Todd Dickerson: The Rise Of The Brilliant Coding Mind Behind ClickFunnels

“Don’t give up. It takes a lot of dedication and time in the dark learning and working that no one knows about — but ultimately, the person who can create the most value for the most people wins.” — Todd Dickerson

In early 2011, Todd Dickerson was going about his day minding his own business until an email arrived. Although he didn’t know it just yet, that single email would change the course of his life forever. The email was from Russell Brunson. But it wasn’t like any of his past emails.

After being on Brunson’s list for years, this particular email got his attention. Because it was a call for help. A distress signal. And Dickerson could feel the urgency in those words. He froze when he read that email. And for the very first time, a thought flashed across his mind. It only took him a few short minutes to think it all through. Suddenly, his fingers started flying across the keyboard in a lightning-fast response.

Every click of the keys and each word written would ultimately paint Todd Dickerson’s future across the tapestry of the stars forever. What happened next is the tale of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. As two brilliant minds collided, little did they know it but both of their fates were about to change forever.

The Payment Freeze

Let’s rewind the clock for a moment. Let’s go back in time just a few short months before that email—back to late 2010. It’s just after Thanksgiving in Boise, Idaho. Russell Brunson was running Dot Com Secret Lab, teaching people how to make money online. In his call center, ninety employees were fielding the phones, making sales and following up with leads. It was a well-oiled machine.

Then something strange happened. Payments started failing left and right. Cards that were supposed to be okay were getting declined. One after another after another, more cards were declining. Although declines happened from time to time, this day was different. As all the cards were getting declined, Brunson realized something wasn’t right.

He picked up the phone and called his payment processor. And what happened next would eventually bring Todd Dickerson and Russell Brunson into an unlikely partnership. The payment processor had frozen all of Brunson’s funds. And there was nothing Brunson or anyone else on his team could do about it.

That holiday season was the roughest Brunson had experienced in his life. He had to let all those call center employees go. There was simply no other choice. But what Brunson didn’t realize was that God was working on something far bigger for his life than he could realize.

Ruby On Rails

In the wake of that disaster, Brunson couldn’t sleep. He tossed and turned, unsure of what to do. In that period, he prayed more than he had ever prayed in his life. But in the New Year, Brunson had a renewed sense of spirit. One day, searching on a website called Flippa, he discovered a business for sale called Champion Sound.

The company was on the cutting edge of text message marketing. Brunson made the decision to buy championsound.com and its entire business. But there was only one problem. He had spent money he didn’t have on a platform that was entirely coded in Ruby on Rails. And no one on Brunson’s team had any idea of how they could work in that language.

Brunson tried everything he could to get people to help. No matter where he looked, no one had experience with Ruby on Rails. There just wasn’t much mainstream adoption of the language. Brunson was on the verge of calling it quits and deleting the entire site until he had a thought. Why not send an email to his list to see if anyone knew Ruby on Rails?

That’s the email Todd Dickerson received on that day in early 2011. An email that would change his life and Russell Brunson’s life forever. Todd Dickerson knew he could help. After all, Ruby on Rails was his specialty. And it only took him one hour to fix that code and get Champion Sound working the right way.

An Unlikely Partnership

To Brunson’s surprise, Todd Dickerson didn’t want to get paid. In fact, the pair worked on odd jobs and projects together throughout 2011 and 2012. And Todd Dickerson did not want any money. What he wanted was to learn from a marketing master, someone he had fervently followed for ages.

The truth is that Brunson was a hero to Dickerson. And he knew very well that if he stuck around for long enough, something magical would happen. It takes a certain level of tenacity and understanding to make a decision like that. After working in the dark for so long, Dickerson knew that this was the light at the end of the tunnel he’d been searching for.

In 2013, Russell Brunson got wind that InfusionSoft received a $54 million private equity investment. When Brunson read this and shared the story with Todd Dickerson, he knew that he could build something better. It was the opportunity he had been waiting for.

And that’s precisely what he set out to do. Todd Dickerson started coding and developing the original platform that was first called ClickFusion. And after 6 months of development, testing and improving, he knew he had something with legs.

The ultimate litmus test was this. Could Brunson easily build a sales funnel himself through the interface with no outside help or interface? To give you some context, Brunson would pay thousands of dollars to build sales funnels. And it would require interfacing with many designers and developers just to get the job done.

Every time something had to change, Brunson would need to spend more time and more money just for simple little fixes. That problem was the core genesis behind ClickFunnels. Brunson knew there had to be a better way. And once he could use the platform to successfuly build and launch a funnel on his own, Dickerson knew they were almost ready.

The Rise Of ClickFunnels

Russell Brunson knew that ClickFunnels would have utility one way or another. If it didn’t work as a platform with paying customers, Brunson could use it to build and launch funnels with ease. He told Dickerson that one way or another he would get paid. But the truth is that Dickerson worked largely for free in the hopes that ClickFunnels would become something viable one day.

Brunson knew they had something. But he thought that at the most they would only have 10,000 customers. So that number stuck in Dickerson’s mind. 10,000 customers? No big deal. The platform could easily support that number of users.

But when Brunson sent his first few emails to his list, that wasn’t what happened. Instead of 10,000 or more customers, they had a few hundred at best. That wasn’t enough to really make a dent. Then, Brunson started work on a presentation called Funnel Hacks. The now-infamous presentation was made at conferences Brunson would speak at.

And while watching Brunson close 47% of the room, Dickerson knew he’d made the right choice in building that platform for free, on his own, for 6 months. The brilliant coding genius behind ClickFunnels could have passed up on that opportunity. But within the first year, ClickFunnels blew past 10,000 paying members, and the company had raked in over $1 million in profit in its first year

System Crash

During a 9-hour plane ride to London, Brunson did not realize the chaos ensuing back home. He was on the way to speak at a conference. But when he landed, his phone started ringing like crazy with notifications coming in from everywhere. ClickFunnels had just crashed. And people were fuming. Death threats were coming in left and right and Brunson was in a state of panic.

Back home, Dickerson was holding down the fort. Yes, ClickFunnels had crashed because of a load and scalability problem. The platform just wasn’t ready for enterprise-level activity. And there was an important decision to make. Either try to bring it back online immediately, or migrate to Amazon’s AWS to provide real scalability well into the future.

The system was down for what seemed like an eternity. But Dickerson’s brilliance allowed them to migrate ClickFunnels far quicker than anyone thought. Brunson knew he had to tell people what was going on. So he went live on Facebook to tell people what was happening. And it paid off. People were more understanding than he originally thought.

That’s when Brunson knew two things. The first was that they had created a community that was now rooting for them. The second was the realization that Todd Dickerson was likely one of the most brilliant coding geniuses of our time.

Who Is Todd Dickerson?

As a full-stack engineer, I understand what it’s like to sit in a room and just build. I know what it’s like to tackle one coding problem after another, while working to put the entire puzzle in place. But there are very few people like Todd Dickerson who can build an entire platform like ClickFunnels, and do it on their own.

It takes a brilliant mind to pull something like this off. Some would say that it was luck that Todd Dickerson and Russell Brunson met. Others would say that it was fate. I would argue that this was all by design and that Brunson’s prayers were answered when a seemingly terrible situation became the best thing that could have happened in his life.

However you look at it, know this. ClickFunnels has changed the lives of so many people. And we are all grateful for this platform. We are grateful for the genius coding mind of Todd Dickerson but also grateful for the brilliant marketing mind of Russell Brunson.

Today, ClickFunnels is a behemoth. There are hundreds of thousands of paying customers and the platform has grown beyond its founders’ wildest dreams. Where it will go tomorrow no one knows. But we do know this. It can only keep going up from here. Dave Woodward would surely be proud looking down from heaven at all that ClickFunnels has become and all the potential it has to go from here.