For most, Silicon Valley is a hotbed of technological productivity, teeming with a sea of startups, each clamoring for the attention of both consumers and venture capitalists. Yet, located some 670 miles northeast from the world's most infamous birther of global tech behemoths and newly-minted startups, sits a little town in Boise, Idaho, which is now home to one of the hottest SaaS companies in the world.
However, as the virtual doors silently opened to ClickFunnels in 2014 -- Russell Brunson's innovative startup that has been silently revolutionizing the online marketing industry -- there wasn't a single VC in sight. There was no one there to make suggestions on sales strategies or attempt to influence Brunson's business plan to scale or flesh-out the platform in any shape or manner.
Nope. Not one. Brunson was on his own.
However, ClickFunnels, which was entirely self-funded by Brunson's Etison, LLC, launched amid a dazzle of emails that sent sizzling sales copy, enticing over 1 million people on his list to join his latest venture. Yes, you heard me. Over one million people. That's the size of Brunson's email list. And it's growing stronger by the day.
The competitive advantage that Brunson holds over your average founder is one of deep entrenchment in the internet marketing space. He lives, breathes and feeds off of the analytics, able to meticulously scrutinize sales copy, tightly twist and concoct high-converting offers, and pick apart the resultant traffic until he's created a proverbial cash machine.
As each cash machine comes online, he adds to an army of money-on-autopilot systems that are constantly enriching his vast and ever-growing digital empire while he sleeps. Yes, this is the stuff of legends. This is what dreams are made of. This is what draws in those reluctant 9-to-5'ers who envision a life lived according to their own means, one beyond all the corporate red-tape and bureaucracies of careerism.
As someone who's well-versed and deeply embedded in the online marketing space, I've been drawn to Brunson's drawl for some time now. What makes the man so alluring is his ability to be so transparent and his willingness to help those in a crowded space filled with cheerleaders tooting their own horns, trying to pitch you the latest dazzling make-money system or fad weight-loss diet.
In this field filled with one-hit wonders and smoke-and-mirror shows, a person like Brunson stands out. In fact, anyone in any industry who works to add value first and foremost will rise to the top. And that's precisely what Brunson has always aimed to do -- to add value to the lives of entrepreneurs looking to untether the cord from a full-time job that has them at the mercy of their corporate overlords.
The Early Days
Take one quick look at Brunson, and what you'll discover behind the boyish good looks and youthful demeanor, is a seasoned veteran in the internet marketing industry, able to command an army of wannabe entrepreneurs looking to enter into a space that will allow them to make money online and live a carefree lifestyle that involves the freedom to travel the world, earning an income at their will no matter where they might be on this planet.
I'll confess. I've been drawn into Brunson's hypnotizing webinars and well-place ads that beckon millions to join and salute his causes. I've long heard that voice, which is now a staple on social media sites, even being touted and promoted by the likes of the greats such as Anthony Robbins, Frank Kern and many others.
However, Brunson's earliest days -- we're talking a decade prior to the time when ClickFunnels even had become a thought in his mind -- were wrought with difficulties. He knew he needed to leverage the power of this thing called the internet, but just didn't know quite how he was going to do it.
In a USA Today and Amazon best-selling book released several years back entitled, Dot Com Secrets, Brunson broke down his earliest frustrations with these so-called internet businesses. He had always been fascinated with advertisements, and he would intensively study all the sales copy on ads that would arrive through direct mail at his home and on late-night infomercials, to understand how the best offers were structured.
He was a tinker. Always trying to figure things out. But in one of his earliest businesses, Brunson explains to me that things didn't go quite as planned. Back in 2002, while still attending Boise State, and as a married newlywed, Brunson's desires to make money online led him to launching a business that landed him in hot water.
At the time, pagers were the big thing. Everyone had a pager. Which got Brunson thinking. He decided to build a DIY screen projector for the wall. The parts cost him $10 and he knew he could sell it for $40. He printed out a bunch of flyers and started placing them on cars with his brother until campus security caught him and shut down his venture.
However, it had worked. His pager was ringing off the hook. Each time it went off, he knew he had made another $40. That got him thinking further. Why not create a small booklet that would teach people how they could make $40 every time their pager rang? The lightbulbs were going off in his mind and he knew he had a bright idea.
He decided to print out 10 copies at his local Kinko's and he created a small website with a little PayPal purchase button. Then, in order to reach out to the masses, he picked up a DVD of one million "spam-free" email addresses and crafted an email to sell his guide on how anyone could make $40 every time their page went off. He thought it was brilliant.
The night before he sent out his massive email blast, back when dial-up modems were still commonplace, Brunson told his wife not to worry about anything. They were going to be rich. And he assured his wife that she was going to be able to quit her job and that all their money problems would be solved. Before going to bed, he setup the system and the emails started going off one by one. It ran the entire night.
In the morning, his wife needed to make a phone call, so he needed to disconnect the internet since it was run over the phone. As soon as it was disconnected his phone rang. It was his ISP. The man on the other end was screaming at Brunson, telling him about all the complaints they had received and they had tracked those emails to his internet account.
Brunson swore they were spam-free email addresses. But that didn't matter. His internet was effectively cut off, leaving him crippled and unable to get back online. He couldn't check his email or do anything on the internet. Brunson slipped into a depression and told his wife not to quit her day job just yet.
Later that day, he headed to the library to check his messages. Little did he know that his experiment had worked. Although his ISP shut down his account, there were 30 orders for his booklet and money sitting in his PayPal account. That's when Brunson knew he was onto something.
After his earlier frustrations, Brunson's businesses took off. He was able to fashion a business out of almost anything. He even made hundreds of thousands of dollars by selling a potato gun guide on how to build a potato gun, complete with schematics and DVD. Yes, a potato gun. That's when Brunson realized the sheer power of the internet and his capacity to potentially make an obscene income online.
After years of tinkering with email marketing, Brunson perfected a number of systems that he still uses in his business today. They're called sales funnels. Beyond all the glitz and glamor of a sales page with its slick copy, resting behind the scenes in coding and automation, and at the heart of any successful internet marketer's business, is a software program that allows anyone, including Brunson, to sell on autopilot.
However, sales funnels were difficult to build. Brunson tells me his team would spend 4 to 6 weeks building out each funnel. That's where ClickFunnels was born. Originally, it was created to empower his team to build out funnels and websites far quicker than ever before. However, Brunson and co-founders, Todd Dickerson and Dylan Jones, knew they had something special here.
The system is, in fact, rather brilliant. It allows anyone to build a sales funnel by either using a templated version, or by creating your own. The templated versions allows for a variety of funnels for email opt-ins, product launches and webinar sites, amongst many others. Most of the well-known email and payment platforms are available as integrations to allow for high customization of your funnel.
After toying around with it myself for several weeks, I decided to duplicate one of Brunson's best-selling webinars. I replicated the sales funnel, changed the copy and personalized the entire system. I configured the affiliates section and build out the member's area. This was my big test, which I'm still in the middle of. The entire process to created Unlimited Traffic Secrets was all the matter of 3 to 4 hours of work, not including the content for the member's area.
While I haven't done a formal launch of the system yet, I intend to report back with the results. I'll outline the amount of hours spent building out the members area, and my specific blueprint on how I went about marketing and scaling it through the power of affiliates. I'll also report back with the full revenue numbers.
Overall, the ease of use is surprising. As a software engineer myself, I know just how difficult it is to build what Brunson has created here. That might be why over 40,000 members have signed up to ClickFunnels and climbing. The company, which has two membership levels at $97 per month and $297 per month, currently has approximately 18% of its members on the latter tier and the rest on the former. If you do the math that comes out to roughly $60 million per year.
Pretty outstanding to say the least. Brunson tells me that the year-over-year growth has been spectacular and hovering around the 300% mark. The first year after launching, ClickFunnels had 10,000 members and raked in approximately $10 million. The second year, that climbed to 30,000 members with about $30 million in revenues. This year, the company is on track to make $90 million. And it was all self-funded.
Brunson's earlier frustrations while attempting to build out sales funnels that featured complex interactions such as up-sells, down-sells and even one-time offers, along with the intricate emails that would go out along each step, laid the foundation for ClickFunnels. While the system was originally designed for Brunson and his team to use internally, he quickly realized the usefulness of the software.
In fact, over 250,000 people have registered to use ClickFunnels at one point or another. While there are only 40,000 current members, with its present rate of growth and constant feature additions that seem to be surfacing on a regular basis, this is surely on its way to a billion-dollar valuation over time.
What impressed me the most about ClickFunnels was actually its support. If you've ever used a SaaS platform, even if you found the software useful, you were likely frustrated with the support. With ClickFunnels, they've managed to reduce the support ticket answers to roughly 83 minutes. With 100+ people on staff and 40,000 members strong, that's pretty impressive.
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