An interesting look on how to build a hundred million dollar company.
---Transcript---
Hey, everyone. This is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you to a very late-night “Marketing in Your Car”.
Hey, you guys, it is now 1:30 in the morning. I have almost officially been awake for twenty-four hours straight. I woke up yesterday [laughs] or today or whenever it was, at 4:30 in the morning. I came in early and spend three or four hours busting stuff out before everyone showed up. We worked all day, and we pulled mostly an all-nighter. I just started fading about twenty minutes ago. I just dropped Todd off at the hotel, and now I am driving back home to go get some sleep.
But as tired as I am right now, I don’t think I’ve ever been this fired up about a project ever in my life. We’ve created and we’ve sold a lot of stuff that I’m passionate about – a lot of things that I think are awesome and life-changing and all of those kinds of things, but this is the first time that...Today, I literally spent twelve to fourteen hours just building out funnels and click funnels, and I can’t tell you – I can literally do now what used to take me a programmer, a designer, and a webmaster – what it took three people to do, I can do now myself, and in a fraction of the time. I built an entire automated webinar in under an hour, and that’s because I was writing all of the copy. I was doing everything – the entire thing, from scratch, and got the whole thing done. We built out membership sites. We built out funnels, and I can’t even tell you how excited I am.
I think it’s going to change our industry. I think it’s going to change my personal life. I told everybody, “Even if we never sold this, what we’ve created would still be worth it, because this will change our business forever.” It just gets me excited and fired up about how we’re creating something that is that big. I just started thinking about how in most businesses, I think a lot of the time we sell ourselves short. We think about how to make money or what’s cool. How do we solve this problem for people? We create these little things. I’ve been doing this for a decade now, and this is the first time I feel like we’ve approached something and gone after something that’s bigger than any of us, and the fact that we’ve executed it as well as we have is just...I can’t even tell you how excited I am. It’s so cool.
So anyway, what I wanted to talk to you about is tonight while we were working and talking through things, we kept referencing a guy named Jason Fried. He’s a guy who I had a chance to actually interview a little while ago, maybe about two or three years ago now. He owns a company called 37 Signals. You guys have probably heard of him before. Actually they just changed their company name to Base Camp. They’re the creators of Base Camp.
A while ago they wrote this book called, “REWORK”. In fact, Stu McClaren, one of my favorite people in the world, was the one that recommended REWORK to me. We were at Pirate’s Cove at my Mastermind meeting, and we were talking about books and stuff, and he said, “Hey, you should read this book, ‘REWORK’,” so I went and bought it. It’s a really quick read. You could probably read the whole thing in maybe an hour and a half to two hours. It’s basically that Jason and the partners, when they were creating Base Camp, wrote a book about their experience with the business, and it was the exact opposite of what everybody else was doing.
I remember that I read the entire book, and I remember there were simple, fast chapters – just one concept at a time, and I remember going through it and thinking that every single mistake that I had made in my business, they addressed in REWORK [laughs] as a thing, and I was like, “Man, I wish we would have done this or that,” and so forth. I’ve probably read it three or four times over the last five or six years, and like I said, I had a chance to interview Jason on the book. He was a cool guy.
I remember the same month, I tried to interview him and also Gary Vaynerchuk. Jason was like, “Yeah, man, I’ll do it,” and jumped on the phone. Super low maintenance, it was awesome. Didn’t ask for anything, just giving back to the community, and Gary Vaynerchuk [laughs] said that he’d let me interview him if I bought five hundred copies of his book, which was about eight or ten grand or whatever that was. It was like, “Huh,” and anyway, just a really cool guy.
But some of the lessons – one of the things they talked about was when they created Base Camp. They were a website design company, and they were trying to do project management software, and there was no good project management software, so they went and they created their own. They created it the way they wanted it. They scratched through an itch, and created this thing that as it turned out, everybody wanted it, and, “Boom.” This launched their whole company. I think they have over a million users right now. I think that’s what they said. A million users, paying up to ninety-seven bucks a month, which is crazy.
We were talking about Click Funnels. We built Click Funnels to scratch our own itch, to try to speed up our process of launching offers and rolling out funnels. We created it for us, and now I have the privilege of sharing it with others. That’s the way I really look at it.
It’s interesting, but anyway, there’re so many good lessons in that book, I can’t recommend it enough, you guys. I think the fact that we’d read it – everyone on our team had read it multiple times. I think it’s really influenced a lot of our thoughts and our decisions in how we’re growing our company. We were looking at, as we started growing Click Funnels, the company’s called Etison, E-T-I-S-O-N, we were talking about how to grow it, and we saw that there were two different routes.
One route we saw was with a company called, “iContact”, where the owner, Ryan, went and took on funding and did the whole VC thing and brought in money and had millions and millions of dollars of investor money. He grew it that way and they weren’t really profitable until he sold out. And man, he sold out. I think they sold for about seventy or eighty million dollars. I’ve never built a company that way. I don’t understand that way, but that’s the way he did it, and so for a while, we were looking at it, and we were like, “Wow. Let’s build a company like that.”
But then you look at the other side, and you look at 37 Signals. You look at the way Jason has built it, and all of the lessons they teach in REWORK about only hiring when it’s painful, keeping it small, and that your goal isn’t to try to grow. Your goal can be just to serve people and all of these lessons that are counter to what the rest of the world teaches, and I think we made a decision as a team that we wanted to do it this way – the way that the guys in 37 Signals did. That’s the way that fits into our lifestyle and what we want to do. Like I say, I can’t recommend that book enough.
They also came out with another book recently, called “REMOTE”, and what’s interesting about REMOTE is, if you guys watch “TED Talks” – I think it’s at Ted.com – you search for Jason Fried. He gave a TED Talk about this as well, what the book’s all about. He talked about [laughs] – and this week’s been a perfect example of it. He talked about how when you need to get work done, where do you go? Nobody says, “I go to the office to get work done.” They say, “Well, I come in earlier. I stay late,” or, “I do it during my lunch hour.”
It’s interesting how people at work don’t get work done [laughs], right? They’re talking. They’re doing all of this kind of stuff, and he talked about the fact that if you send all of your employees home and have people work remotely, how much more stuff you can get done, because at work, people don’t work. They’re talking. They’re hanging out. All of this other stuff’s happening. I remember in the TED Talk, he’s talking about, “Would you rather have an employee...?” like everyone’s employees are at the office so that they can be focused, but what if your employee was at home watching TV all day while they were working? If they were watching TV, yes, they’d be distracted a little bit, but that’s a lot less distracting than the boss coming in, or the secretary, or the water cooler talk, or every single person passing through their desk area that wants to communicate and chat. It was interesting when he put it into that perspective, and the book, REMOTE, is all about that – having everybody start working remotely.
As we’re building this new company and thinking a lot about these types of things, and the direction we want to move with things, and how to structure things, and how to grow, I really think that the guys that we’re looking at and I think that the guys that you should be looking at, as well, is 37 Signals, or Base Camp is their new company name. So definitely get REWORK, get REMOTE. It could be your reading for this weekend. Those books are worth their weight in gold, I can tell you that much for sure.
Anyway, you guys, I am home. It’s now 1:47 in the morning. I’m going to get some sleep. I’m taking my three-year-old son to the zoo tomorrow morning, which is super exciting. I’m fired up. That’s the game plan.
Look out you guys. Click Funnel’s coming soon. We’re going to open our second wave of beta next week, and we’re going to roll that for about a month, because we’re going on vacation [laughs]. My family and Todd’s family, and so when we get back from vacation is when we’re going to do the big roll out, but it’s all coming soon. All of the pieces are falling together.
All right, guys, I am in my garage, so I’m going to check out, and I will talk to you soon.