Self-Funded SaaS: Give Software Free, Sell Education

Omer (00:09.920)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talked to Dave Woodward, Chief Revenue Officer and partner at ClickFunnels, a SaaS product that lets you design and create sales pages, landing pages, order forms, and more to easily sell your product or service online.
So this is a story of a fast growing $135 million SaaS company which was started in a small town in Boise, Idaho.
What's more, the company is self funded and has never raised any VC money.
A couple of Internet marketers had built a successful business selling online info products, but they realized they were wasting a lot of time repeatedly building the same sales funnels.
Wouldn't it be great if we could use a tool to automate most of this work?
They wondered.
And so they started brainstorming what the ideal tool would look like.
And when they couldn't find a tool like that, they decided that they were going to build it themselves.
A few months into development, they realized that this was more than just a tool to help them with their info products business.
A lot of people needed a tool like this, and that's when they decided they were going to build a SaaS product.
But when they launched, they had a hard time selling the product.
They had relationships with a lot of affiliate marketers, so they figured selling through those affiliates would be easy.
But it wasn't.
And for a while it looked like this product was going nowhere.
Yet in the space of five years, they've been able to go from zero to $135 million in annual recurring revenue.
In this episode, you'll learn how they use webinars to sell their product and how they package their SaaS product in a very unique and counterintuitive way.
The importance of building a Dream 100 list and how it helped them to grow their business much faster by focusing on relationships first and how they focused on building a culture and community with their customers and how that's been critical in driving growth.
There are a lot of useful insights and lessons in this interview, so I really hope you enjoy it.
Dave, welcome to the show.

Guest (02:25.880)
Thanks.
I'm excited.
This will be fun.

Omer (02:27.880)
So I always like to ask my guests if they have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates them.
Do you have something you can share with us?

Guest (02:34.440)
For me, it's always been about family and trying to keep things Focused.
So my favorite quote actually comes from David O. McKay.
And it's no success can compensate for failure in the home.
And that allows me to, as I'm busy trying to build a company, to continue realizing I really am doing this for my family.
And I try to keep that as my primary focus.

Omer (02:52.310)
I love that.
Love.
That's a great quote.
So for people who aren't familiar with clickfunnels, can you tell us what does the product do, who's it for, and what's the big problem that you're trying to solve?

Guest (03:05.750)
Absolutely.
We started off primarily as a small, small business, middle sized business.
We're actually seeing a lot larger businesses coming on the platform.
When I say small, it's typically the Infopreneur or the Solopreneur, up to about, you know, five to seven employees.
We're now starting to see companies in the 30 to 50, $75 million range with quite a few more employees than five or seven running on click funnels.
The purpose of the software is to allow you to build your online sales funnel on a platform using a drag and drop editor, while tying in all of your merchant accounts, your membership sites, your marketing automation tools and everything else all in one place.

Omer (03:42.010)
So ClickFunnels is basically for anyone who wants to sell something online.
You make that as easy as possible for them to do that.

Guest (03:49.690)
Yeah.
Basically what we say is if you're trying to sell something online or generate a lead online, ClickFunnels is for you.

Omer (03:54.810)
Got it.
So I wanna sort of talk about like, you know, how the idea came up and where you got started here with this.
But let's, before we talk about that, let's talk about like how you got involved with this business and with, with Russell Brunson and with Todd.

Guest (04:12.080)
Sure.
I've known Russell for the last 12 years.
At the time I had my own marketing agency.
I was living in Southern California and I was doing a lot of direct response marketing, primarily for health insurance companies, mortgage companies, financial services.
And a lot of them were trying to figure out this whole online thing.
This was early 2000s.
And so by 2008, I actually saw a seminar where Russell was presenting.
It was with Stu McLaren called affiliate summit or Affiliate Incubator or something like that.
And so I went to the event and while he was there, he and Stu basically got up and said, you know what, if you guys would like to get to know us a little bit better, feel free to go in the back and sign up for Take us out to lunch or dinner.
You can kind of Pick our brain.
So I ran to the back and I signed up for every breakfast, lunch, and dinner that Russell had.
And basically we became dear friends at that point.
We did probably five or six different online ventures together.
Things in the health space, the real estate space, the network marketing space, bunch of different things, Some of them information products, others physical products, and really just had the opportunity of building things out.
So just had a great time getting to know him.
I met Todd probably about two years before we started Click Funnels.
I was out in Boise on a project, and Todd was there.
And Todd was brought into to really kind of be the brainchild behind a lot of the software, tools and resources that Russell was playing around with at the time.
And then we ended up starting ClickFunnels in September of 2014, and they asked me to join right then.

Omer (05:37.790)
So where did the idea for ClickFunnels come from?

Guest (05:41.230)
It's a great question.
At the time, what was happening is we were.
Todd was actually spending most of his time continuing to rebuild the exact same type of funnels.
So Russell, at the time was doing a lot of information products.
They also had a large supplement business.
They had and bunch of different products.
And we actually were trying to really almost launch at that time, a funnel a month.
And after a while, Tom's like, I am literally doing the exact same thing over and over again.
There's got to be some faster, easier way for us so I don't have to keep spending all the time to rebuild it.
And that's when the idea of a drag and drop editor really came up, so you wouldn't have to have a bunch of dev people all trying to kind of work around each other to get things done.
At the time, we had, obviously, copywriters, and you had designers, and you had a lot of the tech and the dev.
And we found, you know, even though Todd was pretty much the guy driving the tech stuff forward, there were still quite a few other people he was outsourcing things to and thought, you know, there's got to be a faster, easier way that anybody could do this, and most importantly, get a product up and running and tested much faster.
And I think that was the biggest brainchild for us.
And that's really when Todd and Russell kind of got together and literally sat in front of a whiteboard and said, all right, if I was to do this, what would I want?
And so Russell just started throwing idea after idea, well, I would like this, and I want market animation tool, and I want a merchant account.
And actually I got multiple merchant accounts.
So I don't get shut down and I want to be able to do.
And Lily just created this long laundry list of all the things that he wanted.
And Todd went to work and basically built what Russell wanted at the time.

Omer (07:12.240)
So I'm curious, like, why didn't you guys, like, look in the market and see if there was a product that could help?
Because there was.
You know, I'm kind of trying to think back to what things were like

Guest (07:22.480)
in 2013 so that this is 2014, first thing.
Literally, LeadPages had just received their.
I think it was their first round of funding.
And that's when Todd was like, wait a second, I could literally build this in my sleep.
And so he thought, well, if I couldn't build that, what else could I build?
And so there was.
Again, I think it's hard for people now.
I mean, we're 20, 25 and a half, six years since we started this thing.
And the SaaS tools that are out there now are so robust and so much more abundant than they were what seems like an eternity ago.
But again, if you went back five or six years, there weren't as many things as there are nowadays to actually build and do the kind of stuff that we can do now.

Omer (08:03.860)
And when you guys were thinking about this, was this in the context of let's build a product we can sell to other people, or was this about let's build a tool that makes it easier for us to do all of this stuff that Todd is doing manually today?

Guest (08:18.180)
Great question, Omer.
At first it was, let me build it just for us.
And then it wasn't soon after that where Russell thought, you know, I've been trying to build something like this for other people for a long time.
I wonder if we could actually build this and sell it.
And so Russell loves marketing and selling stuff and very quickly tried to think, all right, if we can actually create what I think we can create, then let's find a way of creating a marketing system around this to really go out and sell this to the masses.

Omer (08:44.910)
What are you guys doing in terms of revenue today?

Guest (08:47.230)
So 2019 just closed, and we just did over 135 million.
2019, 2018, we were around 100 million.
And so we've been adding about 30 to 40 million per year for the last last 4 years.

Omer (08:59.950)
I mean, you've basically gone from zero to over a hundred million dollars in the space of around five years.
And basically none of you guys had experience with software before this, as far as I know.
And a lot of the Things that you did to try and drive growth were very different to how we see most SaaS companies thinking about their marketing.
So I think it's a really unique, kind of interesting story.
And I really want to, you know, that's one of the reasons I was really looking forward to this and having this conversation with you sort of dig into, like, how you guys drove that kind of growth and some of the unique things that you were doing that maybe, you know, we just don't hear enough about.
So maybe let's talk about that.
So Todd says, okay, I'm going to go away and build this product.
And then at what point did you guys decide, okay, now we're going to start selling it, and here's how we're going to do that.

Guest (10:01.900)
That actually took place about midway through the development phase.
And I think one of the big things for us is we realized at the time we all had our own side gigs kind of going.
I was still living in San Diego, working, doing some things on the side.
Russell had a couple of his other side projects going, which actually we'll talk about a little later when we started going out to other people with one of the concerns of some of our affiliates.
But for us, one of the biggest issues was we didn't want to take on any capital.
We wanted to make sure that the software could stand on its own.
We really kind of anti vc even to this day.
It's kind of fun.
I talk to a lot of growth equity, private equity people all the time and they're like, you're trying to tell me you have no debt and there's no additional cap people on the cap table besides you founding partners and things.
And I'm like, no, we haven't taken on any.
And so it's a great story and I love telling it, but I'm more than happy to talk about any of the growth things we've done.
Whenever you'd like to fire away those.

Omer (10:55.950)
Yeah.
So let's talk about the VC piece first.
Like, I've heard Russell talk about this before, but just for people who aren't familiar, like, tell us why you guys are kind of anti vc.

Guest (11:08.270)
A lot of it came down to we've talked a lot about this.
Most of us as entrepreneurs have all cycled two or three times, meaning we've had things that have worked and things that have crashed.
I've always kind of at our gut feeling was we gotta be able to build something that should be able to stand on its own without having to bring in other people's Money first.
And so it was more of a proof of concept to want to make sure that, hey, we can actually go out and do this.
And then so we started doing it, we realized the last thing I want to do is give away equity to a bunch of B.C.
guys who really have no.
I mean, they're in this thing for, you know, a 3 to 5x multiple in 3 to 5 years.
They don't care about the culture, they don't care about us.
It's just a money grab for them.
And so for us, we really thought, you know what, our whole idea behind this, as we start building a community and a culture and educating and teaching people about how to use the platform, we want to be doing exactly what we're teaching them.
And it became really a foundational tenet for us in our own personal beliefs that you should be able to go out and build a business in today's marketplace without having to bring outside capital.
And fortunately, we've been able to prove that.
And we've got right now over 700 people that have done over a million dollars in a sales funnel, and 50 that done over 10 million.
And we've got those that are now eclipsing, you know, 50 and 75 million without bringing on capital.

Omer (12:21.540)
So let's talk about, like, how you started selling clickfunnels.
I know that webinars were a big growth driver when you launched the product.
So tell me a little bit about, like, how that worked.

Guest (12:34.020)
Well, first of all, prior to webinars, we really thought Russell had been in the information marketing space for quite a few years, and we thought that just the product by itself should sell itself.
And, and just by going out to partners and affiliates and things, we already knew that we could literally just give them the product and they'd be, oh my gosh, it's the most amazing thing in the world.
We want to use it, let's just go ahead and use it and it'll sell itself very quickly.
We found that was not the case.
And we tried a couple of different things, tried different, you know, freemium type products, tried different lower price points.
And it wasn't until Russell was actually asked to speak of one of Mike Phil Same's event down in San Diego, and he said, you know, gosh, Russ, I really want you to speak and I want you to sell clickfunnels.
And at the time, like, we've been trying to sell and hasn't been selling that great, can you put together a sales presentation and sell it at my event?
And we're like, sure.
Now, obviously at that time, anytime you're selling from stage, you're typically splitting revenue 50, 50.
So we thought there's no way you can, we could split just the software piece.
And so Russell put together a amazing killer offer and ended up selling it $997 for a year's worth of click funnels.
We actually gave away, which is one of the keys I think, for any of the SaaS times.
We actually gave away the software for free for that year and actually sold all the education, the content and all the training that was necessary to help a person actually have success.
So they bought that for a thousand dollars and then they got the software for free.
That one gangbusters.
And literally that, that night at dinner where Russell said, you know guys, we finally hit it.
This is the deal, this is what we're going to do.
And it's going to, it's going to go crazy.
And it was prophetic because literally within months we found Russell literally doing a webinar, sometimes two or three a day and just burning the midnight oil.
But in doing that, we brought on literally tens of thousands of customers.

Omer (14:27.420)
Okay, so let's talk about the, what you just said about like, you know, they were buying basically like info products and the software was you gave it away for free initially.
What was the thinking behind that and why do you think that was the right way to sell the product?

Guest (14:43.860)
Actually it ties into Principal Russell's taught for years.
It's called the perfect webinar, where the idea behind it is to identify the vehicle.
So the vehicle here was sales funnels at the time, really wasn't people were that familiar with.
And then during the whole presentation, it's a matter of helping people overcome all their internal beliefs and their external beliefs and then providing the offer.
And the idea behind it is the offer actually needs to have the tools and the resources that provide the people everything they need to overcome those false beliefs.
And so some of those false beliefs could be, I'm just not techie or I can't write copy or I can't drive traffic.
And so what we ended up doing was providing literally the tools and the resources that they, that's what actually they were buying were those tools and resources.
And that was.
We had our funnel hacks training that basically taught people how to actually create an online sales funnel.
We gave away instant traffic hacks, which then taught them how to actually go out and get traffic.
We gave away some of the copy secrets as well.
So they were buying those types of things for the thousand Dollars and then the logical place would then be well I need to put that someplace.
And where do I put it?
I put it inside of clickfunnels.

Omer (15:48.980)
Got it.
Yeah.
I mean most SaaS companies would sell the product and, and to different levels of, you know, whatever.
They would provide resources to help those customers be successful.
At a very basic level it might just be, you know, some help documentation.
On the other end of the spectrum I've seen some companies will build, you know, some kind of academy type thing where they have training content and online courses and will kind of help you be successful that way.
But you guys kind of flipped it completely and said no, we'll sell you the training content and we'll give the software for free.
Which is it.

Guest (16:33.620)
Lily was a game changer for us.
And I think as I've had the opportunity of looking at others who have done similar types of things, one of the biggest issues people have is they struggle with trying to find out what they should be selling and how they should actually be communicating and working with their clients.
And too often most people undervalue the content, the information that they have.
And we by actually selling that and then providing the software for free, we actually were able to charge much more than the actual software.
And that allowed us then to again goes back to Dan Kennedy's idea.
As far as whoever can spend the most acquire customer wins the game.
And when all you have, if you take a look at for us as far as our CAC at that time would have been about 140, $150, then that's for a free trial.
And if you figure, you know, 40% of those are going to convert to paid, we literally almost had to have $300 to actually get a paying customer paying, you know, $97 a month.
And so you've got about a three month run rate on that for us.
By being able to charge much more, we were able to generate a lot more revenue to then actually spend more money to buy ads, to pay more traffic to the webinar which then fueled a ton more of our growth and then also paid for our developers, helped pay for support and really allowed us to grow without having to take on additional capital or any capital for that matter.

Omer (17:50.020)
Yeah, and if you're someone like Russell who has kind of a background of many years of selling info products very successfully, it's probably a lot easier to sell that and create that type of product and sell it for a higher price than a SaaS product where people may struggle to, to sort of give you you know, $1,000 upfront for, you

Guest (18:18.730)
know, I'm sure it'd be easy for people to say that these days.
Fortunately, Russell's created.
We now have the trilogy that he's releasing,.com secrets, expert secrets, and now Traffic Secrets.
Expert Secrets is the one that literally goes through and teaches you exactly how to become that attractive character, how to put together the entire copy, basically, that allows you to create those types of products.
So no matter who you are, whether you're selling Bigfoot Expeditions up in Washington state, as one of our clients does, you literally can create that type of a product.

Omer (18:49.690)
Yeah, they're great books.
I haven't seen the new one, but I have the Dot Com Secrets and

Guest (18:54.770)
that it comes out May 5th.

Omer (18:56.570)
Oh, there you go.
Here you go.
Okay.
So I'm curious about the affiliate piece, because I always assumed a big part of ClickFunnels success was, you know, Russell already had.
And you guys already had this community of people and affiliates, and it was like, oh, you guys built ClickFunnel and sent an email out to this list.
And all of these people were like, you know, yeah, let's sign up.
And suddenly things got started really quickly, and it's like, whoa, that didn't happen.
And you kind of struggling to sell the product.
Why do you think that was?
Like, why was it so hard initially to sell the software?

Guest (19:32.160)
I think the main reason was whenever you're selling a whole bunch of different products, as Russell was at the time, a lot of people get concerned that you may.
Hell, it's different when you sell an information product versus a SaaS product.
When you're selling a SaaS product, your customers expect you to be around for a long time.
They don't want to see another offer from you coming out in another month or two or three months or six months, for that matter.
They want to know that this is what you're going to be in.
Well, Russell had done a lot of different products and offers, and so some

Omer (20:02.460)
of the affiliates, even though they'd be

Guest (20:03.780)
more than happy to jump on a different type of product offering, they were a little hesitant to jump into a SaaS offer where they knew there was going to have to be a whole bunch of support where this is something that.
That wasn't going to just be around for six months or a year, but people were literally building their entire business and counting on that to literally sustain them for years to come.
And so we had to.
There was a lot of issues that we had to kind of overcome in the mindset of some of These affiliates, that it wasn't just a quick buck, that this literally was our shutting down every other business.
Russell had to focus completely on click funnels.
And that took some time.
I think there were some other people who were sitting there going, you know what?
We want to sit and wait and see how this actually plays out.
This wasn't the first time Russell tried to create a Click funnels type of product.
This was our third attempt.
And so life has a couple of lessons, and it was one of the lessons we ended up learning at that time.

Omer (20:59.250)
So how were you getting traffic to the webinars?
Was this mostly just pay per click ads and getting people to register that way?

Guest (21:08.610)
There were some affiliates.
We actually.
One of the main things Russell spends a ton of time teaching in his books is this principle.
As far as the dream 100.
And so we really had.
We had done a ton of marketing to our dream 100. Who would be.
Who has the audience that ClickFunnels is perfect for?
How do we get in contact with them?
And so instead of going just to our affiliates, we literally started doing our dream 100, where we had an outreach campaign to find out we want this person because they have the audience that is ideal for it.
And if we can get a webinar with that guy or girl, it would be a game changer for us.
And so, yes, you would, I guess, in necessity, kind of call that person affiliate.
But it was literally a Dream 100 campaign to those people.
Some of it was actually building funnels for them and showing them how easy it was and then giving them the funnel for free and then exchange for that of doing a webinar later.
So the dream 100 for us has been a huge, huge growth opportunity.
We still use it today.
We're in the process of.
Of creating our Dream 100 campaign for Russell's book Traffic Secrets that launches May 5th.

Omer (22:09.820)
So the Dream 100 is basically a list of, like, the top influencers who already have audiences that would be a good fit for Click Funnel.
And then the outreach is really about figuring out how you can get them on board to get to know clickfunnels, like clickfunnels, and eventually, you know, promote that to their own audience.
So I'm curious, like, what were some of the kind of tactics you used to do outreach and get some of these people on board?
Because I'm sure there's a lot of people listening right now who are thinking, wow, yeah, that's a great idea.
I could probably come up with a list of a hundred people.
But how the heck am I actually going to persuade them to pay attention and get excited about what I'm doing here?

Guest (22:55.050)
I love this.
We could talk for hours about this principle.
I think the main thing is, again, it goes back to this whole idea as far as people care, they want to know that you care more about them than about your own product.
And so a lot of our outreach was really just trying to build that relationship.
And some of the times it was identifying what are.
There's a lot of research that goes into this.
What are they like, what are they currently involved in, what are the things they're doing?
And it takes some time where you're literally just sending them different things that pertain specifically to them or to their audience or to the charities they're involved in or whatever that might be.
It's really just, I look at the Dream 100 just as you would dating and you've got to make sure you spend a whole bunch of time getting to know that person.
You're asking this.
There's a ton of trust whenever you're asking someone to promote your product.
And we just didn't want a one time promotion.
We wanted this to be something that we could come back to six months later, a year later.
And fortunately we've had that opportunity because we really dug that well deep before we needed, before we got thirsty on that, I guess.
So knowing ahead of time that we eventually want to do this, we started really early on starting to dig that well.
And sometimes it was, hey, you know what?
We see you've got this product launch coming out.
How about we actually build your launch funnel for you in advance?
Other times, Russell's book.com Secrets came out real soon after our launch.
And so we started sending free copies of the book out to people.
Had the opportunity of inviting people to masterminds, having, doing anything and everything we could to really just develop a relationship and a friendship that would last much longer than just a quick promotion.

Omer (24:21.580)
Okay.
And so typically, like how long would you do this kind of outreach before you made an ask and, and felt like, you know, you were ready to or they would be ready to promote Clickfunnels?

Guest (24:34.900)
Well, for Tony Robbins it was over 10 years.

Omer (24:37.460)
Wow.

Guest (24:38.340)
Dean Grazios, he was probably about seven years, eight years.
These are two guys who we have great relationships with.
We just did a major launch with them earlier this year on a different product.
Others are just two or three weeks and sometimes it's two or three months.
It just depends on the person.
A lot of it also depends on who you know that knows them.
If you can get an introduction.
A lot of it was tending live events.
I'm a huge proponent of attending a live event.
People let their guard down a lot more when they're at a live event.
They're much more willing to talk.
You can really find out, spend time with them.
A lot of dinners, a lot of just networking and spending the time to find out more about them.
And if someone knew someone else and we asked for an introduction, we would do that as often as we possibly could.

Omer (25:21.810)
So what I like about this term, Russell coiner on the Dream 100, is that when people think about sort of doing influencer marketing, it's like, okay, I'll kind of start making a list of people and I'll have some kind of email sequence that I'll send out to them or something and eventually I'll make an ask for them.
But when you sort of limit it down to say, look, these are 100 people that are our dream list of people, then it kind of gives you license to spend more time like really understanding each one of those people as you sort of described and what are they doing?
What does success look like for them?
How could you help them?
How could you share something that might be useful in, you know, and just really think about like, I love that concept because it's what you said about like digging your well before you're thirsty.
That's a great book by the way.
I think I have that somewhere.
But yeah, it's really about that, right?
It's just in terms of really thinking like thinking about a relationship rather than an email sequence or just outreach.

Guest (26:27.580)
Omar, I, I can't express more than that is you have to look at.
Business is all about relationships.
Anytime it's just a quick couple of emails, I mean, they quickly go to someone else.
It's.
I see a ton of the, you know, Instagram shout outs and everything else and you pay X dollar amount.
Yeah, those are great.
But that's not a real relationship.
I want someone who I, I mean, I've known Roland Frazier for years and we've done a ton of things together and I was consulting with him a while back and again he did the consulting for free, but just as a token, neither Russell or a drink.
But I know that Roland is a huge collector of fine wines and so we sent him a very expensive bottle of fine wine just to say thanks.
And I think that's.
I treat those relationships the same way today.
Even after they've promoted, after we've done business.
I was on the phone with Dean Graziosi earlier today, just as a friend, just kind of talking through some different business ideas.
I don't look at a dream 100 as what's in it for me and how fast can I do this?
I want these relationships that are going to last for a long, long time.
It's not just about a quick promotion.
If you're going into the dream 100 just to get a quick promotion, you're doing it totally wrong.
And I'd encourage you not to do it that way.

Omer (27:34.150)
You guys have also spent a lot of time thinking about culture and community.
Can you talk a little bit about that and what you've done and how that's helped drive growth?

Guest (27:43.750)
Sure.
Our culture and community, actually, I think we probably got the idea most of all from Apple.
I'm a huge proponent of Steve Jobs and everything he's done as far as.
Or did as far as building Apple.
Again, you could basically have Apple and you have PCs.
And these days I walk around and all I ever see are Apples.
I don't.
I rarely see a PC these days.
And I think the main reason for that is the culture and the community they built around this.
For them, it was more of the rebel.
It was the 1984 rebel ad.
It was those types of things.
But even going forward as Steve Jobs came back, one of the main things as he came back to Apple, he's got rid of a lot of the extenuous types of projects to really focus on what was the product that his community, his culture, needed for us.
We've looked at it the exact same way.
We've been pretty gun shy about having an annual event.
So we launched ClickFunnels in September.
And we had a lot of people who said, wow, let's do a live event.
Let's get everybody together.
Because they started feeling this community.
And we were just.
Just didn't want to do it.
And then all of a sudden a couple people said, well, we're go ahead and we're gonna do this event.
We're like, whoa, wait a second.
We don't want our community doing the event.
We want to be the ones in control of it.
So we thought, well, what do we call this?
And at that time, we started seeing the term funnel hackers come out.
And it always coined from what Russell was doing and he was teaching.
It was part of the webinar.
And that was.
It was called funnel hacking.
How do you actually funnel hack the success of someone else to expedite your learning and your growth of your own company?
And so we started and had our first live event, which was called Funnel Hacking Live.
Our next one happens to be in next week, it'll be our sixth one.
My only reason saying that is the term funnel hacking.
And funnel hacker became our community to the point where we now have T shirts.
And it.
In fact, anytime a person signs up for a free trial, our onboarding sequence, literally watching a 20 minute video of Russell, by the time they get through, that is if they've watched it, all they have to do is click a button, tell us the size of the T shirt and we send them out a funnel hacking shirt.
It's just black shirt with our funnel hacker logo.
And, and the crazy thing is I've seen that shirt in airports, literally around the country.
And sometimes as I've traveled internationally as well.
And for me it's exciting to see that people wear that as they wanted to belong to something.
They want to belong to a community.
Especially as entrepreneurs these days, who we serve the most.
It's a really lonely community out there.
And so if they can feel like they're part of something, uniting that community for us was one of the biggest things that we did with ClickFunnels was try to unite a very fragmented entrepreneurial community.
I've had people basically say, gosh, that free T shirts cost me literally hundreds of dollars because they just.
Or thousands of dollars because I haven't even done anything yet on the software.
But I just love the community.
And so I think it's.
There's just a lot that goes into building a community and most importantly, really spending the time to nurture that community.
And for us, it's everything from the T shirts, it's the podcast, it's everything that we do, our live events, everything's built around our community.

Omer (30:41.140)
Yeah.
And I think that T shirts are a tactic, but the real thing that holds all of this together is this identity that you've created of what a funnel hacker is.
And I've heard Russell kind of, I guess be a little bit provocative when he's just saying, hey, you know, we don't, we go out there and we do this with the money we have.
We don't cheat by raising VC money and all that sort of stuff.
And I think people, that really resonates with a lot of people, right?
They, they want to feel like that they're part of something like that.

Guest (31:12.900)
Definitely.
In fact, we even have a funnel hacker manifesto.
It's.
I'm a funnel hacker.
I define my own destiny.
I create my own luck, I build my own empires, I Change the world.
I'm just one funnel away.

Omer (31:23.850)
Love that.
Let's talk about some of the challenges of running a software company.
And I know, you know, when after ClickFunnels had sort of taken off and you had customers and everything, you shared an example with me before we started recording about what you described as like, you know, one of the scariest days of our lives.
Tell me about that.

Guest (31:47.850)
Sure.
Russell and I were in Denver.
We had just done a live event where he had spoke from stage.
He was about ready to fly out to London with his family to catch a flight and to speak on stage out there and sell clickfunnels internationally.
We're super excited about the whole thing.
He literally got on his flight, and as he got on his flight, Todd reached out as he basically started seeing our Facebook community and our channel going nuts because everyone's sites were down, every single person's funnels were just crashed.
And we're like, what's going on?
And come to find out, basically the servers had crashed, our database had been who we had trusted.
The people with basically gotten corrupted.
And Russell was midair trying to figure this whole thing out.
Todd and Ryan.
Ryan was our CTO at the time and trying to figure out what we could do.
Fortunately, we were able to find a backup and the company we were working with at the time said, you know what, we'll have this up in the next, you know, two to three days.
And we're like, no, you don't understand.
We don't have two to three days.
We've got like two to three hours at the most.
We got to find some way of getting this up and running.
So Todd and Ryan went heads down with our other developers, took it from where it was, put it onto an AWS server at the time, built everything, and literally rebuilt all of clickfunnels.
And it took, I think probably six hours.
And the most important part was at the time Russell's flying internationally, was communicating with the audience, with our our channel and basically saying, listen, he was totally open and transparent about it, saying, you have to understand, we are the number one customer of ClickFunnels.
All of our funnels are down too.
We feel your pain.
We know what you're going through.
We're doing absolutely everything we possibly can to get this up and running.
We will keep you posted, we'll keep you updated, and anytime we've ever had any glitch or anything, that's been really kind of the approach we've taken.
But I think that that's where the importance of redundancy.
And even though we thought we had all the backups and everything else, we really wanted to make sure that we had invested into the software and into the database much more than we had in the past.

Omer (33:42.310)
Yeah, I guess you were victims of your own success in many ways.
Right.
And I think it's worth pointing out, right, that the.
The severity or the impact of.
Of an outage like that for a product like ClickFunnels is massive.
Because if you have a SaaS product and, you know, it's kind of, I don't know, let's say it's a CRM or something and it goes down, it's probably not the end of the world.
Right.
Your salespeople can still go out and talk to customers and all that sort of stuff, but when something like this goes down and you've got customers who are running their businesses on it and relying on it to generate sales day in, day out, you're messing with their livelihood as well.

Guest (34:29.230)
Oh, my gosh.
Yes.

Omer (34:30.990)
Right.
That's kind of nuts.

Guest (34:33.310)
Yeah, yeah.
It's crazy.
It's insane.
It's one of those things where their entire business, their entire livelihood is on your platform.
And so having stability is probably one of the most important things for us.
And that's really what we've tried to.
Our whole focus is, yeah, we want to continue to grow and to build and develop, but the stability aspect has got to always be there.

Omer (34:56.509)
Yeah.
Okay, I guess we should wrap up.
Let's get on to the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can, okay?

Guest (35:07.709)
Yep.

Omer (35:08.229)
All right.
What's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?

Guest (35:11.970)
For me, honestly, the best advice I ever got was just to trust your gut.
I had a friend refer to it as gut tuition.
And that is too often you think, gosh, I should ask my customers about this, I should do that.
And most of the time, you know best.
You're just afraid to actually take the action that you need to take.
And so I've learned that the best thing for me to do is just trust my gut when I don't know what else to do.

Omer (35:34.210)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Guest (35:36.940)
Oh, gosh, there's two books.
One would be Play Bigger.
It's refers.
I actually like.
I wish they had titled it the Category King.
The whole idea about it is to build a business that literally can become the Category King.
The Category King will take up about 90% of the market share and everybody else fights for the remaining 10% of the scraps.
The other book is a book by Keith Cunningham called the Road Less Stupid.
And it's just great from a business owner's perspective when you're actually trying to run a business.
And too often we forget the importance of managing by numbers.
And he goes through all the successes and failures he's had over the years.

Omer (36:09.670)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?

Guest (36:13.670)
For me, I think the most important one is storytelling.
I think as an entrepreneur you have to have the ability to cast a vision and to convey that vision.
And there's nothing better than if you can actually do it through story.
And so I would tell any entrepreneur you need to really study how to tell stories.

Omer (36:28.800)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Guest (36:32.000)
I probably use Voxer with G Suite and Slack.
We use those as well.
But Voxer is probably the thing that we communicate through the most with our community and with our team.

Omer (36:42.160)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

Guest (36:46.160)
I'm actually doing it right now, and that's clickfunnels.
There's nothing else I'd rather do than this, and it's a crazy, crazy idea.

Omer (36:53.440)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Guest (36:56.590)
That's hard for me because I'm so open and transparent about everything.
I'm just an adrenaline junkie and I think most people kind of see that.
But I'm pretty open, transparent.
There's few things people don't know about me.

Omer (37:07.070)
And what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Guest (37:10.270)
For me is my family.
We love being out in the outer doors, spending time together.
Nothing's more important to me than that.

Omer (37:16.590)
Awesome.
Great answers.

Guest (37:18.070)
Thanks.

Omer (37:18.270)
Dave.
Thanks for joining me and sharing the ClickFunnels story and all the crazy stuff that you guys have done in this kind of very short amount of time and the success that you've had.
Now, if people want to go and check out clickfunnels, they can go to clickfunnels.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Guest (37:38.400)
Either Facebook or Instagram.
I'm on both those pretty frequently.

Omer (37:42.160)
Okay.
We'll include a link in the show notes to those and you have a podcast of your own as well.
So I'll include a link in there as well if people want to kind of hear more about what you're up

Guest (37:51.160)
to that sounds great.
Clickfunnels radio that's awesome.

Omer (37:55.560)
Thanks, Dave.
Thanks for joining me and wish you guys all the best of success.

Guest (37:59.480)
All right, see ya.

Omer (38:00.600)
Cheers.
Bye.