What Took Months Now Takes Minutes With AI Funnels

I've taken AI and built funnel pages and shipped them directly into ClickFunnels.

In 2026, 6 months is a lifetime.

In an ever-changing world of AI, our guest today has shown consistency throughout.

Before, the creation of a funnel was a significant time investment or money investment. Now we use Claude Code. You know, we're talking about AI and making funnels. It's like, I want more funnels, I want cheaper funnels, I want better funnels. If you're not willing to play the long game, like, what are you doing? Speed to execution through these Tools is the key.

In today's episode, we are gonna have a fantastic conversation about the world of AI, about the speed, about the tools, and most importantly, about how to implement them the right way.

Come see how James Kern is staying ahead of the curve. Welcome back to another episode of ClickFunnels Radio. I'm Chris Cameron, and joining with me as always is my main man, Dante Torelli.

What's up, dude?

This one is fun.

Oh yeah.

You weren't, you weren't here for the last time this guest was here. Um, But this was maybe like 6 months ago that we had him on, got the origin story, got so many really, really cool things. But since then, the world is completely different.

6 months is crazy time now.

If you want to go hear that, like, this would be a really, really complement to this episode. Go watch 760, 760, and you can listen and hear James' entire story. So I want to welcome James Curran to the show. James, what's up, man?

So pumped to be here and talking about all the things we're going to cover today.

Well, okay, first question is this. 6 months or roughly, we were just talking before we hit record and everything has changed. You've been the linchpin funnel guy, you know, that whole story of you being a software developer and then changing into this, but now enters AI and everything is happening in funnel and AI years, right? Like dog years. Like everything is happening at an accelerated rate. Like catch us up on what's changed with you and what you're doing and how you're implementing AI.

Yeah, it's funny. I developed software for over 20 years, you know, the full gamut. I was a supporter initially, developer, developer manager, you know, director, all that kind of stuff. I did, you know, backend stuff, hosting, all of it. So I learned the full stack and then, you know, transitioned to being a funnel builder. I had this epiphany at FHL 2022, how I can help the the community with technical skills. So I did that the past 4 or 5 years, whatever. And then I joined Inner Circle and had a call with Dave Linenbaum. And he told me, dude, you should, you're a programmer, you should do something with AI. And I was like, uh, AI, AI, everyone's talking about AI. I had really grown because so many people were doing things that were about copy and things that just felt like kind of, for me, they were inauthentic. But then I had this epiphany of like, okay, there's actually a niche that I've been wanting to serve for a while.

Well, I think just to back up, I think that's how everybody was using it. It was all ChatGPT, right? Yeah. Everybody's like, oh, this is all copy right now.

Everyone shifted. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and it's, it's taken a different package. You know, if you look at what Russell launched last week with the Marketing Secrets AI, you know, the, his, his, Part of his ethos was you take your frameworks and you embed them into a piece of software, which is, which is amazing.

I remember just hearing this, James. I was like, hold on, we're taking the same framework that he's done forever. Yeah. Sell information products. But we always paint this as a new opportunity. Mm-hmm. Right. And his new opportunity was like, well, yeah, you still do your information products, but add that software to it. You're not a product, you know, you're not a programmer, but you can be now.

Yes. Um, so yeah, so let's, You know, going back there, I was inspired to start creating software again, and I was first looking into how to, like, do agents. And then at that point, the coding models weren't that great, so I'd experimented a little bit, but it was pretty brutal actually. Like, they were just coming back with dumb ideas and bad code, and I wasn't really on board. But at the end of last year, and especially beginning of this year, things have just blown up to the point—

When did you have the call with Dave?

I was actually, we were in Europe on vacation. I was in Italy. And it was probably July of last year. And so then—

Really?

Yeah, then I got into a, like a rediscovery of software 'cause I'd been out of the game for a number of years. And usually that's a, it's a pretty big deal where it's like, you know, there's a lot to catch up on.

You were doing coaching?

Yeah, yeah, coaching, funnel building, you know, group coaching. And which was good, I needed to learn that. I need to get the marketing muscles so that I could crush the next thing, right? So now I've built that.

I love that you say that.

Yeah.

You got to build that up.

Yeah, 100%. But getting back to AI, it wasn't good enough for a while. And I had to figure out what had happened. Fortunately, the web development landscape had not changed that much. We're still using Chrome primarily. We're still using Chrome DevTools. A lot of that hasn't changed. Some of the ways that we do had changed. But the benefit was I got to get caught up to speed quickly because I could use AI to bridge the gap that I had in the knowledge of how to do things in the current time. All of my principles and foundational, like knowing what good code looks like and knowing what high-quality applications look like, that was all solid. And then I could use AI to bridge the gap to catch me up to speed quickly. So that was a real blessing. So yeah, late last year, early this year, things have just changed dramatically.

You were just using it as information. Okay, I'm getting stuck on this part of the code. Help me through maybe this gap that I've got right now.

Yeah. What are the current, like, frameworks? Like, what are the current methodologies? You know, I'm still writing C# code, talking to SQL Server and putting it in Azure. But what are the current ways of doing that? Because that had shifted and there's this new thing called Aspire. So I'm like, okay, what is Aspire? How does it work? You know, should I be using that or is it going to be overkill? Just finding out what the landscape was. AI helped me a lot with that aspect of it.

This is a lot of mindset though, and I don't want to glaze over this or just, you know, completely go over this call with Dave because you're an Inner Circle.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of people, they get into this, they, you know, you've gone through 2CCX, you're now an Inner Circle, and one call can change everything. Like, those who know Dave, he's very, you know, he's very fun, he's flamboyant sometimes out there, but you get him on a call and this guy is like genius level.

Savage.

Maybe talk a little bit about that mind shift. You see these things happening, you have this conversation with Dave, you've coached people and now you're getting coached, but you have the, the ability to self-reflect and go, oh, there is a change that needs to happen. Tell us maybe more about that call.

Yeah, well, on the call he suggested I do something with AI, just knowing that it's a trend, knowing that it was something that was going to be hot and people, you know, there's demand for it, right? Um, and like we're starting to say, there was— I had resistance because people that were non-technical were leveraging this technology to push out products. And I just didn't, it felt inauthentic to me. I wanted to distance myself from that. So got off the call with him, got on the metro, go and visited my wife and daughter at the Spanish Steps in Rome. And during that train ride, I had this realization like, oh, I had this idea for software that was going to be an automated software that will check people's funnels to make sure that they're up, make sure that they're fast, make sure that they're correct. There's this whole world in soft— regular software development called application performance monitoring where we know what's happening with the software, whether it's up or down, fast, whatever. And there was this, this gap in funnel land, and I— it had never existed before. It's still to this day, besides my stuff, no one really cares about this, right? But I was like, okay, now's my time. I didn't want to hire a team of developers to do this because I had the idea 4 or 5 years ago, but I didn't want to distract myself and I didn't want to hire anyone because it was too expensive. But now this insight, like, oh my God, I can actually build this thing now. And I had, at that time, there were marketers who were going into holes and coming out a month or two later and coming out with software. And I was like, I mean, sure. Yeah, but that's not robust. It's not going to scale. It might solve a problem on the surface, but everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face, right? When the rubber hits the road and you actually have to ship this thing or support this thing over time, there's a whole, again, set of muscles that are required. It's a whole set of embodied experience that I have that most people don't, and any developer who's been doing this for decades has, and that's the kind of thing that you can't just vibe code. Right? You have to like know what that looks like, what that smells like, what it feels like. You have to know what it's like to get a call at 3 a.m. because the database is down, because something broke. Yeah, yeah, I can fix it, right? Yeah. So that's when I'm like, okay, I can leverage all that past with this product in this moment to create something awesome. And that's what I've been doing.

This is reminiscent of like 2022, your Funnel Hacking Live. Everybody else is freaking out and you see it as an opportunity and you dove hard into Linchpin. This is what I appreciate about you and and about marketers in general too, is like, you know, let's say for linebackers or whatever in football, you're keeping your head on a swivel.

Yeah.

And you're seeing these opportunities. So this is a unique moment where you're saying, hold on, I have this past in programming and I'm now seeing this new opportunity. And once again, in James Kern fashion, gonna figure out how to capitalize on it.

Yeah.

So what's the next step? You have this realization, you're going, seeing that other people aren't coding this, but there's this opportunity. What's next?

Well, we glossed over psychology a little bit, but a lot of it was because there is no awareness. Sometimes in marketing, people don't know that they have a problem, or they've accepted the fact that the problem exists and that it can't be changed. So the problem that I'm solving with the software is something that people don't really realize can be different. So I've had a lot of hurdles that I've had to jump through just psychologically to you know, like to actually build this thing and believe that other people would want it. So there was a big like, you know, proof of concept, a lot of conversations with AI to make sure that it exists, that the demand exists, that people are gonna want it. And it wasn't until I actually shipped it that I realized that like, okay, this is actually something that people want. So there was a whole building a prototype, building up confidence, having conversations with my wife who's a world-class mindset performance coach. Tony Robbins, right?

Yeah, yeah, she was a platinum coach Tony Robbins for a while.

And, you know, just kind of getting through that sort of like resistance to failure. So that was kind of like the second, you know, the back half of last year while building up my developer muscles in the current age, you know, and figuring out how to create something. Created a prototype that was good enough for me to be like, okay, I can actually do this. Ended up canning that and then starting it from scratch. And that's the platform that we're on right now.

And this will go find holes in their funnel. You tell me what holes are you looking for? Like, how are you optimizing?

There's a number of invisible revenue leaks, I call them. So like at any given time, your page speed is going to help you or hurt you, both with conversions and also with cost for, for, for CPA. A slow page for a Google ad or a Meta ad is going to cost you more than if it's fast because those platforms want to deliver a high-quality experience for their audience. So speed matters there. There are correctness things. So in software, when we ship a web application, we have developed unit test, integration test, end-to-end test. We test in development, we test in production. A funnel is a web application.

Sure.

Right? It's a bunch of forms and buttons and it has to work right. But we're spending thousands of dollars every single day to send traffic to them in a lot of cases. Yep. And yet we don't know whether the buttons work, whether they work on desktop and mobile. We don't know whether the links work. Are there dead links, right? There's so many different ahas and gotchas that are present that someone like me who's been a funnel builder for the past 5 years knows to look for, but most people don't know to look for them. And even if you do, you can still screw it up. Like when I built this software and put it on my own funnels, I realized that I had funnels and funnel hubs that were out there where no index was turned on, which means it's blind to Google. Like, Google will not index it because of mistakes. So there's just a million different little, like, death by a thousand cuts. This is got a thousand eyes looking at your stuff all the time to make sure that it's up and fast and correct.

Well, even building, like, we do a lot of partnerships, like, for different JVs and stuff, and we had a webinar that we were doing and it was repeatable. Even though you're jumping in and you're like cloning the funnel, which was working, you still forget how many steps there are and how it integrates with Zoom, how you do all these, these things. Like it's almost impossible to remember it all without checklists and that type of thing. So you're saying this will go and checklist all of those functionalities?

Yeah, it has like a generic set of, of tests for, for things most people don't think of. But it's also got the ability to— I have a cartographer agent which goes and maps out your funnel. It finds out what all the steps are. And then it will create tests that execute every one of those flows. So, you know, upsells, downsells, all that kind of stuff, it builds the map and execute it to make sure that it's correct.

I think we're at a very interesting point here where I think you got 3 groups. I think you have people who are hyper excited about AI and jump into this thing big time. You have people who are cautiously optimistic, and then you have people who are, you know, against it or just like, I don't even want to deal with it. What would you say to each one of those groups?

I think it's hard to convince someone who's against it. Maybe they're just afraid that it's not going to be safe for them. So maybe they just need to have an experience where it improves their lives or eliminates some time. So I think a curated experience where, you know, something that's not gimmicky, you know, but a lot of people just have negativity bias and are just resistant to things in general. And it's kind of hard to like, nothing's going to help a negative mindset, you know. So I don't— I'm not concerned about them so, so much.

Well, you're saying too before, like, man, we need to have optimism in this thing. Like, you know, it's not going to be— what was it in Terminator? Skynet? Is that what it was? Or what was it?

AGI?

Yeah, I'm just saying, like, that stuff— I don't want to go down that. Like, we need to be positive moving forward with this stuff. Like, there will be people who aren't early adopters, you know. Like, I mean, how many people didn't, you know, have Facebook or didn't have the— a cell phone, right? Right. And this is the biggest change generationally that we've had. So I mean, I get that, but then there are other people who want to do it but they don't know what to do. So what's, what's your advice for them?

I'd say find someone or something to, to model, then just kind of see like who's doing something cool that I'd kind of trust as a person. Because, you know, um, you can just ask it. You can ask, hey, I want to accomplish this thing. But I think a lot of people, um, if they don't have that sort of confidence in themselves or the courage to, to to go and try something and take that risk. They might want to just find someone who's done it and feels safe for them to give them an easy onboarding. That's what a lot of people want. A lot of people follow me and like me and trust me because I'll go out there and find some new way to do things and then show them that it's safe and that they can try it. And here's the keys. Go for it. So I think if you can find someone that you trust that's doing what you want to be doing, then go for it.

What if you can't?

If you can't find someone?

Yeah.

I mean, you can always just ask, ask the LLMs, hey, I'd like to accomplish this thing, I'm not sure how, what are some options? That's the safest thing they can do. But it feels a little awkward to people, I think, at first. So it's like, you know, it— there's like a trust thing that happens for people that haven't engaged with AI. So it's, it's—

and how would they build that trust?

I think you see other people doing it first. That's it. You see someone else.

Yeah, it's model pioneers.

That's it. Yeah. I mean, you find someone else who's doing it and then the resistance goes down. It's okay, that person didn't die. It's like anything, like we're tribal, right? So we see someone from the tribe going and trying something, trying a new food or doing whatever. It's like, okay, you didn't die. Maybe it's okay for me too. You go first. Yeah, that's it. And so the people that are more risk tolerant or, you know, have more of a sense of responsibility, they'll do those things, right? Or if you just have more experience, like I've taken AI and built funnel pages and shipped them directly into ClickFunnels via API, via a beta API that doesn't even exist to the general public, you know? That's something that's like a courageous step of like, you know, being innovative and trying things. And, you know, I'm sharing with people how to do that so that they can build funnels faster, which means they can, throw more different, you know, A/B tests at things and try different designs and you can iterate so much faster. And as if you're a funnel builder, you can add a ton more value to your clients via this mechanism.

I mean, that's one of the biggest questions I had too. And I think that has changed. And I think maybe what you've come to in the last 6, 8 months is we're not throwing out funnels, we're not throwing out ClickFunnels. Talk to me about how though you're accelerating funnel use, accelerating conversions, using that AI, you're using both of these tools together.

Yeah, well, we know that it— you're one funnel away, but it's not the next funnel, right?

Exactly.

Right.

Or the first, right?

Right. Yeah.

Not your first funnel iteration, right? You got to figure out what sticks.

Absolutely. And so before, the creation of a funnel was a significant time investment or money investment, right?

Absolutely.

Kind of eliminated now. You can iterate, you can design. We have a client who— he's actually on the front page of ClickFunnels right now. It's Ted Hardy. He's a freedive instructor. He used to do brick and mortar. Yeah, this guy. Yeah, cool. Yeah, he— I was on a call with him earlier this week. We're building a funnel for him and we're taking his funnel from, from a different platform and putting it on ClickFunnels. Right. But then it's like, you know what, let me— how can I add more value? What if we just did two completely different designs? They look nothing like what's out there right now and just split test them and see, see what works.

Which in the past you're talking about building out, even if you're using templates, you're building out, you're making all the buttons work and everything else and then doing an A/B split test. This speed now.

Yeah, yeah. So now we use Cloud Code and we generate completely different designs with different color schemes, different copy, different everything. We import them into ClickFunnels, wire them up to make it so that they connect with, with the workflows and everything. And yeah, that'll be what we'll do is like, because when you're, when you're doing split testing, you get more lift from big changes like that. Yeah. You know, you won't get your chances for success with smaller increases are higher. But if you, if you get one that hits on a big change, the actual overall lift will be higher. So it's like if you're putting out a brand new funnel, you should try some pretty big different color changes and copy changes like on an initial split.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Then once you dial it in, then you can change headlines and all that kind of stuff.

One thing at a time to say, okay, now we can do this. Can you accelerate that though and get closer using some of the AI stuff that you're doing rather than just putting it out to the public?

100%. So there's this technology called MCP, Model Context Protocol. You don't have to worry about what that means, but basically you can have a conversation with your AI and it connects with all the different things. Meta just released an MCP server for the Meta Ads platform. So you can have your AI look and see what ads are out there doing their thing, what the click-through rate is, what's successful, whatever. You can, you can bring that information into your AI session. You can take that information and generate different landing pages that are, that are related to the ads that are doing well, generate the new landing pages, shoot those up to ClickFunnels or wherever, and based on actual data, create new landing pages that potentially can convert better.

Wow. Is this like a focus group though? I mean, think what we had to do in the past is go say, all right, we're going to get a bunch of people in a room or we're going to do like an ask campaign and say, hey, if I did this, would you like this? You're telling me like, for example, Meta is going to say, okay, the target audience you have, this is what they're connecting with already and let's shortcut that process.

What I'm saying is if you're putting out like with Andromeda, like the ad creative diversity is like the thing, right? So you're putting out 50 different ads. You can see which one of those are crushing and you can, you know, that just, that just means that click is working, but is the conversion working on the other end? So you can better match up the landing page to go with the ad speed. Yeah, yeah. And do it at scale. So like you can generate a whole bunch of new landing pages specifically tied to messages from the ad platform. So instead of having just one front door or three front doors, you can have 20 front doors and be congruent the whole way through. That's the key.

Yeah, that's the key. Yeah, because we could have had 20 front doors at any time, but keeping it congruent and keeping on track with all the metrics and stats and see what's actually working, that's what was difficult.

And it was expensive because you were paying someone to do all that.

Well, difficult, time, money, and like skill set and everything else. Everything's compressed now. Yeah, everything's compressed.

But James, I'm so scared for the future, and I feel like every day I wake up and I feel more hopeless. Like, I feel more hopeless and less powerful. Can you rewire me? Why am I wrong?

I think it's the most exciting time to be alive in human history. I think the hopelessness can come from a feeling of things moving too fast or it being overwhelming. Um, you have to get over the idea that you're going to be able to catch it all. It is a rushing, roaring river, and you've got one cup. You're not going to catch the whole thing, right? So you take the best. I like to use news aggregators in newsletters that are aggregating the information, the headlines that surface to me, the, the, the choicest cuts. I take in what is relevant and I apply it to myself, or I apply it to my audience, and I see how I can add more value to the world every day. I think if, if you, if you focus on that, I think that hopelessness or despair often comes when we're focused on ourselves. And if we can shift the focus to helping others, it kind of just makes that stuff go away. So have that be your lens.

Oh, that's actually really interesting. You said that because it all just washed over me as a wave there. Like, yes, I am thinking very selfishly.

Yeah.

I only feel hopeless because of my own internal beliefs and the own internal things that I want for myself, not thinking about my customers. Definitely not thinking about their problems and the hurdles that they face every day when they wake up and go throughout their day.

That's a big thing for me right now. When I think about the funnel building community, I think that there is a lot of fear and despair around it, and I'm taking it upon myself to be a positive light to them because I feel like we can— there are a lot of voices that are saying to replace your agencies and replace your funnel builders and all that. And my response is add more value, find ways to add more value. Because if we think about the average CEO, they don't want to build funnels. Yeah, they don't. It is a responsibility that they want to delegate. And if they're having to talk to the AI to be like, no, not that, no, I didn't want— like, they don't, they don't want that. I think there will always be a nerd, a high conscientious person who is— would rather deal with that and finds safety in that and finds power and prowess dealing with something technological to do that. And you're always delegating to them. So while it's true that the things that the average funnel builder used to do are more cheaply produced, my response is just add more value, right? Like, like we talked about before, do more, more split tests, you know, What can we do to add more value? What are the agencies that are charging 5 times what you were charging? What are they doing? What were they doing? How can you do what they did for cheaper and eat their lunch? You know, like there's always a way to add more value to the world. And just because stuff is more cheaply accessible doesn't mean that you can't also just jump on that and add fuel to your fire and do more.

So I love that. And I have another segment I want to get into with this, but it just occurred to me, like, if you look at history of the world and we were still 1800s horse and buggy, here we are, you know, 200 years later and we're going, hold on, we now had cell phones, computers, you know, social media. And here we are at this rapid accelerating rate. You say, hey, we can just do more, add more value. Where do you see this in 10, 15 years? Because the acceleration of progress is gonna be so rapid. We were joking about, you know, AI years. In 10 years, listen, let's see how this ages, but I'm curious, where do you think this is going 10, 15 years?

10, 15 years, I think it's really tough because there's this concept called the singularity, and that's the point in which AI is kind of able to think for itself. And I think that no one really has a, a firm grasp of that. So I'm— things could change drastically when that happens. So I don't think it's fruitful to think about that.

Yeah.

What I like to do though is think about until that happens, how can I add so much value? I love it. Ride this wave because it's kind of like a, you know, a lot of people are doomsday about it. I'm like, yeah, maybe, maybe, I don't know. Yeah. But I'm not gonna freak out about it until it happens.

Yeah, 'cause equally maybe not.

Exactly. I don't know that. I'm not in charge. I'm riding this freaking wave though, I'll tell you that.

Riding the wave. Yeah. Like grab your surfboard because you can sit on the beach or you can enjoy this a little bit and say, okay, what can we do with this?

Yeah.

Which, which brings me to my next point. I've asked this before to others and I've seen this happen. I get on a call and all of a sudden somebody goes, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, it's simple. I'm using Claude for this. I'm using ChatGPT for this. I'm using Perplexity for this. And we got this mix and mash and they're like, oh, and then by the way, get these 5 Google plugins. And I just used all this way and I just go, dude, I ain't doing any of that. I'm not doing any of that. And so we have this time where we go, all right, back in the day it was like, okay, is Super Nintendo gonna win or is Genesis gonna win? We had a clear winner. Is it HD DVD or is it Blu-ray? Do we know which one's gonna win? And how do you manage all these things that are out there and say, okay, how can I harness these to the best of my ability to accomplish my goal? Are you using a bunch of them? Do you use just one? Is there gonna be a clear winner? What are your thoughts?

I think there will be a number of strong contenders. You know, if we look back into the smartphone market, there was Apple and Android, right? And Windows Phone tried to do a thing. And I was a Microsoft guy back then. I had a Windows Phone.

Yeah, meanwhile BlackBerry's dying.

Yeah, BlackBerry, they missed the bus. But I think that, you know, there's something to be said. I think that like, you know, the category king gets like 80% and then the other one gets like 20%. There's some rule there, right? Yeah, two can, can be supported.

Uber gets 80, Lyft gets 20%.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then everyone else is fighting over the scraps. So I think that, that to answer your question of who's going to win, I think there'll be probably two. This tends to happen. Um, there will always be people that are more technologically, um, oriented that are okay with the sort of dissonance and, and will take the responsibility of like coordinating different tools and, and, and, and owning that. And there's some people that are just like I just want to, I just want to press the button, right? So like right now, if, if you want that, I'd say go on something like, like Manus because it will write your web page for you. It will host your web page for you. It'll do research for you. You're going to pay a little bit more, but you don't have to think about anything else. And so there's always going to be services. And it's, it's an aggregator too, right? It uses Anthropic behind the scenes. It uses OpenAI. It abstracts that away. You don't have to care about that, right? So there's always going to be people that With convenience, we'll make it easy for you.

With, with that in mind, tell me what you thought about marketingsecrets.ai. Have you been diving into it?

Yes, I have been diving into it and I have clients that are using it and it's pretty new. I focus a lot on the promotion of it last week and we're here to talk about affiliate stuff and yeah, and but yeah, I, what I think that it's, it's really the, my, the thing I think is most powerful is that we have all of Russell Brunson's frameworks and swipes and, and, um, preloaded. Yeah, like we've all been playing this game for the past couple years of like, act as Russell Brunson.

Yeah, you don't know research that's done or if it's accurate.

It doesn't have the whole Marketing Expert Secrets book. It doesn't have the whole doc. It has whatever it has, you know. And sometimes I'm like opening up my Kindle and like taking screenshots and trying to paste in specific things, and then it's like it gives me 10 times better context or output. So the fact that this has all of Russell's stuff and then you upload your voice, I think that, you know, it's, it's a game changer from that perspective.

Russell was talking to the team and he was saying, I think the future of AI is not necessarily all those different things, but creating these boundaries around that. Specifically, if you want to do the marketing and so on, what you're talking about is exactly what we've done with Marketing Secrets AI. Is we have all those frameworks and everything put in in one place, and then it can go use all those other AIs. Like, what was the word you used? Like where it uses it and then use, and then you're just using the front end.

Oh, aggregator.

Yeah. The aggregator.

Yeah.

You know, and then you can get these outputs like perfect webinar, never been easier.

Yeah.

Right. Because now you have all this to put in. Um, but what was interesting is you traditionally have not been necessarily an affiliate marketer.

No.

Yet here you are at ClickFunnels HQ here in Canton as on the leaderboard too. Like, I mean, specifically for Marketing Secrets AI.

Yeah.

Did you use AI to do that? What was the change here and why affiliates?

I felt compelled. Well, first of all, I know not super plugged into the community and what promotions are coming up. So Russell was talking about, I'm like, oh crap, I should probably pay attention to this. I have felt because of my, you know, we can go into it, but like, I love helping people with technology. One of my first jobs was working at a call center, helping the people there with their computers and their phones, connecting everything. When they got issues, I would— that was— there was that guy. There was a period of my life where I needed to add more responsibility and value to the world, so I created at the local library, I created like a tech help thing where the community would just come in, they would bring their laptops to their computers, some people even brought their printers, and I would just solve technology problems for them. So something about that just resonates with me. I have a whole lot of patience and I can take a lot of ambiguity and distill it and kind of get to whatever the core is of your question, your need, and be like, aha, I got the thing for you. Just do this, that, and the other thing, right? So there's something there for me and I know that. And with AI, I'm slowly, I'm like the reluctant hero, I think is one of the 4 attractive character types. And it's becoming more clear to me that like, God's put me in this place, in this moment, in this time, with these skills, with this experience, with this opportunity to help people of all sorts. So I see this, I'm like, okay, I can speak to this. I can, I can promote this authentically. I can create an offer that when people go into that and then they say, what did I just buy? They can come to me and I can help them navigate that and maximally put it into their life.

Similar to what you did with Linchpin.

Yeah.

Because that was the whole thing is linchpin is it's not the easiest thing to understand. Once you get it, you've got it down. There's a lot of components to it and you saw that as an opportunity and said, okay, hold on, I can help here. And similar with AI.

Yeah, I mean, I think, I don't know, I feel like we all just want to be valuable. We want to be valuable to, to others, you know, on some level. So I'm, I'm not the most whiz-bang guy. I'm not going to be able to start up a conversation, you know, cold. I'm not the best with icebreakers or, you know, that kind of thing. But with this stuff, understanding technology and helping people with it, it's like my bread and butter. So it's like I'm looking for opportunities to do that.

And then you're willing to shift and so on. And I think it's interesting that came down that call and you're like, this is next.

Yeah. Yeah. I, I don't know what's happening. Like, I'm not in charge, right? I have to be willing to shift if, if I feel called to do so, if an opportunity comes up, if, if someone needs help. And I can do it, I have an obligation to do it. Like, that's one of the reasons why I love Russell, um, is because, you know, you're ethically obligated to help people when, when you have an opportunity. It's like, what am I going to do, just sit, sit in the, you know, be selfish and be like, nah, figure it out? I can't. It's not an option.

So you do such a good job of that too in all of our communities and so on, whether it's, you know, even, even, okay, you know, like 2CCX or whatever, or Inner Circle or whatever. You're jumping in and I see these posts. Yeah, I see these posts where it's just like, hey, have you thought about this? And never are you like, hey, I can help you with that, or just reach out to me, and you're not selling. Why are you constantly going in and providing just these value things? Are those AI as well, by the way?

When I do my posts, I do like a brain dump. Now we're, you know, I'm talking to my computer more than I'm typing, which is a totally new thing that's transformed my life in the past couple of weeks. But I'll insert a nugget, and then I have a couple of different copywriting frameworks that the AI is trained on that I'll have it to help me to create that. But when I'm responding to people that need help in the community, firstly, it's a selfish thing. I get an ego boost.

Yeah.

When I help someone and I get that like, thank you, I feel great about myself. So that's, that's, there's that. But also, you know, I gave a presentation yesterday for the affiliates and My whole thing is just be valuable. Be so freaking valuable that when someone does need help, you're the go-to. You're the person that people point to.

It's a long game. It takes a long time to get there.

Well, if you're not willing to play the long game, like, what are you doing, right? Yeah, like, I don't want to talk to you. Like, if you're here to just jump in and jump out, then you're not adding value to the world, you know? Yeah.

So what are your levers of value? I guess I'll ask you that from wearing a marketer's hat and then wearing a software hat, or maybe it's both the same hat. When you're looking at this, find others who've done the thing, model the success that they've already had, right? But then what levers do you pull so that you can actually deliver more value than that person?

I think a lot of times it's translation. And that was my whole thing during this Marketing Secrets AI thing. I, I, I was able to take whatever, you know, I showed up for all the days and I would translate it and share a transcript and the translation from like a developer's perspective that I gave to my people. But I think one of the things that I'm doing is I am on YouTube and I'm watching people that are super close to, like they're in Silicon Valley or whatever, they're super close to what's actually happening. Then I can take it in, filter it through my lens, and then project that into the people that I, that I serve. That's, that's, that's my main thing. How can I distill this into a way with layman's language, uh, with examples that solve problems that the people that I serve have? That's, that's the whole game. I'm taking it, it's like this conduit. Take it, put it through me, and I kind of bounce it around and then project it out to the world. And so when people think of AI and, you know, writing code, they may not be that interested in it. But if, you know, we're talking about AI and making funnels, it's like I want more funnels. I want cheaper funnels. I want better funnels. So if I show them how to do that, then they're going to pay attention.

Absolutely.

We've talked a lot back and forth, but I think that there is a landscape, you know, there's a funnel landscape that's been a certain way for a long time. But I want to know your opinion on like what the current landscape is. And there's people who are, who are fearful right now, you know, maybe they got all their funnels done and but, but there's a landscape that we have to deal with now. Talk about what that is and maybe what the future holds in your opinion.

I think, you know, there's a lot of trepidation in the Funnel Builder community about people who are building funnels by themselves without needing them. And my answer to that is like, well, those people were probably not going to hire you anyway because those are very resourceful people. They're more DIY people. Home Depot exists, right? So, so do contractors. So the people that are willing to package something up for you, how much of that responsibility do you want to take on as an individual business owner? You want to be the one to keep track of all that stuff?

Go for it.

You've got your agent, go for it. You want someone to just handle that for you so you can focus on other things? Talk to my guy. Yeah. You know, so I think that dichotomy will always exist. I think that funnel building is in a flux state right now. There are not clear-cut tools, and one is going to launch today, I think, from our friend Todd Dickerson in the other room. Yeah. To build apps and funnels. But it's always going to be a big mess of opportunity. And you can like move the slider towards, you know, more custom and more, more individual tools and kind of move it over here to where you have just maybe one platform. I do think it's important to, regardless of how you create the thing, it needs to be tied to infrastructure that you don't want to replicate. People are saying software is dead, right? Oh, I can, I'm going to come up with everything. Well, you're not going to come up with a payment processor. Stripe will not die. You're not going to send text messages. You're not going to send emails. Those are infrastructure, right? You're not going to want to send emails. You're not going to want to, to, to deal with the integrations and all those things. ClickFunnels as a backend is totally key to everything that I do. If I build something in Lovable, I am connecting to ClickFunnels via API. I'm sending the contact over there and I'm tagging them to trigger a workflow to send out the email number 1, email number 2. There's an opt-in that happens in some other platform. I'm tagging them in ClickFunnels, sending out the abandoned cart sequence until they come through and buy. Like, all that stuff still exists. You don't want to vibe code that so you can come up with front ends for that and whatever you want, but you want to be tied to infrastructure, be kind of an anchor, still like a main, a main thing. Yeah, because the thing is, ClickFunnels has been keeping websites up and running with incredible demand, with surges that happen when things turn viral for a very long time. You're not going to be able to replicate that with your free web hosting and the thing that Clogged Code came out with. So don't try, you know, leave that to the big boys.

Wow, that's, that's big.

Yeah, that actually is big because I know a lot of people right now, they're literally thinking about this in how can I make an email autoresponder? Right. How can I make some— my own payment gateway for whatever reason? And they're making it so much harder than it has to be.

Go out there. I mean, if you can do it, more power to you, but you're probably going to fail. You're probably going to fall on your face, which is, you know, no, that's the entrepreneur way. That's not a problem. That's how we learn, right? It's like you go too far, you know, actually, yeah, I need to not do that. Let me just go ahead and do this. I'd rather pay the percentage to have you handle this because you don't want to get into regulations and PCI compliance and all that stuff.

That's a whole other thing.

No. No, it's a whole other thing.

James, tell me again, one, why though do you continue to still stick with ClickFunnels and Russell and Todd Dickerson? Because you're one of the 1,000 true fans. We've seen it. We've seen you scale this value ladder. Tell us a little bit why you're, you're one of those.

It's, um, it's a bit of a spiritual thing. Which is interesting. I'm going to spend 10 seconds talking about this.

Please do.

I wasn't spiritual. I didn't have a connection to God 3 or 4 years ago. And through FHL, through Russell and Todd Dickerson, through seeing all these people that were ethical, they were leading their people, being responsible and making a lot of impact in the world. I had a shift of like, there's something that I'm missing here. I need to be humble and see what's happening and just be open to being wrong. And I had a complete conversion as a result of lots of bad things in my life. But, but this community was part of it. So I'd say they are responsible people making impact in the world despite everything that comes at them. And they're my guys, my ride or die.

So you mentioned something I think that's very, very interesting, that as AI continues to grow, there's something that can't be replaced is that community. And that is what makes, in my mind, ClickFunnels stand out above and beyond everything else is the community.

100%.

And the people that you've met, especially when you get into the levels that you have.

Yep.

Right? I mean, you've met countless people, you know, that have changed things for you. I think that's key. I think at some point there's a pendulum swing that's like, hold on, everything is so robotic and AI, like, do we come back to that? You know, humanity. How do we hold on to that?

Support each other and be empathetic toward each other and lead each other and inspire each other. Healthy competition, like all of it. You get that through, you know, person-to-person interactions.

So funny you mentioned that Funnel Hacking Live 2022 was such a shift for you too. How did you feel when Funnel Hacking Live was retired? Like with Funnel Hacking Live 10?

You know, definitely bittersweet. I was happy to be there. Yeah. You know, because I could say I was there. But it definitely felt like there was a void. Fortunately, being in the coaching programs and things, I knew that I was gonna be going to events and connecting. So I wasn't losing that much, but there's something to be said about getting a bunch of people in the room and having the stages and the lights and the speakers and all that. It's a transformational couple days, so.

It is. I love it and I'm so glad that it's coming back. It's funny 'cause we do these segments, right? We do these segments, we jump in and we do these rapid fires and usually it's sponsored by something and this time it is too. So it's funny that we say FHL as this is coming up right now. So we're gonna bring you rapid fire questions by Dante, but this is brought to you by Funnel Hacking Live. If you do not have your tickets for September in Las Vegas, go to funnelhackinglive.com/ai and get in the room where everything happens in a world of AI, in a world of chaos. This is real life people in real community that you can collaborate with and completely change your life. I mean, so many stories on ClickFunnels Radio start with just like James too. Like I was sitting in Funnel Hacking Live and something happened and something changed. So funnelhackinglive.com/fhl, get your ticket now. But with that, we're gonna bring you rapid fire questions. Are you ready, Dante?

Let's do it.

Let's do it.

First question. If I'm just getting started, should I be learning how to build funnels the right way, or should I be learning how to build apps right now?

I'd say it's depending on whether, um, what problem you want to solve and who you want to serve. Um, an app may not be something that— if you're just going to do high-ticket coaching, then where you're coaching one-on-one, then you might not need an app. That said, companion apps are a thing. I just helped my wife Vibe Code an app that she's going to be using for her clients so that in between calls that they have a journal and a way that they can interact with the AI version of her. Funnels are less complex, so probably start there. Hmm.

Okay.

I want to know what's the most overrated piece of marketing advice you've heard or you hear in the marketplace? Maybe.

I don't know. I don't think in terms of what's overrated or not, I try to, try to filter out what doesn't apply and, and just focus on, on what I'm doing. I'd say one thing that kind of seems overrated but is legit, I think, is consistency. I think the more that you're consistent, you, you demonstrate trust to people when you show up publicly consistently, and they, they trust that you're going to actually deliver on whatever you promise.

What's your favorite marketing principle, something that you follow like every day?

Again, consistency. I put out a post every single day. Um, it was as a result of, of a bet with a friend. Um, but doing that has been transformational because it requires me to come up with a new spin on current events or what I've been doing that day. Um, and I think, yeah, again, it demonstrates trust, so it's an important principle. Hmm.

If I'm anti-AI, should I stay anti-AI, or am I making a mistake?

I believe you're making a mistake. There is a notion called the K-shaped economy, which is something that, uh, if you are without this, then you will be less valuable in the future and things will be harder for you. Jump on the AI bandwagon. We ain't going back.

Yes, we want things up and to the right.

Yep.

Yes, 100%. Okay. What tools, what, what AI, what LLMs are you using to amplify your funnel building right now inside of your ClickFunnels account?

Right now I'm building individual— well, I build an HTML web page and then from there it gets transformed into a funnel. So I'm using Claude Code for that right now. I've used a little bit of Claude Design, but In the end, it kind of doesn't matter. They're all good enough to create HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. From there, you translate it into a funnel. So the advantage of taking this approach is you just can cut the time that it takes to get something up there, because an LLM can create a page in under a minute, where it might take you, you know, 30 minutes to an hour, um, if you know what you're doing. And if you're not sure, it might take longer than that. So speed to execution through these tools is the key.

Yeah, make the test, get it up, get the data, make a decision, move on.

Yep.

Yeah, and I, I love that you, you hit on that. I think speed is everything, is how fast can we find the winning version, right? And then we optimize that and just pour fuel on the fire with ads and everything else.

Yep.

Yeah. As we wrap, James, I just want to give you an opportunity to— people are going to be intrigued, they love what you do, and they want to learn more about you. Where, where do they find you?

Well, you can find me on Facebook. You can reach out and I'll connect with you. But I really want to bridge the gap with AI as much as possible. So you can go reach out to appsandfunnels.com.

Appsandfunnels.com.

Yep.

James, you're the man. Thanks for being such a, like, loyal member of the ClickFunnels family too. We love you. You're a go-giver. I've said that before. Like, that's a true thing where you just keep pouring in and pouring into this community. And thank you, man. Thanks for being a great guest again on ClickFunnels Radio. We'll catch you next time.

Thank you so much for having me.