What really happened over the last three days…
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Hey everyone, this is Russell Brunson, and I want to welcome you once again to “Marketing in Your Car”.
So first off, I want to say that I think it’s about time we get a new theme song. What do you guys think? [laughs] The 1980s initial version is about ready to be retired, I think, so that’s going to be first on my list for this week.
Anywho, it’s been a little while since I’ve done a podcast. The reason why is that I’ve been neck deep in getting ready to launch Click Funnels, and I’m guessing from the outside, everything seems so calm and simple and easy for what we’re doing. We launched the first pre-launch video yesterday, but there’s always a story behind the story, and so I thought I would just share that to you guys while I’m heading in to the office, because I think it’s always fun.
First off, Click Funnels has been a big project [laughs]. We’ve been going crazy trying to get all of the templates done, working and testing them on every browser, and on and on and on, and it’s been a ton of work on that side, but it’s turning out amazingly. For the last three or four nights in a row, I’ve been pulling sixteen hour days. I work eight hours, go home and play with the kids, and then go back another eight hours, and then come home and sleep for a few hours, and then go back again. It’s been a lot of work on that side.
The last week we started planning out the pre-launch. What should we do? How should we do it? My team member, John Parkes, and I sat down and we brainstormed out an idea that it would be fun to have Chris, our number one designer, go head to head with somebody who’d never used Click Funnels before, and see who could build a website the fastest. We started brainstorming these ideas, and it went from this really simple idea to us renting out an octagon and having these two fight it out in the octagon. We got really excited. This was Thursday.
I had this guy who wanted to do the video, so I called him up and said, “Hey, do you have some time next week to do videos?” He said, “No, I’m flying into Tokyo on Monday.” I was like, “On Monday? Crap. I need these before Monday.” He’s like, “I have tomorrow, Friday, if you want to do it then.” I’m like, “All right, man. Let’s do it,” and so Thursday night, I’m scrambling to try to write scripts for this four video launch sequence. Typically I think, most people spend a couple of weeks writing out scripts to launch a brand-new company [laughs], but literally, I had to do it in about an hour.
Then I had to find an octagon, so I’m calling around, and luckily, some of my buddies own an MMA gym and we were able to rent an octagon. We got the camera person in. I needed to find somebody to be the other person competing against Chris. One of my friends is an author in town. She’s written a book, and she’s been super successful. She’s a life coach, and she also certifies life coaches, so I called her and begged her, and she dropped everything, moved all of her appointments around so she could show up and be the other person, and on and on and on.
That day, I get a call from the Ferrari place, because my Ferrari, which is a whole other story for another podcast, has been in the shop for six weeks. They’re like, “The Ferrari’s done,” and I’m like, “Oh, sweet. We can have the Ferrari in the video.” So I raced down to go grab the Ferrari, and on my way back, trying to get home, it died about thirteen times [laughs], so it still doesn’t actually work, but at least it moves forward long enough so you can catch a glimpse of us driving it on the video [laughs].
So we put the whole thing together, and then the video guy is scrambling because he’s flying to Tokyo Monday morning at 6 a.m., so he’s scrambling to edit the videos and put it all together and get all of his stuff done. Then he texts me Sunday night at about five in the morning and says, “Hey, I got it pretty much done. I left the hard drive out in front of my house, and you can go grab it, and hopefully the files will all work for you.” [laughs]
So I go and grab the thing, and it looked good, but there were some tweaks I needed, and my brother, who’s my main video guy, was heading out of town Monday morning, so I called him and tell him and his wife they can’t leave yet, and so he goes down on his computer and he’s editing the videos and tweaking some stuff to get it just perfect [laughs]. I swear, his wife is probably cursing me out, because they were leaving on this big family vacation. We get that back, and then at the same time, we’re in the process of moving our e-mail auto-responders again, for about the third time this year, to this company called MaroPost, and we’re having issues there. We can’t get the list imported [laughs], and then their scrubbing process, which should take an hour, took about three days.
Then we started building out the launch funnel inside Click Funnels, and honestly, the only funnel I’d never tested yet was the launch funnels, so we started testing them. The first time around, there’re always issues that come with any funnel. Then we’re rebuilding our entire launch funnel sequences and Click Funnels and we’re adding features, and it’s like this storm of things, literally, for the last four or five days. I don’t even know.
Finally, yesterday, I was in the office, and I hadn’t slept in about three days in a row. I literally am living off of our supplement that we’re launching in the MMA market, called “MMA Ignite”. I take a shot of that, every few hours to wake me back up, but the effects of it had stopped working yesterday. I think my body was just done. I was just dragging, putting all of the pieces together, and then finally we got the launch page up. We got the video live. MaroPost uploaded. I sent the e-mail out to the list, and I sat down, and I was just like [sighs], “We did it.” I was so excited.
I went home, played with the kids for a bunch of time, and then checked my phone, and a whole bunch of people were texting, “Man, that video is awesome. It’s the best video you’ve ever done.” You know, all of the things people message me on Facebook and stuff about how impressed they were with it all, and how good the scripts were and everything. It just made me smile, knowing that we pulled the whole thing off, literally, in about a day, if even that. I think it turned out pretty good, so behind the exterior, there’s always crazy stuff happening inside.
Oh, and not only that, we’ve got our support team, right? We ramped up because we were getting ready for Click Funnels, but then, low and behold, Neuracel just went crazy, and so we’ve got three full-time support people who’re doing Neuracel, and we have no one to support Click Funnels, so we’ve been scrambling and trying to hire people in Boise. We haven’t found anyone good.
Luckily, thankfully, and hopefully some of you guys listening have probably got some great friends who’ve volunteered who are good at something, like Garrett Pierson. He’s the owner of a whole bunch of sites, Trust Guard, Shopper Approved, Kart Rocket. He just dedicated his time. He’s coming up for a week to work for free just to help us during the launch week [laughs]. We’ve got a couple of other people that are I met on Facebook that are friends that are going to come in and work for a couple of weeks. People are literally flying here just to help out with the launch, just to help us so that it will go off opefullyHwithout a hitch while we’re finding a more long-term support team.
So anyway, it’s just kind of crazy. I’m grateful for everyone on my team that’s made this happen. I’m grateful for everybody outside of it, people like Garrett and others, who don’t have any vested interest, but just care about me and about us enough to come and throw in a helping hand. Some really cool things are happening, but I just wanted to share that, because I’m sure a lot of you guys, in your business, you see you’re doing stuff, and you feel like nothing’s working, and you’re going crazy, and you’re freaking out. Even though it may look like on the outside that we have it all together all of the time, we’re just like everybody else. It’s a lot of work and a lot of juggling, and when it all comes together in the end, it feels really, really good.
I’m excited. Launch Week is in less than a week – Launch Day. We’re just going to launch to our internal list first and we’re going to test that out and make sure we can handle the support, and then we’ll open it up to affiliates after that. It’s pretty exciting.
After I got home last night, after the kids went down, I had a chance to finally watch “24”, which was awesome, because it’s was Wednesday night, so I’ve had two or three nights in a row of wishing I could watch it, but I’ve been too busy working. I got to watch it last night. It was exciting, and I wish that show would never end. For those guys who are watching it right now, they only have twelve episodes a season, and they just finished up with number ten, so there’s only two more to go. We should have a 24-Dot Com Secrets “Marketing in Your Car” party for everyone. That would be fun.
Anyway, I’m in the office. I’ve got a lot of work to do. I’ve got to go clean up a couple more messes and stuff for video number two, but I’m excited for it all. I appreciate you guys listening. I hope you got something out of this one, and I’ll talk to you guys all again soon.