What to do about pirates, copy-cats, and unethical people.
On this episode Russell shares why people can copy your message but they can’t copy your fire. He also talks about how the universe has a way of evening things out, if you are ripping others off.
Here are some fun things in today’s episode:
So listen below to hear what to do when somebody rips you off.
---Transcript---
Good morning, everybody. This is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Alright, everybody, hope that you are having an amazing day today so far. I wanted to have some fun on today’s podcast. I had like 4 or 5 ideas that we could talk about, but this is the most fun because it’s one that drives us, as producers crazy, yet when all is said and done it’s really not that big of a deal, but it still drives us crazy.
This morning I was listening to one of Garrett J. White’s podcasts about how they can….I can’t remember the title, something about, they can copy you, but they can’t clone your fire, they can’t copy your fire or something like that. He was talking about some other friends, who in his mind, he just kind of knocked them off, or they kind of knocked him off. And he’s talking about how you can copy the marketing style, you can copy the message, you can copy all those kind of things, but you can’t copy your fire. I thought that was really cool, and it was interesting because we had, last month when we were doing our hack-a-thon, we had all our Clickfunnels team out here and that was one of the concerns we had. Do we have all developers move in house, we can have tighter controls on our codes, nobody can steal the code. You know, all these different things. And what was interesting is that, this is me as the outside marketing guy being nervous, like, “I don’t want people to copy us, or what if somebody got our code and they hack Clickfunnels and they’re competing with us?” It’s this fear mentality mindset. The developers kind of laughed, “you know like have the stuff we’re doing is open source and we’re open sourcing it, we’re giving it to the communities so people can build on it to, and all these things. If someone wanted to steal the code it wouldn’t matter because most was out there anyway.”
Anyway, I don’t know how the open source is, but apparently we’re donating most of our code to open source for other developers to develop on and make cooler things and all these things, and I’m just like, “It’s so weird to me because it just seems backwards.” But one thing….I can’t remember if it was Todd or Ryan, but somebody said, “This is the deal. Somebody could go and they could copy our code, or parts of our code, or whatever that might be, but there’s intangibles that they can’t copy.” Similar to what Garrett talked about, they can’t copy your fire. They can’t copy our message and our community, and our work ethic, and our team, and our vision and all the other pieces that go into growing an empire.
They can clone things, but they can’t do all the rest of it. It was funny, I was reading an article last week, I had 10 people tag me to it on Facebook, but it was about a company in the UK that basically knocks off every big hit. Amazon came out, they knocked off Amazon. Groupon came out they knocked off Groupon over in the UK. They knock them off, and build them up really fast. They straight just rip everything. You look at the sites, color scheme is the same, layout is the same, everywhere in the menu set up the same spot. Everything is just identical, and they were saying they have teams of people that all they do is monitor these sites daily, and if Amazon shifts the menu one pixel to the right, they shift their menu one pixel to the right. They’re assuming that Amazon is doing all sorts of crazy testing, so they just straight rip them off. Their whole model is they just rip these guys off and then come back to the original companies and sell them. They’ve sold their Groupon clone to Groupon and they’ve done it others. These guys made over a billion dollars, just ripping people off. So it’s like, you see things like that, and you’re like, I don’t want to be ripped off.
It’s funny because I see people that all the time, my stuff’s up for sale on eBay, I see the pirate sites, as soon as I create a course it’s for free on the pirate sites. The other day I was looking for one of my logos, I couldn’t find my logo file. So I just Google imaged it, and I found the original logo file to my design, I’m like, wow! Who has this on their site? How cool is that? I can’t even find it on my own computer. I went to the site, and on the site there was this thing, “Hey here’s Russell Brunson’s course, I’m going to buy but I need people to pony up some money.” There’s like 100 people that all ponied up like 50 bucks to be able to buy my course so they could all just rip it off and share it together. It’s just ridiculous. It’s funny because there was this time in my life where there was so much fear behind that. I was just like, Oh if they rip it off, then this and that and all these kind of things, and I’ve had people come to me, who are like, we are eBay’s company and we’ll police eBay and we’ll knock off anyone who steals your stuff and posts it. We’re going block it and all these kind of things.
In fact, we had this guy, I probably shouldn’t name names, but I have to name names for the story to be funny. His name was Cody Moya, and he used to clone everything we did. We created a product, and I would announce, we’ve been spending three months on this product, and we would announce that we were launching it. And that same day he would send me an email launching his version of what we did, and he’d somehow just put it together really quick, and he’d have the identical product as us. It was crazy. So we used to call him Cloney Moya, because he’d just clone anything that any of us did, it was so interesting. This is a funny part of the story. Joel Comm had…He bought a copy machine in his office, a big huge copy machine. The tag was like, the Copy Master 2000 or whatever, and he broke the tag off and put his own tag on and it was called the Cloney Moya. So he’d do photocopies on the Cloney Moya. It was so funny because….that guy had some success for a little while, but has anyone heard of him since then? No! It’s because you can copy the sales process, you can copy the content, you can copy whatever, but like Garrett said, you can’t copy the fire. I thought that was really a powerful message for me today.
It’s funny, I had a guy that we published for a little while, and I asked him about his journey, like “how did you get successful online?” He said, “You know what’s interesting, I used to go to…..” some pirate website in internet marketing space, where you can get pretty much everybody’s product for free, he said, “I used to go that thing and I would download everyone’s products and I’d listen to them, and it was the weirdest thing, I had all this information in my head, all these things, but I was never successful. One day I realized that I was straight ripping everybody off, and I’m trying to go out there and provide value to world, and trying to help, to sell my own products. There’s some weird thing with the universe, if you’re ripping other people off, you’re stealing their intellectual property, other people aren’t going to pay for theirs. One day I just got sick of it and cancelled my accounts. I went to some of the products that had the biggest impact on me that I’d stolen, I went and I bought them just to pay the authors for those things. When I did that everything changed. Suddenly my product started selling.” Everything good came after he had done that. I thought how interesting that was.
I’m not too concerned when people rip off my stuff anymore, because they’re not the kind of person I want to serve anymore anyway. The dude who’s okay going and ripping a product and consuming it, and can sleep well at night, is not the kind of person in my coaching programs, using my software. I’m not okay with that kind of a person. So if they want to do it, that’s cool and hopefully someday they’ll see the light, but I’m not concerned about that kind of person. The customers I want are the customers who are going to pay me because they know the value I provide to them.
In fact, if you look at my business now, almost everything we sell now is free. You know what I mean? All our best stuff is free plus shipping. We do have upgrades where you get more, you know upsells and stuff like that. For the most part it’s all free. I give all my stuff away from free. People always ask me, like my Perfect Webinar script, “How much is it going to cost?” Just go get it for free, for 5 bucks we’ll ship it, just go get it. And they’re like, “No, I’ll pay you for it.” And I’m like “Just take it.” And they’re like, “Why do you do that?” and I’m like, “If you actually implement the perfect webinar, guess what’s going to happen? You are going to make a crap-ton of money and then you are going to come and give me $25,000. And that is so much more valuable to me than getting $97 from you today.”
For me, I’m all about giving away all this stuff, so that people can consume it and get a ton of value, and then they’ll want more. They will come back if what you give away is amazing. Just a side note, I’d never heard of Dan Kennedy, this is back in the day. I was on eBay and some dude ripped off Dan Kennedy and I didn’t know, but it was like this marketing thing, and I’m like, “sweet I like marketing.” So I bought these Dan Kennedy Cd’s for a $100, and turns out it was like $1,000 course, but I didn’t know that. So I was listening to this course and it was awesome, I got so much good stuff. So because of that…in the product he kept talking about his Platinum Group, and I was like, “I want to be in the platinum group!” This whole course kept indoctrinating me and I eventually call up DKC and I begged them to let me in and I paid them $25,000 to be in the platinum group and I was in that group for 6 years. So they made, $150,000 off me, plus I spoke at their events, I sold their products. I’d say they conservatively made 3 or 4 million bucks off me during that time.
I came into their world because somebody else ripped them off. And I remember, Bill at the time, was all freaking out about the pirates stealing his stuff. I’m like, “Dude, do you understand that I am in your world today because some pirate ripped you off and unbeknownst to me was selling your product on eBay and I bought it and now I’m here and you’ve gotten 5 or 6 million bucks from me. Was that worth it?” Yeah, let the pirates have fun, if they want to go do that they’re spreading your message, they’re spreading your word. Just don’t deal with it, because a couple of things, first off, the right people will pay. The people who stumble upon that stuff, if your stuff’s awesome they will come back for more. It’s the drug dealer close right? You give them the first one for free and then they gotta come back.
That’s how I feel, I want to make content so addictive that when they have it, they gotta have more. I don’t know if that helps at all. The biggest thing is don’t stress out about people knocking off your stuff. I don’t put password protect stuff on my download pages because I don’t care. Again, people who are going to rip me off, can rip me off. People who want to buy are buyers and they’re going to continue to buy. And those are the ones who I’m catering towards and to and that’s all that really matters for me. So there you go. If you are stealing stuff right now, knock it off because it’s probably keeping you from where you want to be. As weird as that might sound, I don’t know how or why but for some reason, that’s just how it all works.
Alright guys. I’m at the office, I’m gonna go create some cool stuff. Hopefully go change the world and hope that something comes out today that’s going to help you guys. Appreciate you all, have an amazing day and I will talk to you guys all again soon. Bye.