Marketing Secrets with Russell Brunson - (VRE) ClickFunnels Acquired GERU.com - Find Out WHY...

Episode Date: February 3, 2023

On today's episode you'll learn about the Geru.com acquisition, why we bought it, what the "Rembrandt in the Attic" is for this funnel... and more! Hit me up on IG! @russellbrunson Text Me! 208-231-3797 Join my newsletter at marketingsecrets.com ClubHouseWithRussell.com Magnetic Marketing Geru.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Okay, so today I want to talk about Giroux. So the first question is, what is Giroux? How do we find it? Why did we buy it? And what in the world are we going to be doing with it? So the story actually dates back to almost 20 years ago. Some of you guys who have been around my world, you've heard me tell the story about the very first person I ever saw who broke the four minute mile in internet marketing. And it was John Reese. John Reese was the first person to make over a million dollars in a day selling a course. The course is called Traffic Secrets. And a decade and a half later, I bought the domain from him. I wrote a book called Traffic Secrets and all that whole story.

But I originally came back to John Rhys. John Rhys was the first real big internet marketing guru. He was the first person to do these big numbers, these big things, and everyone was following him and studying him. And it's interesting because back then he had the best names for everything. He had Traffic Secrets. He happened to own Marketing marketing secrets. It's weird. That's the name of this podcast now. He owned product secrets. He owned a whole, like all these different things. And I think now, I think I've pretty much purchased everything that John has ever created. Again, I bought marketing secrets from him. I bought traffic secrets from him. I bought basically every business he's ever created. I've given him money for it eventually. And shortly after we launched ClickFunnels,

he created a really cool product called Giru. And what in the world is Giru? Well, Giru is funnel simulation software. So it's kind of like what ClickFunnels is, except it doesn't actually build the funnel. It creates a simulation. So you can say, if I was to build a funnel in ClickFunnels, what would it look like?

You know, send me one, I'm gonna have a landing page. And then after they go in the op, after they put their email address on page one, then they're gonna go to a sales page. And if someone buys a product here, they can go to an order form. And if they say, yes, there's gonna be upsell one, and then a downsell and then upsell two. And you can map out the entire funnel, what you want to look like, which is kind of cool, but there's a lot of software. You can map out a funnel. You could just do it on a pad of paper or a whiteboard. Like I typically traditionally do.

If you ever watched any of my trainings, 99.9% of them, I'm on a whiteboard mapping out a funnel, right? So that part's not difficult, but what Giroud does, it's really, really cool. It's after you map out the entire funnel, it gives you the ability to simulate what would happen if we sent traffic and what would happen if this page converted this rate

and this rate. And so what you can do is on each page say, okay, let's say the landing page converts it 30%, right? So you set 30%. And let's say the sales page converts it 5% and say, upsell one converts it. And so you guess what you think the conversion rates are going to be. And then you can actually set up traffic, have traffic flow into this funnel and say, okay, I'm going to go on Facebook. And let's say on Facebook, it's going to cost me $3 a click or $1.50 a click or whatever you think it's going to

be, right? And on YouTube, it's going to cost me this much. And so you build out like a simulation of what this funnel could possibly look like. And then you click a button and say, okay, if this is the conversion rate numbers, and this is how much it costs me to get traffic, how much money is this actually going to make? And you can click a button and sit back and watch and you see traffic going through it and see the numbers popping out. And then the day you can see like, Hey, if, if this funnel converts to what my guess was, I'm going to break even, or I'm going to lose money, or I'm going to be rich, right? And so you can see it and you can look at the simulation and say, man, based on the numbers right here, this funnel's not going to convert. So if I'm going to make this work, I need to either lower my ad cost, or I got to increase

conversion on upsell one or the order form. And you can just play and you tweak around with it till you figure out what it needs to be for this funnel to actually be successful. And if you look at that, you can say, do I think that's going to be possible? And if it is, then you take that, that funnel map, that simulation, whatever it is, and you would go into ClickFunnels and then actually build it out and you can launch it to the world. And what's cool is after you launch it to the world, you can actually look at what the stats and numbers look like, go back to funnel simulation software and plug it all in. Okay. This is what it actually cost me on Facebook. What it actually cost me on YouTube is what the landing page conversion actually was, you know, upsell conversions, you build it up. And then you can see like,

based on if I keep driving traffic to this, I'm going to go broke or I'm going to be rich, whatever that might be. Right. And it gives you the ability to say, man, what do I need to fix in this funnel? Right. Oh, if I got the landing page conversion from, from 12% to 17%, what does it look like? Right. You tweak the numbers, click the button and like, oh, okay. If I can make it, if I can get this page increased by 5%, then, you know, the funnel starts working. Then you go back to ClickFunnels and you can make those tweaks and changes

and keep working until you get that 5% conversion, right? And so that's kind of what Guru is. It's funnel simulation software. And it's a tool that I was using for a long, long time for myself. Our team and I, before we launched any funnel, usually it still started with me doodling on a whiteboard because, you know, it's hard to break bad habits.

It's not bad. How do I love whiteboarding? That's the number one. From there, we usually take it and we build it into Guru and we'd run the simulations and say, okay, this is what we got to get for this funnel to work. This is how much ad costs need to be. We'd have fun kind of simulating it. And after we kind of had it mapped out and perfected and everyone on the team knew this is what the funnel is going to look like. This is where our goals are. This is what the numbers are going to be. Then we go into ClickFunnels and we actually build it out. So again, we use it as a tool for a long time. In fact, when we launched the Traffic Secrets book, the first upsell I wanted to be was an account to Giru. And it's kind of funny. So I went to John Reese at the time. I said, hey, can we buy licenses from you and be able to put these in

as the upsell? And John told me no. And I feel bad because again, trafficseekers.com was his domain name I bought from him and it became the book. And it's because he wouldn't sell me licenses to gear or to give to all of you guys. We ended up finding another company. There's something similar. I don't think they did as good of a job, but they built a similar software and that became the upsell. And I think, anyway, I know John was frustrated by that. I felt bad. I tried to like sell his software as the upsell, but he, anyway, I know John was frustrated by that. I felt bad. I tried to like sell his software as the upsell, but he, anyway, it didn't work out. So we sold some other software and fast forward, I don't know, a year or two later, um, John came back to me and said, okay,

I'm ready to sell guru. Do you want to buy it as well? And because I'd bought basically everything else he'd ever sold, I was like, ah, should we do it? Should we not do it? And that brings us to the decision. Like, should we buy another company? We had just bought Magnetic Marketing. We had just bought Vumli. We were in debt a lot of money, especially from buying Vumli. It was not cheap. As you guys, if you've listened to past podcast episodes,

know it was really expensive. And we're just like, oh, we don't want to buy another company. But there's one thing we got from the Vumli acquisition. If you guys listened to that episode, you remember the funnel I walked you guys through, what Brad Callen did different on that funnel that made that company blow up? Why was it doing $40 million a year? It's because of the way the funnel was structured. There's a

lot of people that sell hand doodle software. The reason why Doodly and Toonly and that brand and that business was worth so much money, why I had made so much money is because the way that funnel was structured. And as John came and offered us to purchase Guru from him, I looked at it, I said, this is a cool product. It's a cool brand. It's cool software, all these things. But I knew that the funnel wasn't structured correctly. Okay. This was the Rembrandt in the attic. Again, referencing a past episode. If you listened to that episode on the podcast about a Rembrandt in the attic. Again, referencing a past episode. If you listened to that episode on the podcast about Rembrandt in the attic, I knew that what I could do with, with Guru by just shifting the way the funnel was structured to modeling what

we had done in Dudley and Tunely, that now this could become a front end where I could sell a thousand, 2000, 3000 copies of Guru a week. And what's cool about that is on the back end, someone who buys funnel simulation software, guess what else they probably want? They probably want funnel software to actually build the funnel, right? And so there's a direct, immediate, like perfect match between guru.com and clickfunnels.com. And so for us, I saw the Rembrandt in the attic. I know that if I could take Giru, if I could shift the model and shift the funnel structure to model what we did that was done in Doodly, then I could scale Giru to a really high level. And then all the Giru customers would then want to buy ClickFunnels in the future,

which means we could use Giru as a complete break-even company. Some of you guys have heard me talk about break-even funnels before, but Giru, the goal is not to be a break-even funnel. It's to be a break-even company, an entire GearRoot company. If I can just get it where using this model, I can get, again, 500 to 1,000 brand new customers a day buying funnel simulation software. And then from there, if we get half those people or a third of those people to become ClickFunnels customers, that is the big secret. And so that is the reason why we bought GearRoot. So the question then is like, well, what has happened with it? We bought the company, I think it's been five or six months now. And the initial step one of the process was, again, keep things working. So like, you know, keep traffic, keep things

happening. But then the right, some improvements on software we want to make. So it was getting the dev team to make these improvements and tweaks and changes and things just to make the software a little bit better for all of our ClickFunnels customers. And then the big one was to transition the funnel structure from what it was before into the model that Brad Callen had perfected with the Doodly and the Toonly funnels. And so that's what we've been working on for the last couple of months. And I'm happy to announce, well, by the time you guys watch this, that funnel could and should be actually live. And so you have a chance if you go to guru.com, you have a chance to see it. I'd recommend go to guru.com and then

leave and let the ads follow you around. And when they do, that's where you'll see the secret behind the scenes funnel. Again, if you watch the doodly episode, you probably know a little bit about how that funnel structure works, but that's kind of what we're doing right now. And so I'm excited to roll this out because I think it's going to become a really, really big front end for ClickFunnels. One of my goals, probably two or three years ago, I sat down with our team. I was like, I want to figure out how do we create more non-Russell-based front ends? Like, I don't, you know, as great as that Russell wrote a book and Russell wrote another book and Russell has a webinar. Russell, like all these things, like it's tough because Russell is ClickFunnels and there's never any separation, right?

Like if I get hit by a bus, what happens? Like ClickFunnels struggles because all of a sudden the face of it left. And so one of my big initiatives for the last couple of years is like, how do we create more non-Russell based front ends that aren't my face on there, right? Which is the big reason why we bought Dan Kennedy's company, right? Now, Dan Kennedy is a face for ClickFunnels. He's written like 40 books. We have 40 potential funnels coming in, all bringing people into magnetic marketing, which then brings people into ClickFunnels, right? Buying the Vroomly business, right? Doodly, Toonly, those are all non-Russell-based frontends. Giru is a non-Russell-based frontend. You'll see many more of these rolling out over the next year or two because the number one goal, my number one personal goal is to make it where

Russell is one of the faces of ClickFunnels, not where i am the face of click funnels and so that's kind of what we are working on and trying to um to to do so that's one of the big reasons and the motivations behind it and so uh i'm excited now that you guys kind of know a little bit about it first off you guys go get the software test it play with it see how it works uh see what you like about it please let us know in the comments like oh i wish you did this i wish you did this again there's a couple of competitors out there that have little things. Some have features that I don't think are important, but others are features like, oh, I know we want to add those things in. So please in the comments

down below, if you're watching this on YouTube or if you're in the podcast, like tag, take a screenshot of this on your phone and tag me in and say, Russell, I'd love for you to add this to gear. Like, let us know those things. We're looking for feedback as we're doing the new relaunch rollout of it. But as a whole, the software is solid. It's powerful. Like I said, we've been using it now for a couple of years as customers.

And I'm excited now to have a chance to bring it to you guys as an amazing product that you'll be able to use to build out and map out your funnels before head on. One of the other really, and this is one of the coolest things, one of the most powerful benefits of Gearoo, you know, as powerful

as for you as a marketer or as a, you know, a team to be able to do funnel simulations, if you run an agency, that's one of the other real big, powerful purposes. Because when you're running agency, a lot of times you're going to a client and you're like, hey, we're going to build you a funnel. They're like, what's a funnel? And then, you know, you try to explain to them, then you build them a funnel, you give it to them. They're like, I don't know what this is. And then you launch it. And then they're like, oh, I thought I was gonna be a billionaire, like I'm poor. And like, they don't understand it, right?

The most powerful thing you can do as an agency is to help your person understand. Like, so you map out, here's what the funnel's gonna look like. Here's page one, page two, upsell, like this is what it's gonna look like, right? Now let me show you what happens. We're gonna put, you know,

$100 a day into Facebook ads, right? And if this page converts it 1%, you know, you show them the whole thing, like if this is what it looks like, it means that you're not gonna get any leads. But if we get this to convert at 3% or 8%, right? If we get our ads costs here, whatever that thing might be,

and you show them like this is where you start getting profitable customers, right? And then if we get it to 12%, then we can go from $100 a day to $1,000 a day. And that's when your company blows up, right? But then you show them what it looks like before you ever give them an actual funnel. They have a chance to look at it and understand it.

And then what happens is when you come back and you build them a funnel and you launch it and you're like, Hey, we spent a hundred dollars and broke even your client's not angry. They're like, Oh cool. It means we're at 3%. Right? So what percentage may I get you to, to make it more profitable? And then they, they understand the process. And so it's one of those powerful agency tools in the world. In fact, I think upsell two, I believe not that you're in the funnel yet, but when you get there and you should get there, um, I think upsell number two is like an agency account where you can like do that where actually you can build out the funnel simulation and it doesn't even say guru anywhere. Like you can brand it with yourself. So it's like, Oh, Russell's funnel agency made this really cool software. Let me show you how the simulations you

can show people and like makes you look like a rock star, even though we're doing all the work on the back end. So there's so many cool things here. But as an agency, it's a powerful tool as you try to map out and plan out your funds ahead of time for you post, you know, after your funnel launches, you're like, I don't know what's like, what do I do now? Like you can plug all the things in like, oh man, my ad cost is too high or this is too high, but it gives you the ability to really see exactly what's happening. And then from there, be able to call your funnel audibles, right?

I've done at Funnel Hacking Live now two different times I did presentations about funnel audibles. And it's funny because I've had multiple people afterwards ask me like, what is a funnel, what is an audible? I didn't know what that was.

So what an audible is in football, if a quarterback comes up to the line of scrimmage and they call the play, like this is what play is going to be. And he sits there, looks out over all of a sudden, he's like, oh my gosh, this play is not going to work

because that guy's there, that guy's there, this is not going to work. Because that guy's there. That guy's there. This is not going to work. He calls an audible. So last second, he's like, hey. He yells out to his team. He has some number like blue 32 or whatever the thing is. He says something different.

And all the people hear that. They know that the play has changed. So instead of the play we were planning on, we're changing it to this play. That's what a funnel audible is. So the same thing is true in, we call these funnel audibles. Because most of the funnels we launch don't just crush it day number one. Some do, which that's amazing, but that's rare, few and far between. What normally happens is you build a funnel, you launch it and it doesn't do that well or it does okay or break evens or it loses money. And most people are like, oh, this

funnel thing's a scam. That Russell Brunson's full of crap, that John Denver. Anyway, so that's what funnel audibles are about, knowing before you go into time that it's like most phones don't work the first time, right? It's like, we're trying to make our best possible educated guests, right? Based on, we do our funnel hack. You look at like what's working in the market and we do our best stuff. We're at the best copy. Okay. The best feels, we were best shot, put it out there and then we see what's going to happen. Right. And the majority of time, it's not a rock. Like it's not a huge home run. In fact, I remember when we first launched the inner circle way back in the day, and I was teaching everyone, do a webinar a week, do a webinar a week. So everyone was writing webinars, they'd launch them,

and it was every night, every time someone launched a webinar, well, I didn't do it the first few times. This is why I started afterwards, is they'd message me on Vox, like, all right, my webinar's going live tomorrow. I got 500 people registered. I'm so excited. And I'd Vox them back, and I'm always like, hey, just so you know, really quick, it's probably going to bomb. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but if you go into this with like your hopes this high, and then it crushes, you're gonna be broken. And tomorrow you're gonna be boxing me and you're gonna be crying and you're gonna be miserable and you're gonna be angry. You're gonna want a refund. Like just, you know, it doesn't typically work the

first time. Okay. At first you're not gonna be that good. Your message is gonna be good. The, like all the things aren't going to be right. Right. But you get it out there and the market tells you like, Hey, this is great or this was not great. And then you can make the tweaks and the changes based on that, right? And so I would warn people that in inner circle before they do the first webinar, they do the webinar, they come back,

hey, I did only sold three things. I'm like, cool, but now we know what's wrong, right? Now we can make the tweaks and the changes. Like, where do people drop off? What are they saying? What would happen in the comments? Like, do people like the offer? They're not like the offer.

Like all the things, like now we have data that we can make some good decisions. And so for me, the same thing, like we launched the funnel to get the data back so we can make the tweaks and the changes. Like, oh cool, upsell number one's crushing it, but the landing page sucks. So how do I fix the landing page?

I need more curiosity. Like I need, and again, if you've been around my training, it's either the hook, the story, or the offer. What's the hook, like what's wrong? One of these things, either hook, story, or offer is wrong on the landing page. We gotta fix it, right? Or whatever the thing might be.

And so Guru gives you the ability to do these funnel simulations very, very quickly, uh, ahead of time before you launch the funnel. Then after you launch the funnel, look at it and be able to see from the high view, like what's working, what's not working. Cool. Let's try it. Just tweak this as changes and stuff like that. So anyway, I'm excited for it.

Um, again, I think gear is going to be a powerful tool for all my funnel hackers, which is one of the main reasons why I acquired it. I think it's going to be an amazing front end to get more people into my universe, into ClickFunnels, a non-Russell based front end that we can hopefully generate a lot of customers at break even or better. And then, yeah, and also it'll bring people into ClickFunnels, but also help people who are ClickFunnels members and help serve them so they can be more successful. So anyway, it was a fun acquisition that we're having some fun with right now. I'm hoping after this initial launch, similar to like when we launched Dan Kennedy's business, we did the first launch and it covered the cost of the company. I'm hoping the same thing happens with GearRoo where basically

we do this new rollout, the new launch, and hopefully from the initial launch to our ClickFunnels customers, it'll cover the entire cost of the business that we bought. And then from there, it's just pure profit. And so, um, yeah, hopefully you guys enjoy this episode. We tied in a lot of different principles from other episodes, right? The Rembrandt and the attic. We tied in, um, how we took the funnel structure from, um, from doodly.com and we model it whole over here in guru.com. Like, um, my goal with these, with this podcast is that we're giving you guys these, these ideas, these strategies, but you start seeing how to kind of like link these things together. Right.

Um, hopefully it gives you a glimpse inside of my mind and the mind of those, those of us here at ClickFunnels who are building things to see like, Oh, I see why Russell did that. I can do that in my business. Right. Um, uh, and as you're looking at custom companies, potentially the buyer to acquire, like what's the Rembrandt in the attic, you find it right. Like I see the Rembrandt in the attic. Um, again, for this one, it's so simple. Like I changed the model, boom, we launched it to our list. We break even, we covered all the costs of the actual company. And now we've got this amazing tool to grow and to scale and get customers into ClickFunnels for forever. So anyway, I love this game. Hopefully you guys are enjoying following along with us as

well. And with that said, if you enjoyed this episode, please, if you're watching on YouTube, comment down below, let us know. Again, features you want for Guru, any other questions you have about why we did this acquisition, how it's going to work. And if you're listening on a podcast, same thing on your phone, usually you can like see the actual podcast. So take a screenshot on your phone, click the buttons, take that picture, post on social and tag me and let me know because I look at those, I like reading them and it gives me ideas for future episodes. And on top of that, if you have any other questions you want me to answer on the podcast, if you go to marketingsecrets.com, there's a spot where you can actually ask your questions and your answers and they may become a future podcast episode as well.

So that's it. Thank you guys so much for listening and you should go get your account at geru.com. G-E-R-U.com. All right. Thanks everybody. Talk to you soon.