Jay Schwedelson: We are back for do this, not that. And I, I got a, I got a big dude here. I really do. I got one of the biggest names out there. So who's here? We got Russell Brunson. Now, if you don't know who that is, I don't know who you are, but this guy, he didn't just build. This software company. Okay. He created an entire generation of online entrepreneurs.

Jay Schwedelson: And I'm not just saying that he's the co-founder of ClickFunnels, but everybody knows that already. And if you don't, ClickFunnels has over a hundred. 50,000 customers and its users have generated over $10 billion. That's like a B, that's a big deal. This all one platform, it lets people build these sequences and guide visitors to the single action.

Jay Schwedelson: And Russell's all about driving to outcomes. He's written all these books, he's done all these things. If you've ever heard the word. Funnel or offer stack or webinar launch or any of these things, it's Russell's fault. It's all his fault. We're gonna get into it all. Russell, welcome to the show, man.

Russell Brunson: Yeah, super glad to be here man. I appreciate you and um, I'm looking forward to this. It'll be fun.

Jay Schwedelson: Alright, awesome. Let, let's get into, for anybody out there, when we say the word funnel, like what does that mean? Is that the thing you pour like a drink into what? It's a ridiculous question to ask you of all people, but what exactly is a funnel?

Russell Brunson: A funnel cake. Yeah, a funnel. So, well, when I got started 20 years ago in this business, everyone had websites. And so I, I tried to put up a website and nothing happened. I didn't make any money. I was like, what's happening? And, um, I started meeting these guys who, uh, you know, I think a lot of co friends we have nowadays, but 20 years ago they're trying to figure out this internet thing and how do we make it work?

Russell Brunson: And I don't know who stumbled upon it first, but they found out that like. Um, a confused mind always says no. So if you give somebody like a bunch of options, a lot of 'em just do nothing. And so they're like, well, let's build, let's build, uh, a website, but make it where it's like there's only one page and there's only one thing you can do on it.

Russell Brunson: And then the next page, there's one thing you can do on it and like make it simple and walk 'em through a step-by-step process. And back then we didn't have a name for, we called it sales processes or whatever, but they were very simple websites that just, you know, the first page would. Have a headline and say, gimme your email if you want more information.

Russell Brunson: So you give an email, then go next page. And there was a video or a sales letter or something that would talk about something else and like, gimme a little money and I'll, I'll show you the next page. And it just walk 'em through a step-by-step process. And so that's what a funnel is. It's just, it's a really simple way to take your potential customers through a very strategic process that eventually helps them to become customers and hopefully become customers for life.

Russell Brunson: And, um, that's kind of a funnel. There's a million different ways to do funnels. It's hard to say just this, there's a ton of ways. But basically that's the gist is it's this very simple step-by-step process you take somebody through that makes it simple and easy for them, and helps you as the business owner collect the most amount of money and serve them at the highest level.

Jay Schwedelson: So as a broad statement when, uh, uh, you're looking at somebody's business, like, you know, we're, we're getting a lot of traffic to our site, or we think people keep talking about our stuff, we're just not making sales. Is it that their, their closing process, their actual sales process is just too complicated.

Jay Schwedelson: There's just too much noise as they get closer to actually closing that deal.

Russell Brunson: Yeah, a lot of that, or they're like, they'll see a video of you and they click on the thing and they go to your website and then there's like links and that and they're like, okay, I'm gonna go follow 'em on social. And then you go on this path and they just get lost. Versus like, okay, if I get someone's attention, I'm gonna take that.

Russell Brunson: And like I think about this, like if I met someone in the street and they're like, Hey, I'm trying to start a business. I'm like, oh, I can help you. Let me tell you the first thing and the second, and I would walk them through a process, right? I would never just be like, oh yeah, we'll go to the mall and there's a bunch of stuff.

Russell Brunson: Hopefully you'll figure it out like, but that's what we tend to do online. And so this is just basically taking somebody, it's like, it's like replicating the greatest salesperson of all time and just tell 'em what they need to make the first decision, what they need to make the second decision. You just kinda walk 'em through.

Russell Brunson: Very simple process.

Jay Schwedelson: So, alright. I've been watching you forever and there's a lot of stuff that you say that's kind of evergreen, that's like, okay, I could have watched it a year ago, two years ago. And it still makes a lot of sense, like what you just said right now, that'll work five years from now, but I'm just curious.

Jay Schwedelson: Everybody's, oh, everything's changing, the planet's changing, the world's different, whatever. So. In the last, you know, let's say 12 to 18 months, has anything like changed in your world in that whole process and what it is that you talk about? Or is it basically Nope. Still the same thing. No matter what's going on, no matter about AI or whatever.

Russell Brunson: Yeah. Well, nice thing is that human psychology doesn't change. We're still humans, right? And so for me it's changed dramatically. But the foundation's exactly the same. Like the structure I look at. We did a challenge, uh, two weeks ago. High converting thing I've done in my career to this point. Um. But if you look of the outside, the structure was identical.

Russell Brunson: Cool. Like, it's just like if you build a house, like the, the framing of the foundation, the framing, the house looked identical. But I think what, what I'm seeing now is that AI has given us the ability to write better copy, to make better videos, better persuasive arguments. And so, um, but the foundation doesn't change.

Russell Brunson: I mean, I look@my book DotCom Secrets that wrote a decade ago, and I'm going through to do an edit for like, they want me to do like an AI version update. And I'm going through, I'm like. This stuff's all the same. The only difference is I can use AI to speed up maybe writing the videos or, you know, knowing, you know, analyzing more people's stuff before I build my own.

Russell Brunson: But for the most part, a foundation doesn't change. Human psychology is the same whether AI is there or not. And so that's what I love about this is so many of the principles are evergreen, and I'm sure that someday instead of looking at monitors, we'll be on our phones instead of phones, maybe we're on goggles.

Russell Brunson: The psychology between like where I'm taking somebody, what I'm trying to get them to do, I think that'll be here forever. So that that part never changes, which is, which is kind of nice.

Jay Schwedelson: So, wait a minute. So you just had your, your greatest launch ever, all of that. What happened? What did you do? What did you do that you didn't do before? Why? Why was it a success?

Russell Brunson: Yeah. So for me, whenever I, I launch a new campaign or, or funnel or whatever, um, I have a process I call funnel hacking. So my people always call themselves Funnel Hackers. So I'll go and I'll, I'll look at, like, if I'm launching a book funnel, I'm gonna go and find. 200 other book funnels and look at 'em all and see what they did and then from that, try to take the best practice and make something really good.

Russell Brunson: But that takes a lot of time, right? So I was doing a five day challenge and um, and so I'm like, well, I know the structure of the five day challenge looks like, but I'm like, what are people doing now that. That I didn't know about. I haven't, I haven't seen. And so I was able to go and I found, I found about a dozen challenges that had done anywhere from 10 to a hundred million dollars in sales.

Russell Brunson: But if I would to watch all of 'em, they're like five day challenges, like five hours every day. Like it's so much to consume. So instead, I went and I transcribed. Every session of every single thing. We also set it up. So when we opted into it, we got every email, every text message, like just everything. And then we threw all that in.

Russell Brunson: AI is like, analyze this and tell us what you found out and then look at mine versus mine. Like, what are they doing different? What? And it just pulled out all these things like, oh well your VIP sessions at the end, which means you're getting off to it. Move your V-I-P-V-I-P sessions the first and try this, you off, you introduce your offer over here instead, try it over here.

Russell Brunson: And like, we just move the pieces around a little bit. The, the framework. Um. And then emails is like, you're only sending out X amount of emails. These people are sending out 90 emails. Like, here's the structure that you're missing. You know? So we were able to like identify all these amazing things, these best practices.

Russell Brunson: So we did our new version, took the same framework, but we kind of added in these new, like the, the things that we saw other people discovered and then ran ours and just, it was like night and day. It's like I feel like I, I was just a brand new beginner, uh, having, you know, 'cause it was just like I hadn't had success like that in so long.

Russell Brunson: And I was like, I just feel like I figured out a secret. And it just came from. Using AI's ability to scan through and look at a lot of data and then gimme back the best, the best of the best.

Jay Schwedelson: You know what's really cool about what you just went through? It's that, um, you don't, you, you, you grind, right? You just, you just went through a series of things where you were like, I basically worked my butt off. I gathered all this stuff. I didn't use some crazy AI tool that nobody has access to. It's like whatever everybody has access to, and you grind and you put it in there and you made whatever yours was better.

Jay Schwedelson: If there's, am I, is it fair to say that anybody out there can literally do what you just did to improve their business?

Russell Brunson: A hundred percent. It's so simple now because, um, I get, like for us humans, we, we had to wade through a lot of stuff to find like the, the nuggets. In fact, I had a, I can't tell you the person's name is, but there's this guy who I was gonna hire for consulting. He wanted $150,000 plus 10% of everything that this thing we were building made.

Russell Brunson: And I was like, oh, that's a lot of money. So I went to his YouTube channel and he had a whole bunch of really smart videos, him talking about what he does. So I just took the videos, I uploaded 'em to, uh, I use Manis, which is one AI, and I uploaded, I said, transcribe all these videos. It transcribed all the videos.

Russell Brunson: I took the transcripts. I put it into Claude. Those are the two that I only two that I really use. And I was like, I was like, read all these and tell me what it's saying. And then I was like. It became like a consultant. I asked a couple, like, if you were, if, if I hired you as, as a consultant based everything, you know, for all these, all these YouTube videos, what would you do in the situation?

Russell Brunson: And it'd just tell me, I'm like, wow, that cost me $0. And I got, I believe it as good as if not better than I would've got if I would've paid him the consulting fee. So for me, I'm doing the same thing. Like I wanna learn something. I'm like, okay, who's wrote the, who wrote the book about it? Usually I would go read the book and try to like.

Russell Brunson: Get the information from them, maybe I would hire them to, but I might read the book, find their YouTube videos, find their podcasts, have AI analyze everything, and then let me ask it questions as if it's a consultant. And it doesn't cost, I mean, it cost you whatever, 20 bucks a month for the AI to, to run it.

Russell Brunson: It's like the cheapest employee ever.

Jay Schwedelson: That's amazing. That's amazing. Yeah. If you took every one of my podcasts you uploaded, you'd find out every bad TV show I watch. So I don't know, you get a lot of consulting out of it, but that's okay. Uh, I wanna pivot here for a second though, 'cause I've now seen you say something over and over again. It sticks in my mind, which is webinars.

Jay Schwedelson: You have this video out there that says if you do a webinar every week right, for a year, you will be financially well, you'll be doing great financially. Okay. What is that? What is going on there? Because I literally could see the video in my mind. It's everywhere. So good marketing, but what is with you and webinar and doing them a.

Russell Brunson: So webinars is, um, like I did webinars a lot in my early career. That's, you know, first we would speak on stages and then we were doing teleseminar. Then it became webinars. But I would just kind of do 'em sporadically. I have an idea for an offer, make a webinar, sell it, and then, and maybe I'd do the webinar to one of my friends list and it would be kind of done.

Russell Brunson: And it never really like it Wasn. I mean, it's kind of what a lot of people experienced the webinars. Yeah, I did. I made some money. It was, it was great. But when I launched ClickFunnels was, it was interesting 'cause um, my business partner Todd Dickerson, who built ClickFunnels, you know, he, he had spent so much time on it.

Russell Brunson: So, uh, he was like, I need you to focus on just this for a year. If you focus on just like, 'cause I'm a DD entrepreneur, I'm doing 50 things. He's like, just focus on this for a entire year. And I was like, okay, I promise you I'll focus on this just for a year. And so the way we launched it is, I, I, I wrote a webinar.

Russell Brunson: We launched it and it worked. Um, and it was interesting because when the webinar got done, typically I would just do the same webinar bunch because it did well. In fact, I remember the, the launch day of the webinar, we did it and I actually had two webinars happening that day. One that happened earlier in the morning, like I don't 10 or 11:00 AM I did the webinar and I think we had 800 people on, I'm not gonna remember the numbers perfectly, but 800 people on and we sold like 30 or $40,000.

Russell Brunson: I'm like, yeah, that was. Was a big win. My business partner Todd, like as I'm like celebrating how good I did, he goes into, I think it was GoToWebinar back then or maybe Zoom, and he exported all of the questions and he's, he come back and he's like, Hey, at minute 13, everyone's confused here. I was like, what?

Russell Brunson: They, everyone's confused. And so I look minute 13, I find what slide? I was like, oh, well let just add this, the sentence in here. I may have a slide in here to explain that. And he's like, Hey, minute 24. Everyone's asking the same questions. I went back to my slides. I added a slide in there to address the question.

Russell Brunson: Then in the offer, they're confused about this, and so we went through the, the webinar and we just tweaked it a bunch of times, and then a couple hours later, I was doing it again live, and so I jumped back on live again. This time, similar amount of people, maybe seven or 800 people did the same presentation, but I had these new little things that were added to it, and that time we did over a hundred thousand dollars in sales.

Russell Brunson: I was like. What just happened. And then Todd, in his infinite wisdom, went and download the chat from that. It's like, all right, here's what gets stuck now. And so like, he would tell me and we add it. And so we did that back and forth and I was doing the time, three or four webinars a week, um, sometimes two or three a day.

Russell Brunson: Every time we did it, we'd export the things, tweak the slides, and it got better and better and better to the spot where like, uh, every time we get on the webinar, I knew. Depending on how many people had had registered, I knew exactly almost to the dollar how much money we would make because it was, it was so scripted, so perfectly.

Russell Brunson: And I did it live, I think between 70 and 80 times. I did it live before we ever evergreened it. And in that first year we went from zero to over $10 million in a RR in ClickFunnels, all off of just doing that webinar every single week. And so I've been telling all my students for years now, it's like, 'cause they'll happen, they'll do a webinar, sell their course, their coaching, and then they just.

Russell Brunson: Try something new or whatever. I'm like, no, just focus on that. I said, if you do a webinar a week and I set it up, I do a webinar every Thursday, and then you have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and half a Thursday to promote it. Then Thursday you do the webinar. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, you do the replay sequence and you close it down, and then Monday you launch a new webinar.

Russell Brunson: You start driving ads to it, and if you do that. What happens in the year is you get better and better at the pitch. More and more people come into your ecosystem. And between those things, everyone who's done it in a year, they then with a list of 30, 40,000 people, they've generated tons of money and their pre presentation's just flawless where they can do it by memory because they've done it so many times and it's so, so good.

Russell Brunson: So that's been my experience. It's how we built ClickFunnels and it's how, uh, so many of our students now have done it. 'cause that, man, the webinar week is like, it's like an apple a day, keeps the doctor away. Webinar week keeps all the cashflow problems and business problems away.

Jay Schwedelson: So I, I got a real question here because I, I've struggled this, I've been the, in the game now for 27 years, and sometimes I feel like. I'm repetitive. Sometimes I get sick of talking about the things I've been talking about forever. And I also feel like everyone's gotta know what I'm about to say 'cause I've been saying it for 400 years and other people have been saying it 400 years.Jay Schwedelson: I mean, do you ever feel that way? 'cause I feel like, not that you are repetitive, I don't mean that, that in that way,

Russell Brunson: But I am on

Jay Schwedelson: pushing, I, I mean, you know, by design your business even what you just laid out. You know? Do you ever feel that way? Or you're like, no, no, no. That's not the way to think about it.

Jay Schwedelson: You're trying to drive home a point. Like where do you, what, what's your vibe on that?

Russell Brunson: no. Great, great question. My, uh, one of my early mentors named Dan Kennedy, he said that he's like, you'll get bored of your stories way before the marketplace ever does. But for me, I get like the people who have tried this, they haven't had success, is they have an existing audience and they'll do the webinar to the audience one week and they do the webinar to the audience next week.

Russell Brunson: And by the third week. It stops working like it doesn't work anymore. And I'm like, this webinar week strategy is not something you're doing to your existing audience. This is the front end where you're bringing new blood and new people into it, right? So that's happening. And then after someone goes to that webinar, they buy something.

Russell Brunson: Then over here I do other stuff. I'm telling 'em the cool strategies and I have upsells. I have other events, and I'm like, all the cool stuff happens over here where I can be a creative entrepreneur, share the fun things I want. But if I don't have new blood coming in every single day, then then this all disappears over time.

Russell Brunson: And so the only way the model works is knowing that like, okay, I can do it once. In fact, the way we structure it internally for us is like I do my webinar once a quarter to my entire audience. 'cause that point, they've all three months, they've all forgotten and it works again. Um, so once, once a quarter to my own.

Russell Brunson: And then every single week to bring new people in and new blood in. What happens is, is for them, the first time they show up, it's brand new. And yes, I get so tired of telling my stories about potato guns and tired of my, of the supplement, like all the things like I, you know, but it, but again, you get tired of it way before the market does.

Russell Brunson: I got asked last year to speak in London and I was coming out and I was trying to think of a new thing and the promoter's like, I want you the, your Funnel Hacks webinar. I'm like, no. Everyone's seen it. It's been a decade. Like everyone's seen it. He's like, no, my people haven't seen it. And so I went out, out there and I was just like, kind of embarrassed, almost like, uh, this is my old stuff.

Russell Brunson: I, I wrote a, a decade ago, right? But I did the presentation and it was crazy 'cause people were like, just like at day one where I was doing, they, they're running the back room. They're buying, they're like in tears. Like, like you shifted everyth. Like it finally makes sense to me. And I was just like, I forget that like.

Russell Brunson: This market's always replenishing new things. People, new people are coming all the time and it's like these stories are brand new for them. And so that's why like on the front end is having that message that we know we've curated, we've perfected it. New people come in there and they, it helps to like turn them into your dream customer.

Russell Brunson: And then after that, then you can be creative with everything else you do with those audience. But that, that webinar week on the front end, just it, it's what makes the businesses consistent and grow.

Jay Schwedelson: I think it's so valuable for everybody here out there because, uh, you think you're being repetitive. You think that people already heard it, they haven't. Keep pushing, keep sharing. So, all right, listen, we're gonna put everything in the show notes. We're gonna tell you how to follow Russell on on Instagram and go to clickfunnels.com and all the things.

Jay Schwedelson: But Russell, how do people get involved with your world that don't know you? Where should they go? How do they consume it all? Yeah.

Russell Brunson: Yeah, there's a lot of, I've been doing this a long time. There's a lot of stuff, so it kinda depends, you know, we have things for different audiences and stuff, but, um, honestly, like, you know, I think the, the best way to get started with me is like, just go read one of my books. Like, my books are kind of, you know, like the, the foundational frameworks.

Russell Brunson: I got three books, one's calledDotCom Secrets If you're in Funnels, that's like. The Bible on funnels. The second one's called Expert Secrets, and that's the book that's like, um, like how you do the messaging inside the funnel. So stories you tell and how you persuade people and things like that. And third's called Traffic Secrets is how you get people to show up.

Russell Brunson: So in your business, wherever you're at, if you're like, I don't know what a funnel is, like start DotCom Secrets, I got a funnel that's not working, go read Expert Secrets. Like I gotta a funnel, but no traffic and Traffic Secrets. Just kind of plug in wherever that makes sense. Um, and then just. Come join, you know, jump in.

Russell Brunson: We're having a lot of fun all the time. Like I'm, uh, you know, we have such a cool community of entrepreneurs and we're all just talking about these nerdy things all day long and it's so much fun.

Jay Schwedelson: It is true. ClickFunnels is more than just a platform. It is a community. I'm not just saying that it's for real. The whole thing is, is a business vibe and uh, Russell Brunson is a legend. I appreciate you being here, my man. Thanks for doing it.

Russell Brunson: Yeah. Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.