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Marketing Secrets

Welcome To Russell Brunson’s Marketing Secrets Podcast. So, the big question is this, “How are entrepreneurs like us, who didn’t cheat and take on venture capital, who are spending money from our own wallets, how do we market in a way that lets us get our products and services and things that we believe in out to the world… and yet still remain profitable?” That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to MarketingSecrets.com.
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Now displaying: Page 1
Sep 23, 2015

Early morning, sleep deprived ramblings, the morning of product launch day.

On today’s episode Russell talks about product launches and how much work it was before Clickfunnels. He also shares what he loves and hates about product launches.

Here are some fun things in this episode:

  • What Russell loves about product launches.
  • Why product launches can be so difficult.
  • And what one of Russell’s favorite reasons for having a deadline on a product launch is.

So listen below to hear about Russell’s love-hate relationship with product launches.

---Transcript---

Good morning everybody. It is product launch day.

Hey everyone, welcome to Marketing in Your Car. Today is product launch day. Yes, you heard me right. Today, ClickFunnels 2.0 is going live, which means it's 6 in the morning and I'm driving to the office. I was up last night until after 1:30. I want to talk about a couple things.

First off, product launches, I forgot how hard they are. The last time I did a ... well, let me rewind. My business, for a long time, for probably 5 years or so, was based off of a product launch model, which was horrible. I don't think I realized how horrible it was until I moved to one that's not product launch. I was like, "Wow! That's way better." This was our old model, is every quarter we had to launch a product. We get as many people as possible to promote for us, and we get them all on board. They all promote, we make a bunch of money, we get a whole bunch of people to join our list, and for the next three months we would have to then repay favors to everyone who promoted for us. We promote all these other things, repay favors, by the end of three months, our list was kind of dead from promoting other people's stuff. Then lo and behold, we had to do another product launch. Everyone that we had promoted owed us favors, so they promoted.

That was the cycle. Four times a year, we’d do a product launch, and I forgot how much work it is. I forgot the stress and the headaches, and all the little things. Obviously, that was pre ClickFunnels, so now it's way easier. Back then, it was like, I don't know how we survived it, but we did somehow, luckily. We survived it, we thrived through it, and now we're here. Anyway, it's kind of interesting to me. I'm so grateful to not be in a difficult product launch business. We did a product launch earlier this year with my book, and then we're doing this one for ClickFunnels 2.0, which is two in a year, which is way too much. I think I'm retiring from the product launch business. I'm going to be focusing on growing a company the good old fashioned way instead. We're doing this because we can, and we think it'll be fun. It'll give us a big surge of energy, and customers, and excitement.

It's kind of interesting, at our live event we promoted the dream car contest, which is exciting. We promoted Actionetics and Backpack. In that little room of 600 people, everyone was going nuts, but then the rest of the world doesn't know what's happening, so it's kind of like, we needed to make some noise and get everyone else excited too. That's kind of what this is about. This obviously isn't like a typical product launch. It's not just us doing a new product, it's ClickFunnels, but now we're also releasing Backpack and Actionetics inside of it. It's exciting. That's kind of what's happening today. One secret I learned from product launches is never have your product launch go live at 9 a.m. I used to do that all the time. We'd pull all-nighters, 9 a.m.  we'd go live, and there would always be issues. We set it for 4 Eastern, that way I've got until 2 o'clock my time. I could go crazy, past lunch, and then we open it all up. I've learned that, and hopefully you guys, if you ever do product launches, that will be a good little tip for you as well.

Dang,  I had something really cool to share with you. I'm trying to remember what it is now. Well, I think it had to do with the transitioning of a company from a product launch, over to a sustainable business. I was listening to a podcast with Ryan Lee. Ryan is one of the coolest dudes. I don't think I've ever really told him that, but I really just like him. Anyway, he launched his podcast called the Freedom Show. It's really good. It's kind of like Marketing in Your Car, just little ten minute things. Ryan is just fun. I like him a lot.

One of his guests he had on there was one of my friends, Mike Lovich. Mike was talking about a concept that I thought was kind of cool. He said that when he launched his business, he was out there trying to hustle and nobody ever promoted him. Ryan, I guess, was the first person to ever promote him. Ryan promoted him, he made some money, and he's like, "That was house money now." He made 2 or 3 thousand dollars. He's like, "Now it's the house money I'm gambling with. Then I went out, and I learned how to buy ads, do media, and do all these other things that kind of go with that."

That was his big secret. I think about that, you know, the main reason I like product launches is because of this increased excitement and energy and surge of people caring about what you're doing. It's still probably one of the best ways to launch a business. It's hard initially, because a lot of times you don't have partners, you don't have things like that, and it's hard. If you really launch it, do the initial product launch with one person. If you find one person who believes in what you're doing, pay them 100% commission, or 200%. Whatever it takes to get them engaged and involved.

Do this initial push which causes momentum. Momentum is good because, even if it's just a little bit of momentum, one dude buys your thing, that's momentum. That's like, oh my gosh. Things are moving forward. Now we can start running instead of walking. There's all this momentum that starts going forward. I think a lot of times it's that initial surge. When you do start making money from that, the key. This is the hard part for a lot of us entrepreneurs who like to spend money on dumb things. You got to reinvest that money. There's a point that you can take money out, but it's not at first.

I look at our supplement business, it's funny. People are always like, "Oh, I wish I was in the supplement business. You're making like 20 grand a day." I'm like, yeah but we didn't pull money out of that business for like a year and a half. Every penny we made went back into either inventory or ads. It was kind of interesting. A business like that, you have to scale it. The time you start making a lot of money is almost when the business dies. It's not necessarily that way. We built this one better.

The first time I ever remember seeing that, these guys were selling a website on Flippa. It was back in the acai berry days. It was a free plus shipping, scammy acai offer. They were explaining their metrics. They were like, "Yeah, the way it works, we scaled it up. We got it to the point where it's doing 100 grand a month, or 500 grand a month," or whatever it was. He's like, "We're buying media. We're not making any money, and then we stop buying media and we just live off the recurrent as it dwindles down to nothing." That was the whole model. At that point, they sell it on Flippa.

They were kind of showing, they'd done the cycle over and over again where basically that's what they were doing is that you know, they got to a point where it was making half a million dollars a month but were not making any money and then they stop buying ads and then that recurring of half a million dollars a month comes in and then next month is 300 thousand and 200 thousand then 100 then 0 and they only make their money when the business is dying. Which kind of sucks, right? We won't make money until we decide to kill our business. That's how a lot of these guys work and Neuracel wasn't that way. We were profitable earlier but it still took a while. It was ... we weren't able to pull money out until we decided to stop growing, if that makes sense. We got to a point where we were doing about half a million dollars a month and then we stopped growing it because we wanted to take some money out. We sat there ... we could have kept growing it but then we would have had to kept reinvesting the profits in inventory and advertising.

So it's kind of ... I hate business like that where you can't ... you know where you grow and you ... or where you profit when you stop growing, which isn't much fun. I don't know why I went on that rant. Probably because I had like 3 hours of sleep last night. It's been thing after thing ... but anyway, the moral of that story was, when you do a business, when you do a product launch, you get that momentum, is reinvest that money. Reinvest it back in and get to the point now where you can pull profits out. Make a little money, you pull it out, you just killed the goose that could lay golden eggs. All right.

Now I remembered what my moral of the story was, kind of. I think ... some smart dude, I don't know which guy it was. It was either Parato or Occam or some dude who said something famous. I would probably know this like 3 hours from now but this early, I really have no idea. But he said something and I'm sure someone out there is just shaking their head, thinking, Russell, you should know this guy's name.

Anyway, he basically said that like when you have a task, right, all the ... or you have a deadline. Somehow magically, all of the like the amount of work will grow to expand to fill that task up, right? Fill that allotted time up. It’s funny, because we have been working on this product launch forever, we had all these things pre-done like months in advance. We were ... it's just crazy. No matter what you do, at least in my experience, maybe other people are better than me, no matter what you do though, you're always ... all the stuff you have to get done for this product launch, does not get done until the second it goes live. It's insane how that works. It's literally insane how that works.

We spent so much time and effort testing everything and then now still we were up until 1 o'clock last night. I'm up this morning at 5. You know, and we're testing and trying and everyone's going to be up and then ... what's interesting and this is what's kind of cool. As you get closer and closer to the deadline, you always have this list of all this stuff you want to get done and as you look at the clock, okay, there's 3 hours left, there's 2 hours left, there's 1 hour left, there's 30 minutes left, there's 5 minutes left. You start cutting things. You're like, "That can't happen. That's impossible. That's impossible. Eventually come out with what's left, which is the little pieces that basically the ... you usually start trimming off all the nice to haves and you end up left with the half to haves. After the launch starts, then you go back to adding in all the other things that you try to get it finalized.

But it's interesting is that ... that's one of my favorite reasons to have a launch is it forces you to get done all the must haves, right? And to trim out all the should haves or want to haves or whatever you want to call them. Most people ... most entrepreneurs, they never get their thing live because they spend years trying to get it perfect. Like I said, if you don't have a deadline, you don't have something happening, somehow magically all time will get filled up with stuff that you need to get done and it just never gets done so that's one nice thing about a deadline like this. It's do or die. You don't have any choice because you know, in 4 hours from now, people are promoting whether it's live or not and if it's not live, then they don't promote, we just lost on huge opportunities, you know, hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars.

Anyway, hopefully you guys got a little value out of today. If not, I apologize it's the lack of sleep and everything that we got from the circumstances but regardless I hope that from this you got the fact that having a product launch business model is no fun but having a product launch to force you to get stuff done and to give you initial momentum, which then can be turned into cash flow and everything else you need to be able to start scaling your company in an actual growth-type business as opposed to a product launch business is good. There's a time and a place so thank you Jeff Walker for giving us a product launch and everybody thinks that that's a business, you're not listening to Jeff. Anyway, I'm at the office guys. Appreciate you all. Have an awesome day. Hopefully when you watch this, ClickFunnels will be live and will be bug free or at least as close to that as humanly possible. Love you guys. Thanks everybody, have an awesome day and talk to you soon.

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