ClickFunnels: Bootstrapping a SaaS to $140M ARR with Webinars – with Todd Dickerson [413]

This is machine-generated transcript.

[00:00:00] Omer: Todd, welcome to the show.

[00:00:01] Todd: Awesome. Thanks to be here, man. Excited.

[00:00:04] Omer: My pleasure. Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you that you can share with us?

[00:00:09] Todd: I do actually, this has been my favorite quote since high school, and it's true knowledge is knowing that you know nothing. It's a Socrates quote.

[00:00:15] It kind of reminds me to stay humble and stay hungry for learning and, and just exploring new things and yeah, it's a, it's a great quote to keep in mind as you, as you grow a business, and especially as you get bigger. Great.

[00:00:28] Omer: So tell us about ClickFunnels. For people who don't know, what does the product do?

[00:00:32] Who's it for and what's the main problem you're helping to solve?

[00:00:36] Todd: Yeah, so ClickFunnels is the easiest and most profitable way to sell anything online, across any industry. That's kind of the way I like to pitch it and talk about it. We basically are, for anyone who's starting a business it's a, it's a broad market that we're targeting these days.

[00:00:51] But everyone who's going online to sell, they need to collect leads. They need to make basic purchases and sells, and ClickFunnels really makes that super easy to do without a, without a tech team behind you, without developers, without anything else. And as we've, as we've grown the platform, it's incorporates more and more features that people are looking for around that.

[00:01:09] Omer: Great. And give us a sense of the size of the business. Where are you in terms of revenue, customers size of team?

[00:01:16] Todd: Yeah, we I think last year was around 140 million. We got about a hundred thousand users right now, and I think we're around 300 employees.

[00:01:24] Omer: Great. And the business was founded in 2014.

[00:01:27] Todd: 2014. We have our 10 year anniversary next month.

[00:01:31] Omer: Woo-hoo. Oh, that's so funny. It's like the 10 year anniversary of this podcast is next month. Is it really? Yeah. I should come over and celebrate with you guys.

[00:01:41] Todd: So we're doing an online event out in Vegas, in a, in a studio out there. So it should be awesome. It should be fun.

[00:01:48] Omer: Great. All right. So let's, it's a, it's a really interesting story of how you, how you ended up building this business. And it all started with a random email one day from from Russell Brunson, who's your, your co-founder. For people who may not know who Russell is you know, SaaS, people who maybe just don't know that much about click funnels for whatever reasons.

[00:02:15] Just, just, just give us, just help them understand who Russell is.

[00:02:18] Todd: Yeah. So Russell, I, I was on his email list probably 14 years ago and that's how we ended up like getting in touch originally. But he was at the time just teaching people how to sell online teaching people how to create eBooks, info products software products even at the time.

[00:02:33] And was basically just teaching people what he was doing and learning behind the scenes. He was teaching people how to create opt-in pages, write copy make initial sell and that kind of stuff. And that's how I had ended up actually in his ecosystem. I was building software, so I was, I was trying to sell software myself.

[00:02:49] 14 years ago, 15 years ago, and I was just trying to learn from everyone I could around marketing strategies and ways to get leads and ways to upsell people and ascend people through stuff. And I was just absorbing everything I could. And I'd gotten into Russell's ecosystem at the time and, and was on his list.

[00:03:04] Omer: And so this was probably about two or three years before you guys. Started ClickFunnels, you got this, you got this random email from Russell. He just sent it out to a bunch of people and it was just a plea for help.

[00:03:16] Todd: Yeah. So just to give a little bit of context on what I was doing at the time, I kind of had gotten into the world of SEO, so I had been building a lot of websites.

[00:03:24] I had like probably 1500 different websites, SEO properties where I was running ads on 'em and all this kind of stuff, right? But I was also making SEO software to optimize my own sites. And without getting into details on all, like the software, I basically got it to the point where I felt like I was kind of maxed out on the industry.

[00:03:42] You know, I was ranked number one for my keywords. I was doing my thing. And I was honestly living like a four hour work week lifestyle kind of, which was great. Like, like Tim Ferriss, right? Like that was, that was the thing. This was like shortly after his book was originally came out and I was like, that sounds like a fun goal.

[00:03:56] Nobody told me it wasn't realistic, so I just did it. But I'd honestly got to the spot where I was kind of looking for my next thing. I felt like. This is fun, but how long can I just fight with Google over SEO rankings? Like there's gotta be something more that I could do. So he sends an email out to his list.

[00:04:11] He had just acquired another website. He had bought an app and it was a Ruby on R'S app. And this was literally like shortly after R'S 1.0 had released. There were very few rails developers out there. But I had actually built my app on Ruby on Rails right after it came out. Got involved with a startup weekend and had had just randomly learned rails.

[00:04:32] And we built a startup weekend app. And anyway, so I had some experience with Res. So I, I get this email on a marketing list. You gotta think like every email that's coming from Russell is like, how to, you know, get higher conversions on your opt-in page and like write an info book like product, all these things.

[00:04:47] And I get an email about Ruby on Russell. I'm like, there's this jumps out at me. I'm like, there's no way there's anyone else on his email list that knows Ruby on Rails except me.

[00:04:55] Omer: Okay, let's take a quick breather here. You know, I've come to realize that some tools can really change the game when it comes to building a business.

[00:05:02] That's why I'm excited to tell you about Lead Feeder, a tool that helps you cut through the data and turn those website visitors into solid leads. Lead feeder shows you which companies are checking out your site tracks their behavior, and integrates all this with your CRM the result. It's your secret weapon for engaging leads and helping your team turn website visitors into sales.

[00:05:23] Head over to lead feeder.com/try for a free demo and get a free extended premium trial when you let them know that you're a listener of the SaaS podcast. That's lead feeder.com/try. Alright, let's get back to the show. And I and I And is it true that no one on his team knew Ruby on Rails either and they'd acquired this product?

[00:05:45] Todd: Yeah. So basically I find all this stuff out later. But he, he had a team of 10 developers, none of them. And they had New Ruby on Rails. They were like maybe PHP guys or something at the time. And back then it was not easy to run a Rails app. We were using like. Ong rolls. And like there was this like whole ordeal, like Capistrano deployment scripts to like do anything.

[00:06:04] Like, it was just this nightmare to get anything working. And he had 10 guys on his team, they'd been working on it for a month, could not get the thing running. It was still not done. I didn't know that this email he sent was his last ditch effort before he just threw that business away. He was just gonna throw it away, write it off as a write off for the business he acquired here.

[00:06:21] He had bought, and then he's like, you know what? I wonder if there's somebody on my list. So sends this email out. I reply to this email basically the next day I, I actually knew some like similar people, so it was like, Hey man, I'm not looking. Like a job, but if you wanted to partner on this thing, I'll partner with you on it.

[00:06:36] I'll do the work and like you sell it and do your thing. And he's like, sounds great. And of course I didn't know he was about to throw the thing away if, if I hadn't have replied. So he emails it over on like a Friday and I spend the weekend kind of getting the thing back online, fixing up bugs, like making it.

[00:06:51] Do what it was supposed to do. It was actually a email service provider platform at the time. So I get it, I get it working, get it running, and I'm like, Hey man, I fixed it all up. Here's the logins, here's how it works, found some issues. I think we should do this. But it, it's, it's working. So I sent it over to him and again, little did I know he tells his side of the story, but like he had, he was expecting me to like reply back sooner, not like 72 hours later.

[00:07:13] So I didn't reply back immediately and he's like, man, this guy took my code. He disappeared. He stole my website. Like, he's like, he's like thinking I did the opposite and then I show up with it and he's like, oh, wow. Like I, my team's been working on this for a month and they couldn't get it running and you did in a weekend.

[00:07:29] So I kind of started our relationship. Of course, I just had a lot of experience with that technology and then his team didn't, but that started our relationship and kind of started what became a big partnership. I think I read somewhere that said you didn't want to be paid for the work that you did.

[00:07:43] Yeah, I, I mean, because I had like the four hour work week business thing that like I had running on the side, I basically was looking for something bigger, right? I was looking for like a partnership. I was looking for what became ClickFunnels. From day one, like literally I was pitching him on ideas that were, are now part of ClickFunnels and some of it was like marketing automation stuff and whatnot.

[00:08:03] I'm pitching him on like, Hey man, we should build this platform. You've got an audience. I can build the thing. Like, we'll figure out how to sell it. Like, we'll make this thing a thing. And he's like, yeah, okay, okay. Maybe, maybe. But yeah, I, I basically was like, nah, I don't pay me. I want equity. I want, I want profit share.

[00:08:19] If the company makes money, the project makes money, pay me. Otherwise, I'll just, I'll be over here. I'm, I'm okay. I'm covering my expenses with, with what I've got going on, on the side anyway. So, yeah, it was a unique, unique situation. There was a point where he eventually he tells the story as he was in his office and he's like asking his, his guy that directed business operations, and he is like, how much did we pay Todd last month?

[00:08:41] Or whatever. And Brent's like, I, I, nothing, like, we haven't paid him in like three months. Like it's not making any money. So we didn't pay him anything. And he's like. Todd is like running our entire business. I think we should send him some money. So eventually he did put me on like a payroll for like a year there.

[00:08:55] In between that he's the, we had projects that weren't making anything. So I'm like, sure you can, you can pay me something. Just keep in mind I'm looking for a partnership. Right. So yeah, there was, those were pre click funnels that's like, we were building, we built probably 15 different businesses while I was working with 'em.

[00:09:10] Like I say, businesses, some of 'em were nothing more than a landing page and an order page. Right. And then some of 'em were like full blown. We had a supplement business that was doing half a million dollars a month by the time we got, we got done with it and switched it off and switched over to ClickFunnels as the focus, but yeah.

[00:09:25] Yeah, it was a wild ride.

[00:09:27] Omer: So, so you guys kind of worked on these different kind of ideas for a few years, and then 2014 you launched ClickFunnels. So where, where did the idea come from? And I, I know part of it was like Russell had. I guess popularized the whole idea of sales funnels and back then it was a real pain in the butt to, for anyone to actually build a funnel, right.

[00:09:53] If you didn't know how to code.

[00:09:54] Todd: Yeah. So he was definitely one of the voices out there at the time. And I, we were, I don't even know if we were really calling him sales funnels at the time. We were definitely like it, we were teaching sales funnel strategy. That was the thing he was teaching. We just like sales funnels really hadn't caught on as a phrase until probably about 2014, 2015 after we started stuff.

[00:10:11] But yeah, he was, he was basically teaching that strategy, doing that kind of stuff. We were I'll take a step back. I guess it's a pretty funny story in my perspective, and I guess I'll give the full details of the story. So I'm on a plane to go to Boise, Idaho, which is where Russell's out of, I'm in Atlanta, he's in Boise.

[00:10:29] I'm on a plane to go to Boise. I'm going out there to work on a project. We were doing automated webinar software. So it was a platform we were building that does automated webinar software. One of the big hurdles that we had though in that platform was. I, or one of the designer developers was having to like custom build the landing pages for everyone's automated webinar was like, yeah, we need, we've got the forms and the backend stuff, but like the page has to be designed for every new thing.

[00:10:53] And anyway, so I'm flying out, I get a, I'm reading through like, I don't know, tech Crunch or whatever. I see that Lead Pages had raised $5 million and they had raised it like over the past weekend. And at the time, lead pages was nothing more than literally like a static page that you could like change the headline, change the images.

[00:11:11] You couldn't move anything around. You couldn't like do anything. It was just like best practice landing page thing. And I'm like. I'm getting like matter and matter on the plane. I'm like, how did they raise fire? Like I can build that this week while we're in Boise. Like this is not that big of a deal.

[00:11:24] Like I'm just like, so I land, I'm like telling Russell about this and we're just kind of talking back and forth. I'm like, this is the piece that we need to build for our automated webinar software. We need this landing page that's dynamic and this customizable and like this is missing. And of course he's like, well, yeah, but if we're gonna build this.

[00:11:41] We shouldn't just build what they're doing, we gotta do way better. Right. And then we sat down and we literally like just went to the whiteboard and started mapping it out, coming up with this plan. And literally I probably probably spent the entire night mapping it out and working on it. And he was just like, I don't know, man.

[00:11:58] I don't think we can do this. Like, I had my previous team try and build something kind of down this path in a completely different name for it and stuff. And he's like, I had, we tried to build it, we wasted a ton of money and a ton of time. Like, and I'm like, I think I could build it as long as we're smart about it.

[00:12:13] Right? So it was like a matter of like scoping it down to like the pieces we do, the pieces we rely on, third parties to do, like that kind of stuff. And I kind of broke off and spent six months like off on my own prototyping and building what kind of became the first version of ClickFunnels.

[00:12:30] Omer: Great. So for all the, the developers and the nerds who are listening here, right?

[00:12:36] The. When, when you, when you come up with a vision for a product, usually it's the kind of thing that in reality, it's gonna take you four, five years and you still won't have built 50% of what you imagined. Right. And so there's always this thing about the MVP, like, how do you boil it down to something which is valuable enough that you can ship in a fairly short period of time.

[00:13:05] But it's still, you know, I mean, yeah, they talk about the thing about, you know, not being embarrassed, you know, all that kind of stuff. But nobody wants to be embarrassed about their product. Right. So when you, when you thought about this big vision, and then you started thinking about, okay, how am I gonna execute this?

[00:13:23] What, what was your thought process and, and how did you boil it down to something that was manageable?

[00:13:28] Todd: Yeah, I mean, that's. Hard to be a hundred percent sure on like when you're, when you're doing that. Right? Right. But what I basically tried to do was to sit down and say, what do we need? Right? Like what's like the minimum thing we need to like be excited about this.

[00:13:43] And I think that's important. It can't be minimum in the sense that like, okay, cool, it kind of does the thing, but I'd never use it. I'm not excited about it. Like. I don't know if I even like the phrase MVP, like there's another phrase like, exceptional, viable product. Like that might be a little better, like up more at my alley, but it's a matter of like, what makes me super excited to use this thing.

[00:14:03] And there is like, so basically we ended up building kind of initially like a better version of lead pages that connected pages together and did like the funnel building process. But while we were doing that, we brought in, and this is a part of the story, I don't know if gets talked about too much, but we brought in another partner we brought in a designer, so that designer, so we had you sometimes hear the phrase like hustle, hacker and hipster like, or whatever.

[00:14:25] Like, so we had Russell's the Hustler, I was the hacker. We were missing the hipster. So we, we hired a designer, we brought him in to work on this project and he was like, full disclosure guys. I've been trying to build a page editor myself for five years and it was like, well, if you've been working on it for five years, I'm pretty sure there's not much conflict of interest.

[00:14:42] We're, you know, so we're gonna, we're gonna do this thing. Well, he decided to get super inspired after he helped us design ours to go finish his, and he actually started from scratch again and built like a new version of what he had worked on for a page editor. So we ended up actually acquiring him and bringing him on, on as a partner.

[00:15:00] And this is early 2014, so I was building this backend with a fairly simple editor experience, but like the full backend experience built out. He was sitting here in in isolation, building the editor experience with no backend experience behind it. And then he sent us his video of the editor and it was just so good.

[00:15:18] It was that exceptional, viable product thing. We were like. Everyone's mind will be blown. Drag and drop, move the thing. It's so smooth. The effects work, as you would hope, like just super clean. And he'd, he'd basically been building that in the six months I'd been building the other part. So we basically brought him on as a partner, gave him equity and merged the two apps together before our big launch.

[00:15:40] We actually beta launched probably in April before that, with the beta. And that's when we start, started first getting feedback, right. So it was like people liked it. They, they thought it was cool, but the number one was CREs request was why can't I drag things around and move them where they need to be?

[00:15:54] Like, and that was when we, when he brought, basically brought his editor in the picture and we were like. This solves that problem. How do we make this part of our, part of our vision for ClickFunnels? And yeah, so that kind of answers your question, but yeah, there's a a lot going on there.

[00:16:08] Omer: Yeah. So did he, did he just build a prototype or was it actually a function, you know, a working front end?

[00:16:14] Todd: He built the entire working front end, but with basically no backend. Like it would like save an HTML page and like, what do you do from here? Right? Like, it was that kind of thing. Which luckily I had already done the rest of it, so I had already figured out, what do you do, how do you serve it, how do you scale it, how do you do all the opt-in processing and integrations and all that kind of other stuff that I was doing.

[00:16:33] So he built it literally all client side JavaScript, like just kind of went nuts. And the version that's in ClickFunnel's classic to this day is. Basically his version with, with updates from the developers over the years on top of it, obviously. But that's the original, original editor that was built in really jQuery for like no real libraries or anything back then.

[00:16:54] Like he's just JavaScript and jQuery, like Yeah, that's, that's before React and View and all these frameworks. Right. Before all that. Yep. Did you build the backend in Ruby on Rails, by the way? I did. I built the backend in Ruby on Rails. I, I, I had to, I was like. We, we basically went all in on Ruby, on Rails at the time.

[00:17:10] I was super excited about it. I still am to this day. I think. We recently built a new version of the platform, which was about four years ago. We started that and we chose Ruby on Rails. Again, I, there's a lot of benefits to it in my opinion. I know it can be divisive. It's like almost talking religion or something, or politics when you start talking about what your preferred programming language.

[00:17:30] But I love how simple it is. Like it's just a fun, elegant language to work in. I'm not sure that it was that fun in 10 years ago, like when it came to deploying things and running it when you had PHP that would just magically run and work on your servers. But yeah, nah, it's built in Ruby on Rails as well.

[00:17:45] Omer: Yeah, I remember trying to learn Rails. I think probably around the, maybe just V one had been around for a while and it, I loved the, the, the elegance of simplicity. But there was also like, I. This, this whole thing of like this magic stuff that it was doing, it was just like, I couldn't, it, it kind of left me like feeling like I don't really have control.

[00:18:09] There's weird stuff going on and I don't really understand it. And I think once you get past that I think life becomes a, a little bit easier.

[00:18:16] Todd: Yeah, it definitely takes some getting used to, that's one of those things that like, can, yeah, you either love it or you hate it almost. Right? Like, I personally, once you, once I figured out most of the backend stuff going, you know, I'm going through the libraries and, you know, commenting and doing stuff anyway, so I'm getting up to speed on how it actually works.

[00:18:31] And you're like, all right, I can deal with a little bit of magic as long as I know the, the main stuff that's working. It's not like we all know how the, you know, ones and zeros are working on our operating systems these days either. But a little bit too much magic and back then potentially for, for new users.

[00:18:46] Omer: Great. Okay. So you've identified a problem. You're inspired by what you're seeing with lead pages that tells you that there's some validation already there. You've got. Russell's audience, a very big audience that you can tap into to sell this product. So once you built that first version of ClickFunnels, I think from what I understand, expectations were pretty sky high, right?

[00:19:14] I mean, you got this massive audience, we got this great product, we've kind of, you know, had, had Russell go through and, and he can use it and he likes this thing. And so you were expecting, like a lot of people would, would, would kind of, you know, be, be running to, to buy this product. But what happened?

[00:19:32] Todd: Yeah. So I mean. Full disclosure, Russell thought it was gonna do 10,000 customers at launch. Like that was, he's like, we're gonna have 10,000 users at launch. This is the best thing ever. Any of my lists that doesn't buy, this is crazy. Like it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. And not that I'm saying he's wrong, it was just like I was, I had lower expectations.

[00:19:51] I was like, I'd be happy with a thousand customers at launch. You know, like, that's amazing. Like we've a hundred grand a year in a RR, like right out the gate. Great. Like, that's awesome. But he was convinced it would be bigger than that. So I'll give a little bit more context on how we did the launch plan originally.

[00:20:05] So we started actually planning the launch. There's a, like affiliate group that Russell had a lot of exposure to this network of different people that sell products, online, info products, whatever. And we kind of had reached out to all his contacts, we call it the Dream 100 list, right? We had reached out to all his top affiliates and been like, Hey guys, you have to promote this thing.

[00:20:23] It's gonna, it's gonna be amazing. Like, here's a preview, here's what we're doing. We did that before we made Dylan and the new editor part of the project. So we had planned the launch date based on the original like, call it V one beta version of ClickFunnels. And we decided we were gonna do an upgraded version of it, like a month out from launch, maybe, maybe three weeks out from launch.

[00:20:47] It was like right before launch. So Dylan and I flew to Boise, Idaho and set it in the room for two weeks straight drinking, red Bull sleeping. Not at all merging these two different apps into one app with a hard deadline. 'cause we had told these affiliates to promote, they cleared their calendars, they were like ready to send emails, there was all this promotional material ready for it.

[00:21:09] They had, they were ready to go and we were still like finishing the product, which was most one of the most stressful situations ever. But

[00:21:18] Omer: yeah, I wanna understand a little bit about that because I think, you know, these days when I. You, you're building these types of sort of products, right? You, you, you'll have the front end like, you know, react or whatever.

[00:21:31] And, and the backend may just be like a bunch of APIs, right? So that it's easy for the front end to call the, the, these APIs and, and get whatever it needs. But I'm assuming that when you built this, you kind of already had you own front end and there wasn't these APIs and then there's this other front end.

[00:21:48] And so you've got these kind of, these two things which are kind of conflicting with each other that you've gotta get working together, right? So it, I just want, I, I think I just wanna point that out because it was probably a lot harder to do than something like that might be like. Trying to do that now.

[00:22:05] Todd: We created multiple years of tech debt in that two week period of time. Probably like it was just, so his was, I think he did do Ruby on RELs, but he wasn't a RELs developer. He was very much a JavaScript run-in guy. He just kind of like had a res app that like created a page and loaded a JavaScript editor and then it like saved that to an HTML file on the server.

[00:22:23] That was kind of it, right? So I had to then go in, I don't think he had like email integrations or any of that stuff built out at all. So I went in and like, I'm like, all right, we gotta figure out a way to integrate with all these, like what happens when someone submits the form? Like where do we store it?

[00:22:36] Then how do we trigger, like sending emails to people? How do we, how opt them into MailChimp? Like we were at the time integrating primarily with just third parties. So what we ended up doing, which is kind of a fun story, I don't know if Russell's ever even told this one. We ended up doing what at the time, we joked around calling reverse launch.

[00:22:53] 'cause we had to do something for our affiliates. We were like, we have to go live on this date and time, but all that's gonna work. Is building a page and collecting an email. That's it. Like we don't have integrations working yet. We don't have we were building membership sites. Membership sites weren't working.

[00:23:10] E-commerce wasn't working like it was just collect the lead store, the lead. That's it. So basically we ended up doing a reverse launch because we had to, we were building the product as we were promoting it, and we launched that version and then a week later we're like, cool guys. Now you can integrate with MailChimp.

[00:23:26] And then it was like a week later, cool guys, now you can build a community. A week later now you can integrate with Stripe. And we just rolled out, we kept the launch going different promotional reasons every week or two for probably the first month or so, month or two until we got it to what really was the MVP that we were aiming for originally.

[00:23:45] It really had all the major features that we wanted to incorporate to begin with which is basically those that I just listed. Interesting. Yeah. It was a, it was one of those things where like, in hindsight people were like, that was the best idea ever. Rolling out new features every week. That was so cool.

[00:23:59] I'm like, yeah, you don't know. We just weren't sleeping. We were just building them for the first time. Like it was, it was crazy.

[00:24:05] Omer: Yeah. I, I think it's funny because you, you, you, you said, you know, when we were kind of designing this thing, we wanted to build something better than, way better than Leadpages, but then when you, what you shipped was probably.

[00:24:16] A basic version of Lead Pages. Right. But you, you kind of added stuff on fairly quickly after that.

[00:24:21] Todd: Yeah, it was basically like at the time our, our editor was definitely better 'cause you couldn't like even drag and drop in there. So we launched a better version of Lead Pages essentially. This is what we kinda launched day one.

[00:24:30] It was like, but it did none of the other stuff that we had planned yet. And literally I think it was, yeah, it was over the month or two that we like, just kind of just went nuts. I mean, we had started it all. Like there were lots of things that were close. It was just like a lot of it because we had decided to merge two platforms into one that we just had to be like, well that used to work, now we've gotta turn it off until we can make it work again.

[00:24:51] So yeah, that was, it was fun. Okay, so big Launch affiliates lined up sleepless nights. Russell setting this expectation of 10,000 customers. How many did you actually get? I think we hit 90 KMRR during that launch phase, which would've been that like first month basically. Which. I think our price point was about 97, so it was about a thousand customers at the time.

[00:25:16] So I, I thought it was great. It was a proof of concept. I mean, I don't even think Lead Pages was making that much at the time. They had raised money, but I don't know if they were actually making much revenue. So like, it was great, like we got traction, but it was nowhere near what Russell was actually counting on and thinking about with this thing.

[00:25:31] So he was disappointed. He's like, why are people buying this? Like, what did I miss for market fit? Like, he's going down the list, just kind of banging his head against the wall, trying to figure it out. And, and yeah, like we had to, we had to wait until we got to the next next milestone, I guess, and figured it out.

[00:25:47] Omer: Yeah, I mean, most founders would be very happy if they had a thousand people signing up for launch. I, I think the, the, the issue here was expectations were much higher. I. And, you know, you guys already had an audience, a big audience that you could market to that Russell had been building for years. So it wasn't like you were going out and saying, oh, we don't know, you know, we don't have an audience and we gotta find the first 10 customers.

[00:26:18] Right. You, you, you had this, this kind of, this, this, this unfair advantage, but as, as you, as you guys unpack that, like what, what was the issue? Why were people not, why were not as many people buying this as you guys were hoping?

[00:26:34] Todd: Yeah, I think it was a combination of a few things. So, I mean, Russell did have an audience, but his audience was very much like.

[00:26:41] Info product buyers kind of like biz off. They were looking for a business in a box. They were like, you know, I don't know. I'm trying to make money online. Tell me what to do. Right. And this was a tool for businesses to collect leads and like Ascend leads and sell products. Like you had to have something to sell.

[00:26:55] And a lot of his audience just wasn't there yet. They were, they were still learning the ideas. They were excited about doing something online. They weren't necessarily businesses, people that were businesses, a lot of them kind of got it. And if you had tried setting up a WordPress site before at the time, like this was way easier and you're like blown away by it.

[00:27:11] But, you know, a lot of the people hadn't done that and we're still just kind of in the really early days. I, that's part of it. I think there's also like, I mean. I don't know. Honestly, I'm not a hundred percent sure. Like going back and looking at it now, in hindsight he, he basically had probably 50,000 people that would open every email he sent.

[00:27:32] Right. So he could send them to the page. They could, they could review the stuff, they could see it but they really just didn't maybe get what the value was they were, that it was providing. Right. So it was just like, if you, if you had got it, if you had had the challenges before, if you had tried, tried overcoming those challenges before, like, yeah, it made sense and you'd identify with it and potentially sign up for a trial, but a lot of those people were still like, just too early in their journey to like, understand the value, I think.

[00:27:56] Omer: Yeah. And I, and I think the other difference was that he had been training his audience to buy basically info products, right. And to then suddenly put a SaaS product in front of these people. You know, may, maybe there was just a, a, a learning curve there that, or, you know, it kind of, it didn't kind of completely, the dots didn't connect with people.

[00:28:23] Te tell me about the, that, how that event came about, that you went, that, that Russell kind of, you know, started kind of selling ClickFunnels. Because I think that for me, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like what you guys have done with selling ClickFunnels and the way you sell it, kind of packaged around info products and training and all of this stuff is so different to what 99.9% of SaaS companies do.

[00:28:58] It's a very different way to sell, but it's also a very smart way to recoup. Customer acquisition costs before they've even paid for a SaaS product and actually kinda lower your, your cat costs. So, we'll, we'll, we'll unpack that, but I kind of feel like it was this, this was sort of the, the pivotal moment where maybe that shift started to happen.

[00:29:23] Todd: Yeah. So I mean, another piece of it, I guess was just the fact that like a lot of his audience had seen him sell different things every week, right? Like he's selling other people's stuff as an affiliate. He's selling a book on how to, how to make an ebook, like he's selling another course on this other thing.

[00:29:37] So he's selling constantly different things. And even if you're a serious business, if you're seeing like, I don't know, this guy sells a new thing every month. Like, why am I gonna run my entire business on his new thing of the month? Right. So it literally, like even for some of our best friends in the industry took years before they were like, oh, this ClickFunnels thing is like.

[00:29:55] Legit, and like, everybody's using this, why am I not using it? Like it took a long time for even the people that knew us well to kind of get over that, that hurdle. But yeah, I think sorry, what was the, what was the second part of that question?

[00:30:07] Omer: Yeah, so tell me what happened, but how did this event come about?

[00:30:09] That, that ultimately, you know, you, you started selling ClickFunnels in a, I guess in an unusual way.

[00:30:15] Todd: Yeah, no. So this is this is a fun story. So Russell had a number of different events that he used to speak at back then. He had they were basically internet marketing style events, right? Like, people are coming, they're trying to learn how to sell online.

[00:30:25] They might be might be new businesses, might be experienced businesses, all kinds of different demographics. But ClickFunnels was sponsoring one of those events right out the gate. I mean, this is month two or three after we launched the platform. This is the first probably event we had sponsored at the time.

[00:30:38] And we're like, all right, let's set up a booth. Let's do this thing. And the guy's like, I want Russell to speak and I need you to sell something at a thousand dollars price point. And Russell's like, I can't sell ClickFunnels at a thousand dollars price point because people aren't even buying the trial and it's free.

[00:30:53] And he's just like, I can't do that. And the dude's like, alright, well you gotta figure it out. I need you to sell ClickFunnels at a thousand dollars price point. He is like. Alright, I'll try and figure it out. Right. So he, he goes back to the drawing board and we brainstorm some ideas and he basically comes up with what we were calling the Funnel Hacks masterclass.

[00:31:10] So this is before masterclass was a thing. I think we coined the phrase, I dunno. But anyway, so it was like an eight week course and the idea was we were gonna take people through building a funnel and I mean, we had like, it wasn't like we hadn't proven the funnel concepts, like we had a supplement business doing half a million dollars a month in supplement sales on using our exact funnels, exact strategies.

[00:31:30] So we were able to kind of use these things as examples and be like, here, this works. Here's legitimate examples of this working. Let me teach you how to structure it, how to come up with the offer, how to build the upsells, how to do all this stuff, and oh yeah. Up until three months ago, you had to hire a developer to build all this for you.

[00:31:46] Now you can just get ClickFunnels and we're gonna throw ClickFunnels in for free for a year. So the course was 9 97. You got eight weeks of training. You'd have live. There was actually live training. We were doing live training every week for eight weeks. And you would come in, you'd watch the live training, it would tell you how to do all this stuff, build your offer, build your business from scratch, right?

[00:32:05] Like whether you had an idea or not. We even had stuff about Russell would teach idea offer creation, like business idea creation, all that kind of stuff too. Product creation. So start from scratch. We solved that problem. We solved the problem with technology with ClickFunnels. We solved all these different problems that people had in their head with, like why they wouldn't use it or couldn't use it.

[00:32:23] So he goes on stage, and I don't remember how big the room was, but I remember specifically that he had sold 45% of the room, which is probably like maybe a couple hundred people. You know, he's, he's doing the pitch. This is like one of those events where people run to the back of the room, put their credit card down, like just the table at the back was swarmed with half the room surrounding it.

[00:32:43] And he comes out afterwards and he's like. I don't know, Todd, if you just realize what happened, but this is it. This is, this is the thing like that. I've never seen that happen before. 45% of the room, half the room came back and paid a thousand dollars on the spot after I got up and spoke for an hour.

[00:33:00] So he really like, during that dialed in the objections that people were having dialed in the offer, dialed in the thing. And then we went on basically a webinar roadshow for the next couple years of like every week it was doing a webinar, which was dialing in that offer that was originally done at that live event and just making it better and better and better.

[00:33:21] Omer: And, and so, and, and did you still continue with that same model where. People were paying for training and getting click, getting the SaaS for free. Yeah. So, so basically the way it worked, and especially after we dialed it in over the next year or so it was a, it was a course, people were signing up to buy the course.

[00:33:42] Todd: Originally when they're opting in, they're opting in for a webinar to just learn about funnels, learn about making money through money, through sales funnels. It's free webinar. And this isn't like a, a lot of people in our world, the software world at least, are thinking like, oh, like a sales webinar. Or maybe they're thinking a training webinar.

[00:33:58] This is nothing like that. This is what Russell coined as the perfect webinar. This is the idea is like you come in and you're tackling like three secrets, three major things that you're gonna bring in and like cover as you're, as you're talking through the webinar and you're gonna take people on a journey, tell 'em a story, you're gonna give them lots of good information, but it's very specifically crafted to actually result in a cell.

[00:34:20] So. We come through and basically build this, build this webinar, sell the course for a thousand bucks, package the software as a bonus for anywhere. We had different price points we've tested over the years. We did six months of ClickFunnels a year of ClickFunnels, two years of ClickFunnels. We've like packaged all kinds of different offers over the years.

[00:34:37] But yeah, you would, you would only be technically buying the course and the software was free and at the end of the time period, your software went to monthly unless you canceled or decided to do something else. But yeah, that's, that's basically how the offer worked. And I think one of the amazing things about it that, that a lot of people miss is the webinar.

[00:34:56] Let's say the opt-in happens on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. The webinar's happening on a Friday. So on Friday you collect a thousand dollars instead of collecting a free trial sign up, which probably isn't gonna pay you for a month, and then it's gonna take you another year to collect the rest of the money from that.

[00:35:13] So what that enabled us to do is spend a lot of money on advertising, right? Because if we can come in and if we know, I, I'm gonna make up our numbers 'cause I can't remember off the top, but something like $10 a lead that we could actually get it was probably between five and $10. So if you make five to $10 for every lead you get, that enables you and it within a week you're making five to $10.

[00:35:33] That enables you to buy tons of traffic on Facebook, on Google, obviously these days there's a lot of other channels that we use. But back then it was a lot of it was Facebook. So if you can dial that in, you've got tons of off, you've got tons of people being able to basically. We call it a self-liquidating offer, right?

[00:35:49] Like we would spend all the money, we would collect that first link week on advertising to grow as fast as possible. But a lot of people opt in and they don't buy on the webinar. So if you have even five, 10% of the people that buy on the webinar, you sell 90% that didn't. Those people are on our email list.

[00:36:05] Those people are signing up for free trials because they, maybe they didn't have a thousand dollars, they weren't quite quite ready for that. Doesn't mean they don't wanna learn from our free information out there from our books that we now have from our other education and training. So a lot of the people would come through and actually sign up.

[00:36:19] So for every. 9 97 webinar sell we would make for this masterclass. We'd sign up at least three different free trials at the same time, and we were able to basically not even consider the advertising cost as a, as a expense for those trials. We just, our goal was always to break even on that webinar at the end of the week, whatever we spent on advertising, we needed a break even on Friday, Saturday, Sunday as we did replays and, and the webinar.

[00:36:46] Omer: What were you selling? As this self-liquidating offer. Right? Because, because so, so basically someone is seeing, let's say, a Facebook ad, which is gonna drive them to register for this webinar, but you're also making an offer to sell something to them in between there, right?

[00:37:03] Todd: So, yeah, I, I'm using the phrase self-liquidating offer.

[00:37:05] Most of the time people use that with lower ticket stuff. Our actual funnel hacks webinar was our web self-liquidating offer. We weren't really converting. I mean, we may have tested over the years, I think we had our 108 split test book that we would split test as an upsell. I can't remember how long we did that and what, what the best offers were off the top.

[00:37:23] But we have done things where it's like, okay, I opted in for the webinar now on the thank you page, where it's like, cool, here's your date and time. Add to your calendar. Oh, by the way, step one before the webinar sign up for your ClickFunnels free trial. Cool. Go sign up for that. Step two, buy the 108 split test.

[00:37:40] Book and we're gonna send it to you and we're gonna show you the best split test that we've done over the past three years. Right? Like, so we had up upsells, but they were basically on the thank you page. 'cause our main goal was still to get 'em to the webinar, but the secondary goal was to get that free trial.

[00:37:52] 'cause we knew only, you know, 5% of the opt-ins are gonna buy, but we've got potentially 15, 20% that will actually give us their email address for well email and credit card for a free trial. Which it, it's actually important, like we do paid, paid trials. We make your card be verified before we actually sign you up for a trial.

[00:38:10] Omer: Got it. So most SaaS companies would run some kind of ad campaign and it would take people directly to the signup page and say, sign up for a trial. And either people sign up or they abandon. That's it. So what I'm hearing, what you guys did is you are running these ad campaigns. You get people to sign up for the webinar on the thank you page.

[00:38:42] Often you're testing stuff to sell these smaller things like the, the split test thing that they can buy for 10, 20 bucks or whatever. And every time somebody's doing that, you are basically recouping the cost of acquiring that lead in the first place. And you are giving, you're inviting them to start the trial.

[00:39:05] With ClickFunnels, but it doesn't stop there because now they've still scheduled in something to their calendar. They're gonna turn up for this webinar, they're gonna get some value from it. Some are gonna buy this, this course and get ClickFunnels. And the, the 90% that don't are still on the email list, and you can still invite them afterwards.

[00:39:27] So you're getting like, as you said, like multiple shots at getting them onto a trial and you're, you're like generating a bunch of revenue to cover all your advertising costs before anyone's paid like a dollar for ClickFunnels. It's like, why don't more companies try stuff like this? I mean, maybe there are, I, I just don't see it.

[00:39:49] Todd: No. I mean, we get, like, we, we've had to, we've had VCs and PS over the years, like kind of ask that same question. So we like. Wait, I don't get it. Like, so you don't spend, you don't need any money. And we're like, nah. I mean, we, we drive ads and we break even on it. Like that's always my goal on any, any campaigns we do.

[00:40:04] Like, what we're basically talking about right now is what we call a webinar funnel. Russell's called 'em a the most infe, incredible free gift ever offer Miky funnels because you're basically like, cool, we're liquidate on this, but then we also have these other free gifts, so maybe you'll give away books or something.

[00:40:19] But yeah, we'll do that. We'll do Russell's book, traffic secrets.com Secrets, expert Secrets. He's got a series of books that we've done over the years. Those books are different type of funnel that we do for that. Like most people, when they, we, we literally give the book away, right? Give it away.

[00:40:32] Free plus shipping, so you pay $7 shipping kind of covers our cost of the shipping and the hard cost on the book mostly. So we end up doing free plus shipping book, but we actually make about $40 for every book we give away. Right, because we do upsells, right? So we've got the audio book version.

[00:40:47] We're gonna sell you. We've got a course that is the follow up to it. We're gonna sell you. And then we don't consider this usually in our advertising costs. We also are telling people about ClickFunnels at the same time, so we're able to have funnels and ads that are promoting books that also promote ClickFunnels that are promoting a webinar that also promote ClickFunnels.

[00:41:05] We got all kinds of different funnels, like we practice what we preach, right? Like that's why we are bootstrapped, like we haven't needed to raise. We, who knows, maybe we could one day, but we have no, no need for it right now. We just. Do our, do our funnels and break even on the funnels, hopefully make some money on 'em, and then we shift people over into ClickFunnels for a backend.

[00:41:25] There's a saying, Dan Kennedy does, which hopefully I don't butcher it, but it's whoever has the last backend wins, right? Like, it's like you want to keep layering these things on if we're competing with someone who's just building a piece of software and trying to sell it for the same price and doesn't have all these other layers.

[00:41:40] I mean, we, I, we didn't even talk about the coaching program. We have a coaching and consulting program on the back end too. That is a higher ascension model. We have our live event that we make revenue from, right? Like we have all these other layers of business that we stack on, and that's how we're able to really dominate as opposed to if you're just thinking, oh, I'm gonna write a book and it's gonna be successful, like, cool, hopefully.

[00:42:00] But if you want to compete with me on advertising, like you're gonna need more than just that book. You're gonna need a bigger business built around it. Yeah, that's, that's kind of the strategy.

[00:42:09] Omer: And, and to clarify, when you talk about backend and Dan's quote, we're talking about backend offers to sell stuff, not Ruby on Rails, backends, right?

[00:42:17] So it's like, good point,

[00:42:18] Todd: right? Remember the audience, right? Like engineers and here are thinking like, wait, what? Backend? Yeah, no backends to sell something, right? So like, I've got the book, I've got ClickFunnels, I've got coaching program. Like, like if you've just had the book and you don't have ClickFunnels and then you don't have, you just got ClickFunnels, but you don't have a coaching program, right?

[00:42:34] Like there's different layers that allow me to spend way more on advertising than, than somebody that just has one of those layers.

[00:42:40] Omer: Yeah. So great. So once you've got this, this model going and you are basically recouping the cost of advertising. And so basically you can just keep running these, these ads and these webinars and basically that's what you were doing.

[00:42:57] It's also interesting that you told me that for years, like a lot of people would, would if they tried doing webinars, they try to get to like. Automated webinars as soon as possible. And I was interesting, you told me that like, like Russell was like actually doing each webinar every week for years right before you, you automated this stuff.

[00:43:17] Todd: I think Russell and I agree on this, that's one of the biggest mistakes people make with webinars. They do it once, maybe twice. They record the thing and then they just play it on replay. Every time you do it, you interact with people in the chat, you get better. Like you, you audition, you learn the objections, you improve the offer.

[00:43:34] Like you need to be dialing it in. I, I Russell, I. I think he said like 50 times you should do the webinar before you ever go into automated something like that. If you haven't done it at least a dozen times, like don't even consider automating it yet. Have it so dialed in that you're like, this is so good, I don't think there's anything I should change on it.

[00:43:50] Like that was great. Like I can't do better than that. Now you can consider rolling it into an automated, and I'm not saying you shouldn't automate, like we have automated webinars all over the place now but we don't just record once and then turn it into automated.

[00:44:02] Omer: Yeah, I think that's so smart. And, and in fact we do something similar with with, with SaaS founders.

[00:44:08] In my, my community we have kind of coined this term where we talk about like the anti PLG strategy because everyone wants to do product led growth and wants to put this stuff in where it's self-serve and I don't want to talk to customers and you know, they're just gonna do this. But the thing is, when you're in the early stages, when you're trying to get the first 10, first hundred, cus customers trying to get to the first million in a RR.

[00:44:36] You, you need to talk to those customers, right? And so when we say anti PLG, we're like, Hey, instead of automating it, make them fill out a form where they have to request access and you have to schedule a call with them. So you get to talk to these people and figure out what questions they have, what objections they have, right?

[00:44:52] Because that's like, so super valuable. But doing it for years, week after week, man, that takes some stamina. It's like

[00:44:59] Todd: it does. He, he only, I think he would keep doing it if he hadn't gotten to the point where he was so overwhelmed that he is like, alright, we're gonna have to automate this stuff eventually.

[00:45:06] But yeah, no, I mean, there's great, there's great tools that automate it and makes a lot of room for not making errors too, right? Like once you, once you kind of dial that thing in, it can be great.

[00:45:14] Omer: Yeah. Let's talk about growing pains. So you, you know, once you, you guys got this webinar kind of dialed in and sales coming in, the business starts growing.

[00:45:27] People are starting to not only use ClickFunnels, they're relying on ClickFunnels to run their business, to make money, to make a living. And then you guys have this massive outage, right? What happened? Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah, I'm kind of jealous of people now that don't have platforms that people are like relying on to run things on one side.

[00:45:48] Todd: It's great to be like core to their business, but also if you're core to their business and you have any type of hiccup whatsoever, you're gonna hear about it and people aren't gonna be happy. So, so yeah, we, our first major crisis and really the, the biggest outage we've ever had. Basically I told Russell when we were launching this thing and kind of seeing how users were using it and usage patterns and stuff, I'm like, okay, we can probably handle around 10,000 of these big users that are doing stuff on the platform like that are using it and driving traffic and whatever.

[00:46:17] It seems like we probably handle about 10,000 and right around when we got to 10,000 users. We basically, Russell was flying on a plane to London to speak at an event, I think it was a maybe coaching or con internet marketing event. Sorry. So he was flying out to London to land on this thing, and I had a horrible surprise at 4:00 AM basically, our entire app had gone down and our database had disappeared from our database host.

[00:46:46] Yeah. Not, not like, like down, just it wasn't there. It wasn't like no longer there. And clearly, like obviously we got off this database host as fast as possible after the fact, but I'm in panic mode, right? Like, I'm reaching out to them, talking to them. They're like, oh yeah, we're not sure where it went.

[00:47:02] We're not sure what happened to it. I'm like, what do you mean you're not sure what happened to it? How can it just disappear? And they're like, well, we have the backups. We'll start restoring. So they start restoring the process and I'm like, how long is this gonna be? And they're like, well, you know, it should be later today or something.

[00:47:15] I'm like. What is happening. So luckily we were running our own backups as well, and I'd been wanting to migrate to Amazon Aurora at the time. That was relatively new at the time, but it was like, clearly seemed like this should be where we should be hosting our databases. So I brought in our database engineer that we had on contract and brought him over and him and I just started hacking away at like, how do we get this backup live on Aurora as fast as possible?

[00:47:39] And clearly our database was not small at the time, right? So we're basically racing against the clock trying to get our databases online or main database online actually. So eventually we get this thing back online on Aurora and get running and we're like, oh, sweet. We got 10 times faster than we were.

[00:47:56] Like, everything's just way better. But by the time that was all done, we had been down for eight hours

[00:48:01] Omer: and that's huge, right in the middle of the, the day for, for most people. People were really pissed about this. Right. And, and they were very vocal, which is the last thing you need when you're trying to build a reputation as being this, this, this product to run your business on.

[00:48:15] Todd: Yeah, absolutely. That was literally the pitch. And like I was saying, like we were trying to convince these people like, this is we, you can trust us. Like you're the, we're the place you should be running your business, running your LA leads and all this. This is like the worst possible thing that can happen.

[00:48:26] Right. Russell said when he landed in, in London, obviously he's much more of the public face of the company than I am. He landed in London. He had guys that literally, like before he took off in, in, in Boise, were texting him about how amazing he was and how great ClickFunnels was who were now texting him, like death threats as he landed.

[00:48:45] And he's like. That's how he found out we were down. He, he saw those before he saw my messages that we were down, he saw death threat. Like people be like, I, you owe me $50,000 for my Facebook ads that were running and my site went down. You know, like just that kind of stuff. Just like complete death threat type stuff.

[00:49:04] And he's like, I have no idea what's going on. I need to talk to Todd as fast as possible. Right. So, so yeah, like that it was, it was, it was a nightmare. Yeah, it was not fun.

[00:49:14] Omer: You guys kind of turned that around because obviously, you know, you, you were scrambling and you, you not only restored the service, but also found a more reliable place to host your database.

[00:49:28] But just talk through like what Russell did as well in, in terms of going, going on Facebook.

[00:49:33] Todd: Yeah, definitely. I mean, I'm in, I'm in full, you know. No sleep panic mode, trying to figure out how to get this thing back online. But Russell, Russell stepped up completely and it was just a matter of like, like what do we do?

[00:49:44] Do we, do you hide? Like obviously your instincts are I wanna hide and I wanna hide behind the computer and try and just like fix this thing. But he had the correct instinct that he needed to go live on Facebook. We didn't make a prerecorded video. We didn't call in a video production crew. Like we didn't script something like some PR announcement.

[00:50:02] He was like, I'm gonna go live on Facebook right now and talk to people, right. And tell them what's up. And that's what he did. He jumped on Facebook, pull out his phone in London. He is like, Hey guys, I'm sorry. This is not acceptable. It's not acceptable to us, it's not acceptable to our engineers. It's not acceptable for you.

[00:50:20] Like we are completely doing everything we can to try and resolve this, but we understand what you're going through. Like we understand how bad this looks, how bad this is, and. Really the reaction from the community was just support, like, it completely flipped everyone around who was, who was in panic mode and freakout mode.

[00:50:40] They're like, oh, you are on top of this. Like, you do actually care. You are a real person. Like you are a real business. You're, you're trying to resolve this issue. He just made it crystal clear, was vulnerable and open and, and just told them how things were. And the, the crazy part is, which I, I've, I'm sitting here like, we're done.

[00:50:58] Like, we're gonna lose half our customers. Like, everyone's quitting. Like, I'm in, I'm in panic mode. And he's like, I don't know, like, people seem to be un like responsive and understanding. I'm like, all right, we'll see. So we look at the data like a day or two later. No dip in customers. Like there was no, like, no new signups 'cause we were down, but no dip in actual customers.

[00:51:18] Everyone that was on the platform stuck with us, went through it, and yeah, we came out stronger on the other side. What was the size of the business

[00:51:25] Omer: then? Like were you

[00:51:26] Todd: We had 10,000 users, like it was right at that number. 'cause I remember that being like, the part where I was like, I think we might be in trouble with our database at 10,000 and then didn't anticipate it disappearing, but that, that was, I, I won't throw that vendor under the bus.

[00:51:39] They're still out there, but I don't think many people use 'em. But yeah, so it was, it was probably 10,000 users. It might have been 25 employees. Mostly customer support, like engineering wise, it was me, two other engineers that were full-time and maybe two contractors that were mostly full-time. So we're talking like five engineers with 10,000 customers that are paying customers.

[00:52:05] Omer: I, I know you had a bunch of other growing pains as well as the, the team grew and, and got, got bigger and, and so on. I love, you know, we could talk about this stuff for hours, but I think we should leave it there and and, and try to wrap up. Yeah, it's been fun. Yeah. Before we get into the lightning round, just one, one final question.

[00:52:27] You guys have done so well with growing basically, you know, a nine figure a r SaaS business in a very unconventional way. I'm sure that's attracted a lot of copycats, a lot of people trying to get some of the action. How, how has that changed the way you guys think about the, the business? Like, how much time do you spend thinking about competition?

[00:52:57] How is the product evolving? Where are you going next?

[00:53:00] Todd: Yeah, I definitely, I mean, I'm constantly staying involved in as mu as much as I can with how people are making money on online. Right? Like whether it's e-commerce, Shopify community stuff, like course creation stuff. I'm, I'm staying in it all the time.

[00:53:13] But a big move that we did make with the new platform when I was setting out to actually build this thing, I basically set down the ground rules that like, I don't know what I don't know, right? Going back to that original quote, like, that's how I think about stuff. But what I do know is like things are gonna change.

[00:53:28] The economy's gonna change, the industry's gonna change, the landscape's gonna change. And I need to build a platform that allows me to quickly build the new thing that allows our users to be successful. And that's what we've done, right? Whether it's been building e-commerce stuff to, to be able to do a, an e-commerce store on the platform or run an entire private community courses membership stuff.

[00:53:49] All of this is now apps inside of it. You can do full automation workflows, like anything I see that like our users are needing and going out and like having to get third parties, that they pay three times the price of our software for alone. I'm basically going out and being able to build those into our platform, or at least the core value proposition that I see our users needing out of them.

[00:54:08] So yeah, that's, that's been like my big focus, honestly, after the over the past four years, is just keeping an eye on what's changing, what the customer needs, talking to 'em, finding out, finding out what we can do to make our platform be the place that runs their business.

[00:54:21] Omer: And I, we should just clarify that you did.

[00:54:24] Earlier you mentioned talking to VCs, but those were just conversations. You guys haven't raised any No. Any money from investors. Yeah. It's a self-funded business. Yeah. How, how much did, how much did you guys start with, like how much did you put into this business to start?

[00:54:41] Todd: Yeah, we literally only put in, I think it was 15 grand Russell put in from his previous business to have a explainer video made.

[00:54:49] Not for engineering, not for like building stuff or not nothing. It was just to have like a promotional video on the homepage. Like that was the only thing we actually capitalized on the business. Other than that it was like sweat equity, myself, Russell, Dylan co-founders, just the three of us just jumping in and making it happen.

[00:55:06] Yeah,

[00:55:07] Omer: and it all happened because of that one. Random email that you chose to reply to and help out.

[00:55:15] Todd: It did. It did Works in mysterious ways, right?

[00:55:18] Omer: It does, yeah. Alright, let's let's wrap up. Let's get into the lightning round. So I've got seven quick fire questions for you. Ready? Yeah. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received?

[00:55:29] Todd: One of the best pieces of business advice was to find a level 10 opportunity. We had someone in the early days before we came up with ClickFunnels, Russell and I were, were talking to the guy and he basically was like, you guys are like level 10 marketers in a level two opportunity right now. And it really like struck both of us.

[00:55:48] And we both talked about that for years later. And when we found ClickFunnels and the idea, we were like, this is the level 10, like level 10 opportunity.

[00:55:54] Omer: What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

[00:55:57] Todd: I think a must read is the classic Think and Grow Rich. Like, it really just lays foundational mindset that everyone has to have.

[00:56:05] I advise anyone that asked me any question, like, if you haven't read, think and Grow Rich, go read that. Then we'll talk, talk about later stuff. Recently, one of my favorite books was buy Back Your Time, Dan, one of my coaches. Yeah.

[00:56:17] Omer: What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

[00:56:22] Todd: I think stubborn persistence, like just not listening to the haters and just knowing and sticking to your vision and sticking to your dream and doing it. Like you have to be what other people consider in stubborn in order to be successful, I think in, in this game.

[00:56:38] Omer: What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

[00:56:41] Todd: Yeah. I think the habit would be waking up early and working out, like taking care of myself a little bit before the kids are up. The wife's up, everyone's running. Like there's a saying, the lion eats first, right? Like you, you need to get up and take care of yourself a little bit before the world starts.

[00:56:58] I'm not saying you gotta spend four hours doing a morning routine, but, but something to take care of yourself in the morning.

[00:57:05] Omer: What's a new crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time?

[00:57:08] Todd: Man. I'm kind of doing it all the time with ClickFunnels right now because, because of the way we did the platform thing, right?

[00:57:13] Like being able to like add new things into ClickFunnels is the crazy opportunity. So I've always got new stuff. We're do, we're working on like AI funnel builders, which are fun, like trying to automate as much as possible for people. So that, that's really, I want more time to work on that piece and hopefully you'll see me in a year or two from now and I've had more time to work on it.

[00:57:31] But I think there's a lot of stuff we're gonna be able to automate with ai just to, to help people get started easier. I.

[00:57:37] Omer: What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

[00:57:41] Todd: Yeah, I don't talk about this one that often, but I actually am pretty good at League of Legends, like the computer games, so just,

[00:57:49] Omer: there you go.

[00:57:49] You're a nerd after our own hearts.

[00:57:51] Todd: Yep.

[00:57:52] Omer: And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

[00:57:55] Todd: I'd say fitness and health. Like I, I work, I make sure I work out at least a few times a week, eat the right stuff, healthy supplements, the whole thing. I kind of obsess a little bit too much over it maybe, but just after I turned 40, I like kind of the abuse that I used to take in my twenties, like hurts a little bit more now and I kind of, I kind of wanna get back a little bit like I used to be able to handle.

[00:58:17] Omer: Awesome. Todd, thank you so much for joining me. It's been a pleasure. I loved just unpacking the story. I think it's a great story. Lots of great lessons here in terms of how you guys have. Gone and, and, and built this, this business. And hopefully we've given, you know, people some inspiration, some ideas that they can go and take away.

[00:58:34] If people wanna check out ClickFunnels, go to clickfunnels.com and if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

[00:58:41] Todd: Probably on LinkedIn actually. If you go to LinkedIn, Todd Dickerson.

[00:58:45] Omer: Great. We'll include a link to your profile in the show notes. Awesome, man. Thanks so much.

[00:58:49] It's been a pleasure and wish you and the team the, the best of success and let's get you back some time and, and we'll continue the conversation and see where ClickFunnels is in a year's time or whatever.

[00:59:00] Todd: Yeah, absolutely. I look forward to it, man. Thanks for having me.

[00:59:03] Omer: My pleasure. Cheers.