go. So that's what it was. And it was. Yeah, it changed my whole life. I'm gonna talk more about One Funnel Way this afternoon, so I'll share some of those stories. But, man, this was the very first time it changed my life and gave me belief that, like, I could do this for a living. I still remember because my mom, I was like, graduating from school at this time and I was doing this stuff. My mom kept asking, so when are you gonna get a real job? I was like, mom, I have a real job. She's like, no, but, like, where you work for somebody and, like, they pay taxes and all this. I'm like, mom, I have a real job. And. And she would not believe me. And then. How many of you guys know David Fry? David's one of my favorite people in this whole industry. So David's actually my second uncle or second. Yeah, something like that. And I remember he does very similar business to all of us. And I didn't know that. And I met or I reconnected with him after a couple of years. He messaged me. He's like, wait, you do Internet business too? And they showed me his stuff. So I called my mom. I was like, I'm doing the same thing David Fry's doing. And she's like, oh, he makes really good money. Okay, you can do that then. It was the first time this business was ever legitimate in my mom's eyes. And even though this was happening behind the scenes anyway. Kind of funny. So 2016, the very first time. And after that we kept building funnel after funnel after funnel. I was like, if we could build some software that made this funnel process easier, I think that would be a good thing for me to sell. And so 2009 is actually the very first time I tried to build clickfunnels, which is funny. This is before I'd ever met Todd or any of the other guys. But I did know Dylan Jones. Dylan was one of our original co founders. Dylan was the one who built the original editor. We ended up buying him out a couple years into clickfunnels. But he was the first person and Dylan actually designed my very first try at doing this. The domain name we had was click.com.com, which is so confusing. Are you guys glad we changed it? But this is what it looked like. This is the landing page@click.com.com, you come in there, you sign up, and then you come through. And this is like the payment plans and then this is where you sign up. We didn't call them sales funnels back. Sales funnels wasn't a word back. We call them sales flows. So you can see like your product, your follow ups and your sales flows. You set up your sales flow. Sales funnels are so much cooler. Yeah, that was what we call it back in the day. And then we had this where you could do your all your things. Anyway, this was the whole site. And we spent three or four years trying to build this, trying to launch it, trying to code it, trying to. Cause like, this is like the thing I need in the world the most. And I wanted it for myself. I knew the market wanted it. We kept trying. And it wasn't just me. There were tons of people also trying to build some version of this. Like everyone I knew was all trying to build this thing. And it was like an arms race of us all trying to build a platform to make these funnels we were creating simpler and easier. We tried over. So 2009 was the very first time that I tried this. And we did overtime. Eventually the company we had that was building this, it kind of fell apart and we had to fire everybody. It was kind of a dark side in my journey where just everything fell apart. And I was like, all right, we're never gonna do that. And I remember it was A spot where we'd gone from about 100 employees. We'd let go probably 95 of them. We moved from this big, nice office. We're into this little tiny office with five of us in there and we're trying to figure out like how to pay the rent. We're trying to figure out how to like pay off some debt. We had a bunch of IRS money. We own. It was just this painful time in my, in my journey, my life. And I was trying to figure like, what is, like, what am I supposed to do? Like, what's the next thing? There's gotta be something out here for me to do. And I remember going to flippa.com. anyone here ever go to Flippa? Flippa sells websites. I went to Flippa and I'm looking through all the sites. I'm trying to find my next idea. Like, what's the thing that's going to like help me be successful? And all of a sudden I saw this website pop in there. It's called Champion Sound. And it was a text message email marketing platform for bands. And it was the coolest thing. I was like, this is amazing. Not that I wanted to like be the guy doing text and email messaging for bands, but I was like, if we bought this company, we could take it and then we could rebrand it and do like a text marketing system for chiropractors and for dentists and for doctors. That was the whole vision. And so they were selling this, I think for $20,000. I did not have $20,000 or a credit card or anything. And I was like trying to figure out how to make some money. And I was hustling a bunch of things. I was selling stuff. I had like to earn the $20,000 and finally got enough money. I bought this on Flippa. I was like, cool. This is the future. I'm going to change the world. We're going to give email and text message autoresponders every market. And so we bought it. And then they were trying to transfer after I wired them the money's contractor signed. So I can't get out of it. I'm trying to transfer the website from theirs onto our servers. Right? And not to get nerdy with you guys, but we have different servers. They're like, we need servers that you could host Ruby on Rails on. I'm like, what does that even mean? They're like Ruby on Rails. It's like a programming language. I was like, a programming. They're like, yeah, you do php, which is like English and Ruby on Rails is like, Chinese. I was like, so that's my developers. Like, do you guys know Chinese? Like, no. I'm like, can you do Ruby on Rails? They're like, no. So we couldn't transfer it over. So finally, to get some new server, they moved it over to our server and then they left. And all my developers, like, we don't know Ruby on Rails. I don't know how to do this. You're kind of. You're kind of screwed. I was like, that was the last $20,000 I didn't have. Like, this has to work. And they're like, sorry. So we went on, remember, went to, like, odesk. I was trying to hire programmers to fix it. I was trying all sorts of stuff. The customers they had were all angry because it was falling apart, it wasn't working. I didn't know what to do. And I remember, I just. I was like, I just wasted 20 grand. We didn't have. I know what to do. I can't fix this thing. Customers are yelling at us. And so I remember emailing my developer. I was like, just cancel the servers and shut it down and we'll just. We'll just walk away from it. And I was at my office, and I remember getting up and I left the office, and as I was walking out the door, I had this weird impression. You guys ever had those impressions? And the impression was like, email your list and see if there's a Ruby on Rose programmer that works that's on your email list. I was like, what? Like, my list is teaching people marketing stuff. Like, there's. There's not a Ruby on Rails. I don't even know what Ruby on Rails was. And my list wasn't that big at the time. But when I hear impressions like that, I try to. I try to follow them as much as I can. So I stopped. I walked back in my desk, I sat down, opened my email, and I was like. Subject line was like, I'm looking for a partner who knows Ruby on Rails. And so I'm like, hey, this email is probably not for any of you guys, but if there's one person out there who happens to Ruby on Rails. I bought a site. I'm looking for a partner who wants to help me fix the site, send me a message, here's a site. And I send the email out to my list, thinking nothing's going to happen. I go back home that night, check my email, and sure enough, I get a couple people respond back, and I'm reading through the different things I'm Looking at the different resumes, and I don't even know what's right or what's not right. And also, one of the people who popped through was this guy right here, and it was Todd. And I remember I was like, hey, I have this site. If you want to partner with me on me, let me know. And here's logins. Good luck. And I remember I just sent him everything because I didn't know what to do. And I went to bed. Next morning, I woke up and he's like, hey, I fixed this, I fixed this. I fixed this. This was done. I changed this, I added this, I moved this around, and it's all working great. What's next? I was like, what? And everything started working. I was like, this guy's awesome. And so we started something else. And I remember at the time, we had no money at all. I was like, this is awesome. I can't pay you. But if we ever make money from this, we can share some of it. He's like, cool, and never asked me for money. And it's crazy because as we kept going through our business, he worked for us probably over a year. And he would fly out to Boise, work on projects, we try to launch them. Sometimes they made some money. Most times made no money. We would try different things and different stuff. And he just came in and just, if we made some money, we'd pay him, but it was just kind of random. And I remember one day he was in Boise, and I was looking over his shoulder, and he has laptop open, and they're like all these, like, job, like, emails full of people, like, offering him jobs. Like, what's that? He's like, oh, it's people. Like, Ruby on Rails is kind of a rare language. So, like, it's really easy to get jobs if you want him. I was like, how much people offer you for jobs? He's like, I don't know. Let's check it out. He opens up an email. It's like, people offer like, $350,000 a year. I'll pay 400,000. Like, all these things. Like, the whole email box is full of these job offers. I was like, you should take those deals. Like, I'm paying you zero dollars a year. That's a way better deal than this. He's like, no, I don't want to work for anybody. I want to be a part. I want to do this kind of cool stuff. And so after that, I remember I was, like, kind of freaking out. I'm like, if he ever leaves, I'm in big trouble. So I was like, hey, we don't have very much money, but I think I could spend. I could probably, like, we could pay like 50 grand a year. Like, is that okay? He's like, yeah, whatever. So they're like, cool. So I'm like, okay. So they set up paying 50 grand a year, and then, you know, a little while later, we're launching stuff, make a little more money. And then I remember coming back, I was like, hey, I. I think I can pay, like 70 grand a year now. Is that cool? He's like, yeah, whatever. So up to 70 grand a year. Eventually got to like, 100 grand a year, but he never once asked me for money. He was just there to help, to serve, hoping for the best, hoping something cool would happen. And I remember one day he was flying out to Boise, and it was right after LeadPages just gotten their $5 million round in funding, and he was about to leave Atlanta, and he sees that, takes a picture of it, texts it to me. He's flying the air for four hours. I wake up in the morning, I see this text from him, and I'm like, leadpages? They gave him $5 million for lead. I was like, so confused. I couldn't understand it. By the time Todd got there, he was like. He's like, they give lead pages $5 million. I'm like, I know. Like, this is insane. He's like, I could build Leadpages tonight. Like, you could? He's like, yeah. I'm like, let's do. Let's build lead pages tonight. Let's do it then. And then he's like, cool. Like, we're doing this. We're like, okay, we'll be a lead page. We're like, it's going to be amazing. And he's like, do you want anything else besides beside what they have, like, any other features you want? I'm like, oh, yeah? Like, what if we did this and then this and then we sat in front of a whiteboard for a week? Like, every idea we had possible, he listed them all out, and he looked at it all. He's like, okay, that's what we're go build. And he flew home. And over the next eight or nine months, he built the very first version of Clickfunnels, which is insane. So. I got one last story, then I'll bring him out. I remember after we had that whiteboard meeting, and we're driving, I'm driving him to the airport to drop him off. I remember we pulled up, and pulling up the airport. And we're kind of talking back and forth, and before he gets out of the car, he's like, hey, if we're gonna do this, he's like, I don't want to do it, like, as one of your employees. He's like, I want to do this, like, as, like, a business partner. I remember, like, in that moment, I'd never had a business partner before, and I was just like. And had all the fear of, like, no. Like. Like, no. Like, I'm the entrepreneur. I want to be the business. Like, no. And I went back and forth, back and forth, and it was, like, probably a thousand conversations in my head in, like, 20 seconds. I'm sitting there, and he's about to get out of the car, and I was like, all right, let's do it, man. Let's be business partners on it. And he got out of the car, and he left. And I remember being scared and nervous and looking back now a decade and almost 12 years later since we first started building clickfunnels. 12 years later, I look at that as probably the second greatest decision in my life. And the first one would be marry my wife, Colette. And the second one was when I told Todd, yes, I love to be your business partner. And that moment and completely changed my life forever. And I am so grateful for him as a friend, as a person, as a partner, and someone who I have so much love and respect for. I'm glad that he's here. So, with that said, should we all stand up, put our hands together for Todd Dickerson?

Wow. You're way too kind.

That was.

This is too cool. I'm super excited to be here with you guys in Vegas. My girls are at home, I think, watching live. Hey, girls. Like, yeah, this is. This is so cool. Oh, man. I'm sitting backstage. I'm listening to that conversation. I'm thinking through my head of, like, my side of, like, of what I was thinking at the same time, because.

I sound a little crazy, like.

Like, this guy just wouldn't take money. Like, he wouldn't. Like, I tried to pay him, and he wouldn't take. I'm like. But when that email came through, I felt that tug, right? Like, that calling. It was this. There's something here. There's something more. Like, what you're doing is cool. I was building software, doing cool stuff, I thought, at the time. But there was this tug of, like, there's more, right? There's something more to work on. There's some bigger impact to make some bigger changes. And yeah. Just channeled my inner Eileen and was.

Like, do it now.

Reply.

Do it.

The email. Do it. I'm curious, like, because I know, like, I mean this is for everybody, but like the leap of faith of like any new journey is always scary, right? Especially entrepreneurship. And like, you're coming into this, like, explain to your wife, like, hey, I'm gonna go work for free for these guys. I have no idea if anything's gonna happen. We have no good ideas yet, but we're just gonna try. Like, was it. How did they deal with that? How's your wife?

Felt like there was definitely a lot of conversations around, like, you know, we.

Need a new car.

We need like, maybe we should make some more money. We should do this thing. And I'm like, no, it's fine. We got enough to get by. We have a successful. I had a four, four hour workweek style business that was bills and it was like, no, we're good. I've got a bigger plan. Like, there's, there's something here. I didn't know what it was at the time. I obviously was just, just following my instincts. That calling of just like, let's keep going, let's, let's see what we can do.

What's funny about this is I'm gonna Talk about Level 10 opportunities tomorrow with you guys. Some really cool stuff. But I remember like, we were trying to think like, what's our Level 10 opportunity? We were at TNC in a hotel room, like just talking about that. And I remember that we like, we thought we had the big idea, right? This is like, this is gonna be the future's gonna change the world. And I have the logo not on the slides, but we thought was gonna be the thing that changed. Worldforce was a site. It was WP undies.com and it was the WordPress logo wearing tighty whitey undies. Like, that's the thing that's gonna change the world. It was funny. That actually was the first thing that eventually became Clickfunnels.

Yeah, it grew into that. Like, that was one of the random prototype software projects I built at the time too. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's fun.

Awesome.

So I'm gonna. I've got some dates and stuff here. So. This was crazy. So September 23, 2014, this is the day the Clickfunnels officially went live. Which is crazy because crazy. That was 10 years ago.

Yeah, it was almost exactly 10 years ago.

So in 10 days from now will be our 10 year birthday.

So, so close. Like, oh, I wasn't planning on Saying this, but I just thought of this too. Like we, when we were going live with this, I was literally like at the computer talking back and forth with you. We're doing this promotion, we're doing all this stuff and my wife is like, we gotta go to the hospital. I gotta go to the hospital.

Remember, this is like two in the morning. You're talking to me and yeah, yeah.

I'm talking to Russell online. And he's like, oh no, what's wrong? What's wrong? And basically we had a miscarriage. So like at the same time we're launching clickfunnels. Like we were going through that too. So it was a tough time, but also an exciting new time of a birth of a new business and a birth of a new thing. So yeah, super cool. Too crazy. Anyway.

You know, an emotional. Here was a fact. All my friends from the room. Anyway, it's crazy. So 7 we launched it. A couple cool stories. These are like the original logos when we first launched it that we were going through. I found all these. I'm like, this is crazy. This is like we're trying to figure out what is ClickFunnels, what's the branding, what's that actually look like? Initial logos. This is the room where all happened. This is, that's Dylan Jones on the left hand side. Todd Dickerson to me. And we're sitting there mapping out click like there's the left hand menu. Include like we're mapping out page by page on these whiteboards and taking pictures and dreaming about crazy things. Remember, we got it done. We launched it when we first launched. It wasn't like I thought as soon as we launched this, it was like, we're, I think our goal is like 10,000 customers week number one. And we didn't. And then we kept trying different versions, different things. And it wasn't until this event, I think it was like two or three months into clickfunnels. I think it was October, maybe a month, month and a half into clickfunnels. We got invited to speak at an event, one of my friends events. And he's like, hey, we need you to come and sell clickfunnels this event. I was like, you understand we have a free trial clickfunnels right now and nobody's buying it. He's like, yeah, but you gotta come. I already put your name on the sales letter. You're coming to speak. And I was like, I don't know how, like this is okay. And he's like, I need you to sell a thousand dollar Version. Because if you have never spoken in an event, the way it works when you speak at an event is you create an offer, you sell it, and then the promoter gets half the money, you get half the money. So they create a thousand dollar offer of clickfunnels to come and sell the event. We came to this event, we put it together. I remember, like, we're working on sizes, we're flying out there. We did the first demo. Dylan was inside of the event room doing the first demo live, as we're going live. This whole presentation, the end of it, we did the offer to sell it. And it was crazy because we did the pitch and people were jumping over the tables, running the back room, people knocking each other over. And I'm sitting there just like. I'd heard people talk about table rushes before, but never actually experienced before, and people were jumping over and it was the craziest thing. We closed more than half of the room at that event. And that night I remember going to dinner and we're sitting there and I was like, we're just. We're finding, we're celebrating first off. Like, we actually made some money, which is fantastic because we are completely broke. And so that was really nice first off. And we're all happy and like, I think we ordered like good food that night. Like, this is. You know. And I remember sitting there telling you and Dylan, I was just like. I was like, I don't think you guys understand. Like, I've never had, like, I've never had people respond to something we've done like that, ever. I've been doing this for 10 years at this point. I've never go do a table rush. I was like, I know the path now to get us to the point where we're gonna be rich. Like, we're gonna be crazy rich from this. And that was the kickoff of this whole movement. And from there we went and just. Yeah, 10 years later, here we are.

I remember that conversation. You were like, you're just like, this changes everything, guys. You don't realize, like, this is it. This is how we. How we teach the strategy, how we teach the software, how we do it.

Now we can run. So do you wanna talk about some of the things that have happened over the last, the last little bit since we've launched this little company called Funnels?

Absolutely. Yeah. I can't wait to a little bit about like, what we've been up to. But it's much more important to talk first about what you guys have been up to. So jumping straight into it we got over $12 billion have now been processed through click funnels and sales by you guys. Like just insane.

It's crazy.

Yeah. Almost 2 billion in the past 12 months alone. Just insane volume. You guys are crushing you, Skip.

That is not a big deal. $2 billion in the last 12 months alone. You guys have processed through click funnels, which is insane. That's a lot of money. Congratulation all the guys.

Yep. That's over 2,500 people who have joined the 2 comma club.

Right.

So that's people that have made over.

A million dollars in the funnel.

Over 2500 now. How crazy is that?

Yes. Thank you. Our very. Our first fun hike life at 800 people. 1200, 1300. I mean it was. It was like five fun hiking lives before we able to get 2500 people to be in a room.

Yep.

And now so many people have won a two comic club award, which is insane.

Yeah, that's crazy. I mean, 343, two comic club X winners that have done over $10 million. We didn't have that many more people in Vegas 10 years ago. So that's crazy.

It's insane.

You had 105 two comic club C winners. So that's you guys that have done over $25 million. Like, wow. And nine two heart winners. So if you guys are familiar with this.

Yeah, this is my. Of all the awards, this is my favorite one because this is the one that's not how much money you make, but it's how much money you give. And I remember when we first did this the first time, I thought, this may be something. We give an award every. Every decade. Maybe someone actually will do this. I said nine of you guys have donated over a million dollars to charity for the money you made from your funnels, which is so awesome. It's amazing. So love it.

Very cool. Guys.

This is the big question. How many guys. So the next funnel, like live is not a year away, which is crazy. Next live is like five and a half months away. How many guys at home I want to see by raise events. How many guys have a goal next year to be on stage with us getting your 2 comma club award? If that's you, raise your hands. Let's go. Be awesome.

That's awesome. So our mission, obviously for the past decade has been to free entrepreneurs. Right. So you can focus on actually changing the lives of your customers. That was what I've set out to do from a software perspective since the very beginning in those early conversations. Right. It was Always about how do we make this easy? Like there's constant challenges, constant tech hurdles, and that's been our vision and been our goal for well over a decade now. And yeah, we've got exciting new things to help make that even easier now going forward too. So. But before we do that, I've got an awesome video that we've been working on for you guys. So if you'll let me, we'll play a video for you guys.

First off, show one more screen real quick. I want to see this. So this is our 10 year official birthday party. So happy birthday. Clickfunnels, let's go. Yeah, can I help set something up real quick? So typically, funnel, I can live. We do a big huge couple hour session, go through all the things that we've done in ClickFunnels, things we're gonna do this year. Because we're virtual, we thought it'd be fun to tighten it up a little bit. And so they spent the last week or so making a video showing you guys all the stuff that's been happening inside of clickfunnels. What's crazy is there's a lot of stuff that's done that's live inside ClickFunnels a lot of people don't even know exist. So we're sharing some of those things throughout the week with you guys. But this video really encapsulates learning who the people are who are behind the scenes, building everything inside software and showing you some of the cool stuff you probably don't even know exists. Anything else you should talk about before setting it up?

No, I think we just jump into it and we can talk about it a little bit more after too.

All right, very cool.

Here we go, guys. Hey everyone.

Todd Dickerson here. And we're here at our HQ in Atlanta, Georgia to celebrate a huge milestone together, 10 incredible years of Clickfunnels. Come on in. A decade ago this month, we set out with a bold to empower entrepreneurs to create thriving online businesses faster than any other platform. Since then, over 100,000 of you have utilized clickfunnels to turn ideas into reality and dreams into profitable online business. From startups to industry giants, course creators, e comm sellers, affiliate marketers, authors, bloggers, brick and mortar companies, and more have all trusted ClickFunnels as their partner platform in business. These 10 incredible years would have never been possible without you, our amazing community. So on behalf of our entire team, thank you. To celebrate our birthday, we've been working tirelessly behind the scenes to bring you something truly special. We're excited to show you just how powerful the platform is today from all the new features that were rolled out this year, as well as unveiling some revolutionary new features, including one that will change the way you use clickfunnels forever. But before we do that, let's take a look back at the last decade.

So we had this idea.

We'Re working on this thing right now.

It's amazing.

It allows us to actually create marketing funnels.

Most entrepreneurs, we have so many stresses. The last thing we want to worry about is our sales funnel.

I felt trapped and exhausted by my life.

I went through probably 12 business tries and they were all failures.

We literally were selling furniture out of our home.

That's why we created clickfunnels office that.

We just moved into.

We wanted to focus on impact and on legacy.

I have a calling.

Yesterday I realized I have to do this well today. Today is the day that you change the world.

Finding click funnels, like finding a flashlight.

In the woods, it's brought us home.

I can help people in ways that I hadn't previously thought were possible.

I found my people. I found people that actually think like me. Discovered my purpose.

It's changed not only my life, my family's life, and actually brought us closer. I'm getting goosebumps talking about it. The world's beginning to take notice.

6,000 coaching calls, 771 members of 25,000 students.

Amazing mastermind.

I'm like, we gotta come to mastermind in paradise.

FHL unlock the secrets. Anyone can help. Yes, you guys, it's a beautiful guys. If you could get there on your own. But then we wouldn't need each other. If we don't need each other, then we would ultimately have no purpose in life. And we're there for each other through all the ups and downs, the good times and the bad.

You guys were born as entrepreneurs, but you're here today because of a choice you made. So while you're an entrepreneur at birth, you are a funnel hacker by choice. For the first time ever, Funnel hockey live is going virtual show. Keep hacking the world, bro.

This has been quite a journey.

Let's get out there, let's change the world. Let's help people out. Let's go clip family. Together, we're building a whole new world.

Every funnel that you guys watch out.

There, we actually donate money.

It couldn't have happened without click funnels. Everyone here believes in us.

There's heart, there's family. And we all advance.

It's just fire.

We have amazing God given talents. When we lean into them, we can do incredible things.

Build on.

You.

I freaking love you. We're ready to make an impact.

Don't fight your people.

They need you. We're nothing without you. The funnel hackers, the people who are crazy enough to take risks to go all in and impact the world in a way that we never could.

And the gift of that. The gift of that, now, that's everything.

What a decade.

You know, Tony Robbins always says people.

Overestimate what they can accomplish in a year, but they underestimate what they can.

Accomplish in a decade.

That's true.

However, in the past year, we've done a lot.

2 comma Club Awards. Our members are smashing ceilings once again. So far this year, we've approved 192two comma Club Awards and 56two comma Club X Awards, with more being added every single day.

You're up, Robbie.

I'm excited to share our latest work on courses with an improved ui. For better guidance, we've streamlined the course creation process. This allows you to focus on your content and quickly publish to our learning hub, reaching your audience faster than ever. We believe this feature will be extremely valuable for content creators.

We dropped Zendrop. With zendrop, you could start selling products without the hassle of inventory management, fulfillment or supply chain issues. With the Click Funnels zendrop partnership, you can get started with an E commerce business with less cost, less risk, and less effort. See what I got.

We understand that starting with clickfunnels can be a bit overwhelming for new users. That's why we've completely reimagined several areas of software to reduce the complexity while keeping all the powerful features that our experienced users know and love. Our new navigation makes it simple to begin with our most common features. And when you're ready to explore more, our powerful apps are just a click away. So you, your grandma, or even your crazy aunt June can build an entire business using Click Funnels.

Oh no.

We heard you. Now you can offer discounts right at checkout. Set up your discounts quickly with percentages, fixed amounts required, minimum spend, limited time use. The options are all there. Apply your discount to a product and now your customers have a great reason to check out right now on your order form.

We've rebuilt communities from the ground up to be more engaging for your customers. We've added mentions and email notifications, improved the UI to make it more intuitive and customizable. And completely revamped customer profiles so you can break up with Facebook, dump school divorce circles, and start building your community on Click Funnels today.

Our new CRM lets you schedule appointments, manage your sales pipelines, and communicate with your customers wherever they are on your website or via sms, email or messenger. Integrated seamlessly within Clickfunnels, our CRM lets you automate every stage of the customer journey, turning your leads into paying customers effortlessly. We've made Message Hub even more powerful. Now it can automatically respond to your customers and connect all your communication channels in one place. And it makes it easy to keep in touch with follow ups. These updates help you stay connected, keep your customers happy, and boost conversions. You really want to know about all the updates we made to clickfunnels? Okay, well buckle your seatbelts because it's exciting. Zapier Funnel and page specific Zaps Store upsells, Expanded API Flexible workflow delay steps Conferencing integrations for appointments Robin Assignment for opportunities World actions for products Enhanced invoice view Product Carousel element Self Server activation improvements Advanced split testing Directory filtering for opportunity Exciting, right? Maybe the next person in your video shouldn't be a developer.

With all these new features, our community has been getting busy building like never before. And the numbers speak for themselves. In one year, you guys have built over 533,000 funnels and still counting. And for our amazing affiliates, we've been able to pay out over $9 million in commissions. And we've been able to give out over $123,000 in Dreamcar bonus payments. We love our affiliates. If you're not promoting ClickFunnels by now, ask yourself why? Is it because you hate money?

Or cars?

Or freedom?

Anyways, Funnel Hacking Live continues to be the most transformative marketing and sales funnel event in the world. We had over 4,500 attendees that went all out for four days. And in only a few months, we'll be back together in Las Vegas, baby, for Funnel Hacking Live. 10, 10, 10. I don't know what to do with my hands. It's been a massive year of updates for Clickfunnels, but we're not slowing down. It's important for us to provide our community with the newest tools and technology to do their very best work. And to do that, we're excited to announce some huge updates that are going live now. Artificial Intelligence. Ever heard of it? We love a custom funnel. But for the entrepreneur who likes to work fast, there's the new AI Funnel Builder. A revolutionary tool that allows you to build a funnel, webinar, store, website and more using nothing but prompts. You can now simply choose what type of funnel you'd like to create? Tell us a little about yourself and your business. Pick your look and feel and our AI builder will do the rest. Surveys it's easier than ever to create a survey, ask the right questions, and sort your customers based on their answers. You can automatically group customers, target them with specific offers, and follow up with personalized messages, all based on what they told you in the survey. These updates help you to turn customer feedback into more Sales Implement your Dream 100 strategy with our new Affiliate Centers.

App, you can run and automate your entire affiliate program using strategic affiliate types, percentages or flat rate CPA commissions. Give affiliates everything they need to be successful with detailed analytics reports, tracking links, assets, data exports, and so much more. Enlist your own army of affiliates to promote your products and services constantly using a secure and flexible system that works.

Seamlessly with all your funnels.

The Affiliate center is a huge lever for business owners, allowing you to pull back or throttle forward your campaigns and how much noise is is generated around them.

ClickFunnels was created to help entrepreneurs launch online businesses, and after 10 years we're launching our biggest improvement ever to that experience. We call it Frameworks. Frameworks allow experts to share not just sales funnels, but an entire business operation or any piece of it. Whether it's a site, a store, a theme, a course page, templates, email sequences, or automation workflows. You can now build the structure and details of an entire online business on ClickFunnels and share it with the world. By opening our platform in this way, we're enlisting the help of our entire community of business experts to help new users quickly build and launch their online business. This is a quantum leap for new entrepreneurs. Instead of writing the perfect email, they'll have emails ready to send. Instead of building the perfect follow up sequence, they'll have automations ready to run. And of course, instead of learning how to build the perfect funnel, they'll learn from a funnel that's ready to use. Instead of signing up for a platform with features to learn, they're signing into a business they can run on click funnels. Experts can play well with each other. Frameworks are stackable and composable. That means that an entrepreneur starting their journey with one expert's foundational business framework can continue to add additional strategic and tactical frameworks from other experts within Click Funnels as their business grows. For those of you that are already experts with a business on click funnels, you now have the ability to save, clone, sell, or share that exact business. And creating a framework is easy. Say Jimmy Here wants to share a framework in his ClickFunnels account. He presses Create Framework and he chooses what pieces of his workspace he'd like to share. He can now effortlessly share everything or specific pieces with Dante here, who's just learning how to use ClickFunnels.

It's my first day.

It creates two huge new opportunities. Jimmy can share his frameworks for free and receive a share of ClickFunnels subscription revenue as an affiliate. Or he can also sell his frameworks and the knowledge and expertise that they represent and keep 100% of the revenue. See where I'm going with this? For the launch of Frameworks, we wanted to do something really special. We love our affiliates who put so much effort into promoting Click Funnels, making videos, blogs, tutorials, and now with Frameworks, they can simply share a full fledged business. So for the next year, we'll be raising our affiliate commissions to 50%. For those of you who choose to be part of this launch, that means you get 50% of the lifetime value of the customers you introduce to ClickFunnels. We can't wait to see the impact you're gonna make with Frameworks. As you can see, ClickFunnels is now so much more than funnels. It's an entire business operating system that's easy to use, ready to scale, and guaranteed to optimize sales for your online business. We're a global community that's on a mission to empower 1 million entrepreneurs to turn their exciting business ideas into reality. And with these updates, we can confidently say that anyone can start an online business in a single day. Our platform makes it easy, our expertise makes it effective, and our community makes it more fun than should be allowed. So that's our update for Funnel Hacking Live International. I want to quickly thank our team for all the incredible hard work over the past year. It's been an incredible journey and we can't wait to hear your feedback. So our question for you is, what will you start today?

And a couple things over the last year.

Just a couple things, the team's been a little busy. Like obviously it's changed drastically over the past decade. We have a massive team behind us now. Dan's video crew did an amazing job on that. But yeah, we just appreciate you guys supporting us for all these years.

And yeah, we're excited to go deeper all the features. Tomorrow we have a special session showing you guys how to use Frameworks, which if you didn't get it yet, Frameworks is like share funnels on steroids and they're Insane. But we'll get deeper into that tomorrow. But we want to do today actually is we've got two more people we wanted to bring up, and one is Todd's partner in crime on the development side, Andrew Culver, who is insane. And then other one is how many guys have been involved in the One Funnel Away challenge recently. The other one is Dante, who is the. Who basically has run the One Funnel Away challenge. He's one of those live Q and A's multiple times throughout the week with me and Trey Whelan by himself and a whole bunch of other stuff. He's going to come up and we're going to do a Q and A session. He's going to facilitate that with me, Todd, Andrew, and yes. With that said.

Absolutely.

To put our hands together for Dante and Andrew.

Beautiful people.

Beautiful people out there.

Awesome.

Well, thanks for the opportunity. How moving was that video?

I don't know about you guys. It was amazing.

Absolutely. Let me hear you guys from Zoom as well. How is that video? It made me feel emotions, and I just love that. So a really great opportunity to talk about some of the amazing features that we just had. Before we get into those features, though, I'd really like to talk about something that happened the other day. I was having dinner with a really good friend of mine and he said, dante's still doing the same thing. I said, of course I'm going to do it for the rest of my life. And he says, it's clickfunnels.

Right.

The marketing company. You work for the marketing company. And of course, I stopped immediately. And for the next three hours of dinner, I gave him a full dissertation on click funnels and our history and who we are and what we are. But why me do that? Because I don't have the time right now. So to kick this little talk off, I'd like to talk to Todd first. What is ClickFunnels? Are we a marketing company? Are we a software company? Are we something in between?

Yeah, absolutely. No, I love that. I think one of the things that really makes us unique comes from the genesis that we were literally just talking through and talking about. Right. We had Russell, who obviously is a leader in the industry, like one of the best marketers in the world, obviously. And then myself with an engineering computer science background. Right.

I'm a computer science major. I've been building software for 25 years.

Basically my entire life. So I've been doing this for a long time. And I think that merger of, like, marketing and software expertise has been in our DNA since the beginning. So it does become one of those things. Teaching strategies and coaching and all this stuff. And he's out front and center doing. But if you look at like how the breakdown of the company actually is, we're 77% of ClickFunnels payroll is actually product development engineering. Like we're almost entirely an engineering and product development organization at this point. You just have a lot of awesome faces out in front of the camera talking all the time, like, Russell, I'm.

Really loud and annoying, I apologize.

No, it's awesome. It's great. So yeah, you'll just. I consider us a software company that has amazing marketing talent and skills. But we also, we are marketers, so we dog food our own product so we actually know what works.

Could you explain what's dog food mean?

Yeah, sorry, that's an engineering development term kind of that we use all the time to just simply say that we actually eat what we make. Right? So we make the product, we use the product. Russell beta tests the product, he tells us what sucks, what we need to change, what's too complicated, what we need to make easier, simpler, what features are missing. We're having those conversations all the time. So obviously at this point we talk to our customers constantly as well. But in the very beginning it was Russell, it was Dylan and myself in a room with Russell being like, wait, what if we did this? He's like, ah, I'm kind of confused by that. Like, what if you called it this instead? Right. Simple stuff like that has just been in our DNA since the very beginning.

I think for sure we would rather be known as a marketing company that's part of the core competency of the business rather than just be known as a software tool. We want people to know when you're using click funnels, it's a tool that's specifically built by people who know how to sell and are driven to sell, that really want to sell. And therefore when you're using the tool, you're not left to figure it out on your own. You've got coaches, you've got education, you've got a culture and an incredible community.

100%. Talking about culture and community, like if you and Todd were going to build clickfunnels just for yourselves so you could make your day to day lives easier, I think that'd be pretty simple to do. But you're not. You built clickfunnels for the masses to bring it to the world so they could do their thing. How did you do that as far as like inside the company? Getting the right developers, getting the right staff, making the right culture.

Yeah, so you met in the video, the folks many, many developers, engineering managers, product people, all of that, that build the product that we use every day. I think one of the things that's different about ClickFunnels, I'll just say it, we have a really, really high retention rate for employees. We have a really low turnover. And this is actually unique in the technology industry. So it's very common in big venture backed startups for developers to go from company to company as they progress in their career. That's cool. I don't mind that they do that. I'm sure they get a lot of great experience. What's really special about clickfunnels, I mean, literally even just myself, the reason I work at ClickFunnels is the core mission of what we're doing. The people that we serve who are helping. And it's not just the people here, not just the people online, it's all the people still out there who have this inkling of an idea that entrepreneurship might be the right thing for them. But they haven't been able to do it yet. They haven't found the right tool, they haven't found the right coach. So the mission of us serving that audience of people is attractive. It's what is in the veins of the people that work on the product that is clickfunnels. And so when people come to work for us, they stay. Because there aren't so many places that you can work on that mission where you have the opportunity to serve the people that we do. So I think one major benefit then that that provides for the developers, like that's why they stay. But in terms of what it means, if you look at everything that we accomplished over the last year, I mean, our team is not as big as these massive venture backed startups, right? So how do you do it? It's because we have people that have been with the company. You know, the company's 10 years old. I work with people every day that have been at the company for eight years, right. And when they take in that culture, when they take in the priorities of our customers, the goals, the ambitions, the experiences, and then apply that to the software you get. You know what Todd kind of says, like 10x developers, right? People talk about that and you're like, is that really a real thing? Well, in our experience, what creates a 10x developer is somebody who's been in our industry long enough to know how to use the superpowers of software development to enable Sort of an outweighed entrepreneurial success.

Absolutely. I love that.

And to dive into some fun stuff. Now I want to talk about funnels. So for a long time I've talked to people and they're like oh man, I have a really great product and it's selling really well so I'm going to make a funnel for it and then they stop and it's the end of the journey. So in your guys eyes when do funnels stop or do they ever?

Yeah, that's awesome. No, I definitely view it as everything's a funnel. Like you're in a funnel now, right? Like everything we do is through the lens of funnels and that's core to what we teach strategies. Russell teaches like core to the software, how we build things when those product decisions that engineers make during the process come up. Like I view it as your business is a funnel, right? People are coming in the top, money's hopefully coming out the bottom. But within that you have traditional landing page, squeeze page type funnels, you have sales page order form funnels, the traditional stuff that we've been doing for a decade plus. But within that also some people have a store, they might have an E commerce store that is actually should be viewed as a funnel and within that each product in your store really should be viewed as a funnel and that product should end up having upsells even if it's a one off product. Right. So we build features like store upsells that make it possible to be like okay, if a product comes from this collection, this is the upsell path that follows along with it. So we put that in the DNA of everything we build. Like if you're building you know, sales pipelines so you have a follow up sales pipeline sequence, each one of those sales pipeline stages is set up where you can trigger a workflow automations that does a follow up funnel behind the scenes. So funnels are just everywhere throughout everything we do. And I think that's one of the things that really again goes back to that original marketing software, DNA mesh that we know what you need because we're doing it because we're out there on the field with you. There's not focus groups that have to happen for the engineer product team to come back and then send it to some outsourcers that then come back with a product that's not right and like go back and forth like we are living this every single day. These conversations are the conversations we have all the time.

I think one thing that's interesting is like and I Bet a lot of people don't even know this, but we rolled out our store feature inside of ClickFunnels, which is awesome. It's really good. And it's funny because like you said prior to that before we had our own store feature, we were using Shopify and it was so frustrating because it's like, I love Shopify. They're really, really good and easy, except for they're really complicated and I can't edit the pages and I can't make them look awesome. And then there's no upsells correctly without adding like 12 different plugins. And like it was such a frustrating thing where now like you said, we have stores that are great and you can have upsell sequences. So simple, so easy. And like every feature is based around like this core message of like, how do you turn it into a funnel? And it just makes the use cases different when you guys understand them. So that's cool.

Yeah, absolutely. I love that.

One of the core things, I think if you go back like a decade plus, we as an industry needed somebody to teach us about funnels. Like just deeply, deeply, deeply teach us about funnels. And then I think in a way the industry, like the broader industry has now caught up, right? There was a point in time where like click funnel, like my click funnel was like a generic term people were throwing around. It's like, thank you, Russell. You taught everybody how to business and how to actually grow your revenue and your margins and all of that stuff. So there was a time where that was really needed. I will say I can see now one sort of misstep as the industry caught up or tuned in or started applying these lessons in their own businesses. One thing they kind of missed, and you see this sometimes when you look in the landscape that funnels, they almost position funnels like it's a feature and it's not like that. I think people here in the audience, people at home, if you haven't conceptualized this yet, funnels aren't a feature. Funnels are a mentality. Right? So yes, there's like the actual funnel, which is the, you know, step of pages that people are going through, but it's actually the right way to think about everything in your business. And it's been cool because previously we had a platform that initially started with building funnels and now we've got this all encompassing, like every tool you need to get started in a business and run a business. What's really important for people to conceptualize is that all of those features you should be thinking in terms of the funnel, the customer journey, and all of that. So thanks, Russell.

Yeah, thank you, Russell, 100%. So I think what you're saying there is like, let's say I'm going to have a storefront and I'm going to have, I don't know, I'm going to sell, I don't know, a pickleball paddle. I shouldn't just sell one quantity of the pickleball paddle. I should take them to my funnel that sells the paddle, hopefully sells more ofa ecom, learn how to get the V curve. But we're going to sell them a pickleball paddle and after that, we're not just going to send them back out to the ether and say, go, enjoy pickleball. We're going to say, hey, do you want some bowls to go with your new pickleball paddles? How about some safety equipment?

Right.

Where we could have just had one sale, we now have four and five. The average cart value goes up and that's integrated throughout the entire business. I think it's so important if somebody's watching for the first time, just so important they understand, like you said, Andrew, the mentality, the actual mindset behind what.

A funnel is and online is getting more and more competitive every year, right? Like, ad costs are going up, more people are going online, more businesses are coming out and entering into your space, no matter what your space is. And why that's critical is to maximize your average cart value, right? Like you need to maximize. You're paying money to Facebook or Google or whoever it is to send people to your website to your funnel, hopefully, right? And you need to maximize the amount of revenue that's coming out of that at ad cost. And funnels allow you to do that. And that funnel mentality allows you to do that. You don't send them to a generic page that has 10 different products and they're kind of browsing around. Can't tell you how many times, like, I'm a sucker for, like, clothing online. Like, oh, men's clothing ads on Instagram.

Cool.

Those pants look cool. And then I start looking around and I get distracted with like, oh, I should maybe. What about the shorts? Maybe I want eight different colors. Maybe I want. Oh, you know what? Nevermind, Forget it. I'm distracted now. I'm not doing it. But if you had taken me down a funnel, I would have bought the pants right out the gate. I clicked the ad, I was ready for it. Boom, I would have bought it. And then you offer me the shorts that are the same ones and the same style.

Cool.

I probably would have got the shorts, then the pack of T shirts, then all the other things. Right. And a few businesses do this well online, but not many. Right. And this is your competition. So using those strategies, using that mentality across the board and at clickfunnels, that's what we're trying to do, is make everything default to the best customer experience to maximize the average cart value, maximize your return on investment. That's our main goal.

Whoever can spend the most to acquire customer wins.

Right.

There you go.

You said that. Some really smart guy, some wise man, some real genius.

But if I understand correctly, then, Todd, that means that let's say I have a storefront and I have 15 products in my storefront. I should be making 15 funnels for that storefront. Correct. And then each funnel should come with its own workflow, its own email sequence. Because we haven't even gotten into ascension yet. We haven't even gotten into sending them up the value ladder. So that kind of seems like a little bit of work to me.

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, absolutely, you could build one funnel for product. You could use our new, like, store upsells feature, which you could do it based on collections. So maybe you have a different funnel per collection. If you have, you're selling books or shirts or pants or whatever, Right. You don't have to do it for every single product, but it's still a lot of work, Right? Like, that is a lot of stuff. And that's literally why we built frameworks, right? So talking about frameworks, which we dropped and talked about in the video very briefly gave you an example of it. That's why that product exists. Right. That's why we built that feature set. Because it's not necessarily just enough to share someone's funnel, to have a starting point of a template of a funnel, of a template of a page. There's a lot of other gluing behind the scenes you need to do to really have an optimized business. And that's where frameworks come in.

Yeah, sorry.

No, please. I'm just so excited to talk about that.

For me, frameworks is one of, if not the biggest feature we've shipped in recent history, because we've spent all this time building out this really broad platform. Like I was alluding to before, it does all of these things. And one of the challenges with that is you come into that platform, you have the benefit of, hey, if you learn how to do one thing, the interface, all of the. You don't have to learn 10 tools. You can learn one tool and the information that you gather sort of transfers from area to area. You get the benefits of having all your data in one place, one API to integrate with one, all of that stuff. But it's still a lot of work to build the business. And so I think with frameworks, I don't know, actually, just if you think about this, you can't do this on. I'll just call out a specific platform, Shopify, right? And I'll just use them as an example. Great platform, incredible company. Canadian.

Sweet.

Love it. I'm Canadian, the major contributor to the Canadian economy. But they do one pretty narrow thing. And everybody that's talked to anybody that set up a store on Shopify, the first thing you do is install like 10 plugins, right? So you tell me, how do they build a templating system for building out an entire business process and all the pieces and make it something that somebody can click the button and just run it across their whole business? They can't because they don't control all the individual pieces that people need to run a business. So it's been a long time coming. We've worked really hard to build out this one whole platform sort of according to the original vision. But now that we have it, we can add a new layer to it with frameworks and people really can build out all of those pieces. Click a few boxes, hit publish, and then share that and it's the entire business operation. It's. It's really unbelievable.

Can I add one thing to make sure everyone at home understands this? I want to make sure. I know for us we're geeking out because I think all the frameworks are new thing we're excited about. But just so you guys understand what it looks like, you guys know in clickfunnels we have share funnels, right? So you can build a funnel with somebody, you give it to them to click a button, it copies in their account, which is great, right? But again, a funnel, for most people nowadays, it's not your entire business, right? There's a funnel, but then there's an email sequence and there's a CRM and then there's a store and then there's a membership site and all these kind of things, right? So what's cool is inside your clickfunnels account, you can build an entire business and then you can just like you create a share funnel instead you created a framework and you can say, okay, I wanna, in this framework, I wanna share the membership site, the email sequences, all different things. You select them all and it creates a link and you can give it to somebody. So you can literally build an entire business and then turn to a business in the box and just hand it to somebody. And so it's like a share funnel, but you're able to build and develop an entire business. And we're gonna show some really cool use cases of how to do that. But anyway, I just want people to say that's what's really, really powerful about this, is just how simple it is for you to create a business and give it away to people, just like we do with sharefunnels before. But share funnels on steroids, of course.

And if you're a coach, an expert, a guru in any industry, right? Like, you can get 50% commissions for click funnels as well by sharing that. So it's also an affiliate link for you.

We talk about it when we're like in the office, when we get together in person, and we'll just talk through all these different metaphors for like, how would you describe this? And Dan Usher, some of you know him, produces our incredible videos, including the one that we got to enjoy. Dan, when we were recording, he was like, I don't think people are going to get it, Andrew. And we cut this out because I'm a terrible actor. But he was like, I need you to grab the camera and tell people, like, do you get it? How big this opportunity is? Because he gets it. And so there's so many different. We're not going to stop talking about this. Like, this is. We're going to talk about this for a while now, and I hope you don't get tired of it. But the point is, we desperately want to enlist. It's not about us sharing frameworks. Like, yes, we'll do that. This is a great tool for us. Like, wait until you see what Russell's got. But it's also about enlisting the support of the entire community for the mission of helping as many people become entrepreneurs. Because we're not going to be in every niche, right? So somebody out there is going to be, you know, the perfect coach or perfect educator in a specific niche. And now instead of having to teach them how to use click funnels, you can just give them the business to run, to get started, to use the software. And there's one other thing that I think is really helpful and valuable in all of this. Yes, there's like, what Todd was saying with the. This would be an affiliate tool and all of that stuff for bringing people onto the platform and then, you know, getting that cut of the lifetime value of the customer. That's great. I love it. That's going to motivate some people. Other people will be motivated by. Well, there's all these different reasons that you'll use this as a tool and different ways that you can use it. But I think I just lost my train of thought. Sorry.

You were talking about all the impacts that it's going to have and how people are going to use it. And we're still gone. So one thing I think is really cool about frameworks is the multi level. So you can create multiple links, like on the expert track of things. You're an expert in whatever niche, whatever field it is that you're in. You can. How many of us have tiers in our business right now? You can become a gold, a silver or a platinum level member and with each level of access, you get different levels of assets and deliverables. So now with frameworks, I can take that business model and I can have three different links that you get depending on your level of purchase. I just think that's revolutionary because no longer do I have to have a link that comes with a video that shows you how to set up the thing and then have a follow up email with you to make sure that everything got set up in place properly. I just give you the framework, you import it and you go and you start practicing business right away. I really think being somebody who's able to work with our customers every single day and see the problems that they have and remember the problems I had when I started, I truly do believe this is going to be revolutionary.

Yeah, Dante, I can pick up that thread. So the point is, when people are building these frameworks and sharing them with everybody out there in the world, the benefit is the framework itself can be the product. You can have the product, you can give one part of it away for free, and then in the funnel, you're upselling them the additional detail or some other tactic or strategy or whatever. One thing that's really, really nice about frameworks is you're not on your own. Yes, you're building this sort of no code software on the platform, packaging it up and then distributing it to people. But in the fulfillment of that, once you've sold them on the vision of what they can do with the tooling and the knowledge that you're sharing with them in the fulfillment of it, they don't have to pretend to be an entire software company.

Right.

You're fulfilling with a trusted brand, a trusted platform, and there's just so much strength in that. So I think the opportunity here with Frameworks is it's a true partnership between our affiliates and us. It's their brand, but our name is also on it. It's also our brand. I think that's an incredible opportunity and just something really important to understand.

Yes, 100%. I'm so excited for Frameworks, and there's a million things that we could sit up here and talk about. I know Todd and Russell, you guys are going to be sharing three really cool things in the near future, and I'm super excited to hear that. But I think the final question I have, because we are pretty much running out of time, is for Russell, and I would be remiss if I had him on stage and I didn't ask this question is, I saw you started up a school and I joined it. Of course I joined that school community. But why? What was the purpose? Are you ditching click funnels or is there a reason behind it?

All right, I love people ask me that, too. So you guys saw, in fact, everyone at home is commenting in a school group. And you guys know ClickFunnels has communities. So people ask me, why are you doing that? And a couple reasons. Number one, we're working on a really cool partnership with school, so there's some cool things happening there which are gonna be fun. But number two is it's a traffic strategy. School has a ton of people on the platform. And so if you'll notice, the school group we have right now for this event, we're already in, like, the top 20 most visited schools in the world. And so, like, we're up there and we're getting like, hundreds and hundreds of leads a day coming in from other places, and it's kind of fun tool to play with. So that's why we use Skool for this promotion, this campaign, and it's. It's been pretty cool so far. In fact, I saw from this session so far, there's already like 1500 comments. You guys at home dropped in there. And by the way, don't forget to also drop comments over here because it's kind of fun to see all the comments inside the chat here as well, which is. Which is fun. So, yes, that's kind of the.

That's kind of the story.

Yeah, be a marketer. Use the traffic sources available.

I love that.

Absolutely. And I actually got 20 seconds back, so. Can we talk about communities really quick, Todd?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as you said, like, ClickFunnels does have communities built in. Right? Like, we have the ability for you to do a private community. It's your brand, it's your logo, it's your domain, it's all of your stuff. As Russell said, I view Skool kind of as lead acquisition, source, similar to like our Facebook groups. Right. Like it's a whole other source for traffic, for customers, for leads. If you want to run a private community, if you want your brand, you want all that benefits, it's right there. Another part of it, which Andrew touched on a little bit, is simply the fact that clickfunnels as an ecosystem, if the product allows you to build from A to Z on your business, we're able to do things like these frameworks. It allows you to to a framework that includes the community aspect. You can structure the groups, you can pre seed post, you can structure the categories and topics and best practices that you're teaching and give it to people with the click of a button.

Right?

So it's a major part of just the overall strategy for selling online.

Wow.

It's going to be revolutionary when I'm just super excited about community. I love the expert stuff. I love building community and talking to people. So I am just very juiced up for that. I think we're pretty much out of time. Is there anything else you guys wanted to share? Anything that on the horizon you're just so excited about?

Well, there's some awesome stuff that we're going to talk about tomorrow, so I'll just drop. Like, don't miss our session tomorrow. Russell and I are going to talk about strategy and details and tactics of the actual software side of things, how to do some really cool stuff on the platform. So I'm excited about that tomorrow.

Thank you, Matisse.

Yeah.

We're going deep into three core features. One is the new survey element. Anyone played with it yet? It is insane. Number two is the affiliate platform. This has been probably our biggest request is the affiliate platform. And then number three is we're gonna show you some cool things on frameworks and how you guys can make insane amounts of money playing with those. So that's some fun stuff for tomorrow afternoon. We'll talk about.

So cannot wait for that. Well, on that note, thank you so much for your time. Thank you guys for letting me ask you some questions about clickfunnels and what's up and coming, and we can't wait to see it.

Very cool.

Awesome.

Real quick, give these guys a round of applause. Well, I want to jump really quick because you just watched one of the Intro sessions here at Funnel Hacking Live. And I hope you loved it, I hope you enjoyed it. But right now, if you're seeing this video means you're watching it streaming on Facebook or on YouTube or somewhere else. And it means you don't actually have a ticket to the rest of the event, which is so sad because what's going to be happening over the next three or four days is going to change so many people's lives. We sold almost 20,000 tickets to this event. I want to make sure you get your ticket as well. And so if you are liking this and you do not want this to end, go get your ticket right now and that way you don't miss any of the other sessions that are happening. We're going deep into all sorts of things like how to sell physical products, e commerce, how to sell digital products, information coaching programs, things like that. We're going deep into how do you grow, how do you scale a company, how do you get traffic to your funnels. We're going to be talking about how to do one to many selling. We're talking about so many cool things and they have some of the best, most amazing personal development speakers as well on the planet coming to serve you as well. And so if you want to be part of this, I do not want you to miss it. All you got to do right now is click on the link down below somewhere on this page. I don't know what the URL is going to be, but I'm going to give them a URL, Go to that URL, click on it and get your tickets. That way you can get back into the event as quick as humanly possible. I don't want you to miss a second. We're having so much fun, I don't want you to miss any. So this is called the FOMO Call to action. Give me a little fomo. Do you not want you to miss it? Because if you enjoyed this session, you're going to love everything else we got going on. So with that said, click link down below, get in here, let's have some fun. And welcome to Funnel Hacking Live International.