Russell Brunson: The ClickFunnels Story From Broke To Billions

In a small room in a nondescript office park in Boise, Idaho, Russell Brunson was in a sheer state of panic. Just moments ago he cradled the phone to a loud thud. It was his payment processor. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of his funds were just frozen. And there was nothing he could do about it.

It was just before the holidays. What would he tell his staff? How would he recover from this? Could he recover from this? The color washed away from his face leaving him as pale as a ghost. It’s over, he thought. There’s no coming back from this.

That night, on the way home, he wrestled with the idea in his head. How would he tell his wife? What could he even say or do to make this right? 90 employees working in his call center had no idea that sh*t was about to hit the fan.

The Early Days

Let’s rewind for a moment. That pivotal moment in 2010 was a turning point for Brunson. But let’s scroll back a little further—back to when Brunson was just a kid. One day, pulling into their driveway after school, his mom notices a large white sack on the front porch.

What is that? His mom asks while pulling in. Russell knew exactly what it was. Over the past several months he was phoning every “free gift” offer he saw on television or heard on the radio. It had become an obsession of his. But what he really wanted was to figure out how they were making money.

There was now too much mail to fit in the mailbox. And this so-called “junk mail” wasn’t junk to him. It was gold. Because he knew that it held the secrets to unlocking a future of true financial freedom. And he read every last piece of mail that arrived at his home.

I think it’s for me, Mom, Russell said. Of course, he knew it was for him. And he was more excited to crack open those large envelopes than he was opening shiny gifts from Santa on Christmas Day. For you? That much mail? Russell, it’s too much.

Those early days formed a foundation for Russell. He learned the mechanics of how offers worked. He knew that free gifts always came with sales letters designed to sell you the product or service the company was selling. And he read every last sales letter, digesting and dissecting them one by one.

The Great Freeze

He thought about the innocence of his youth on that drive home. And he thought about the innocence of all the children of all the people working for him. Tears swelled up in his eyes as he pulled into his driveway. This Christmas was going to be far different than any other Christmas in the past.

The frozen funds meant that he was handcuffed. With only one payment processor there was nothing he could do. All of his funds were tied up with that payment processor and that payment processor said funds would be frozen for 6 months or more.

The worst part? It was based on a decision they made as a payment processing company. It impacted every business similar to his that sold services similar to his. This “Great Freeze” of his funds meant it was the beginning of the end of his business.

He thought about a thousand different scenarios. What would he say? How would he say it? Was there anyone else who could help him out of this hole? Tossing and turning at night, he knew what he had to do the next day. It was either let all those call center people go or shut down entirely.

ClickFunnels: The Beginning

In the wake of his business collapse, Russell Brunson was unsure of the path forward. He questioned his decision to own a business. And wasn’t sure about the future. But once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. He just put one foot in front of the other and kept going.

Several months later, he came across a domain available for sale on a site called Flippa. Flippa is a popular platform for buying and selling domains and existing businesses. You can sometimes buy an entire business with all the content and products, or just the domain itself.

The domain he found was called championsound.com. Champion Sound was an autoresponder platform designed for email and text message (SMS) marketing. Brunson knew it was the future. The trouble was he spent money he couldn’t afford to spend on the platform.

He was so committed to it that he didn’t care. He pulled the trigger and he was now the proud owner of Champion Sound. Once he was the owner he sent it to his web developers. But to his surprise, no one could help him at a reasonable rate because the entire system was built using Ruby on Rails.

Brunson had no choice but to shut the entire thing down. But before he did, he had one thought. What if he could send an email blast out to his list and see if anyone knew anyone who knew Ruby on Rails? The blast went out. And to his surprise, he found someone.

Todd Dickerson saw the email and responded. It was a Hail Mary but it worked. Although Brunson couldn’t afford to pay him much (or even at all), Todd Dickerson worked well through 2011 to 2012 largely for free. Then, in 2013 they decided to build ClickFunnels.

ClickFunnels: The Origin Story

The idea for ClickFunnels came from boots-on-the-ground experience building sales funnels. Back then, Brunson had to spend thousands of dollars—sometimes tens of thousands—just to build a single sales funnel. Everything had to be connected manually.:

• The payment API to process payments
• The email API to make sure contacts landed on his list
• The upsell and down-sell systems needed to be connected
• The domain needed to be linked to everything
• You needed a hosting account to set everything up
• Someone needed to setup the designs
• Another person needed to code out the designs for each page
• So many other systems needed to “talk” to each other…

It was taxing. And every single change required going back to the designers and developers to make tweaks. Each time that happened, Brunson was charged again and again. Even the smallest change required going back to the developers and sometimes the designers.

Brunson knew there had to be a better way to do this. One day, in a conversation with Dickerson, he explained the struggles he was facing. He said there had to be a better way to do this. That’s when Dickerson offered to build the ClickFunnels system himself.

So Dickerson set out to build the platform day and night. Brunson is not a coder and could offer no technical help. Dickerson took it upon himself to build the entire system. At first, Brunson couldn’t pay him. But Dickerson knew there was a massive opportunity here. So he kept building it anyway.

The Funnel Hacks Webinar

In 2014, as ClickFunnels neared its beta launch date, Brunson started working on the now-infamous webinar called Funnel Hacks. The Funnel Hacks webinar was a 2-hour presentation designed to help sell ClickFunnels.

He started testing the soon-to-be webinar at conferences and presentations where he was a speaker. At one event, he didn’t close as many as he thought. Afterward, a woman approached him and said she wanted to buy ClickFunnels but thought it was only for selling supplements.

The early Funnel Hacks webinar had references to the supplement business. At the time, Brunson owned a supplement company targeting diabetic neuropathy. When he watched the presentation back and looked at the slides, he made tweaks to make sure he targeted all types of businesses.

On November 7th, 2014, Brunson went live with the Funnel Hacks webinar. He hit his email list and started doing the webinar live 3 times per day. And he did that every single day. Quickly, ClickFunnels swelled to its first 10,000 customers.

That number even blew Brunson away. 10,000 was the maximum number of customers he thought ClickFunnels could ever have. Now they had 10,000 customers almost straight off the bat. And that led to challenges with the platform and ensuring uptime.

ClickFunnels: Scaling Up

ClickFunnels was growing and scaling at an astronomical rate. But once Brunson tapped out his list, he needed to find another way to introduce ClickFunnels to the world. So he got to work writing a book called Dot Com Secrets. It was published on April 28, 2015.

What Brunson knows that few other marketers know is how to attract his dream customer through indoctrination via story-selling. He is a master at interweaving stories in such a way that they create raving fans and turn cold traffic into hot buyer traffic.

The book, Dot Com Secrets indoctrinates people from all around the world. It does this by reeling them into Brunson’s world and his sales funnels. He introduces them to concepts like the value ladder, upsells, down-sells, the power of using stories, and so on.

He helps create an epiphany in the minds of prospects. And once they reach that epiphany, they’re sold and ready to buy ClickFunnels. In fact, the book frequently mentions that there’s a free, zero risk, cancel-any-time 14-day trial available for ClickFunnels.

Marketing In Your Car

If you’ve followed Russell Brunson for any amount of time maybe you’ve come across some of his old podcast episodes. The series, which was called Marketing In Your Car first aired on March 26, 2013. You can listen to the first episode of it here.

The early episodes were right around the start of building ClickFunnels. Before it was called ClickFunnels it was called ClickFusion. But here’s the cool part. Brunson documented the entire journey of building ClickFunnels and the early days in this podcast.

Marketing In Your Car has 251 episodes and it ended on January 4th, 2017. It was the precursor to the new Marketing Secrets podcast. If you’re curious at all about the early beginnings through the start of explosive growth for ClickFunnels go and listen to every single episode to get into the mind of one of the most brilliant marketers of our time.

How Much Money Is ClickFunnels Worth

With hundreds of millions of dollars in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) and hundreds of thousands of customers, ClickFunnels is now a multi-billion dollar company. Software company valuations are 8 to 12 times ARR in most cases.

ClickFunnels has no outside investors. In fact, Brunson made it a point to call out companies that take on massive investments. Companies that do this typically overspend and end up needing another round of investments very soon after.

Who started ClickFunnels?

ClickFunnels was co-founded by Russell Brunson and Todd Dickerson. There was a third co-founder who was bought out. Todd Dickerson was the mastermind of the software platform. Brunson brought the marketing know-how and spearheaded the growth of the customer base.

Is Russell Brunson a billionaire?

On paper, Russell Brunson is a billionaire. However, for Brunson, it was never about the money. It was more about the impact. His reason to keep going with ClickFunnels is for the sheer joy he gets by touching the lives of so many entrepreneurs from around the world.

Is Russell Brunson an author?

Yes. Russell Brunson is the author of several books. His official print books include the following:

• DotCom Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Growing Your Company Online — Published February 20, 2015
• Expert Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Converting Your Online Visitors into Lifelong Customers—Published January 22, 2017
• Traffic Secrets: The Underground Playbook for Filling Your Websites and Funnels with Your Dream Customers—Published March 26, 2020

Does Russell Brunson own ClickFunnels?

Russell Brunson is the co-founder of ClickFunnels. His other co-founder is Todd Dickerson. The pair own a company called ClickFunnels. There are no outside investors or venture capital funds. This was done by design and the growth was purely organic. It’s a testament to Brunson’s superhero-like abilities as a marketer.

What does Russell Brunson sell?

Russell Brunson owns many businesses including the following:

• Lady Boss Weightloss
• Marketing Secrets
• Secrets of Success
• Magnetic Marketing
• Understand.me
• Voomly
• Unfair Advantage
• And more…

What order should I read Russell Brunson’s books?

You should read them in the order they were published. Start with Dot Com Secrets, then Expert Secrets, and afterward, Traffic Secrets. Each book lays the foundation for the next one in the trilogy. And Traffic Secrets was Brunson’s first New York Times bestseller.