Welcome to Bootstrapped Secrets – A New Show From Russell Brunson

Russell Brunson (0:01)

His ideas have literally shaped how we view modern day marketing.

SPEAKER_2 (0:04)

He has impacted the bottom line of more businesses than any I've ever known.

Russell Brunson (0:09)

And of all the people that are gonna change the world, it's entrepreneurs like you. Hey, my name's Russell Brunson, and I want to officially welcome you to the Bootstrap Secrets channel and podcast. And man, it feels good to say that. I've been talking about doing a rebrand and a change for a long time now.

If you know any of the history about me, I started my very first podcast at the backend when my business is collapsing. I had 100 plus employees and everything fell apart. I had to fire almost 100 people one day and it was miserable. And I went from like a 20,000 square foot office down to like a thousand square foot office. And I had the four or five people who were still around working for me. And I remember I would drive from my house, four minute drive, and I had this weird impression. It was like, you should start podcasting. And this is before podcasting was cool. This is a long time ago. And so I was like, what am I gonna podcast about? I'm in the brink of my business failing.

Everything fell apart like I'm an idiot. What should I podcast about?

And I decided to call it Marketing In Your Car because I had a four minute commute from my house to the office and back. And about three or four times a week, I get my phone out, I click record, and I would drive the four minutes and I would just talk about what we were doing. I was documenting my journey. Here's what we're trying today. And we launched this thing and we tried this and it worked and it didn't work and all sorts of stuff. I think I recorded about 400 episodes of the Marketing In Your Car podcast and it started to grow. And about that time, we launched a brand new company. You may have heard of it. It was called ClickFunnels and we launched ClickFunnels and I started documenting that process. And I changed the branding of the podcast from the Marketing In Your Car podcast, which I thought was kind of cheesy and eventually I got a microphone and I wasn't in my car all the time to the Marketing Secrets podcast. And that's what it became for the next almost decade. And we did close to 1000 episodes calling it Marketing Secrets. And that's been so fun and it documented so much of the journey of us building ClickFunnels and trying it out and learning what it was and me writing my books, DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets, Traffic Secrets and that whole journey. And it was so much fun. And then a few years ago, things started transitioning in my life and other things. And the podcast kind of fell to the back burner. And I kept talking about like just doing something different. I didn't know what it was. We tried rebranding a couple of times. We called it the Russell Brunson Show, which I hated as soon as episode one hit. I was like, I don't like this. I feel like I'm talking about myself. I didn't like that. And it came back to like, what do I want to talk about?

What would fire me up? What would get me most excited to do this every single week as opposed to making it something I was dreading? And I didn't like doing interview shows, like all these different things. I kept thinking about it.

And then over the last, honestly, like five or six months, we started a new company. And if you know anything about my story, we built ClickFunnels and in a decade, we bootstrapped that company from zero to a billion dollars in sales. We bootstrapped it without any funding, any outside funding, anything like that. It was just a handful of us, just kids who had an idea we started running towards. And we built an amazing team of people and we built this amazing company called ClickFunnels. And it changed so many people's lives all around the world.

But then things shifted. Everything's changed. The whole world, especially in 2026, AI and how AI has shifted so fast. And about five or six months ago, we started working on a new company. And I remember prior to that, I'd been kind of worn out, burned out. There was a spot where I'm just like, I'm tired of everything, you know? And I remember somebody pitched me on this billion dollar idea, like come be part of it. I was like, if you knew what it takes to build a billion dollar business, you would not go down that path. Like it's so hard and so much stuff. And I was just like in this burned out spot. And it wasn't until our new business started coming together, that I started getting that fire and that excitement again, where I was like, this is amazing.