Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - One Funnel Away: Evolution - How We Scaled ClickFunnels to $1 Billion | #Success - Ep. 138

Episode Date: July 27, 2026

Last week I told you the story of everything that led up to launching ClickFunnels — my original “One Funnel Away.” I ended it like the hero coming home victorious with the elixir. But here’s the thing about a hero’s journey: it always has a sequel. And the sequel is where it gets real. This is the final episode of The Russell Brunson Show — I’m winding it down and relaunching as a new podcast called Bootstrap Secrets. So to close it out, I’m giving you part two: “One Funnel Away: Evolution,” the presentation from the last Funnel Hacking Live about how we scaled ClickFunnels past a billion dollars in sales. Not the highlight reel — the real version, with all the ups, the downs, and the moments it nearly fell apart. Key Highlights: ◼️The launch that almost killed the company — two years and every dollar of savings gone, a “reverse launch” that stalled out, and the five failed attempts before one event with Mike Filsaime finally cracked it ◼️The “booth babes” funnel — told I could speak at Traffic & Conversion but couldn’t sell, how Dave Woodward funneled a hallway of people into the most talked-about room at the event (and how Dave hired himself on the spot) ◼️Why DotCom Secrets became “the doctrine of the movement” — the book that finally made people get ClickFunnels, and the explosion from a few hundred members to twelve thousand ◼️The London meltdown — landing overseas to thousands of messages (some of them literal death threats) with ClickFunnels down for hours, and the one thing I did instead of hiding that flipped the whole community from rage to support ◼️Why I turned down $110 million — the private conversation with Moz’s Rand Fishkin about VC money, depression, and control that made me walk away from the check Looking back, none of it was sunshine and roses — and that’s exactly the point. Every high came wrapped in a low I didn’t see coming, and the business only survived because I had a team and a community carrying it with me. Like Gary Halbert said, one idea, properly exploited, is worth more than ten lifetimes of hard work — and I’ve watched that one idea change more lives than I ever thought possible. So as I close out this chapter and step into the next one, here’s what I’ll leave you with: what’s the one calling you’ve been carrying that’s worth getting punched in the face for… and who’s in your corner for when it happens? ◼️FUNNEL HACKING LIVE AI: The last Funnel Hacking Live ever is this September in Las Vegas — a smaller, one-time, AI-everything encore, and the room where this whole community comes together one final time. If you’ve never been, this is it. → https://www.FunnelHackingLive.com ◼️If you’ve got a product, offer, service… or idea… I’ll show you how to sell it (the RIGHT way) Register for my next event → https://sellingonline.com/podcast ◼️Still don’t have a funnel? ClickFunnels gives you the exact tools (and templates) to launch TODAY → https://clickfunnels.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you have a funnel, but it's not converting? The problem 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you want to learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com slash podcast. That's selling online.com slash podcast. This is the Russell Brunson show. What's up, everybody? This is Russell. Okay.

This is the time. This is probably going to be the last episode of the Russell Brunson show. I'm not going to lie, ever since I changed the name from. marketing your car to marketing secrets to Russell Brunson's show. I felt like I hated that name. I was just like I feel, who names is the show after themselves? I don't know. I did because I want to talk about all sorts of stuff.

And I realized, I just didn't love it. I hate calling the Russell Runcson show. He knows what I was like, welcome back to the show. I never even said the name. So we're going to be winding down this chapter of the podcast. And I'm excited for relaunching a YouTube channel, actually multiple YouTube channels and a couple podcasts that are going to be different and better. The core one you guys will be subscribed to automatically is the bootstrap Secrets Podcasts I'm so excited for. We're filming those this week.

Episodes coming out soon. But as we're preparing, getting a bunch of them in the can so I can start sharing with you guys, I wanted to be able to give you guys two last episodes. So last week I gave you guys, I let you guys listen to the original one funnel web presentation from Funnel Hacking Live. And afterwards, hopefully all one got your tickets at funnelhacking live.com because the last one ever is happening. This is a one-time only encore event.

We're doing all about AI. And it's going to be insane. That's number one. And then today, I'm going to give you guys the second one, Funnel way presentation. Again, the first one talked about everything we did to get up to the spot where we launched ClickFunnels. The second one was all about how we grew and scaled ClickFunnels

to over a billion dollars in sales. And the emotional journey. There are ups, there were downs, all sorts of stuff. I hope you guys enjoy this one. After you do, watch this. Go get your tickets at funnel hackinglive.com. And then get prepared. I think the next episode you're going to see is going to be Bootstrap Secrets,

episode number one. At the very first funnel hacking live where we introduced the two Comic Club awards, I did a presentation called Your One Funnel Way. This is before the One Funnel Way challenge for anything. It was called One Funnel Way. Let me throw up slides real quick. This is the president. Anyone remember this, the original One Funnel Away presentation?

When people joined OFA, I had everybody watched this. And this was basically, we had just launched ClickFunnels. It was like going into orbit. It was really fun. And I told everyone the story like the last decade in my life. Here's all the things that happened. Here's all the ups and the downs. the ups and the downs, like the highs and the lows,

that got us to launching ClickFunnels getting out in the world. It was interesting because it's basically, it was me telling my hero's journey up to that point, right? Like, it was me, this awkward kid, and I was doing these things, I was in my ordinary world, and I heard the call to adventure, we went on this journey, and this kind of timeline, a lot of things, like when I was a kid, I had a junk mail collection,

and I made ZipRander, and my potato gun DVDs, and then the webinar where everything was failing, I created webinar, and saved Christmas for me and my team, and then we had a call center that grew up to 100 employees, and the whole thing crashed and fell apart. And I met Todd Dickerson and then Todd built ClickFunnels. And then we launched ClickFunnels. Nobody bought it.

And we tried over and over and over again. Finally I spoke of Mike Phil Sims event. We crushed it. We created webinars. We started doing webinars all the time. And then we started growing ClickFunnels. So that was this whole hero's journey. I told the whole story.

It was very emotional up and down. And they kind of ended. It ended with ClickFunnels launching. And I thought about that at the time. I was like, in my head, I had gone through his hero's journey. I'd like return the victor. And then at the end of the hero's journey, you return with the elixir and you come back to your people.

And like, I found the answer, right? And that's what it felt like. Come back, Funnel Hacking Lab. Like, I've solved all the answers. Here's the elixir, I was sharing with everybody. Okay? But the reality is when you finish one of your heroes' journeys, what usually happens is there's a sequel.

Part 2 is going to happen, right? And all of a sudden you hear the next call of adventure. And so this presentation, I'm calling OFA Evolution. I want to talk about what's happened since then. We launched ClickFunnels. It was a huge success, right? And then all of a sudden, I get called on this new Heroes Adventure, which has been the last decade in my life.

And it's interesting because you, I think it's hard, is typically when you're with people, you share, like, here's the highlight film. Like, I kind of have you guys know most highlights of the click funnels of the last decade. You saw this and I gross with all these things. But the reality is it's not just sunshine and roses. And I don't think it serves you guys for me. Like, it's amazing. Every funnel we built was awesome. People loved us.

Nothing wrong ever happened. Look how successful we are. So instead I want to talk about just the last decade, the different timeline, the ups and the downs. And hopefully from there, there will be something you guys can grasp for yourself. And hopefully, if nothing else, it helps you guys understand that your hero's journey is not going to be sunshine and roses. You're going to feel that called adventure. You're going to find a plan. And like Mike Tyson said, everyone's got a plan.

You get punched in the face. And the last 10 years has been a lot of that. A lot of successes, a lot of highs, a lot of lows, a lot of getting punched in the face. But it's been an amazing journey. So I want to kind of walk through a couple of those things. If you're cool with that. It's cool with that. Okay.

So, 2013 is when we started building click funnels. We had the idea. We were working on it. Todd was in Atlanta in his basement, coding things. I assume his basement could have been in his kitchen. I have no idea. He was at his house,

coding things. I was at home trying to figure out how to market this thing, and all these things happened to 2013. The beginning of 2014, the biggest event in our industry is called Trafficking conversion. How many guys have been to TNC before?

So we go to TNC. We're kind of broke at the time, so me and Todd are sharing a hotel room together, and we're sitting there, and Todd's Bill and Clifford's we're talking about. We're so excited. We go to TNC that year,

and the craziest thing, Ryan Perry, get on stage, and literally, basically, that year becomes the year of the funnel. Not because of us, because Ryan and Perry got to say, and they're like, everyone, there's a thing called a sales funnel, and they start talking about it. And me and Toddard in the audience, like, holy cow, like everything they're saying is like what we are building right now, right?

And they're talking philosophy and stuff of that. And so we're kind of freaking out, like this is what we're building. Like, we're, like, it's crazy. And so TNC happens. The weekend after TNC, everybody on the planet instantly becomes a funnel expert. It's kind of crazy. Right. Every cell and consulting on it.

I do funnels. Like, this word funnel starts getting flying everywhere. We're ever talking about funnels. And Todd and are like, this is insane timing. We are about to have the platform. The only platform that actually build sales funnels. And people were talking about it. People were all coaching on it.

And like it was this weird, I don't know, luck timing. But everyone starts talking about this thing, not knowing that we're behind the scenes building the solution to actually how to do this. And it's kind of this fun thing, right? So we're at TNC. We're having this conversation. We're kind of freaking out. And Todd's been building the whole thing. And the back end looks really good.

But the problem is that the UI, Todd's a great backend developer. He's great everything. but he's not like the best UI developer ever. And there's this guy that I knew. I'd been projects within five or six years prior to doing all sorts of design work with him. One of the most talented people I've ever met my life. But he's also a little bit flaky. And I tell him this to his face.

I'm okay saying this on camera. He would like need some money. He'd message him. He'd message him like, hey man, do you have any projects? And so I'd give him like five projects. I go to bed. I wake up the morning. All five were done and they were always insane.

Like, how did you do this? I paid the money and then he disappeared. Like five or six months. I'd message him, hey man, can I guess. some help, they get some help, and he just crickets. And all of a sudden, five or six months later, he popped back up, hey man, I need some money. You got any projects? And I'd be so mad at him. I just wanted to strangle him, right? And I looked at all of the projects that done last five or six months that other designers do. And so I take the exact same project descriptions.

I sent all those people. It took a six months to build. And I just took those copy and paste and send him. Here's some projects. I go to bed the morning. I wake up next morning. All of them were done. A hundred times better than the ones before. I'm like, how does he do that? Like, I wanted to strangling, but then I wanted to hug him, so I wire him the money, and then he's gone again. And this is the pattern for six years, okay? I have a love-hate relationship with this guy, driving me crazy. Anyway, Todd and I are sitting at TNC. We're talking about click funnels. They just, like, they're now into industry that funnels are the greatest in the world. We're freaking out, and I'm looking at Todd's coding. I'm like, this is awesome, but it

doesn't look like soft, I don't know. And, and we're sitting there in a hotel room, and I'm not in bed, and also I look at Skype and I look over, and I see Dylan Jones, his name, and it's lit up. I'm like, Dylan's never on Skype. I was like, huh. So I messengers, I'm like, hey man, you need some money? Blink. He messes me back.

Yeah, what do you got? I was like, okay, I got him. I know Dylan. He's insanely talented. And if I can give his attention for a few minutes, I was like, I need you to fly to Boise next week. I'm going to buy a week of your time. What's it going to take to buy a week of your time?

And he tells me, and it was not too crazy. And then I was like, what we're doing, we're building this thing. It's a funnel. I explained the whole thing to him. And he's like, oh, I'm building. building the exact same thing. I was like, oh, well, do you want the money? He's like, yeah, I still need the money. So he's basically, he's like, I'm going to fly to you, I'm going to build a competitor to myself, but I need the money, so I'm in. So next week, he flies

Deboise, he, Todd flies the boys, so we get him in my room, we'll give him some money, and right, this is the vision. So Dylan starts building the UI, the edit, like, starts building all the stuff, and he makes the most beautiful version of ClickFunnels ever. It's insane. He even shows me, like, I'm building on my little website, build over here. Like, yeah, whatever, it's not a big deal. I didn't think too much about it. He builds this whole thing, and then he flies back home to Canada, and Todd goes home, starts coding it all. And within a couple months,

we have the very first version of ClickFunnels done. It's summertime. In fact, I remember I was, we were at Bear Lake, my family, and we did the very first initial launch of ClickFunnels. This is before the September launch. How many guys, anybody you remembered the July launch that year? Okay, a couple people. Yeah, Ashley and Jimmy.

So we launch it. But the problem is that there wasn't like a, there wasn't a really good website editor. Like the funnel, there wasn't a good editor. The page, it was kind of like a few guys really usually. pages like we have the page you can edit like the head like very similar lead pages was kind of basic but the funnel builder was insane funnel builder's everything was great but the editor was like it was okay so do the big launch we get a

bunch of people in we shut down the doors and the editor's horrible it's breaking things are falling apart and we're just like pulling our hair out and it's just like so frustrating and then we're getting close to our actual launch was gonna be in September and so we're getting everything ready and then two weeks before the launch Dylan sends me this video it's just a like 60 second video is like hey man remember I was telling us working on a I got it done, check it out, and he's called it Pultz Editor. And he sends me this video, I start watching it, and it is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

It's this editor where you can drag and you can drop things, you can move things, you can edit things. And I was like, oh crap. I was like, this is so much better than our editor. And I remember watching that video probably 30 or 40 times. And I said to Todd, I was like, hey, check out Dylan's editor. He's like, dang. I said, we have that editor. He's like, I know.

I'm like, how do we do? I don't know. So you need some money? He's like, well, I'm going to launch this. I'm going to make a bunch of money. I should be fine. I'm like, we're going to launch ClickFunnels. He's going to launch this thing.

And his wasn't having any back in. It was just the page editor, but it was so beautiful. And I told him, we have to figure out. We have to. So I start messaging Dylan. And Dylan's smart. He's like, after going back and forth like three or four days, me just begging him, he's like, okay, I will do this,

but you can't buy it for me. I want to partner with you. I'm like, we spent the last two years building this. We don't, like, you can't partner with this right now. He's like, all right, I'm just gonna launch on my own then. Right. So we finally figured out a negotiation for to make Dylan a partner. But then we had two weeks to launch.

We have this beautiful editor, ClickFunnels, and I don't know how all coding works. And I like to push them together. So I'm like, Todd, Dylan, fly to Boise seats. They both floated in Boise for two weeks. And I'm like, we're launches in two weeks. Right, launch states out there. Like everyone knows about this, figure out to smush these two things together. And so they spent the next two weeks, literally no sleep.

Like it was insane. Smushing these two things together. is we getting closer and closer to launch day. The day before launch, it's looking good, but the problem is, like, half the functionality didn't work. So we had this good idea. What if we do a reverse launch, where we launch it with no features,

and then every day we release a new feature. That'd be brilliant, right? So we do our launch, people sign up, and there's no features inside of it. And we're like, no, it's going to be cool. Every couple days, we launch a new feature. And so we do this reverse launch, every couple days we're launching a new feature.

And because of the launch was so backwards and it wasn't quite ready, it didn't take off. As soon as they didn't take off, people didn't stop promoting and the whole thing is kind of like screeched to a hall and it was just like, oh crap, two years of our life, all of our savings gone and nobody's promoting this thing.

It's not working. And that's kind of the first crown of crossroads. And so after that, that's where we started trying the different versions. We tried, you know, the product launch didn't work. Then we tried just a regular SaaS version. We tried another one. We tried four or five times. And after the fifth time, that's the Mike Phil Slim invited me to come speak to his event.

He's like, hey, you should come sell click funnels at the event. I'm like, too, we've been trying. Nobody's buying the free trial. This is not going to work. And he hasn't heard this story. I went out there to the event, created a $1,000 offer, we pitched on the webinar, or pitched on the live event, it crushed, came back home, we started doing live webinars. In fact, I found the date this morning.

The very first actual live webinar I did, after Mike's event, the first webinar was November 7th. I did two webinars that day, and that year month, I kept doing them and doing them and doing them, and that was kind of the launch of ClickFunnels. Now I moved to 2015. 2015, T&C is the very beginning of the year again, so we go back to Traffic Conversion, and this time ClickFunnels is done, we show up, everybody's talking about funnels, We're talking about ClickFunnels.

It's the greatest thing in the world. And then it's, anyways, probably shouldn't say it's on camera, but here we are. I remember Ryan Dice. I love Ryan. He's on stage at this event. And Todd and I are sitting in the audience where it's like listening to everything. And then Ryan's like, yeah, TNC is like the greatest thing. Because of us, companies like ClickFunnels were built.

And we're like, did you just take credit for ClickFunnels? Like we've been killing ourselves. Like, it was like so frustrating. We were like, and then I wanted to speak on the big T&C stage. They wouldn't let me. But there was these little breakout rooms. Okay. So they gave me a breakout room.

I was going to speak and you can speak, but you can't sell. I was like, I can't sell. Like, my name's Russell. It sells like SEL is in my name. I have to sell. Like, I don't know what to do with this, right? And like, when you get 60 minutes you can't sell. And I have a 90 minute presentation, 30 minutes of selling, 60 minutes.

So I'm like, all right. And so we're getting there. And there's like six different breakout rooms. I'm competing with all these other speakers. And one of my friends at the time, he shows up there and we're hanging out and it's Dave Woodward. A lot of you guys know Dave. And I'm like, Dave, I'm on stage in like two and a half hours. I'm competing at six other people.

How do we get people into our booth? He's like, I don't know, what do you need? I'm like, you know, it would be awesome? Just as a joke. I'm like, imagine if we had a whole bunch of booth babes. And then we, like, lined up the wall so that everyone sees this gorgeous women. And they just walk in and we get everybody to funnel into our room and none of the other rooms. And Dave's like, okay, how many do you need?

I was like, I'm like, I'm over like two hours. He's like, just give me a second. So often Dave's on the phone, dude, make on his phone calls, all shirts of stuff. And then I'm like, there's no way this is going to happen. And then I don't, and we weren't, I don't know what he did or who he called, whatever. Anyway, 20 minutes later, he comes up to me, he's taken care of him. I'm like, what? He's like, yeah, it's done.

I'm like, what's done? He's like, there's going to be a whole bunch of beautiful women here. We're going to funnel people into your room. I was like, okay? And sure enough, 15 minutes later, like eight gorgeous tall women show up. And Dave's putting click funnel shirts on every single one of them, right? And we're lining them up. And so people come out of the breakout and walk over and they're like, whoa.

And also, all these people funnel right into our room. One of the greatest sales funnels of all time. So, we jam all these people. They're standing. People are like fire marshals yelling. People wrapped around the walls. Like, everybody's in our booth. And I get up there, and I'm doing the funnel hacks presentation.

But I'm not allowed to pitch. So I do the very first 60 minutes I'm going through. People going crazy. They're melting down. Everyone's freaking out. And at the very end, I'm like, thanks for hanging out, you guys. Appreciate you all. Bye.

And I was like, but real quick, we have a booth in the back. And if you want the rest of this presentation, I have a DVD back there that's got the entire presentation. Go check it out. And people run out there. They run to our booth and they get a DVD of me doing the whole presentation. And that was it. And that was our first thing at TNC. And it was crazy.

And we were the talk of the event. Everyone was talking about us. People were freaking out. And I remember that night afterwards, we were out to dinner and just kind of like joke about the whole things and laughing about the fact that Dave was able to pick up the phone. And all of a sudden all these beautiful women show up to help us. And I remember Dave looked at him. He's like, hey, I want to be part of this.

How can I be part of this? Like, what do you mean? He's like, I want to be part of this? I was like, you want a job? He's like, yeah. And I was like, how much money are you making right now? He told me, I was like, I can't afford you. And he's like, I know, but like, I just want to do this.

Like, what's it going to take? I was like, dude, you're like, yeah, sure, you're hired. And so we brought Dave in at that time to start doing stuff with us. And then this, that year, this 2015, that year got crazy. I've been writing this book, the dot com Secrets book. I think the next month after teen, see, we started, we launched the book, which was cool because the book became like the doctrine of the movement, right? Think about every good mass movement of all time.

If you look at the charismatic leader leads with the book. Look at any religion. How do they lead? There's always a book, right? And so for us, it was like people were coming to ClickFun's world. They're starting to understand it. Then we led with the book. People got Dotcom Secrets book and they'd read and like, oh, I understand it now.

And so we launched a dot com Secrets book, which is crazy. And ClickFun starts growing faster than we even knew what to do. And remember when we first built ClickFunnels, Todd's like, ClickFun's going to be amazing. To the point we gave about 10,000 members. numbers and then we're going to change our technology or something. And I'm like, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm like, if we had 10,000 members, that'd be amazing.

So we're just running and running and running and we're going to go 1,000, 3,000, 5,000, 8,000, 10,000, 12,000, and it's just growing like crazy this first year. And again, at the time, it's Todd and Dillon, two dudes doing the whole thing, running everything. And within a very short period, I don't know if you guys know this, like, ClickFunnels Today is one of like the top 20 most traffic websites on the planet. Because think about, we're taking, yeah, it's crazy. It doesn't show that. that's because I clickfons.com, but like we're hosting all of your funnels, all your websites.

So when any of you guys get five million views a day, that's on our backs. Like the infrastructure to handle that is there's not many human beings on the planet that know how to do that. Right? We didn't know how to do that. Todd had never built a software that's going to be running, you know, with top 20 websites on the, on the entire planet. And so what happens to start growing? All of a sudden, click phone starts doing these weird glitchy things where it goes down for 10 minutes, then comes back.

We're like, what's happening? I don't know. And it's trying to fix things and it goes down again. It comes back. And it's just this weird time where, like, everyone's like, everyone's like, like, click funnels is glitchy, he's going in and out. And like, and we didn't know how to fix it, what to do? And Todd's like, remember about two years ago when I told you that 10,000 members is going to fall apart?

I'm like, yeah? Like, he's like, yeah, that's what's happening? I'm like, what does that mean? He's like, we have to fix this. And we were trying to figure out how to fix it. And the craziest thing, this is not to get technical, but all of our databases were in spot. And we had to move into a different database structure. The problem was the database company that we were hosted on, we were their biggest client, and they did not want us to leave. Therefore, they would not allow us to leave. And so we're in this weird thing where we couldn't move the data, we couldn't do things, and there was all sorts of problems happening,

and it kept getting worse and worse. That year, I remember speaking at Dan Kennedy's event, which is crazy now because this is now of Dan Kennedy's event, but I'm thinking Dan Kennedy's event. I did the pitch. I remember I was backstage, I was about to come on stage, and I'm looking at something, and ClickFunnels is down, and it's down, and messaging Todd, like, dude, it's down.

He's like, I know, he's trying to fix it. He's down, it's down. And also, they're like, Russell Brunson, you're up next. I'm coming on stage, knowing that ClickFunnels is down. I'm like, I've got to tell people that ClickFunnels is the greatest thing in the world, which it is, but it's, like, so I'm on stage, I'm freaking out, like, he's not even going to work, and so I do the presentation. We signed up a lot of people. Luckily, Todd got it back up again after that. It was just up and down, up and down. And then, fast forward a week later,

I was speaking in London, and the promoters invited our entire family. So me and my kids, my wife, we all jump in a plane, and we're flying to London. And it's really fun, right? And we get to London, and we land there, and this is 2015. And so back then we had to get these little, those little chips, you know those chips in your phone, whatever they call. SIM cards, yeah. So we get to London, we get a SIM card, I plug into the phone, it's not plugging in my phone's like, and it's thousands of messages from every platform, Skype, Instagram, messenger, email, phone calls, text messages. And I'm noticing patterns of reading through these. Most of these are people threatening to kill me. Very angry people. I'm buying ads right now, click funnels are down, you owe me, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like, oh, I'm like, what?

And a lot of these people are my friends like 20 minutes ago. Now we're like, F you, Russell, I hope you die. I'm like, what just happened as we were flying? It's like, I call Todd. I remember Todd's like, yeah, we've nailed for three or four hours. And he said something, I don't remember anything other than the word if. He's like, if we're able to get it back up. And I was like, we're like a year into this business. I'm like, if we can get it back up.

And I don't know what to do. And I'm freaking out. The database place that we had crashed. They couldn't reboot their servers fast enough. Todd knew to move forward. We had built something different. We had another partner, time, new Ryan, who had just, who was on vacation, he'd just come home.

And so Todd and Ryan are trying to figure out, like, how do we do this thing? And so they're rebuilding our entire database structure somewhere else while we're trying to get this one back up. And I'm in London with my kids. We're all like jet lag in a hotel room. And I was like, I had collecting kids. I go in the other, they had two rooms, joining rooms. I go in there real quick. And I'm sitting there.

And I'm like, my first time ever being a CEO or being partisan. I'm like, what do I do? Like, I want to just hide. People want to kill me. But I felt like we should do something. I didn't know. And so I remember getting my phone out. And I went live to our little clickfons community at the time.

I went live. In fact, if you go back there, you can scroll through, you can find the video still in there. And I was like, hey, we're down. And I just got lined in London to tell people here about ClickFunnels. And I was like, it's not okay. Like all my stuff's down, your stuff is down, and it's not okay, it's not acceptable. And instead of me trying to hide like I wanted to do, I just kind of like took ownership and I was just like, I'm so sorry, we're trying to figure this out.

This is my fault and it's not acceptable. And what's cool is after I posted that, all the sentiment went from like, Ruffalo want to kill you to like we understand we support you and everyone started dropping in comments and it shifted the whole tone of it all in a really cool way that i wasn't expecting and um during the whole process Todd had rebuilt the entire structure over here there luckily there's a backup that happened like an hour or two earlier he's a recopy the whole thing over i don't know he'd have to tell you technical things i know it was a nightmare um but about eight hours later it was back up on the new servers we needed things to run on long term and it came back up and i was just waiting

we were waiting for like a mass access everyone's going to leave click phones the next day And we look over the next two or three days, and it wasn't, like, it didn't increase cancellation. It just, everyone got over it and it was okay. And for me as, like, the person at the time, like, I learned such a good lesson of just, like, trying to not hide and trying to share what was happening. And so that was one of the big hiccups. But that was such a big thing for us to go through as a community, as a leadership team, trying to figure these things out and got us in.

So that was, excuse me, that was. was 2015. That same year, it was weird because again, we're year into this. And I thought when we launched ClickFunnels, all my closest friends, all the marketing nerds like me were going to be so excited. And I cannot get any of my friends to use our platform. It was the weirdest thing. I'm like, you guys, I built what we've been dreaming about. And they're like, yeah, and no one would use it. Like new people would come and they would use it. I couldn't get my closest friends, people in the market to use it. It was so frustrating to me. So we decided to go and like, let's just start building funnels for people and show them how it works. And so Brandon Fisher,

who's somewhere here, one of our team members for last decade, we started flying around the country. And so we went and met Neil Strauss, who's a famous author. We flew out to him and we built funnels for him. We recorded videos and built funnels. And we flew to Dave Asprey, who would just, it was the middle of like the boltproof movement. His team was using click funnels.

We saw us. We flew out there. We filmed a bunch of stuff with him. We launched funnels for him. We did phones for Tony Robbins. We flew to Australia doing funnels out there. We hung out with Liz Benny Longley, capture her story.

And it was like this time where we're just like, I'm going to prove to people this stuff actually works. We're flying around building funnels for pro bono just to show people like, here's Tony's phone, here's this one, here's this one. And it was like such a fun thing to try to prove to our market, like this stuff actually works. Like I believe in it. I need you guys to believe in it. And it was such a fun.

It was such a cool thing. About this time too, people keep asking like, cryptoons is growing like crazy. Like you guys think on venture capital and like, I'm like, I didn't know, maybe we should. Maybe we shouldn't. I didn't know how the whole thing works. And I remember that there was an event that happened in Boisey that year, 2015 end the year. A guy named Rand Fishkin. Anyone know who ran Fishkin?

Ran was the CEO of a company called SEO Maus. If you remember, SEO Maus eventually became Maus. And Maus had both started a business at very similar times, but Maus had gone a different path, but they took on money. And from the outside, it was amazing. You see him growing, all sorts of successes happening. And so I'm like, well, maybe that's what I needed,

maybe that's our next step. And I remember I went to, we went to this event. His best friend lives in Boise, Idaho. So he's in his little event with like 100 people at it. I go show up to it, and he's talking about Maus and, like, their whole story, talking about them taking VC money and what happened. And this is this is like amazing story.

I'm like, yeah, that's the next step. We're going to take on a bunch of money. The event gets done. Introverted Russell's ready to leave. I was with my extroverted half BJ right at the time. And BJ is like, dude, we got to go talk to him. I'm like, no, he's fine. I know we got to go talk to him.

So BJ pulls me up there and he's like, hey, he's like, ran. So Russell's got a click phone himself. It's like, they're growing like crazy. He's like, would you recommend they take on money? And first round's like, yeah, actually, you know, and then you can't stop for a second. And he's like, just between me. you and me, you guys want to talk for real? Like, yeah. And he's like, okay, he's like, I have a board

of directors that sets my salary. I can't afford a car right now. I live in an apartment. All the people use my platform, make tons of money with it. I'm not able to contractually because I can only work for this one company. He's like, I've been going through depression for last two or three years because I can't grow. We took on money. And now because of the money we took on these companies, the people who invested in us, they're making us do things I ethically don't feel good with, but I have to do it because they want growth month after month. So we're doing things I don't feel comfortable with, I don't feel good with, but I have to because they own me. And he's like, if I was you and you don't have to, I would not take on any money. I was like, whoa. This is a little

private moment. I'm so grateful for him for actually sharing that. It's crazy. Four or five years later, he wrote a book called Lost and Founder. If he doesn't want a really good book about what happens when you go VC route, that he goes through the whole story there. It's a really good book. They told me that. I remember on the drive home, I remember boxing Todd and everybody, our team, I was just like, hey, this is what's happened. I was like, let's not take on money. Like, let's keep this thing ourselves.

Let's do it so we can do it the way we want to do it. So we're not being dictated by a board of directors who we owe money to. Let's stick this and do it our way. And luckily, they said yes too. Thank you. It's actually interesting to me. Every one of our competitors, this point, have all taken on money. And it does give them strategic advantages in some things, as you will see over the next

24 months of my life. I don't have any of the shackles they do, and you will see some really cool things happening. We are a bootstrap company through and through, and I'll leave it there. I'll tell that chapter. Thank you. I'll tell you guys that chapter next time we all hang out.

Okay, 2015, November was in 2016. Now it starts getting exciting. ClickFunnels is drawing. Things are happening. Prior year, we'd done our very first ever funnel hack in Las Vegas. which we're now doing our second funnel hacking live in San Diego. We decided we should get a keynote speaker. We never had like a keynote.

First FHL was all my buddies that came spoke free. Second one, all my buddies is like, we need a keynote. And at a time I was obsessed with a TV show called The Profit. Anyone here seeing The Prophet? Marcus Limonis. And so we figure out how to get a hold of Marcus. We offered him to come speak. At a time he wasn't speaking anywhere, he said yes.

And I'm freaking out because I'm like, this guy, his business, if you look at his business, people come in. He invests money in their business. He goes and fixes them, right? And so I wanted him to come talk about that. And so Marcus, the momentous comes to FHL. I'm expecting, you know, to be a high-maintenance person coming in with taxis and all, or coming in with, like, limos and stuff.

But no, Marcus shows up in an Uber, jumps out. Hey, guys, what's up? He's hanging out in the audience, hanging out, like, so different. We thought he was so awesome. And then before FHL, before he went on stage, we had a chance to go backstage for like 15, 20 minutes, and kind of talk to him. And he comes in, he just got big a smile. He's like, he's like, what is happening out there?

I was like, what do you mean? He's like, this is, he's like, I thought, I thought I was speaking in a website conference. These people are insane. He's like, what, like, what is happening here? I was like, oh, no, we don't do websites. We do funnels. He's like, what's a funnel. And I start trying to explain technically what a funnel is.

And he's just like, glazing over, right? And I was like, I'm breaking Russell's number one rule. No techno babble. So I'm like, hey, what's my story? So we come back and we start telling them a story about, about funnels and how they work and how it changed my life and how it's changing these other people's lives. And I remember I explained it to him. And he's sitting back there.

He's like, wow. So he's like, how would you do a funnel for Sweet Peets? Like, we would do something like this? How would you do a funnel for camping world? How it was explaining it, different businesses that he owned. And I was saying, like, wow, every business needs a funnel. I was like, Marcus Simonis just said. I was like, yeah, freak it out.

Then he gets on stage, he does this whole thing. He gets off, gives his hug, jumps into Uber and takes off. It's like, that was so weird. And he leaves. And like 15 minutes later, he texts me, hey, do you want to be on the TV show The Prophet? I was like, yeah? Like, what? I'm like, yes, I would love to.

He's like, cool, I'll message you in a little while. So, fast for like a month later, Dave and I were at the Genius Network event. We're sitting there in this like mastermind, all these different people. All of a sudden, my phone lights up, boom, it's like Marcus Limo. So I was like, oh. And so I'm like, so I'm like, I'm going to have to go bathroom. I grab the phone and walk outside. And he's like, hey, Russell, this is Marcus.

Hey, I'm recording live on the show right now. And I'm just curious, would you be willing to come and build a funnel for flex watches? And I'm like, yes, I would love to build a funnel for flex watches. It's like, and then I use this weird conversation, we're apparently on camera having this conversation, I don't know, and then ends. And he texts me there, thanks, man. We've got to figure out time to fly you out.

You can build these guys some funnels. And I'm like, anyway, so this whole thing happens. So we're trying to figure out how do we build a funnel like on national TV? And so anyway, it's this crazy thing. And a couple months later, we're flying out there to California. And we decide like instead of like building a photo, it's kind of hard to build a funnel. Like let's build it on these huge cardboard cutout things.

We designed these cutouts. the night before we're at Kinko is trying to get these things printed out. And it was all sorts of chaos. And eventually we had a chance to actually be on the show. How many guys saw our episode with the Flex Watches? It was such a cool thing. So we recorded this whole thing. And then a couple months later, we are live on national TV all over the place,

introducing ClickFunnels to the world. And it was just one of the coolest, most surreal experiences to see, like, this thing that we had made up in a basement was becoming, like, mainstream. People were hearing about it, right? Funnels weren't just like a weird culty thing that we were doing over here. other people were talking about it, it was getting on TV. It was this crazy thing.

The next month after that, I met this dinner with, it was a Genius Network, and I'm there, and I get invited to this dinner. I show up the dinner, I sit down, and I'm sitting right across from Dean Graciosi. First time I had a chance to meet him, we're talking, we're hanging out. I don't remember anything in that conversation, other than in the middle of it, I felt another call.

Is there had that before? For me, I'd written the book.com Secrets. It was very painful. I was like, I will never write a book again. This is the worst pain I've gone through. I'm sitting there talking to Dean, we're talking all of a sudden, I feel, I hear this thing. It's like, you need to write another book. I was like, no, no, no.

I don't do that anymore. One and done, no more books. And I was like, you need to write books called Expert Secrets and it's going to be the next step in your guys' journey. And Dean's keep talking to me. We're talking. I was like, what? No. I'm not writing book.

We go back and forth, back and forth. Finally, dinner, I'm walking back to my hotel room. And Dave and I were actually sharing a hotel room that night. And I walk in there. I was just like, and I walk in. He's like, how was dinner? I'm like, God told me something. He's like, what? He's like, I'm supposed to write a book.

He's like, what? I thought you were going to write a book again. I'm like, I know, I don't want to write a book. But I know the name. It's going to be expert secrets. He's like, what? I'm like, yeah. And Dave starts jumping on day. He's like, we're writing another book.

He's freaking out. I was like, oh, man, I don't want to write a book. It's so painful. And so that starts this new thing of like expert secrets. Another random, I don't know why this story popped my head. Another random story. I remember in the hotel room that night, I was cleaning my ear with Q-tips. I was like, man, this is the second best feeling in the world.

I love Q-tips. Anyway, a week later, I get a box from Amazon, like a big box. And Dave sent me this huge box of Q-tips. He's like, I can't help you with the first best feeling in the world, but here's the second best feeling. I was like, I still have boxes of Q-tips from that box to this day. So Dave continues to serve me. So, okay, so expert secrets.

So then we start writing expert secrets. And then during this time, more crazy things are happening. We decided, like, we should launch a reality TV show. And so Brandon Fisher and I were like, we're launched a thing called funnel hacker TV. And we start filming these stories like Anthony. We go build biohacking funnels for him. We do this all crazy experience. We make this like TV show.

We launch it on YouTube. And then we do another one. And we start filming these TV shows, showing people what funnel hacking was and showing behind the scenes. And like getting the community, actually building funnels for people. And we're doing person after person after person. All these fun things were happening. 2017 we come out and expert secrets finally gets done and we launched that back into the world and it creates this whole new movement right the first

movement with dot-com secrets is interesting it was gathering all of the people who are into funnel building people were trying to understand marketing and funnels right but expert secrets open up this open up click funnels through this whole new market it was people who didn't know they needed a funnel yet all they knew is they had a calling they were an expert they were supposed to create something and expert secrets started gathering those people I was like hey you're next They'd come in here and we teach about how to be an expert. How do I find their voice?

How do things? But then the answer was always like, but to get your message out, you need a funnel. And so it brought new people into our world and helped introduce them in a really cool way into funnels. And that's when ClickFun starts growing again really, really rapidly. 2017 also, I had earlier that year, maybe the year prior, I'd seen a really cool viral video with a pooping unicorn. Anyone remember seeing Squatty Potty when it first came out?

The Squatty Potty ad comes out and I'm watching this thing. And it's already gotten like 100 million views. And it's just, if you haven't seen it yet, type Squatty Potty and watch it. It's this unicorn that's pooping ice cream. And basically, anyway, I'm not getting it with product. It's amazing. And I'm watching this. I'm like, it's hilarious.

But I was also like, this is some of the best copywriting I've ever seen. It's like copywriting in a funny ad. I mean, this is like, I've never, I'd seen funny ads before and I'd seen really good copyrights. Never like these two things blended together. I was like, I want, I want Harmon Brothers to make a video. They're the ones you to Squatty Potty and a whole bunch of viral videos at the time. Fiber Fix.

They had like 10 home runs and a row thing after thing. after thing. I was like, I want to hire these guys. And so I remember contacting them on their website. I'm like, hey, how do we hire you guys make a video for ClickFunnels? They don't respond. I'm messaging them, not responding to all these things. And like, I cannot get these guys to respond to me. I found out later the reason why is that they thought that funnels were things that people use if they were scamming people online. In fact, my whole career, it's been tough. When I first got started 20 plus years ago, everyone thought what we were doing like, oh, you're just scamming people on the internet. It was so weird to me. Nowadays, 20 years later, people are like,

oh, everyone gets it now, but 20 years ago, nobody got it. And even 10 years ago when we launched ClickFunnels, like Harmon Brothers, you have these viral videos who were understanding marketing, they still, they did not understand funnels. They thought they were these weird scamming things. So they refused to respond back to me until something happened. And this is the best. They launched the Fiber Fix Ad.

FibreFix Ad goes. It blows up. It's their fastest growing viral video of all time. People watch FiberFix ad. They go to a Shopify store, and what happens? They hit a brick wall and nobody converts. And they keep trying, they keep trying, they keep trying. the funnel and the whole thing that the company sent millions of dollars on this video is campaign

and nothing's converting and finally they had to do something they had to go reach out to the devil himself Russell Brunson say our funnel our page is not converting Russell I'm like oh it's because you have a Shopify store like how would you fix us I'm like oh you need to build in click funnels but those things are scammy I'm like well do you want to actually make money or do you not want to make money they're like okay fine and so they wanted me to build a funnel for them I wanted them to build a viral video for me and they said okay this is deal we'll make a viral video for you but you can't tell me when we made it because we don't want anyone to know that about that we're using ClickFunnels.

It's like, what is wrong with you guys? Like, how many of you ever get frustrated when you're trying to grow your business and people are like, it's just, you know, you're just like, do you not understand? Anyway, so I'm like, fine, I don't even care. We're gonna make a viral video and it's gonna be awesome. And then I'm gonna fix your prize problems.

So we go build a funnel for them, fix their problems, blow up their company, like, is awesome, right? And then they come to do a viral video. And if you look at the Harmon Brothers, the way they do their process is really cool. The first thing they do is they hire three different sketch comedy writers to write a script for you. So with three different people all writing script for how they would sell click funnels. And then they rent a cabin in Sundance. And you come to

cabin in Sundance and they have all three script artists stand up and the first one reads, and they're comedians, right? They're hilarious people. They read their script. And the next person reads their script. Next person reads their scripts. You see all three scripts. And from the three, then you pick which one's your favorite? Like, ooh, number two is my favorites. They go take that back and then they go sit in a room for three or four hours and they, all the comedy writers work together and then write a new script. They come back out and they pitch that one. And you laugh at and they tweak some things, they go back, and you do us for two days, they come out with, like, the perfect script. And it was weird, and we got to the cabin, the Harbin brothers, you could tell

that they did not want to be there, they did not like us, they thought I was a scammer, but they needed us, and so they're in there, and it was like the weird, it's, like, cold feeling, like, these guys really hate us. Like, I don't understand why they don't like us, but they felt obligated to help us. And so we're hanging out for two days, and we're just like, you know, it was actually the middle of the expert seekers book launch. Like, we're launching the book, we're talking about it. We're sharing success stories. We're telling, like, so within like a day, day and a half we fall, like, these guys fall in love with us. They also are like, oh my gosh, this is amazing.

We're showing stories like Brandon and came to Poland, other people, all these things like how these funnels or change people's lives. And so by the time the two days were over, like, we had broken them where there's like, oh my gosh, we understand it now. We didn't get it before. And so when it was done, they said, okay, we want to produce this. They were initially just going to do this script for us. Like, we want to produce this and we'll be proud to put the harm of brother's name on it.

I was like, okay, thank you. And so they produced this viral video for us. And I'll tell it, I'll jump ahead a little bit because it's kind of cool. After that, they fell in love with us. They fell in love with the mission. They fell in love with everything. They started using funnels to sell their own courses they had. And I still remember two years later on stage, I didn't know that they had won a two

comical board, but I'm on stage into a comicable awards. All of a sudden I look over. They announce the names, the entire Harmon Brothers come up. And they can't give me hugs. And they're like, we wanted it too comical, we did it too. And I was like the coolest thing, have that whole thing come full circle, right? It was awesome. Yeah.

So the Harmon Brother video gets done and we're like, well, if we're going to launch this, we got to like, we got to launch this, right? We don't want to just like, here's a video, good luck. We've got to make a lot of noise around it. And so we're brainstorming. How do we launch this? What do we do? We should do big influencer launch.

And there's so many funny stories about this. Just brainstorming as a team, like a management team, we're throwing ideas out there. And I remember we were trying to get like a bunch of big influencers to come to it. And we were calling Dan Fleishman. I think Dan might be in the room somewhere. I asked Dan, we're like, how do we get people to show up? He's like, we got to do something crazy. He's like, like, influence, if you want,

like the good influencer show up, you know, like, get a Ferrari and drive it off a cliff. He said, what? He's like, yeah, that's how you get influencers come. They want footage if you like them driving a Ferrari off a cliff. I'm like, that's how you get these guys to show? Can I pay him something?

He's like, no, it's got to be crazy. I'm like, well, like, what's the number? If we don't get a Ferrari and drive on a cliff, you have another idea? And so we keep going through ideas. And then finally we're like, what if we tried to set a world record? And like, oh, that'd be cool. We can get a bunch of people that way.

And so we decided, okay, what if we tried? And so we're trying to figure a world record we could do. And then we're like, what about bubble soccer? Like, we create the biggest bubble soccer contest in the world. We could win a world record. And like, where are we going to do this at? I'm like, what if we ran out of the Boise State football state anyway? It was almost like if you give them out of cookie things.

And so within like 14 days, Dave had rented out the Boise State football stadium. He'd called every single in like five or six states around, it's places that had bubble soccer balls and had them. chip all these bubble soccer balls to us. We had called every influencer. I literally sat in my car for like six hours. I had a list of every YouTube influencer, Instagram influence, like hundreds,

probably close to a thousand names. And I would record a video for every single one. Hey, what's up? What's up, Casey Nystad? How's it going, man? Hey, we're doing a bubble soccer party. We wanted you to do that, right? Made a video.

Next person. I sat for six or seven hours, making a custom video for every single influencer we could dream of on the planet. It was the most painful thing ever. But I was like, we need to get some of these influencers to show up. So we made that. Then we had to go send these video out, put them on video cards, send them out to all these

different influencers. We ended up getting, yeah, a whole bunch of amazing people to come to this thing. And we did this bubble soccer thing in the Boise football stadium. We set a world record for the largest bubble soccer game of all time. Any of you guys are in their room for that? A couple of you guys were at it. It was most insane night. And then at that event, we showed the Harmon Brothers video, and then we had everybody promote it.

And this video started going viral. We got three or four million views on this thing. And it was kind of this new face, this new brand lift of ClickFunnels. If you guys saw the videos, this gold prospector being all weird. And that became the face, the mascot of ClickFunnels for the next year. So it was this gold prospector. And that was a lot of fun. That same year, 2007, all the things were happening.

We were doing one of the very first ever fat events. I was on stage of the Fat Events. I get off stage, and there's a phone call from somebody in my church who's really high up. I kind of freaked me out. I thought I was, anyway, I didn't know what I was kind of scared. And I get on the phone call and they asked me, they said, have you ever heard of Operation Underground Railroad? I was like, no, what's that? They said, it's this organization that helps save children from sex slavery.

And we feel that you need to help somehow. And I was like, thank you. And I was like, how do you want us to help? And then I don't know, that's like, God told us you're supposed to do something. So you'll figure it out. I was like, what? So, I'm like, okay. So I had a chance to go down to meet Tim Bauer and people who ran the O-U-R and got to know kind of what they were doing.

And then I went back home and it was like, hey, I'm supposed to do something. So in this incident, I put on like my consultant. Like, if I was a consultant, what would I do? And so we built out this whole plan, what we would do. And it was just a weird thing where we mapped out a funnel that we thought would help bring exposure and all that kind of stuff to this organization. And so we're putting it all together. And I'm supposed to drive down to Utah to kind of present this to everybody.

Here's what we're going to do. And that morning I had this weird, uneasy feeling where I'm just like, that. It doesn't feel right. Like something feels off. I don't know what it is. Like strategically, it's the best plan in the world. But it was my plan. And I had this really weird epiphany. So my plan wasn't the right plan. There was another plan that God had and I wasn't listening. Have you ever had that before? So I'm in the shower that day and I'm just like kind of nervous. I'm getting ready and stuff. And then all of a sudden, I was like, what if I don't do my plan? What do I do? I don't know what I'm going to do. And then if you guys are going to shower,

all of a sudden, like, these ideas start popping your head. In the shower, all of a sudden, this idea pops my head. And it's crazy because I'd met this guy named Nick Nanton, like, five years earlier at an event. And Nick had won, like, 20 Emmys from documentaries. And I don't know if he knew who I was. I'd just, like, cross past with him. And so I get out of the shower, and all of a sudden, it pops my head, Nick Natton's

name. I was like, that's weird. And it was like, you're supposed to, he's going to build a documentary for you to help to help this organization. I was like, what? Nick Nantons is going to who I am. So I'm standing in my towel. I pick my phone, I'm scrolling through Facebook, and I find Nick Natton.

Like, we're both following each other. I'm like, oh, it's a message. I'm like, hey, weird thing. I'm supposed to build this documentary. God just told me, and it's going to help save a lot of children. And you're supposed to do it. And I don't know. What do you think?

Send. And then I'm getting my clothes on. And by the time I close, I walk out and I'm a message back from him. I listen to the message. He's like, whoa. He's like, dude, I felt that. Okay, I'm in. If you cover the hard cost, we'll do it for free.

Other than the hard cost, we'll do it for free. They can keep the rights to it. I'm not going to make, like, I'm in 100%. I'm like, what? I'm like, all right. So yeah, give Nick down a huge round of applause. And so I'm like, we're making a documentary. So I call my team.

You know the plans I'm pitching in like five hours or drive down? Like, it's all canceled. We're doing a documentary now. Like, about what? I'm like, I don't even know. But that's the plan. Like, that's the worst plan.

That's not even a plan. That's just like, I'm like, I don't. no, no, that was what I was told, we're just doing it, Nixon, it's going to be amazing. So we drive down and I tell them, I'm like, hey, we're going to make a documentary. And then, like, someone else did a documentary the past, but then it was this weird thing where they had the rights to, and they were suing us, and this whole nightmare. I was like, okay, well, Nick said that, like, we're going to do it, and then it's yours. And then you do it everyone with it.

We don't want any money for it. We don't want any royalty. Like, it's just yours 100%. Like, there. And they're like, what? Why would you do that? I'm like, I don't know, because God told us. So we're just going to, like, that's the plan.

And they're like, okay, let's do that. And so we started this crazy process. And so, man, there's so many weird stories. I wish I could tell you guys about that experience. But Nick ended up going down and filming them, capturing the story. And then they went down to Haiti to go film Guestomarty, his story, with this kid, Gardi, who got stolen. And they're down there filming this interview with him. And all of a sudden, while it's happening, this trafficker, they've been trying to capture for a long time.

All of a sudden they found her. And Nick Natt and his team are there in Haiti just trying to be normal, you know, interviewing someone and also like, we're doing a mission tonight. And like, what? And so Nick and his entire camera can throw. They throw these guys in like armored clothes from the back of the car with their cameras. Nick's getting like these GoPro cameras and strapping them to all the sergeant's helmets. And it's like this crazy experience.

And they go down there and they go and they find this ring. They busted. They take it all down. And the whole thing gets captured on film for this documentary. It's one of the craziest things in the world. All I remember is that night, Nick Natt messaged me. He's like, bro, he's like, this is insane. He's like, came down and interviewed

these guys. He's like, and then there was a mission, and they took us, and we rested, like, 30 people. It's like, I'm pretty sure that they're going to come and kill us. We're racing to the airport. They're going to get us out of her. This is the most insane experience ever, man. I'll message you when we land. I'm listening to Foxxor mess. I'm like, what?

What's happening? I'm messaging back, no response, no response. I'm like, he might be dead for all I know. Like, I have no idea what's happening. I'm freaking it out. Five or six, hours later, he messaged him. He's like, we're in America. He's like, we're safe.

He's like, we got all those footage. It's insane. And anyway, there's so many stories that happened. And from that, they film this documentary. Fast forward now two months later, we're at Funnel Hacking Live. And this funnel hacking night was crazy. There's so many crazy things happened that year. In fact, 30 days before that funnel hacking live,

I got asked to speak at Grant Cardone's event in Mandalay Bay. You guys have probably heard this story. story before. And this is 2018. 2018 was one of the most crazy years in the world. So 2018 happens. I can go to Grant Cardone's event. I knew at the time the world record for the most that had been sold from a stage is like 1.2, 1.3 million.

I was like, I want to beat the world record. What's it going to take? So we set a goal. How do we make $3 million in a 90-minute presentation? That's the equivalent of like a million an hour take home for me, which would be like the craziest thing. So we figured it all out, reverse engineer it. And you guys have heard this story. I'm not going to go deep to do it. But we do the presentation at 10X.X. We close $3.2 million in sales.

insane. Like the craziest, one of the craziest things in my life. Yeah. It didn't feel real, right? Being, I'm like, we're in the stadium talking about funnels and people are freaking out. I'm like, this is the same thing, you know, 15 years ago, I do an event and nobody would show up to it. Now, like, we're in a stadium and people are freaking out. And then 30 days later, we come to funnel hacking live. And this is the first funnel hacking live where we introduced two common Quebec's coaching program. At that funnel hacking live, it was like the perfect storm. One of the most crazy things in the world. Okay. Night one of that event, we introduced Tim Ballard and Operation Underground Railroad. night we watched the OUR documentary that we had filmed and it was crazy if anyone was in

the room like we're all out here bawling our eyes out it was crazy all of the families from Haiti lost kids were there they were all on stage with us it was the craziest thing and during that event we raised over million dollars for Operation Underground Railroad which was insane it was crazy then we launched two comical bags coaching program we launched that and during that we did over 12 million dollars in sales from that I'm like we go from three and a half million dollars to 30s there, 12 million. Like, it's just like everything we touch is on.

I feel like we're on top of the world. Everybody loves us. We're like, the hero's journey is all happening. Like, everything's perfect. It was crazy. That same year, I go to a mastermind with Dean Graciosi, Brandon Bouchard. We're hanging out, having this whole thing. On the flight back, I'm sitting next to Dean.

And Dean's like, I had this idea. We're building this company where it does masterminds. I was like, you should go buy the domain in mastermind.com. He's like, no, it's too expensive. We're not going to buy it. And so I was like, how can I build a good relationship with these guys? And so I find out, I go to mastermind.com and it's owned by someone who had a two comic club board. They're on the homepage holding two comic club board.

I'm like, oh, if they've got a two comic club board, I got it in, I can figure out how to get a hold of these guys. And so Dave figured out how to get a hold of them, got them on the phone. And we end up buying mastermind.com from them for $600,000. And then I gave it to Dean and Tony's a gift. Like, Dean, you really should buy mastermind.com. He's like, no, we're going to call it something else. I was like, okay, here. I bought the domain.

Merry Christmas. There you go. He's like, what? You bought me this. I'm like, yeah, you just need to have it. It's the coolest thing in the world. So we gave him the domain. After that was crazy.

He called me back, him and Tony and said, hey, that was insane. And then they made me actually a partner in the business. And so the first year we did this insane launch from Tony and Dean and launched it as a partner in the business. And it was great. And then after that, after the first year, I was like, you know what? I want to focus on ClickFun. So I actually gave back my equity and then became a great partner in the business, but no longer, kind of a partner in it.

But for the first year, we were partners in mastermind, which was really, really cool. And that was all 2018. Like, it was just one of the, it was just crazy. We felt invincible for a while. Then comes 2019. Then we invited back to GrowthCon, and we did the second GrowthCon,

which was in the Mariners baseball stadium. Any of you guys? Any of you guys? It was crazy. Supposed of Grand Cardone, parachuted into the stadium. Years later, we found out it probably wasn't Grand Cardone. But it was crazy.

That happens. And then Grand Central Station speaking, I'm right after. we're thinking, okay, there's 30,000 people in the room. I'm doing the math in our head. If we did, off 9,000, maybe this much something's going to make here. Like, we're just planning and killing it. And I do the pitch.

And if anyone was there, I get on stage in this huge stadium, I start talking. First thing, my microphone goes out. So then they hand me like a handheld, which I'm like talking. I'm like, forget to hold it up. Am I talking? Anyway, and then there's this weird echo reverb. So I'm doing this presentation and you can't hear anything. And I talk at Russell Speed, right?

So I'm like, dula, lo, it's what happened. I'm talking. And it hits the back wall and that bounces, back and then it hits me and I hear it and I throw me off and then the audience is hearing like three or four reverbs and nobody can understand a word I'm saying and I'm just like and the confident monitors you're like slow down slow down I'm like I don't know how to slow down like I have 90 minutes to give a two hour presentation and nobody can hear a word and then people are getting up to getting like it was just the weirdest thing and anyway we did a whole documentary if you

want to see the whole story it was crazy but we did this event and like it kind of bombed and it was weird because we yeah it was like everything kind of went down after I was like It was just the weirdest thing. Like it didn't work. They didn't figure out they opened the roof a little bit. There was less echoes. Other speakers did have the echo.

But for me, it was so bad. I don't understand a word I was saying. And it was just like, it was one of those things that was just like, one of those punches in the gut. Excuse me. 2019, I also had a chance to go to Fiji in a mastermind group

and asked Tony Robbins a question. And the question I asked him was just, I was like, I love building funnels, but like, in this role, I'm not building funnels. I'm like, I'm a CEO. I've got meetings. He's got things. I'm like, I don't get to do what I love the most.

And Tony gave me a really cool piece of advice. That whole documentary is online as well if you want to see the whole story. But he was like, well, the problem is like, why are you trying to be the CEO? He's like, you shouldn't be the CEO. He's like, be on the board of directors and then pick the roles you actually want to do. He's like, get someone who's really good CEO and have them be the CEO for you. And I was like, oh my gosh, that would be insane. Because I'm not good at the whole management and people part of the business.

And so I get home and Todd and I start talking about this. And there was only one person that made sense. There's one person who I thought in our organization who could be the person who I would trust with the reins of ClickFunnels. And obviously that was Dave Woodward. And so that year is the year that I kind of stepped down from being CEO. You gave a round applause. And I gave Dave the reins. And I was like, okay, I'm going to go build funnels.

You can do the rest of it. And man, for the next year so, it just, it worked. It was like, it was working really, really great. It was really fun. About that time, I remember we got this random phone call from a company. And they were representing a big, bank and they were looking for a company that did payment processing and obviously click phones processes you know one and a half two billion dollars your payment

processing and they message us like hey this company's looking to acquire someone and they're interested actually acquiring you and we're like we're not for sale we're bootstrapped no and then and the guy's like well are you sure you don't want to entertain this and like we wouldn't entertain this they offers over a billion dollars the guy comes back okay I talk to him they'd be interested they'd be willing if the numbers right to do over a billion dollars right what that was a joke Here's a joke and it comes back and anyway, like, okay.

And so that was the first time like, well, are we, like, we worked that? What does that even look? I wouldn't even know. And so we started part of this guy who's like, we can go find out to see what ClickFun's is actually worth. And so they went together and I don't know how it all works. They put together a package and they put it out there. And then from that, we end up getting three or four hundred people are interested

in looking at the package. And then it's basically this big, huge funnel, right? So these people look at the package. And then from 300, 400 people, it's like, hey, 100 people are like, ooh, I'm actually interested. I want to send NDAs and go deeper. And then from there, and it kept getting smaller, smaller. So, and so like, we're running click phones doing stuff.

There's this weird distraction where we keep hearing these numbers, hearing these things, and have a conversation, people fly out to Boise to meet the team and see what we're doing. We're trying to, like, not pay attention. We're trying to keep doing what we're doing, but there's just weird distraction that keeps happening in the background. And again, this is 2020. And it gets close and close to the spot where it gets down. There's like, I think, four companies at the end. And they start actually giving us, like, real legitimate numbers.

And initially people started, it was going to be a billion dollars. And it got smaller and smaller because of the, like, these guys are really smart. You start learning that. Like, they're very smart. Looking at like, oh, it would be that if it was this, but then there's this and there's this. And it kept being small, it kept tweaking and changing.

And finally, it was actually 2020. It was the day of the election. I actually jumped in a plane and I flew out to Atlanta to go hang out with Todd because I knew that the offer's coming in the next morning. And we kind of had ballpark what it was going to be. And I don't think I'm allowed to say exactly what the offer of coming be. But when all of a sudden done, Both Todd and I personally would have walked away with over $110 million cash ourselves in our pockets.

Like, boom, we're out. See you guys later. Now, is anyone who had an option? It's like there's $110,000 or sorry, $110 million. $110,000 is not that big of a deal. $110 million each would have been each of our personal take home on the thing. So imagine there's the table right here with $110 million you could just grab and then just be like, peace, I'm out of here.

Or there's option two, which is like go back and keep struggling for four or five more years because you have another hero's journey you got to go on. What did you guys do in that situation? Let's go! Right? It's crazy. And so Todd and I are sitting there and it's just like, man, we're there for a day or two talking back and forth.

And I don't know, it's just one of those things. And it was weird because I was scared. I was like, Todd's not going to want to do that. And we type of talking back and forth. And both of us are like, man, I don't feel like we're done yet. I don't feel like there's something we're supposed to be doing. or like, again, that call the contribution, that thing, which doesn't make sense. So we're there for like 48 hours or so.

And the next thing I know, Dave's like, I'm at the airport. I'll be there soon. He's like, I'm not missing this party. So then Dave flies out to Atlanta. And so we're sitting in a room and we're trying to say, what do we do? Like, click phones is great, right? It's been really good. It's like, there's things we know we need to do to get the next level.

Like there's stuff we got to do. There's foundational stuff that we can't do in the existing platform. So either we can create the plan, give it to this new company. They can go do and execute it. Or we can go back to the drawing board and build something that gives us the ability to do the vision that we have. What do we do? What do we do? And I remember we sat down. Oh, in fact, checks out. I have a couple slides here. This is the night before the offer came. We throw slides up real quick. This is me jumping in a plane. I almost died that night, actually. We get in this plane.

We're flying to Canton, which you know, Canton. It's like, there's a lantern. There's a little place called Canton. And there's a little private airport next to it. So we're flying this private airport. And the guy gets above the private airport. And he's like, all the lights are off down there. Like what? He's like, yeah, there's no one down there. He's like, there's like, circling. He's like, there's no one down there. We can't land. And Todd's like in his Jeep down there waiting for me. I'm like, but he's right there. How do we just kind of jump out? Like, I don't want to go right there. Like, sorry. And there's some wind and stuff. And so like, we're going to go fly like somewhere else. I'm messaging

Tom. Like, they're flying me some other airport. So Todd's like racing this airport like at two in the morning. I end up flying and they land somewhere else. Anyway, it's kind of crazy. So we come back next day. We're sitting here. This is the day we're getting the offer. We're freaking out. We're like, what do we do? What do we not do? There's Todd mapping out world domination on the on the board over there. This is the next day. Dave flies out. We go to Todd's Lake House. We sit down and said, okay, we got to do something great. And first we need to get the pad of paper. We said, okay, this is again, middle of election season. So like, make click funnels great again. What do we got to do to make click funnels great again? Like, it's really, really good. How do we make it

great again? What does it actually look like? And we sat down and started thinking about and brainstorming. What would it look like? How long would it take? What would it? And this was, it was fun. It was exciting. It was like going back at the very beginning. We're first mapping this out. Like, what would that look like? This is Todd, Cody. stuff. During this night, this conversation was Todd first reached out to Andrew. He has a chance to be Andrew. Andrew built this platform called Bullet Train that Todd wanted to build new click funnels on. He reached out to Andrew at night. We start talking. This whole thing starts going together. This is us doing more planning. And that's me and Dave at the end of the week flying out after we

decided like, you know what? Let's push the money away. Like we've got a bigger mission. Let's go figure this thing out. Let's go change the world one more time. Which is crazy. Which is scary. It's still crazy. I'll talk about something the next couple of years. But it's always weird to me that like, I don't know. When people get frustrated at me for something, and it's like, you don't understand, like, all these things I'm doing are for you guys. I don't need to be doing this. I could have walked away.

You know what I mean? Anyway, I'll get to that later. But we did this because we know you guys. We love you guys. We know what you're capable of. Like, I think I understand and believe more in each of your divine potential than most of you guys do. I know what you're capable of. I know the people's lives you can change, and I don't want to not.

be part of that. Why we keep showing up and keep doing this despite all the obstacles. Okay. So that starts this journey. 2021 now. We're Todd is in building mode. It was top secrets like the skunk's horse project. Most of our team doesn't know about their rebuild this thing. They're rebuild this thing. The rebuild this thing. As fast as they can from the ground up to rebuild what our vision was. During that time, we start doing some acquisitions. We buy a company called Vumley with a bunch products. Dan Kennedy's company comes on the market. We decided by Dan Kennedy's company. And it's like this heyday of the chaos and all sorts of stuff happening.

Todd's building this. We're acquiring companies to be focusing on the growth. Like all sort of stuff's happening. It's kind of crazy. And we are a week away from closing on the magnetic marketing offer with Dan Kennedy. I'm so excited because I'm freaking out. This whole thing's about to happen. I don't know where the part of this story goes. So about a week before the magnetic marketing deal was done. So Dave and I are sitting in the office and we're talking and we're trying to figure things out. And I just remember Dave wasn't feeling good for some reasons and he was kind of struggling with some stuff.

And he's like, oh, something's wrong. I can't figure it out. I got to go to the doctor to go figure this things out. But, you know, man, he's like Superman, like bigger in life. Like I didn't think much about it. it goes to the doctor and then comes back he's just working on some stuff and um uh the middle of the day I look over at his desk and I see him he's on the ground um praying and um not that I hadn't seen him pray before but never like that in the middle of the day next to his desk and uh wait until he was

done that walked in and um I was like hey what's going on and uh um oh man he told me he's like hey uh the doctor's called him I have a tumor and I have a tumor and he told him he's like hey the doctor's called And I have a tumor. Those guys have had a chance to meet Dave. This is Dave. He spoke of his Captain America one time, Fun Rock and Live. Shows me his pictures. He's like, I don't know what that means.

He's like, I don't know what's going to happen. All we knew was really, it was a really bad one. It was really fast. And things started moving so fast. Within like a day or two, he was in surgery. And like, I don't even know. It was like, anyway, I don't know. Things started happening so fast.

And it was just, it was crazy. next minute was in surgery. He's coming out. We're all cheering for them. Everyone's got Team Dave shirts on. Anyway, a lot of that phase was a blur for me. I don't know. I don't remember all the things. All I remember is like the person who I was the closest to who I spent most time with. It was just, I don't know, it was hard. Trying to figure things out and try and figure, and he was running Clickphones.

He's running the company and he's going through this. And I remember that night, like, For the next two or three months, I couldn't sleep, and I think about him and his wife and his kids. And like, well, they must be going through. And, like, in the fear and I just, I don't know, all the things. And on top of that, we have this click funnels. We're building a new platform.

We just bought two companies. We acquired like five or six hundred employees overnight. And I don't know what to do. And I'm trying to figure, anyways, just, I don't know. It was just so much chaos, so fast. And things are so much pressure and so much things. And like, um, It was just such a scary dark season.

I couldn't, I couldn't sleep for months and months. I still struggled sleeping, honestly. Just try to figure out the things and some of the parts behind it. Not knowing what's going to happen. That year, we had announced to the Funnel Hockey Live that we were working on ClickFunnel 2.0. And we were so excited to share it with everybody. We'd been building for over a year and we were sharing it. And we thought we were probably closer than we probably were.

We told everyone was coming. So everyone was so excited. And we were excited. We were racing towards this thing. And during that time, we had competitors coming in who were taking shots at us. But we're like, it doesn't matter because we got this new thing coming out. It's going to be so great. We're so excited.

And we got closer and closer to the next funnel hacking live during this window, right? We just bought Dan King's coming. Just got phoomily. Dave's got diagnosed. Everything's happening. Funnel hacking is about to happen. And people are giving so much pressure. Like, we need quick photos, we need this.

We're leaving the platform, like all these kind of things. We're like, it's that year, funnel hacking live. And I'll take responsibility for this. I was like, we need to get this to the market. We need to get everybody access to this. And so, that year, Funal Hiking Live, we showed it off the first time. And it's something we've been using for the last six months. Like, we were proud of it.

We were, but what's crazy is, like, we built software. We built ClickFun's the very first time. Day number one, you don't have 10,000 customers. Day one, you get one. Then you get five. And then you get five. And little hiccups come, little bugs, so you fix them long away, right? So we've been using Clickphones for six months ourselves.

We figured out all the bugs was flawless. And shortly after the Likolns, we decided to do the launch, let people in. And we told people was the beta launch, You're going to continue to have access to ClickFunnels Classic, but you also get 2.0. You can just test it out. And so we do this launch. And in one week, we get 16,000 people to join the new platform. It's crazy.

But, man, adding 16,000 people to a platform overnight was definitely a Russell mistake. I will take credit for that one. And things came in, and it was like everyone's starting to hit on it, tons of load and pressure, and we're trying to figure things out. And again, when we launched it, I told them, I was like, you still have classic gift, too, this is beta, like, use both of them and, like, figure things out. But unfortunately, a lot of people came in, and they didn't like the experience initially as we were fixing bugs and keeping things up, and we lost a lot of people during that window.

And it was tough. And it's weird to be because, like, again, instead of, like, people like, oh, it's not ready, all this focus on classic, like, people got angry in a really weird way. Not everybody, but some people did. And again, it was in the middle of all this stuff happening. It was just like, we're trying to get this out. We're trying to everything. We literally walked away from hundreds of millions of dollars to create this.

We're so proud of it. And yes, there's going to be issues and be problems, but we were trying to work through them as fast as we could. And that year started for, yeah, it started for me like a really tough time. It was weird. I started seeing people who were close friends and partners and people who had been with us the whole, like the whole journey, who all of a sudden were like turning their backs on us and walking away. And I started seeing people who I remember them being on stage, getting into a comic awards, crying their eyes out like, Russell, you changed my life.

you changed my life and then seeing them the next month running a Facebook ad with them with the two comical cup awards saying i just missed some click funnels so this one over here to my white label you should go try it over here and like competing directly against me talking trash man like like putting out lies and stuff because they were opportunists as opposed to um sticking with us to the mission and it was like the weirdest thing and for me it became a very dark time almost for next year and a half two years where i was struggling because it was like i was so frustrated like i was called to serve you guys as customers and there were customers who came in who took everything which I love, give them everything we could, and then we took that and then we would compete against

us in ways that were really painful. And for me, it got to a spot if I'm completely honest. I was just like, I don't want to help people anymore. Because if I help them, what's it going to mean? Right? I'm training people who are going to compete against me. And like, it was really hard for me. I'm sure a lot of you guys have gone through that before in your life, where it's like the people you're called to serve, sometimes things happen. You're just like, man, I don't know if I want to serve these people anymore. And it was hard. It was like this weird thing for me. I'm trying to figure things out. And I had people who were like, it's weird, people who left like, hey, you, you forgot about me.

You stopped messaging. I'm like, are you kidding me? Like, are you kidding me? Like, I was drowning. Like, I wish that someone was able to reach back out to me as opposed to what happened. Um, 2020 in the midst of this as we launch click funnels, as we're working through these issues. As we are fixing things, Todd and the team are amazing. and as they're fixing things as fast as we can.

They're improving upon things, strengthening things. They're killing themselves. We're doing things on our side. In December of 2022, I was leaving, I was leaving wrestling practice with my kids, and then I got a message from Dave's wife, and they said, hey, you should come over tonight. This might be the last time.

And so we went over and just had such a cool experience to be with him and pray with him and to talk to him. and I remember when the last conversation I had, he looked at me directly on the eye, and he says, I, he said, Russell, you changed my life. And shortly after that, we had a chance to have a great memorial for Dave and talk about him and share his life. And just, I started thinking about, like, through this whole journey,

the one person was consistent the whole time, was always Dave. He was always one. Every night, I'd be working late. He would show up. He's right next to me in the room. I'd be going through so much pain. He'd come to me, what can I take off of your plate?

What can I take off your plate? What can I do? It was just so, so many just insanely great memories of him on this journey. And I know that there's no way I could have gotten myself here without him, right? And it was, anyway, that was the end of 2022. And in 2023 starts the journey without Dave for that next year, and that year was tough.

It was me trying to jump back into a seat-year-old and trying to figure out how to run things and trying to, and we were bringing people in. And again, we just bought these companies. We're trying to, how do we juggle these companies with our own companies? Plus, we're trying to launch this new platform. And I don't remember a lot of 2023. I don't remember a lot of it. It was tough. Towards the end of 2023, my twin boys, our first foreign kids, they turn 18, which is crazy.

And so proud of them. Oh, man, I love my. My kids are, I have amazing kids. kids, all of them. And I remember at the end of 20, what year is at, 2020, they had their 18th birthday as twins, 18-year-old birthday, and we were planning in our minds like, you know, when you have kids, like you figure like, you have your kids, they're going to graduate high school, and then that point, they're going to leave, and you're prepared for that. So we're preparing for them like that year leaving. And I remember

when our kids turned 18, one of our sons was like, I'm 18, and he was ready to leave and to go into the world. And he did. And I'm proud of him. He's doing such a great job, but I don't think Collette and I were ready for that. Like, he leaves him. It's just like, when you're not ready for that and going through the emotional turmoil that I don't understand like how does this work he's not here anymore he's living somewhere else and like as a parent like it's really scary in fact and then Boe and his twin just left on a mission like a month ago so he's gone for two years now so it's like we're learning this new phase of being parenting right of being parents and it's hard it's emotional it's when these things where it's like your whole life you're pouring into these kids and also like they're adults and they're in the real world and it's like it's if you haven't experienced that yet you with younger kids like it's coming and it's horrible and it's horrible and it's horrible and it's horrible and it's and amazing all the same time. So 23, we're learning how to do that. In 2024, I won't go into the whole thing, but the beginning of 2024,

you guys know, if you guys don't know, I'm mildly obsessed with wrestling myself. One of the things I'm so proud of is, I've always tried to be very present with my kids. I want to be there when they're competing, when they're all sorts of, especially in wrestling, which is my favorite love. So I don't think I missed a wrestling practice.

my entire kid's career through middle school, through high school, every single practice, every single meet. In fact, there was one time we were on a riding retreat with the Harmon Brothers. And I was in a riding retreat that morning, and then they had a wrestling match that night. So I chartered a plane. It cost me $30,000 to fly from the Harmon Brothers retreat, so I did not miss my kids' wrestling match that night. That's how important, like, wrestling is to me.

And this is my son Bowen's senior year at wrestling. I'm there all summer long. We worked out every single day. Worked out every single day of practice. I didn't miss single practice. It's getting closer and closer. It's the end of his season, and we're getting closer and closer, and we're at a tournament at the beginning of the year,

and I'm sure a lot of you guys probably saw the video. It was after a night, the night prior, my wife and I hadn't gone to bed until two or three in the morning because of some reasons. Next morning I'm at this wrestling tournament, and terms happening, my son's wrestling, and I'm not justifying what I did because what I did was completely wrong. My son gets put into an illegal move.

as a dad I freak out. I'm three feet away from my jump off. I pushed the kid off too aggressively. It was definitely not okay. It was not right what I did. Afterwards, I apologize to the family. We drove out there. We apologized to them and the family. Everything should have been okay. Of course, somebody caught a video clip from really, really far and saw an opportunity. And so that video goes viral. Anybody who doesn't like Russell Brunson sees the video and so excited, this is their chance to finally the guy who's got the perfect outside, they're going to take jabs. And people who I thought were friends start reposting the video, start talking about they hate me, why they hate me.

These videos go viral. One of the videos actually made on the Joe Rogan show. I made it on the Joe Rogan show. Yes, congratulations. I finally made it on Rogan. These videos get tens of millions of views. And over the next three weeks of my life, I get conservatively probably three to four thousand death threats. People want to kill me.

Because, yeah. And if you haven't had a chance to get canceled yet, does not feel good. But especially doesn't feel good, it was people a lot of times who you thought you're a friend, who are the ones purport, you know, pushing it forward. And that was hard. That was the beginning of the year. And last year was a hard year for me. It's hard because I'm like, I want to serve people, but, like, I don't want people to turn on me.

Like, fear of that. Fear of, like, if I put my face online and I may get 500 people to talk trash about me. Fear of, like, all these things. And the fear got heavier and heavier and heavier for me. where I was just like, how do I show up? Like, I'm supposed to do this thing. I have this calling, right? I don't feel worthy now.

I'm an idiot. Look what I did on national TV. Everyone in the world saw it. I feel like, like, just thing after thing. I don't want to do this. I want to shrink. I want to hide. Like, I don't like, I don't know.

It was tough. I'm like, what do I do? Do I just walk away? He's like, it's done. And in real that time, I'd been seeing Andy Yellied online. So I got to know Andy in a message. I'm like, hey man, love what you're doing. and love your energy. And he was like, bro, come out to Arizona. I was like, I'm so bad.

I can't come to Arizona. No, you need to come to Arizona right now. And so I don't know why. For some reason, I felt that tug. All right, go out there. So I jump in a plane, I fly out to Arizona. And I walk in and if you guys, I don't know, I show some video clips. But I get to this place. We show up in a Jeep and he's got Andy, the Elliott Army shows up around the Jeep. They start shaking this Jeep. And they're not about to knock this whole thing over. And we're waiting. They open the door. I remember my phone fell out and smashed on the ground. They pick me up. They start throwing me in the sky, they throw me out, I'm flying through that. I'm like, what is happening?

And then I come out, and then all of a sudden they're like, hey, the way you introduced Russell Brunson is not by shaking his hand, this is how you do it. And all of some, there's four or five guys who all start stripping their clothes off and they're in wrestling singles. There's a little guy, a bigger guy, and a guy who's like 400 pounds in a wrestling single. They bring out like this four by five wrestling mat under the Arizona scorching sun. And I'm sitting there in my nice clothes, my Louis Vuitton shirt.

And it's like, all right, Russell, we want to wrestle you right now. And I see drones flying above with cameras, every camera. And they're like, what am I about to do? But if you take my strength finder, my number one thing is competition, I cannot turn down to competition. And I was like, all right? So I take my shoes off. Like, you guys want to lose in front of all these cameras? I'm up for it.

And as I'm thinking in my head, like, I don't know these kids are. They could be national champs. They could be like, that guy's 400 pounds. He could crush me. But I'm going to wrestle. So I'm stripping down my clothes. I walk out there, my jeans, bare feet, and my nice Louisvon, uh, yeah, I'm trying to like dress nice to show up for these guys. Shake hands and we are wrestling on this mat.

Luck, they beat the first guy, boom. And then the scorching sun on these mats gets hotter. What it is like, 2,000 degrees. The kid I'm wrestling, he has blisters on his feet for being so hot. So I jump off and I'm like, oh, so I'm okay, good, we're done. Our feet are bleeding. We're good. They're like, pull the mat to the shade.

Like, what? Like, no. So I pull the mat to the shade. put it cool off for a few minutes. I'm like, all right, match number two. So I'm wrestling the next guy. We have to make a jujitsu guy. And I kind of know a jujitsu, but not great.

So we're doing jujitsu. Luckily, I get him, tap him out. The next guy comes out, wrestle that guy. And also the 400-pound guy comes out. I'm like, please don't make you wrestle him. That guy is huge. And so that guy wrestled the guy. That guy beat him, and I beat that guy.

And then I was done. I was like, okay, I'm done. And for the next, like, I don't know, 10 hours. And he's there. And he's like, do you know who you are? He's like, you're Russell Brunz. my life and he's freaking, I was telling everyone who I am. I'm like, oh yeah.

I forgot I'm Russell Brunson. He's like, dude. And he's thrown every single person. He's like, this is Russell Brunson. You know this guy is? He reminded me who I was. I was like, oh, this feels good. I started thinking about that.

I started thinking about the jury. I started thinking about the last decade. The last two decades, I started thinking about the people who came on stage of people who were crying. It didn't matter what they did with that. What matters is I changed their life and it changed their life, right? And I was like, oh my gosh, like he's right. I'm Russell Brunson. I remember who I was.

If a lot of you guys, you just need someone like me to remember who you are, someone in your family. Who are you? Right? You were called to this. I was called to this. There's always going to be headaches. We were always going to get punched in the face. There's always going to people take advantage of you.

It just happens. That's okay. It doesn't keep you from doing you. your mission, your calling, you still step into it, right? Because there's somebody else out there who you are supposed to meet and you're going to go through people who are going to take advantage, you're going to take people, who are going to make you feel less than you are, go people, you're going to take advantage of you and make fun of you in front of other people.

That's going to happen. Doesn't matter who you are, doesn't matter how much of a business you built. People are like, you build click funnels and you've been happily ever after, right? Kind of. I had someone told me, so when did you know that you arrived? Like, when was that feeling? And I was like, what? He's like, you know, when you figured it out.

I have no idea. I'll tell you when I figured it out. Like, I'm still in the game with you, with you guys, right? I'm not like everyone else who stopped. I'm everyone else who gave up. Like, I am here in the trenches with you every single day. I am a funnel hacker like you. I'm building funnels.

I'm launching funnels every single day. Okay? I've got the same mission. I'm drawn by the exact same thing you guys are. I hear the calling. I keep stepping up. I keep stepping up, even if I'm scared, even if people are laughing at me,

even when it doesn't make any sense. Because it's been called to something greater than what we are right now. Okay? So, as this last year, remembered who I am, my job is to help you guys remember who you are. Okay? Every one of you guys have a calling. Okay?

And if nothing else, I want me to be an example of like, I'm going to get, I got the crap kicked out of me for a couple of years. And it's tough and it's not all sunshine and roses. I wish I tell you today, it's all great. No, no, no. Okay. I know where I'm going. We're in momentum.

You guys fill it here in the ClickFunnels for the world. You guys feel the momentum? Okay. It's coming. But I'm stepping into a new hero's journey. I had to step. The refusal of the call was hitting me for the last year, year and a half. Okay? I have broken through that again.

And now I'm on the journey. And it's not the end. It is the beginning. And it's going to be brutal. But we are going to win. And it's fun. Okay? Man, I just want to tell you guys, like the last... I mean, I've been in this business now for two decades. The first decade I thought was crazy.

And we launched clip photos. I thought we were done. But man, this last decade has been even more crazy. But it's also been more fulfilling. The relationships I built, the people I've met, the friendships, like... the growth, myself personally, but also your guys is like seeing what you guys have done with this stuff, right? 20 years ago, I was doing an event. I told you guys, two people showed up.

So I was so excited to tell people they could change the world, this thing called sales funnels. And nobody cared. And the fact that now it's here and I'm seeing it happen day after day, day after day. I'm seeing it happen to you guys. I'm seeing how you guys are changing the world. Like, that's all that matters to me. It doesn't matter. Like our job right now is you guys see with offer lab and things are doing, we're reuniting the industry.

We're reuniting the community. we, when I'll all of a sudden done the only thing that matters to us is the mission. The mission is to free entrepreneurs so they can go back to changing lives to the people they've been called to serve. That's what we're doing. And I'm here to serve you guys

at whatever level, whatever capacity I can because I believe in you. I know what that calling feels like, but I also know how hard that calling can be. It is heavy. There's a quote, as heavy as the head of him who wears the crown. You can't do it on your own.

I can't do it on my own. I've got a team, I've got a community, I've got people, I've got all of you guys. right and that's why we do this funnel hacking live is a community for you guys to get together okay and again I'm gonna take a break here in a minute I'll come back and I'm gonna do one last presentation about what the future is but for right now like I don't want this to end for any of you guys the worst thing is you hear in this fire eggs this infernal flyerick you guys are on fire egg how many guys feel it right I'm gonna go home and I'm gonna take over the world right

and then a lot of times that flame leaves the fire and it flickers and it dimmers and I don't want that to dim for you that's why we create the coaching office what we create this is we want to take this with you guys on the road want to continue On Monday, we want you guys jumping in the training. We want you guys doing the next steps. We can help you in that mission to continue to do it. Okay? You guys need a tribe?

I need a tribe. We got to stay close together because that's how we're going to individually each get our collective missions, how we're going to do it. Okay? I want to end the session with this one quote that I told you guys earlier. This is from Gary Halber. He said, if you guys remember this early, he said, properly exploited one good idea that occurs to you while walking on a beach

is worth more than 10 lifetimes of hard work. Okay. And this is kind of like the How to Make Money version of it, which is cool and it's inspiring. But I think if we were tweaked this a little bit for our message and start thinking about like one idea, one calling, like one group of people, when you understand how to execute it correctly, like we'll be able to change more people's lives than any other industry, any other organizations ever done prior to this by what we know and what we can do. Do you guys believe it? Because I do. I've seen it. We've been doing this last decade. I've seen it over and over and over again. One thing that Dave used to always talk to me about, every time it would get hard, and I get a spot where I was just like, why are we doing this? Like, we should just give up. We have people filing lawsuits, people angry, all sorts of stuff. And he would look at me, he's like, he's like, this is not just a business.

You know that, Russell? I'm like, I know. He's like, no, no, he's like, this is something bigger. This is from God. That's why we've been called to do this. He's like, that's why we can't stop. Okay, so for me, when I remembered faith in the purpose, this purpose was not something I made up, right? It was planted into my heart.

Okay, and I have faith that came from something beyond myself, which is why we're here, why we keep showing up. The reason why we didn't take $110 million, be like, peace, see you guys, because that's not why I'm here. I could have taken that money to be done. That's not why I'm here. I'm here because of you guys, because I know what you're capable of. I know the impact and the ripple effect that will happen when you guys figure out how to take your message and your voice and get it out to the marketplace. And that's why we're here. Okay.