(modern music plays)
- Hey, what's up!
- [Cameraman] (laughs) What's up.
- Here's what's happening.
We're going inside to get cleaned up,
and then we're heading over to the cigar bar,
then we're coming back, waking up at 6:30,
jumping in a plane, going to Joel's,
and then doing the podcast thing there,
then jump back in a plane, and going back to your house
and then our house
in 24 hours.
The goal's to get everybody here to promote
"Traffic Secrets" book, hopefully.
So we got a couple copies right here--John's got.
- [Cameraman] Perfect.
- Whoa.
- [Cameraman] Perfect.
- (stammers and laughs)
- [Cameraman] I want it.
(upbeat horn music)
- [Cameraman] So is there video evidence of this...
- Of Russell throwing me down and breaking my neck?
I don't have it, no.
And no one will ever see it.
- Came to Florida to hang out with Schefren a couple times,
but we filmed the infomercial here.
- [Cameraman] Really? - Yeah!
- [Cameraman] What was it?
- You haven't seen the infomercial?
- [Cameraman] Which one?
- It's real bad.
The only infomercial I ever did.
It was horrible.
- [Announcer] Have you ever dreamed of working from home
but didn't know how to get started?
Are you finally ready to be truly taught for the first time
in your life by a true internet millionaire?
If you've answered yes to any of these questions,
the next few minutes can literally change your life!
- Oh you didn't see it?
Yeah, nobody did.
(laughter)
There was Schefren.
He's one of the OGs in our space
back when I was first learning this game.
He recently sold his company to Agora.
Now him and Agora are working together on a big project
where they're doing internet marketing newsletters.
It's kinda cool.
And hopefully we can talk about click phones
on the newsletters.
- What are the three surprises that stood out
of all the surprises as far as
things that you just never knew you were gonna ha--
was gonna be on your plate?
Are there things like that?
- I think the biggest one--it was actually--
do you remember when we spoke in London?
A year into ClickFunnels.
I don't know if you remember this, but we were flying
over the ocean, and you know, you have no cell phone access.
We were flying, and we land in London.
My wife, my kids are all with me,
and I get my phone hooked back up to the internet,
and I have hundreds, maybe thousands, of messages
coming in from people who loved me when I left
and were death-threating, wanting to kill me afterwards,
and I'm like, "What's happening?"
and I messaged Todd, who's my co-founder, and he's like,
"ClickFunnels is down, and we can't figure out
"what's happening," and I was just like, "Oh my gosh."
This is a year into it, and I remember he said something
on the phone: he said, "If we're able to get
"the software back up," and all I heard was the word "if,"
and I was like, "I'm supposed to be speaking tomorrow
"at an event talking about--"
I'm just freaking out.
And I remember going to the hotel that night with my wife
and my kids; everyone's tired, and I kinda put 'em
in another room, and I was like--
This is my first time at leadership where I was just like,
"I don't know what to do.
"Do I hide?
"Do I come out and say something?
What do I do?"
And I decided I'm just gonna do a Facebook Live
to our community, and I'm not gonna be
trying to hide behind it.
I'm gonna show 'em how pissed I am and how ups--
how it's just not okay.
And we did a Facebook Live from the hotel room,
and I just, again, came out and was just like,
"This was unacceptable.
It's not okay what's happening.
I'm upset, you should be upset.
I get it. I apologize.
We're trying to figure this out.
We end up being now about eight hours
before we got things back up, and I assumed that
that was the end of the business, people were gonna
walk away.
And every morning I get an email with the sales numbers and
cancellations to kinda see what's happening,
and there was literally no dip in cancellations
during that time.
And I was like, "Oh my gosh."
I realized that people and your customers are on your side
as long as you're not trying to hide stuff from them, right?
The more you come out and like, "This is what's happening,
"This is why it's happening," I think that was one of
the big lessons early on that I was just like--
- [Interviewer] There's more than two things
I greatly admire about you, but these two things I question.
I wonder how you do it.
The one thing is, I think you have this magical gift
to simplify.
Like if I would've wrote "Dot Com Secrets," it would've been
double the length.
(laughter)
and I think you've done that in all your presentations too.
You just have this way of simplifying stuff.
And then the other thing was is that I also think--
and you know this story--but you just have mastery of
creating an offer.
Best strategy and simplification or offer creation.
- Okay, I'll start with the first question,
'cause it actually plays back in.
It is like literally simplification of our sales process.
Because I'm the creative who likes to create funnels
which is a pro and a con.
We have really good funnels; the con is like, we've got
too many funnels.
And I remember last year, John, who runs our traffic
sitting here right in front of us, asked him, I was like:
"In a perfect world, how many funnels per year
"would you like from me?
"I can pump out one a week, one a day; let me know."
And he looked at me and he's like, "Two,"
and I'm like, "Two? A week?
"Like how often?" and he's like,
"No, two this year would be all that we need."
And I'm like, "Wait, what?"
(stammers)
and it broke me; I'm like, "What do you mean?"
He's like, "We can't optimize all the traffic
"to 40 different funnels."
He's like, "If you give us two and then you focus--
"instead of making 40 funnels,
make 400 adds for each funnel."
He's like, "That'll grow ClickFunnels faster
than anything else."
And so for me it was like coming back and looking at our
palette of offers and stuff and be like,
"I gotta kill some babies," because it's too complex
for the company, and then my mind shares
in all these different things, and so we're literally
coming and shutting things off to "here's the focal point,"
and then my job, instead of making new funnels is:
"What's the creative we can make and just put people in."
But I think it depends a lot on the business,
but I think traditionally--it's funny 'cause we talk a lot
about a value add, like having a book for release
to webinar to high ticket--but typically
in the middle is the best place to start 'cause
it's easier to make profit on adds.
If you're selling a $1,000 product, it's way easier than
if you had a "free plus shipping" product
when you gotta have this funnel to optimize like crazy
to get it to break even so you can sell the next thing.
So I think it's figuring out what's the thing that's gonna
be the most money up front and focusing on that first.
- That helps you scale better because
you're bringing in money.
Before you leave though, let's catch up for two minutes.
- [Russell] It's interesting 'cause when we all got started
back in the day, it was really hard.
There was no--I don't even remember how we drove traffic
back in the day.
There wasn't Facebook or Instagram.
And then some of these tools came out and became easier.
In fact, I just finished my third book called
"Traffic Secrets" and one of the first chapters is called
"There's a Storm Coming," and I think that the internet
has been really easy for the last decade, and I think
it's gonna get harder.
We saw, 10-15 years ago, Google with the Google slaps
and all the things that happened, I think the same things
are happening on social--I'm seeing some people losing
their Facebook accounts and things like that.
So I think it's definitely getting--a storm's coming,
and it's really the people who understand the fundamentals
of business are the ones who are gonna stick past it.
People that know how to run a Facebook ad and sell offer,
that's the easy stuff, and that's in the season we're in
right now, but winter's coming, storms are coming,
things are changing, and the people who actually
understand fundamentals are gonna be the ones that
survive it and thrive throughout it.
I think there's gonna be a lot of people who are gonna
get caught and not understand the strategies
if they're not preparing themselves now.
That's a good question.
I think for me, a lot of where--
I tell people all the time that the best way to see
what's actually working is to try to feel the pulse
of the market like what's actually happening.
So for me, for example, I go into Facebook and Instagram
and I unsubscribed from all of my friends; I subscribe to
people who I think are doing well, and then I start
watching what they're doing.
I'm not watching what they're saying, I'm watching
what they're doing, what are they posting.
And then from the things they're posting,
what's getting comments, what's getting shares,
what's not, what's happening.
And then I'll go through the funnel, actually buy
the product and see how I--I try to notice how I felt.
So I think for me, it's a lot of...
It's listening differently, trying to feel the pulse
of the market by really paying attention to what's happening
because it's shifting so much.
And I don't think anyone really knows a lot of the times.
Everyone's trying a lot of things, and I think
the biggest thing we can do is be watching, observing,
and then looking at the patterns and see what's working
and then modeling those things, but not copying.
Modeling 'em as a core idea, but then always
trying to innovate on it.
I think one of the biggest problems is most people
in their market are all copycats.
So someone comes up with an idea and they see it
and it's this pattern interrupt that--all of a sudden
it's working 'cause it's like the pattern interrupt,
and everyone's like, "Ah, that thing worked,"
and then they start copying, copying; soon it's like
the pattern interrupt becomes the pattern and
it stops working.
Nowadays, it's like we have to shift creative.
Every week we have new adds, new things hitting
'cause they'll work, they become the pattern interrupt,
they're working for a while and then, obviously,
all my communities see what we're doing and they're like--
they're copying as fast as we're pumping stuff out.
So we're always--what I do to try to figure it out is
I look at other industries besides my own,
like what's happening in the fitness industry and in the
this industry, and we'll look at all over the place and
try to just get ideas from everywhere, not just from
our market, 'cause there's people innovating
different places.
I still remember the very first hand sketch video
that came out.
It was Mike Geary with The Truth About Abs.
He did this thing, and I saw that over there
'cause I was following all the fitness guys, and I saw it
and I was like, "Oh my gosh!"
I found the guy who did it, hired him.
He did the first--our first one.
We were the first in our market to have a hand-doodled ad
and it worked so good for so long 'cause no one knew
who it was, but then probably six months later,
people found out and they all started doing it
and then it became the pattern that stopped working.
Meme videos were the same way.
We had a bunch of clients in the weight loss space
who were doing meme videos.
They were crushing it and nobody was doing it in our world.
So I go, "Okay, if we start memeing videos"--
and they were just crushing it like,
"I hope nobody sees this," but eventually everyone sees it,
and then now your whole feed's full of those.
So it's looking for other inspiration outside of just
your market of like what ideas that we can try and
we can test, and then you got a window where you can
become the pattern interrupt 'til it becomes the pattern.
But that's the game of marketing.
It's always constant innovation, and it's fun.
And, I think back in the day, people had to innovate
once every couple years.
Now we need to do it a couple times a week,
so it makes it fun.
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