Here’s a quick recap of what happened during this year’s Funnel Hacking Live event!
On this episode, Russell recaps the speakers and presentations from Funnel Hacking Live. He also tells some fun stories of cool things that happened at the event.
Here are 4 fun things you will hear about on today’s episode.
So listen below to see what you missed if you didn’t attend Funnel Hacking Live, or relive some of the best moments with Russell, Marcus Lemonis and many others.
---Transcript---
Hey everyone, good morning, this is Russell and welcome to Marketing in Your Car. Hey everyone, it is the Tuesday after the live event and I survived. Congratulations, I’m here to talk another day. No, I just wanted to kind of give you guys a quick recap of the event, because it turned out amazing. It was just so much fun.
So the whole thing began with, I guess before it began it was me trying to get, my wife and I trying to get all of our kids to San Diego, which is a story in and of itself, but we got there. Then I’ve got all this deep seeded fear. One time 7 or 8 years ago we did a big event in SLC and sold 500 tickets and when we got there, there was about 100 people that showed up, which is embarrassing to go from 500 seats to having hardly anyone sitting there and trying to pull seats out. It was horrible. Then fast forward a few years later, some of you guys may remember Rippln. The second Rippln event we’re expecting 1200 people to be there, or something crazy like that. And when we showed up there was about 100 people in the hallway, so we spent 15 minutes pulling chairs out and shrinking this room down to about 20% of what it was, and it was the worst, most embarrassing, horrible feeling I’ve ever felt. Showing up with 150 people in the room as opposed to the thousand you thought. So because of that I’ve got all these deep seeded fears that nobody’s going to show up to my events. Last year, same thing, I was freaking out, scared to death the whole time. When I walked in the room before I got introduced the first time and there was actually people in the room, I was like, “Thank heavens.”
But that fear peaked its horrible head once again this year and I was stressing out like crazy. We had pre-registrations from 2 til 9 the night before, so I assumed everybody would show up and pre-register, I don’t know that’s just me thinking that people are not like me. Because I probably wouldn’t have pre-registered either, not going to lie. But I just assumed, so the night before I’m going to bed and they’re like, “So far, only 300 people pre-registered.” I’m like are you kidding me? Either nobody showed up or they’re all planning to pre-register in the hour we have before the event. So I’m totally once again, going to bed freaking out that night. Wake up in the morning scared to death. I get down there and luckily over 1100 people had showed up and we filled the room and it was amazing. So thank you guys for everyone who showed up. It was just such a cool show.
It’s interesting, you put so much time and energy and money and everything into these events and I think at first people think, oh this is for you. You’re trying to make money or whatever, and obviously that’s part of the plan, but that’s never the number one goal. The number one goal is to put on a show that’ll be not just something that’s going to transform your business, but hopefully change your life.
When I look at it, we’ll get the final numbers back probably in a week or so, from our cost and profits and all those kind of things, but we spent over a half a million dollars to put on that show for the people that came. In between speaker fees, and hotel fees, and food and beverage, travel for our team, and everything. Looking at half a million dollars, 500,000 or more to entertain you guys for a couple of days.
I was thinking about this, yesterday I took a day off and I was just kind of trying to relax and I really wanted to be entertained. I’d been entertaining all weekend and I wanted to be entertained, so we went to see Batman VS Superman. Before, I’m looking at it all and there’s all the critics saying the movie sucked and all these things. And I went to the movie yesterday and it was amazing. On so many levels. The cinematography was awesome, the story lines were cool. You know, we all kind of hate Ben Affleck right now, because who on Earth does what he did to one of the most beautiful women on Earth, anyway, so we hate him so we’re glad when Superman was kicking the crap out of him. There was some deep seeded anger and resentment against him, but as a whole the show was amazing. And I was thinking about how many tens of millions, probably hundreds of millions of dollars were spent to create that movie where they were there to entertain us for two and half hours. We spent $10 to go to it. We paid a little extra cause we got the D-box seats, the seats that shake when you’re sitting there. It was amazing, it adds a whole other level of dimension to the experience. I’m watching this thing, I spent between my wife and I maybe $35, $40 to watch this movie. I was like, people spent and risked hundreds of millions of dollars to entertain me for two hours and it cost me $40. It was amazing, and anyone who says it’s not amazing is just a high maintenance piece of garbage, is kind of my thoughts.
I feel the same way, if you came to the Funnel Hacking event and you didn’t get value….I spent a half a million dollars to entertain you for 3 days to educate you and train you to hopefully change your life. You spent, between flights and hotels, maybe $1500 to come. For those of you who came and made that investment, I hope that what we provided back was amazing and I think it was. The feedback from this event was awesome. Tons of people talked about how last year was life transforming, this one was even more so. I had one person who came to me and said, there’s been 5 times in his life where his life has been completely changed, he said this is one of the 5 times. One person came to me ahead of time and told me that they were suicidal before this weekend, they were planning on ending their life and after experiencing what we went through, they have a new look on life and they have a future and hope and everything once again. As I hugged that person who was crying, it was just amazing. It was awesome, it was worth the investment on our side.
To put on the show, and you know this year we wanted to do a lot of things. One thing that I wanted to heavily skew and give everyone in their mind, even people who don’t have information businesses to understand the power of information funnels. So most of my talks were tied around that, and I spent a lot of time just trying to convince and show external business owners who don’t have info product businesses why info product funnels are so important and how you can use it to get customers for free, and you can change the paradigm. And you can make it so that the price resistance you might be feeling in your business is completely gone. I wanted people to understand that and we shared with them all of the core info product funnels. And I think that, hopefully for everyone, for me that was the gift I wanted to share with everybody and I hope that everybody loved that.
On top of that I brought in some amazing people. Alex Charfen, he came and I always pronounce his last name wrong, so I’m trying to get it, but I apologize Alex, if you’re listening. But he came and talked about the entrepreneur personality type. Afterwards I had so many people like, “I understand myself now, I don’t feel alone, I don’t feel like I’m a weird person.” Which was really cool. So many amazing speakers. Sean Stephenson came, spent the first 20 minutes just making fun of me, which was awesome. Then delivered something that, I don’t think there was a dry eye in the audience. It was amazing. One of my favorite things he talked about there, he talked about the helicopters that go out in the ocean and try to save boats that capsized. You go out there and the helicopter can only hold 5 or 6 people and there might be 20 people that are in the water. Who do you decide, who are you going to save. It’s a good question talking about us with our business. There’s all these people we want to serve, and give and help and save. Who do we save? He talked the helicopters, said that when they get out there, the only people that are able to save are the people that are swimming towards them and how profound that was to think about for us. We can try to change the world, but you can only really affect the people that are swimming towards you. The people that hear your voice, the people that hear your message, and they come towards you and if you focus on them first and you help them so other people will see that and be like, “They’re helping people that swim towards the boat, we should swim towards it too.” And more people will come towards you, but initially when you’re focusing your message is focus on the people that are swimming towards you first. I thought that was really profound. His talk was amazing.
Kyle Cease who’s a comedian but also just life transformation, he came to his comedy show it was all about transformation as well, it was so cool. Just so cool, I totally geeked out on all that stuff. We had my Clickfunnels partners and founders and everyone get on stage and we talked about the future of Clickfunnles from the tech side and all that’s happening. We kind of bragged about our tech team for the first time ever. A lot of people don’t know, the tech team who’s building Clickfunnels right now, they’re a bunch of what Ryan, our CTO said, he said that they’re like the Russell Brunson’s of the tech world, of the programmer world. In fact, one of them was gone this weekend and speaking at this machine learning conference, he literally wrote the book on Machine Learning and he’s one of the dude’s who’s doing all the backend, database structuring and data and stats for Clickfunnels. If you look at people after people, it’s like a who’s who of the coding world, who are develops are, which is pretty amazing if you think about it.
He talked about why would they come to us versus the other companies, most of these guys are sick of working for VC backed companies that don’t really care about the customers, they’re loving working for a company where they get to see a difference, and when they make something it changes people’s lives and it’s pretty awesome. So that was really cool.
Who else, I know I’m missing some other stuff that happened. Let’s see, the first day, man there’s so many cool things, I don’t want to miss any. The second day we did a big hug hack-a-thon which was awesome. We had I think 7 or 800 people that actually stayed and pulled all-nighters with our team building out pages and funnels and sites. Which was cool. Bill Jones ran the whole hack-a-thon. We had a charity thing, ended up raising, over the last 12 months we donated over $45,000 for World Teacher Aide. During this weekend we raised another $45,000 which was awesome. $90,000 in the last year has been given to World Teacher Aide because of Clickfunnels members, which is sweet. So that was cool.
Let’s see then we had day 3 we came on with Garrett White, came and shared his message. Oh, on day two, I forgot, I did a presentation about becoming a Funnel Consultant, we had a lot of people who applied for our Funnel Certified Clickfunnels Consultant Program, which was cool. So we’ve got a lot of new people coming in there. We had a guy named Alex, who is one of my inner circle members, he came and showed how he does local funnels. How they’re blowing up gyms. They’ll have a gym and they have two different funnels they run, they just run traffic for a week and after two weeks they’ll completely film an entire gym before it’s launched, take that money to go buy the actual gym equipment, they launch the gym with $50,000 in their pocket along with 150 clients from day one, which is nuts. So that was awesome.
Day 3 Garrett White came and spoke about finding your voice and showed progression that he went from, from being who he was to finding his voice and his message. He kind of talked about that whole process, which was really cool. After that I did my funnel stacking presentation, which I was excited for and I think it turned out pretty cool. And then Jacob Hiller came and told this story about the jumpman, which is a info product that teaches people how to jump, which was amazing. And then the last part, which was the coolest for me, was Marcus Lemonis from the Profit, came and spoke.
It was so cool. He was so cool. I can’t even tell you how cool that dude was. We were expecting him to be high maintenance, like a real celebrity. He showed up, he Ubered from the airport over and kind of hung out and everything. Before the event, we had a chance for 30 minutes to kind of talk about he event and everything, he asked what Clickfunnels was and we explained it. He was getting so excited. First it took him about 5 minutes to get it, then when he got it he was like, “Wait a minute, how do you use this for camping?” we told him, “How do you use this for sweet peas“ we told him, “How do you use this for…..” business after business. Finally he’s like, “Is there any business that Clickfunnels won’t work for?” and we’re like, “Not really. It’s pretty amazing.” So he’s like, “We need to get you guys on the show. You guys need to be on the Profit. I’ve got a whole bunch of people with shows coming up. I’m going to figure out a bunch of these ones and you guys can come and build these funnels on the show.” He’s awesome. So then we’re like, “we’re going to take you in the back, w have a secret elevator, bring you up that way nobody will bug you and you can come out the back of the stage.” He’s like, “Nah, it’s Saturday, we’re just hanging out. I’ll just come in and hang out and take pictures with everyone if that’s cool.” I’m like alright, so he just came in the back, hung out with everybody, got pictures, and he came up and did his presentation and it was cool. It was way different than I thought it was going to be. It was more like a Tony Robbins event. He sat there and did interventions with people only he was fixing people on the fly. Super cool.
And then I had another presentation I was going to give, but I felt like it would have detracted from the message that Marcus kind of left, so instead we just ended the event, Ignite Inner Circle people went and got pictures with Marcus, I went and got pictures with everybody else. And that was a wrap, that was the event. Man, it was cool. So for those of you guys, who were there, I hope you had an amazing opportunity. I hope you took advantage of it. Oh Liz Benney spoke on day one and Ryan Stewman spoke on day one. Sorry, how did I forget those guys? Which was amazing, Liz told her whole story. She had the whole audience in tears, inspired and motivated. She shared all her stats, her numbers, her webinar, which was awesome. Ryan showed his backend funnels, how they work. The coolest part, at the end he had people line up for free copies of his book, he said, “You can have any objection and I’ll solve it right here on the spot.” And he resolved objection after objection after objection. That was dang cool.
So anyway, as a whole was an amazing experience for me, hopefully for every one of you guys who were there, and I hope that the small amount of money you put was worth the investment. Like I said, we spent over a half million dollars to entertain, educate, train and inspire you guys and I hope you got all that and a whole bunch more out of it. We’re excited for next year. Next year Funnel Hacking Live will be in February, which will be cool because it’s going to be the last week of February in Dallas. My goal, and this isn’t happening yet, my goal, I’m putting it out there right now, I want to get Mark Cubin, and I want to get Tony Robbins this next one. Otherwise, we can’t make it better than this years, this years was pretty dang cool. If we wanted to step it up, that’s the only thing we got to do it with. So that’s my goal and game plan, but no promises yet, but that’s kind of what we’re shooting for. We will see.
Anyway, with that said, I’m at the office. I took yesterday off to just lay out, hang out. Today I’m going to be using as a planning day, I’ve got a lot of stuff and projects and cool things happening, so I’m going to try to plan it, organize and just figure out the next steps. I hope you guys are as well, especially those who came to the event. Because now you have this reflection moment, “Okay, what am I going to do? All these things have happened. What should I do?” I remember listening to Tim Ferriss at an event one time talk about himself, and somebody asked, “what are you…if we were to follow you around for a day, what would we see?” He’s like, “It’d be pretty boring, most the time I’m just sitting there thinking, and reading and meditating. It doesn’t look like I’m doing much because for me, it’s all about…I don’t want to spend a week, a month, a year, whatever it takes, trying to figure out of all the dominoes all the dues, all the things out there instead of trying to knock over every single domino like most people do, I try to sit and figure out what’s the one big domino that if I push that one over it knocks down all the rest of the dominoes or makes the rest of them irrelevant. That’s what I do.”
So today is going to be like my big domino day. I’m going to sit back and try to figure out what the big domino is I need to knock over that will make all the rest irrelevant or knock over the rest of the dominoes.
So that’s my game plan for today, I hope you do the same thing as well. With that said, Have an amazing day. If you haven’t watched Batman VS Superman yet, go and watch it and don’t complain. These guys spent hundreds of millions of dollars and it’s going to cost you $10. With that said, I’ll talk to you all again soon. Thanks everybody.