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Welcome to the Marketing Seekers Podcast. My name is Russell Brunson, and I'm what you call a serial entrepreneur, but with a twist. You see, 50% of my time, I'm the CEO of ClickFunnels, helping over 100,000 brands to grow their companies with funnels. And the other 50% of my time, I'm actually in the trenches using ClickFunnels to grow the startups I believe in. During this podcast, I'll take you behind the scenes and show you how we are bootstrapping ClickFunnels and my other businesses from startup to nine figures and beyond. Welcome to the show.
What's up, everybody? This is Russell. Welcome back to Marketing Secrets Podcast. Hope you guys are having a great day, week, month, year, wherever you are at right now. I want to jump in here because I want to go back to the basics for a few minutes. And the reason why is because obviously the ClickFunnels team has grown. We have, I don't even know, 3, 400 employees now.
contractors, all kinds of stuff. And anyway, and there's a million different things that we're doing, right? From building funnels, writing copy, driving traffic, doing customer support, doing like a million things. Right. And it's interesting because like, obviously it's, it's physically impossible for me to jump into every department and look, everyone's doing all kinds of stuff. But like whenever I,
do go into whatever section or department or thing, it's fascinating to me that like the same, the same thing is the answer to almost every single problem. And the answer is funnel hacking, which is funny because most people think funnel hacking is just to build funnels. But I want to talk about like the concept of what funnel hacking is, because I think this is what a lot of people are missing. And so I want to give this to you because this will hopefully help shortcut everything in your life. Okay. So what is funnel hacking? Um,
The concept came about because back in the day when I was trying to figure out how to do funnels and we're creating these things, like, um, I would never sit down at a blank page, like what should I do on the first page? What should the second page be? Right? Like what I would do is I'd go and I'd look for inspiration. Um, in fact, I remember when we were building click funnels, um,
one night it was Todd, Dylan Jones and me, um, we're in Boise working on something and Todd was programming ClickFunnels. Dylan was, um, designing the UI and the editor and that kind of stuff. And I was writing a copy and it was, you know, man, it was probably two or three in the morning. We were working all night long. And, um, so I was working on a copy and,
And for some sales letter VSL or something that we were doing and I was like, I spent four or five hours. I was just looking at thousands, not thousands, hundreds of different video sales letters. I'm looking at it. I'm watching him. I'm listening to him. And, um, it's interesting because I think that, you know, we were in a small office. We're all sitting together and, um, probably three or four hours in Dylan walked over to me and he's like,
He's like, I've been like watching or hearing your process for the last couple hours. He's like, it's so fascinating because your process is the same as my process. I'm like, what do you mean? You're, you're designing code and, and UI and stuff like that. And,
And he's like, you know, for me, when I do UI, it's like, I don't just sit down and make up UI and comes out top of my head. He's like, I go to sites like dribble.com and different places. He's like, I'll look at a thousand people who designed different UIs for this app or for that or for that. And I look at them and then I go to different software, different things. I look at a thousand things to create the ideas that I'm going to have.
I was like, that's just like me. I'm like, I don't just write a sales letter. Like I sit down and I listened to 10,000 sales and I transcribed my outline. Like what was the structure? What was the this and the that and the bubble boom and all the different things. Right. And I take all that. And then from there, then I go and I create my, my version.
Right. Well, I think people think funnel hacking is, um, unfortunately they, they look at one of my funnels, they look at it and they, they copy it. Like that's not funnel hacking. Um, funnel hacking is, is like looking at all of the inspiration out there and looking at it closely and, and, and,
what do they say? Someone said this once, like if you're, if you copy from one person, it's plagiarism. You copy from a lot of people, it's, it's creativity or something. I don't know some version of that, but that's the key is like looking at a whole bunch of stuff. So what funnel hacking is, is like, let's say I'm going to go launch a book, but I don't do is I don't look at Russell's book funnel, copy it. What I do is I go try and find 50 book funnels. And I literally do this every time we launch a new funnel. First step, step number one is funnel hacking. We
We literally go and say, Oh, we're doing a webinar funnel. We're doing this. Even though I've done a million webinar funnels, we go down and we go and find all the webinar funnels that are active right now. All the ones we see people running ads to all the ones that look like they're working.
We make a Trello board, we throw them all in there and we look at them all and we look at the hooks and the angles and the colors and the layout, the design, the copy, like all the stuff. And from all that research, then we create ours, right? It's interesting. We've been hiring, you know, people help on our social media team, both on YouTube and Instagram and things like that. And they're doing a great job. But a lot of times they're coming in and they're trying to just think through and be creative, right? And like writing their own scripts, writing little things. I'm like, ah, this is good. But like,
Step number one, if I'm going to do Instagram, if I'm going to do reels, I'm going to go look at 50, 100, 200 different people's reels, look at all of it, and then from there, create something amazing. What most people are doing right now is they go and they see Hermosi, who's killing it on Instagram, and they copy him. Everyone's just copying Hermosi. Or they go see someone else and they just copy it. It's like, man, funnel hacking is so much more than that. It's looking at all the things. Same thing, we're putting in many chat, putting a new many chat thing and
I think the default was, um, people were like, okay, I'm gonna sit down and write a mini chat sequence. And they wrote it, sent me, I'm like, Mike, this is good. But the way to make it great is like, I'm like, how many people did you funnel? Like how many, how many mini chat followup sequences did you look at? It was a 10, 20, 50, a hundred. Like how many did you look at before you started writing the first one? Like that's what people are missing, right? Customer support. It's like, I don't know how to do this customer support thing. It's like, okay, well, you know, how many people did you look at? How many, how many other, like,
I don't know, like every department, every single thing, like that's the key, right? How do I become good at podcasts? How do I become good at videos? How do I become good at like any role? Like the key is coming back and saying, is understanding like to be successful, the step, first step is funnel hacking. It's the eight hours of me looking at every book funnel known to man before I start my book funnel. That's where success comes from. It's the eight to 10 hours of me looking at video scripts and copy and we're going through swipe files and reading headlines and looking at, um, the highest converting ads and
Um, before I read my first ad, like that's the secret, right? That's what most people are missing. Most people look at one person, they copy it, or they just try to be creative off the top of their head or whatever the thing might be. And they're missing, they're missing the rest of it. Right.
And so, um, that's what I want to just kind of bring back to you today is just like this concept of funnel hacking. Like before you do anything, before you write an ad for an email, before you do anything, the first step is never to start writing or start designing or start coloring or start whatever your thing is. Right. The first step is spend that first eight hours and eight hours may be like an over-exaggeration, but it might also be an under-exaggeration. It might be two or three days. Like right now I am, I've been working out on my secrets to success book literally for
four years. I think I signed the contract with it. It's still not done. Um, and I keep writing it, rewriting and tweaking it. And so it just hasn't been come good yet. And then last night, um, I was talking to, uh, Annie Grace, Eileen Wilder, and we're talking, we have a Voxer group where we talk about just nerdy stuff that gets us all excited. And, um,
We start talking about my book again and, and, and like, I looked at like the way I wrote the.com secret expert secrets and traffic seekers book where one very was like, uh, there's a style how I wrote them, but I think I've been struggling with this new books. I've been trying to write my new book in that style. And I was like, what are the books that sell the most? And we were talking about this and, and I had ideas like, I bet if I structure like this, like the books that I've heard of this, how they structured it.
And then I lean out there and start funnel hacking. She pulled back like 50 of the best selling books of all time. They all follow that structure. And Andy jumped on and she's like, Hey, do you notice how I did my book here? And she's like, notice how Rachel Halston girl, watch your face. You notice how Jordan Peterson did here. And like, and she was showing me the structure of the books in this one, that one, that one. And I was like, Oh my gosh. And so like I spent the last 24 hours funnel hacking how to structure the layout of my book, the content, the ideas, the stories.
And like from that process, like Annie was able to pull out three or four different frameworks. I'd never heard it before. I literally, I took Girl, Wash Your Face and Girl, Self-Apologize and Rachel Hollis' two books. And again, Girl, Wash Your Face sold like 10 million copies, one of the best selling books of all time. Like what does she do to make it such a best selling book? And so I put on Audible and Forex Speed and I had the book and I put it to play and I started speed reading. And I sped right at the introduction and the first three or four chapters. And I did the same thing with the other book. And all of a sudden I was like, oh, I got it.
That's what she did. That's how she structured it. I missed it every single time. But now because I'm doing it back to back to back. I looked at Jordan Peterson's two books. Same thing. I started looking at, I started fun hacking all these different authors. And I realized the way to make a best selling book in this genre is different. And it was fascinating. And so, yeah, that's just kind of what I wanted to
to bring to you guys is just this concept of funnel hacking that it's not just for building funnels it's for everything in your business in your life and all the things right find out who's successful find out the you know the 10 20 30 50 as many people as you can find and spend 8 to 10 to 12 to 24 hours 48 hours whatever that is ahead of time and then you go you start writing then you go and start structuring right um i'm just like one little thing i learned from girl wash your face and girl stop apologize like i was just like one little nugget was like
the structure of the entire book was based on one principle, one or maybe one theory, like one theory. And the introduction, like, like introduce that theory hands on silver platter. And the rest of the book is trying to prove that one thing. And it's like, Oh, that's so cool. That is so cool to see, to see that pattern that would have missed because I'm just writing a book like everybody else, right? Looking for the patterns. That's the funnel hacking is about looking for the patterns. And then also part of it's like looking for the patterns you can model, but then Paul,
The other side I think is like looking outside of your, especially funnel hacking, like I'm looking outside of my specific market to find ideas, right? Like everyone in the internet marketing space has kind of copied my book funnel. So it's like, there's not a lot of new creativity. It's just like something everyone copies it. But I go to the health space, I go to some other spaces and I start seeing what they're doing and they're bringing in unique things that aren't being done other places. And so I can take those ideas and innovate by moving them from one industry to another. Does that make sense? So anyway, yeah.
Funnel Hacking 101. Maybe this is Funnel Hacking 201. I don't even know. But it's there in every aspect of your business, everything you're doing. Train yourself. Train your teams. Train your people. I'm going to do another training with my entire team going a little deeper on this concept of funnel hacking and helping them to understand it. Because I think now that we've grown to this many people, it's people that... When you first build a company, every employee, every hire, and then eventually gets to the point where you don't know the people who hired the people who hired the people because it's grown so big. And it's like...
So I want to come back and I'm going to plan on with our team next month is going deep into this with everybody and getting everyone from every department thinking about what they do through this lens of funnel hacking. So I want to share with you guys today. I hope this helps.
and go out there, funnel hack, whatever you're doing. Um, pause, if you're stuck, you're doing now, like pause, go out and funnel hack, which means again, find 10, 20, 30, 50 people who are already successfully doing what you're doing. Look at it, get ideas, get inspiration from there. Then step back into your work and you'll see, um, the, the results of what you're creating dramatically magnified because you did the funnel hacking process prior to the execution of the thing you're creating. Hope that helps you guys. Appreciate you all. And, uh, we'll talk to you all again next week. Bye everybody.
