Offer Lab: Why Collaboration Beats Competition in Online Business | #Sales - Ep. 67

Packages by Expedia.

You were made to occasionally take the hard route to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

We were made to easily bundle your trip.

Expedia.

Made to travel.

Flight inclusive packages are at all protected.

This is the Russell Brunson Show.

What's up everyone, welcome back.

Last episode, I shared with you guys the first pre-launch video from a new platform we are launching called Offer Lab.

I've had people say this is going to be bigger than ClickFunnels.

I'll say all sorts of crazy stuff.

Video number two in the pre-launch was kind of a demo.

So I can't really show you that one because you're listening and it would just be weird.

But video number three is one that's kind of special.

I actually, we had a whole video scripted I was going to do and I got to go actually start filming it I realized that like it was the wrong message and so I told the guys I'm like just Just roll the cameras.

We'll see what happens.

And I sat there and I talked for 30 minutes or so and by the time it was done like I was in tears the guys in the like in the room with me were in tears, and it was really powerful.

And so, I want you to hear this message.

Um, again, hopefully, you have a chance to watch this as well.

It's visually beautiful, too.

You see, like actual footage from when we had the idea and all sorts of stuff.

So, anyway, but regardless, I want you to listen to this because I think it'll give you guys a glimpse behind the scenes of where my brain is, what's happening, why it's important, and what I'm trying to do with the industry,

what makes me sad about it today, and what makes me happy about the future and the direction we're going.

So, I hope you guys enjoy it.

Afterwards, make sure you go to offerlablaunch.com to go register.

When you do that, it'll register for the event coming up this week.

And then also,

it'll give you a free Offer Lab account and a whole bunch of other really cool things.

So go to offerlablaunch.com.

Anyway, again, this is kind of a more personal episode.

I think you like it.

Hopefully, you like it.

Hopefully, you'll feel something.

And I cannot wait to continue to serve you guys.

Thanks so much for everything.

And here we go.

Offer lab launch video number three.

Good morning.

Even though I couldn't fall asleep last night, so

Sam.

Same?

Same.

Yeah, most of this movie we used to hung out.

I tried to be quiet.

I tried to turn the TV on.

I tried...

I watched Friends and Office and More Friends.

It's like, what's wrong with my brain?

We flew to Atlanta to hang out with Todd.

We have like a whole bunch of really big decisions to make.

Almost three years ago, last time I was here with Dave, we spent a week at Todd's Lake House and we made a big decision to build Cliff Fumbles 2.0.

And this is like, if like

one of those trips.

What's the plan?

Where are we going?

What's the future because there's so many different directions we can go do we double down do we not do we change the model I feel like really important decisions we made

what's up guys welcome to video number three

typically in a product launch like this all the videos are scripted out trying to do very certain very important things and we had a script for this video and now that we're here the script didn't feel right and so I just wanted to talk to you guys about

honestly why.

Why did we create Offer Lab?

Why is this here?

Why is this actually important?

And I want to tell you guys a story that's

probably a little vulnerable, probably stuff I don't typically like talk about externally, but will help you guys understand why I'm so passionate about this and why we're putting so much time and energy and effort into Offer Lab.

The idea originally for Offer Lab started about a year ago.

I'd flown out to Atlanta where my business partner Todd Dickerson lives and we were there trying to figure out like what's next for ClickFunnels.

10 years ago we launched the platform and it's interesting like when you look back 10 years ago, most of you guys weren't there.

You showed up at different times.

Maybe you're brand new.

Maybe you came three years ago, maybe five years ago, you came at different times, but like it was different.

I go back in time actually to when I got started.

Literally

I got started, if you know my story, back when

I was in college.

I just met my wife, I was trying to figure out how to support her, how to pay the bills, and I started learning how to sell stuff on the internet.

And it was the most exciting thing.

I remember every day waking up and it was just like I was treasure hunting.

I was going out there trying to figure out what do I sell and how do I sell?

And so what I did is instead of trying to have a product and trying to force it upon people, I went out there and I found out exactly what people were searching for.

And if there were a lot of people searching for it, I would create a product and sell it to them.

That makes a lot.

I was learning about offers and about autoresponders and emails and how to drive traffic.

And

every day was like Christmas, right?

And I was learning.

For me, it was like probably the biggest phase of growth in my life up to that point.

And over time, as I learned more and more, it got harder to find new things and harder to discover more.

And I got to a spot when I was probably 27, 28 years old, where I was just stuck again.

I was just like, I was having success, I was making some money, but

I just felt stuck, right?

I was not in momentum.

I didn't know what to do.

And about that time is when the ClickFunnels story started, right?

So when I met Todd Dickerson and Dylan Jones, we started building this platform of ClickFunnels.

With ClickFunnels launching, then I wrote my book, Dot-Com Secrets, and then we started teaching people and doing seminars and events.

We started a funnel hacking live where I started sharing all these ideas with people.

I saw it in their eyes the first time they got it.

And they lit up and it was just like so exciting.

And that was our business, that was my life for the last decade, right?

ClickFunnels was software that allowed people to move quicker.

That software allowed people to have success.

And then the training, the education was where we gave people ahas and gave them the ability to actually take these things they were learning and doing.

And with the software, it created so many success stories.

I still remember the very first time we launched the two Comic Club Award, the very first event, 79 people got it.

And the next event was like 230, and then 500.

And like, we started seeing people have success, and it was just like it was the greatest.

We built this community.

We all had a name.

We call ourselves funnel hackers.

Like, we were a movement.

We were people.

You saw people all around the world becoming this thing.

I get people messaging me, sending me pictures from everywhere in the world.

I was in Bali and I saw someone driving on a motorcycle with a funnel hacker shirt.

I was over here working out in a gym in some other place, and people I knew were all sending me pictures.

And like, we created this global movement of people.

And it was the most exciting thing in the world.

And then over the last couple years, it shifted, right?

You know, for a long time, we were the only ones doing this.

We were teaching, we were educating.

But over time, more people started learning, having success, and more people started teaching, which was a great thing.

I was like, this is so fun.

Like, it's not just me talking about it, there's tons of other people talking about funnels.

And everyone's bringing their own ideas and their own innovations, and things are getting more and more exciting.

My favorite things at Funnel Hacking Live is to find people, we bring them to speak.

Someone who like came into our world, they would read a book, they learn a principle, then they would take it and they would take that one little piece and they would go super deep.

And they'd build a whole coaching program and movement around their version of my stuff or a version of what they were doing inside ClickFunnels.

And it was like, it was the best.

It made me so happy.

But then over time,

again, with the success we were having, people saw that and they started copying us.

They started, you know, software started popping up.

There's very similar to ours.

People started competing against us,

which is fine.

That happens in any market, right?

I love competition.

I love those kind of things.

But it went from like us and maybe three or four people who were doing this and talking about this to eventually, as you guys know, one of our competitors sold the white label.

And instantly overnight we went from having four or five competitors to a hundred and then five hundred and then a thousand and then two thousand and then three thousand and suddenly there were so many people all with similar platforms to what we have.

Okay, and for me what was hard was not so much that like I love the competition.

What's hardest for me is that so many people who we had trained, people who came on stage who got a Tukama Cup award with tears in their eyes telling me how I changed their life were the same ones who you know six months later were on their ads holding a Tucoma award pitching their white label version of ClickFunnels.

And it broke my heart to a spot where I honestly was like, I don't even want to,

like, I don't want to serve this audience anymore because when I do, they come in and then they take some information and then they leave.

And it was really frustrating.

So when I go to a year ago, I fly out to Atlanta to spend time with Todd and with our team and figure out what's next for ClickFunnels.

I was in a

a pretty dark spot where I didn't know, I don't know what it is.

And while we're sitting there, that was the conversation.

It was just like, what do we do?

Like, do we add more features?

And we try to do this.

Like, what's the biggest thing?

And it's like, right now it's an arms race where everyone's trying to add more features and lower costs.

And it was just like, this isn't the right answer.

This is what everyone's trying to do.

It's just trying to make a better mousetrap.

So we teach in all of our marketing.

They don't make a better mousetrap.

Like, what is the new opportunity?

What's something that's going to change the marketplace once again?

What's something where the funnel hackers will rise up again and say, look, I want to be part of this, this movement, this thing.

And so a year ago, so we're sitting in Atlanta

talking.

The whole conversations began with like, how do we make ClickFunnels better, faster, stronger, more features, more da-da-da.

And like, and then one late night, as we're sitting there, like, what if, what if we're looking at this wrong?

Right, right now we're all competing against each other, everyone's fighting, it's just like this chaos, like the marketplace that we had built up that everyone was together, working together, had literally become segmented.

Where now everybody's competing against each other with very similar offers, very similar software, very similar everything.

And it was just like, this is getting worse, this isn't fun anymore.

And it made me, honestly, it made me kind of shell up.

A lot of people messaged me, like, Russell, I haven't heard from you a while.

Like, what's happening?

I don't, like, are you still with ClickFunnels?

Are you still part?

Like, what's even happening?

And that night in Atlanta, as Todd and I were talking and brainstorming, we had an idea.

And at first it started like, this could be a really cool feature inside of ClickFunnels.

But as we kept talking about development, if it's inside of ClickFunnels, it's just a feature.

Everyone else will clone it, and then it's just another thing.

I was like, if we want to create something special, it's got to be something that doesn't further divide everybody.

What's something we could create that would bring everyone back together?

That was the thought.

And then we sat down and we started mapping out what would that look like.

I'm like, what if we had this, What if we had a centralized spot that everybody in the marketplace, everyone who had ever bought Funnel Hacker in the past, could all come back and come back into this marketplace and we could all put our offers.

I don't care if you sell on GoHigh level or on Shopify or on Patreon or wherever you're selling yourself.

It doesn't even matter, right?

But everybody could come together and everyone plugs their offers in.

And it wasn't something that was divisive where now we're trying to pull people from our software to yours or whatever.

Everyone still uses whatever platform they want.

It doesn't even matter to me anymore.

I was like, what if we did that?

We put it together a spot and instead of having it we're all competing against each other where we can all start working together.

I don't know about your business, but my business has changed in the last 12 months, two years, three years.

Like when I got, when we launched ClickFrones initially, it's back when Mark Zuckerberg was a good guy, right?

When he was fun to work with.

Like you put up, you spend $100 in ads and you make $500.

And it's like, this is insane.

And everyone's having success, right?

It was so fun.

It was so easy.

But, you know, as tech do, they start understanding their value.

They start increasing things.

They start putting tracking pixels so they can help you find a better audience.

They're also to know exactly what you're spending, exactly what you're making.

And then from that, that they can reverse engineer and figure out how to charge you just enough, you got enough money to keep on going, but nothing more, right?

And for me and for most of the people I know, our margins shrunk and they shrunk and they shrunk.

And because we're in these different silos, everyone's all over the place.

Like we're all suffering together, right?

But no one's talking about it.

Right?

You can admit it, I'm admitting it.

It's hard.

Our margins went from 50% to 40% to 30% to 20% to 10%.

And now we're negative up front.

Like our $10,000 offers now to front end just to cover the ad cost and we create something new just to make money.

Like it's insane.

Because Mark Zuckerberg, because Facebook, because Google, all the ad costs have gone up so high.

And so what normally happens?

For a lot of you guys, a lot of my friends, a lot of people I love and care about, their businesses have completely collapsed, right?

They're no longer successful anymore.

They have their audience and they're doing little things that had to fire their employees, their teams, their staff.

Everything shrunk, right?

Because the ad costs have gotten so high.

But because we're on these silos, we're all competing against each other, no one talks about it.

What happens now?

The whole mission we started 10 years ago was to free entrepreneurs so they could change the lives of the customers they've been called to serve.

Now entrepreneurs are in bondage again.

They can't get free.

They're tied to ad costs.

Technical stuff we figured out, but the ads, they're stuck.

They're alone.

We used to always say entrepreneurship is the loneliest job in the world, right?

And when we built the funnel hacker, ClickFunnels movement, we changed.

We brought everybody together into a spot.

And no longer was it lonely.

People were doing hackathons all over the country, all over the world.

These things were happening.

People were talking about it.

It was like the most exciting time ever.

Like it was no longer weird to be an entrepreneur.

It was no longer solo, like you had the chance to be around other people who think like you, who believe like you, who dream like you.

Now it's different because I'm like, well, I can't talk to them because they're competing.

We had the same thing, like their offers, mine, like my customer, and everyone's like hoarding their customers.

It's like, why are we doing that?

And it's lonely again.

And I felt lonely.

So Todd and I are sitting there a year ago.

It's like, how do we create something that would actually bring people together?

We create a platform that everybody could bring their offers into.

And that way, we can still sell stuff on our own, right?

You can still sell in whatever, I can sell in ClickFunnels.

You can sell in whatever you want to sell in, right?

But at the same time, time, we can take those offers, plug them into one spot where now we can start working together.

And so we started thinking about, okay, that's the concept.

How does it work technically?

Is it possible?

Is it not?

And we started working on the tech and the development.

And at first, it was not possible.

The concepts are there, but like we can't, the technical limitations, it's impossible to actually execute on what we're trying to do.

So the question is, like, how do we create a funnel where I put my product in the front end, I take someone else's product because upsell one, someone else's product, upsell two, where it could all be in one streamlined funnel and the money gets split instantly so that you're not waiting for people to pay you and all the other chaos that comes with traditional affiliate marketing.

We're trying to figure out how to do that.

Eventually we had a chance to actually message our reps at Stripe and we've been lucky because we've got such a good relationship with Stripe.

The ClickFronts platform has processed over $12 billion

in Stripe sales.

So we called them and said this is what we're trying to do and they're like, that's not possible.

Like I know it's not possible.

Is there some way to make this work?

And we went back and forth and back and forth with them.

And luckily, they put tons of time and energy and money into creating the platform so we could do this.

So because of that, we're the only ones that can do this.

We're the only ones that actually have the technical capabilities to do this today.

And that's what's so powerful, why it's so important.

It's what that means for you is that you can come and you don't have to always rely on all these other things.

You can leave your silo and come back together as a community once again, where we can work with each other, we can serve each other, we can all grow together.

That's the story behind Offer Lab.

That's why we created it.

That's why we're so excited.

And so, the reason why

I didn't want to give you guys the video script we had written before is I want you guys to understand the reason.

Okay, a year ago,

I was done.

I was tired, I was tired of the industry, industry.

I was tired of the separation.

I spent the last years gathering a community where we were all happy together.

We were all building together, all growing together.

And I felt like that community had slipped through my fingers and everything had fallen apart.

And I looked at it and I realized it was my fault.

I was the one that was being the most divisive.

I was saying, you have to go my way or no way.

And because of that, people chose different directions.

And some people stuck over here and some people left and it became the worst thing.

I remember seeing a post one day that literally made me cry.

Someone said, still a funnel hacker just using a different tool.

And I was like so broken, like, like,

but the reality is if I looked at it correctly, it's like, no, it doesn't matter what tool they're using.

Like, we are a community.

How do I create something where we can all work together?

And from that is where Offer Lab came.

And so if you are a funnel hacker and you're using any tool, it doesn't matter.

Now we can all do it here in one spot.

We can plug in together and we can start working together.

Instead of giving most of our profits to Mark Zuckerberg, we can give our profits to our friends.

How much of a better way is that?

It's a better way to live, it's a better way to have business, more fun,

and something that's more sustainable.

As we were putting together Offer Lab,

somebody had showed me a picture of the Tucoma Club Award, and they were very proud they had won one through ClickFunnels.

They were so proud, and I remember in there, in the comments, some people were talking bad about it.

And I was like, why are they talking bad about it?

And I realized it's because they were building on a different platform.

They didn't have the opportunity to even win one of these awards, right?

Because they couldn't.

So instead of like celebrating this person, celebrating the friend that that they have who actually won one, they're talking trash because they don't have the ability to win one because they're using a different platform.

I was like, man, if we shifted this, like, how do we shift this around?

I wanted to create this where now, if anybody's publishing on Offer Lab, you can win it to Comic Club Awards.

You can be selling on any platform, it doesn't matter as long as you're going through Offer Lab or you're doing it through collaboration, you can also win it to Comic Award.

You can also be part of this movement, okay?

The funnel hacker, the identity, the

community is encompassing everybody who's using whatever platform.

It doesn't matter.

And Offer Lab is how we actually work together.

And that's why I'm so excited.

What we've created is really unique, it's very special.

And if you adopt it and play with it, it's going to change the way you do business.

It's not only, I believe, going to make you more money.

It's not only going to make it so that you don't spend as much money on traffic, but you're going to make some of the greatest relationships in the world, some of the greatest partnerships.

Like, when you look at that, it just changes the landscape.

literally overnight.

It goes from all of us being silos, all of us being together

once again.

And so this video is for all of you guys.

As entrepreneurs, as funnel hackers as creators as people who are trying to change the world I want to do it together.

I don't want to be my own silo.

It's not worth it.

It's boring out there, right?

We can all make money independently, but so much more money and so much more fun to make money together.

And we can all do it here on this platform.

So what does that mean for you guys?

Number one, obviously get your offer live at camp.

Number two, bring your offers over.

And number three, I'm doing a live training.

Okay, it's probably going to be happening after this video, depending when you're watching this.

But jump on that training because in there we're gonna give you guys the next steps Here's how to take these concepts this platform and how to change everything how to use it as a tool and an asset to dramatically grow your company How to get more people actually selling your products on the platform But also how to make it so you're getting more traffic into your offers and your products right how to find partnerships and collaborations and how to dramatically increase your businesses together I hope you guys have enjoyed the series up to this point.

The next step obviously get your offer live account get on the live training We're gonna take you guys through the next step and then after that then it's all about going in there and having fun okay this is similar i look at this like i have friends that are stock traders and i see them they walk into i walk into their office and they've got a wall of like 20 different monitors they're trading stuff and they're moving things back and forth it's like the most exciting thing in the world right like that's what the offer live back panel is you log in there you see all the different offers people are messaging you to promote your contact team and like this whole communication back and forth and back and forth you guys can create the most amazing partnerships right and you can launch these things very very quickly i can see you like finding influencers and helping them build a funnel and they launch it on their thing and then in you 20, 30 minutes now and money coming in for you and for them like there's so many opportunities in so many ways.

I just picture all of us logging every morning to our Off Lab account, looking at stats, looking at numbers, going to the inbox, checking things out and then making money, making deals, finding partnerships and finding friends.

That's what Off Lab is all about.

Thank you guys for being part of the series.

I will see you guys on live trading.

More importantly, I'll see you inside of the actual platform.

I hope you messaged me.

I hope that you promote one of my offers.

Hopefully I'll have a chance to put one of your offers inside of my funnels and we can all win and make money together.

Thank you guys so much for me, McCaudle Dickerson, the entire Offer Lodge team.

We're grateful for you, and we cannot wait to be working together with you once again.