I Built Every Business I Own by "Copying" Someone

Russell Brunson (0:00)

The very first time I did this, it helped me to launch my very first company in college. The second time I did this, it was completely out of spite, and it helped me build a seven-figure-year supplement company. The third time I built it, it was the key behind how we built and launched and scaled ClickFunnels. And I'm about to do it again. And right now, I've talked about this before, but nobody is doing it, and that's what today's episode is about. Welcome to Bootstrapped Secrets. Let's have some fun.

SPEAKER_2 (0:23)

His ideas have literally shaped how we view modern-day marketing. He has impacted the bottom line of more businesses than any I've ever known.

Russell Brunson (0:31)

And if all the people, they're gonna change the world, it's entrepreneurs like you. Hey, this is Russell. Welcome back to the Bootstrapped Secrets podcast.

I hope that you enjoyed our last couple episodes and have a lot of fun doing this, and kind of rethinking back through, stuff we've done in the past that we used to build ClickFunnels and what we're doing today.

It's funny, cause as I was preparing today, I was like, it's one of those things where like, the concept is so simple, I've been talking about it for a decade.

Yet most people, first off, don't do it, and second off, aren't doing it today. And it's what I'm literally doing every single day right now, as I'm building Overskill and trying to build it to a billion dollar company as well. And so, yeah, so some of you guys, this is not gonna be a new concept for most of the people in my world, but I guarantee it's probably a concept you're not doing. You're not doing as much as you should be. So that's my goal, is to talk about that. So the concept I wanna talk about today is this little thing that we call funnel hacking. Now, before you're like, oh, I've heard this before. I've been to Funnel Hacking Live three times. Whatever, stick with me, because it's the fundamentals that win games. Remember Vince Lombardi, the story about him. He'd come into football practice, and he's got the greatest team in the nation. Comes in the very first day of practice every day. Comes out and says, gentlemen, this is a football. Starts with the fundamentals, the beginning. So for us, it's like gentlemen and gentlewomen and everyone just hanging out. This is funnel hacking. This is the concept that most of us have forgotten or we're not actually doing. Those of us who call ourselves funnel hackers are probably not doing the scale we should. So I want to reverse in time and kind of retell where this came from for me. When I got started on the Internet back, I was in college, just married my wife. So this is, what am I, I'm 46 now. I would have been 22 So this is 20, man, I'm getting old, 20 whatever years ago.

And I got on the Internet and again, I don't think I was ever someone who was very creative or very, like I was just someone who was trying to figure this whole game out. And I was a wrestler. I am a wrestler still. I still identify as that. I should change that to my bio, identify as a wrestler.

But I'm a wrestler and as a wrestler growing up, like what I would do is I would try to find who are the best people in the world that I can learn from, right? And so my dad was really good. My dad would go and we'd be at tournaments, I'd be wrestling and he'd be finding the dudes who were the people, right? The best ones, he'd bring the video cam, he'd film all the other people who are winning the championships, the finals, we'd record the finals and we'd watch those, right? We start looking for the best coaches. And we'd go to the wrestling camps to learn directly from them.

My dad found people he really liked and then there's one guy named John Webb who's one of the greatest wrestling minds of all time. And he lived like an hour south of us, so we set up things where I would drive down there one on one, we'd work out with him a couple of times a week just to get better. We're always looking for who's the best right now and let's go learn directly from them because they're the ones who already know what we don't know yet, right? Instead of me trying to go and figure out how to be successful, it's find people who already have those skill sets and go directly to them, right? So I was always in my mentality in wrestling and so when I got into business, I was going to school at Boise State and I was trying to learn this thing and I was trying to figure things out and again, I'm not creative. I have tons of ideas. I was just, I knew that people were doing it and I need to figure out who's having success.