A recap of my favorite moments from the last six funnel hacking live events. On this episode Russell recaps his favorite parts of all six past Funnel Hacking Live events, and gives a quick recap of this year’s event. Here are some of the awesome things you will hear in this episode:

-- Find out why Russell didn’t want to do another Funnel Hacking Live after year three.

-- Hear which year was Russell’s personal favorite and why.

-- And see how he thinks this year’s event went, and where it falls on his list of favorites.

So listen here to find out what Russell really thinks of the past six years of Funnel Hacking Live.

There were so many cool things. But for me, it just ended really well and I felt satisfied afterwards. And it was just like, I was happy and I’m excited about the future and where things are going and our shifts and our changes. Oh, we also watched a documentary with everyone called the Two Comma Club, which was really cool. We, there were so many, if you weren’t there I’m so sorry. You guys need to come to these events, seriously. If you knew what was going on, how it would touch and effect and change your destiny from that point forward for the rest of your life, there’s no way you would miss it.

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What’s up, everybody? This is Russell Brunson, I want to welcome you back from Funnel Hacking Live, back to the Marketing Secrets show.

Hey everyone, we just back from Funnel Hacking Live yesterday and then today I’m actually flying with my family out to Puerto Rico to hang out with a whole bunch of amazing marketers out there. And I just got this short window to sit and to message you guys.

And part of me wants to sit down and do a huge recap of the entire event, which was 4 days of insanity, by far the best Funnel Hacking Live we’ve ever had, which is so crazy because every year we get done and every year the question is “How in the world are we going to make this better than last year?” There’s no way even to top it and somehow, someway, every year it keeps getting better and better and better.

So anyway, without me doing a 14 hour episode kind of going into all the details of the stuff, I was thinking more about, this is our 6th event and I want to talk about just kind of the big things I got from each event, like the big takeaway’s and feelings I remember from each one. And for those who were at these events, hopefully it reminds you of that.

For those who aren’t, maybe it’ll, I don’t know, who knows what will come up for you. Worst case scenario, hopefully it will get you to go and book tickets for next year’s Funnel Hacking Live. Right now tickets are on sale for I think another day, and then we pull them off the discount. I don’t know if they’ll be available or not, but if they are go to FunnelHackingLive.com and get your tickets for next year’s event in 2021 back in Nashville again. It’s going to be amazing. So with that said, so again, this is our 6th Funnel Hacking Live.

The very first one, I remember it was a couple of months after we launched Clickfunnels and people in our community started gathering together and doing these little meetups, and they’d call them Hack-a-thons. Because me and Todd used to always talk about how when we launched Clickfunnels we’d go into these hack-a-thons and go into a room for a week or two weeks, drink a bunch of Redbulls and code all night.

Not going to lie, I don’t know how to code, and I didn’t drink Redbulls, but they would. And I’d be sitting there trying to do marking, and I’d be doing Dream 100 and writing copy and writing emails and sales pages, all the things to get ready for this launch. So we started seeing people doing that, and they were getting together, and they were like, ‘Let’s do a hack-a-thon, who wants to meet up in San Diego? Who wants to meet up in Austin?”

And we started seeing this happening and we’re like, “We should do an event.” I was actually really scared of doing an event because the last two events I had done in a prior business, one of them I had 300 people who signed up, and then only 100 showed up, which was bad. The next one we had 1200 people signed up and only 200 showed up, which was humiliating to me.

The second one wasn’t my own personal event, but I was part of the community that was doing it. I remember getting there, and we’re about to open the doors, and we looked out in the hallway, and we were like, ‘There’s no way there’s 1200 people here.” So we came back and we pulled out a thousand, probably 8 or 900 chairs out of the room, and it was the worst most painful, awkward, embarrassing feeling for me ever.

People came in, and there’s like 2/3rds of the room empty, no chairs, the first 3rd only had chairs. Ugh. Anyway, I was like, “I’ll never do events again.” So you know fast forward now, 3 or 4 years later we’re sitting at this thing and we’re like, ‘We should do an event.” And I’m like, “I don’t want to do an event.” And like, “If we don’t, someone else is going to start doing one in our community. It’s happening regardless, we have to do this thing.” So we finally agreed to do it.

We sold tickets, we sold 600 tickets to it, it was in Las Vegas, and I remember being so scared that nobody was going to show up. And we were also giving away my Ferrari at this thing, and we were launching our Dream Car Contest. So in the room we had the Ferrari and we had a Corvette, which I ended up keeping that Corvette for a couple of years afterwards, because it was pretty awesome.

But we had this event, I remember being so scared and I remember we started at noon day one. And we started at noon and I remember sitting at 11:00-11:30 sitting behind the stage scared to death that no one was going to show up. I remember peaking behind the curtain and looking out, and being blown away that we packed the room. It was packed.

And I didn’t know what to do, just one of those things where you’re freaking out about everything. Anyway, the event was amazing, we started on, again, it started at noon and we did the whole, that whole day, the second day we did a whole day, and the third day we went to about noon day three, and then we were done. So literally it was like a 2 day event, because I didn’t know what else to talk about, and you know, I was not an event person.

I do remember at that event was the first time we decided to launch a Clickfunnels certification program. And we were only going to have 50 people sign up for it, and it was one of the biggest table rushes I’ve ever seen. We ended up getting over a hundred people signed up for it, and we launched our certification program. I remember that event, it just, when it was done, just being so grateful. We weren’t sure if we were going to do it again, then finally decided, yeah, let’s do it again. So that was Funnel Hacking Live part one.

Funnel Hacking Live part two, we decided to go to San Diego, and we thought we’d make it a little bigger, so we went from 600 seats to 1200, which I was super scared about. So we did it in San Diego, and at that event, is…let’s see how did we do it? At that event is where we launched, no we re-opened up the certification program. I think year one was $3500, year two we raised it to $8000.

This is the first event we ever had a keynote speaker, so we had Marcus Lemonis come, which was so cool. And it was crazy, we did the whole event, we sold the certification program again. This time we did it differently. Darin Stevens who is a close friend of mine, he kind of showed me the way they sold things at events, so we kind of modeled his model, which basically I talked about and I had everybody leave the room, and then if they wanted to sign up they had to come back in with a $500 deposit.

And then they’d come back in, and then basically what we’d do is we’d sit down and explain to them what it was, and they had the chance to pay the $8000 at that point. And I remember everybody leaving the room and being so scared like, “What if nobody comes back in?” I was hyperventilating, and freaking out. And then we opened the door for those who wanted to sign back up and we had 120-130 people come back in and we did over $1 million in sales that event, and I was just like, “Oh my gosh, this is crazy.” So that was year two.

Same thing that year, I remember being scared to death no one was going to show up. That event was amazing. And the big thing I remember getting from that event, is I didn’t just have marketing teachers, like we did year number one. I brought in some personal development coaches. We had Sean Stephenson came and spoke, Marcus Lemonis who I thought was going to be a business speaker, but he was more personal development, he was amazing.

We had, I’m going to blank on his name, he was a comedian, like a personal development comedian, he came and spoke and it was awesome. Yeah, that was that year. It was cool. So then, fast forward to Funnel Hacking Live 3.0, we went to Dallas, and this time we had 1300 seats, so we got a little bit bigger. We ended up selling out really fast, which was kind of, I was like, “Oh my gosh, I guess this could be bigger than we thought.”

This was the first year that I ever invited Tony Robbins to speak, I was so excited and so nervous. We also shut down our certification program at that time, so we decided not to keep doing certifications, for reasons that could a be a podcast for another day. So I was like, “I need something different to sell at the event.” At each event we sell something. So we’re kind of thinking through that, and we did a couple of things.

Number one, that’s where we launched Actionetics MD, the very first time. And I remember that presentation killed it, it was one of my best presentations ever. I just went onstage and we had the “We are not ConfusionSoft” t-shirts, I ripped my shirt off, and the biggest table rush ever. Tons of people signed up for that, which was awesome.

But then later in the event we tried to sell the FHAT event so people would come to Boise for $10,000 and I totally screwed up that whole presentation. I think we got like 5 people to sign up and I was just devastated because the year before we did over a million dollars, and this year we did like 50 grand or something in sales.

And I remember I just, it would get me bummed out because that event, oh and I remember I tried to orchestrate the event, I had a whole new idea that I thought was going to be the greatest thing ever, so I orchestrated the event to set up the sale in this certain way, and it completely bombed and we lost money at that event. I was like, we should never do this again.

Especially after we spent so much money on Tony Robbins and all these things. I remember that event, and even leading up to the event, there was a couple of things, I did a presentation right before Tony and I didn’t go very well. I remember just, after that, before Tony got there, it was like, “I never want to do this again. I’m done. I’ll never do Funnel Hacking Live again.”

Then Tony came out and he just killed it. It was amazing. I remember afterwards, him on stage and the entire audience stood up and started chanting my name, and I was like, “I didn’t do anything. I brought tony, but I didn’t do anything.” But because I brought Tony to them, people were chanting. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is amazing.”

So after that event, I remember going back and first off, I didn’t want to do it again, but we decided let’s do it one more, let’s do it again. So we did. This time we decided to go to Orlando and have 3500 people, so it got bigger, and we invited Tony back again, and he said, “Yes.” which was really, really. And this time we hired Sage Productions, which if anyone knows Barry and Blue at Sage, they are an amazing team that helps you run events but also helps you choreograph how you sell at events as well.

So we changed how we did everything. And of all the events I think we’ve ever done, this was my, this was the one that was the most fulfilling for me for a lot of reasons. Number one, it was the first time we ever had the Operation Underground Railroad, we showed the Operation Toussaint video at that presentation.

Tim Ballard was there, we brought everything on, and it was insanely emotional. I remember at the end of night one, day one was amazing anyway, but at the end of night one we showed the documentary and me and Tim Ballard got on stage and we’re bawling our eyes out, I was an emotional wreck. It was bad.

And that was day one. Day two went off, day three went off, and then we launched the Two Comma Club X coaching program, and we were hoping to sell I think, 250 people was the goal, and night one we signed up l think 400 people. And I was just blown away. And the next day we did a re-pitch, which I’d never done before, and we had Myron Golden come up and do this re-pitch that he just kind of made up on the spot and he closed another 300 and something people.

So we had 800 and something people that signed up for the coaching program that year. I remember coming off stage and Melanie my assistant was back there, and I walked up to her and she’s bawling her eyes out, I’m like, ‘What’s the matter? What’s the matter?” and she’s like, ‘Everything was just perfect.” She’s like, “We ended up raising over a million dollars for OUR, the coaching program ended up doing over 10 million dollars in sales.” It was just like, and what’s crazy is that 3 weeks earlier was the 10x event where I did 3.5 million dollars in sales.

So it was like, this month was like insane. I did 3.5 million in sales in 90 minutes and then fast forward less than a month later and we did, I think it ended up being 12 million dollars in sales, 3 weeks later at our event. I was like, “this is insane.’ And to raise a million dollars for charity, and then Tony came and spoke again, it was awesome.

I was just like, definitely for me, that was probably my favorite Funnel Hacking Live, personally, just because it was, I don’t know. Success from getting people to sign up for coaching, and success for a charity, it was 3500 people. It was magical. That was my event that was like the magical one.

Then fast forward to last year, we decided to go to Funnel Hacking Live Nashville. And this time we grew. I think we ended up having 4300 people, if I remember right, who came to this one, it was in Nashville. Our backdrop to that was sick. We didn’t have Tony Robbins this year, and we decided to do a concert instead. So we had Lindsey Sterling at the end, and this event was amazing.

I could just, all the things were awesome, and we launched, we sold the coaching program again, we didn’t sell quite as many, but it was pretty close. I think we ended up with 750 people join the coaching program during that one, which was, I think the year earlier it was 850 people, if I remember right, this was 750. It wasn’t quite as big, but it was still amazing.

At the end Lindsey Sterling did a concert and I thought it was going to be cool, and it was so much cooler than I thought. It was ridiculous. The one thing I do remember is at the end of it, there was negative publicity after that event. Garret White did a really good presentation but he kind of, he uh, anyway, those who were there remember the buzz online, there was some negativity around it, we got some flack, and there was a lot of damage control.

It was tough because this whole event happened and it was emotional, and it was hard to raise another million dollars for OUR, which was insane, and then leaving and that night when I’m supposed to be relaxing, I was on social defending stuff and trying to… I remember the next day, it just, I don’t know, that event was good but it just ended in a way where I was just like, “Ugh.” It just didn’t, I didn’t feel like I had a chance to rest.

You know what I mean? It was like, “Ugh.” and got back in the real world and just…yeah, that event was amazing from a coaching and from a raising money thing, but it definitely wasn’t, just didn’t leave me fulfilled at the end like Orlando did. Orlando, when that ended I remember we took our kids to Disney World for the next week and I remember just being on cloud 9, where as last year we left and I just kind of had this uneasy feeling. So that’s how last year went.

So this year coming into it, I was like, “Ah, I want to make sure everything is perfect. I’m so scared, so nervous.” We also this year, those who heard, we sunsetted the Two Comma Club X coaching program, and we shifted things. We are now moving the entire Clickfunnels company 100% into a software subscription business. So anything that’s not sold in subscription is basically being shut down or faded away.

So the coaching program wasn’t part of the subscription. So what we basically did is we added a new tier of Clickfunnels called the Clickfunnels Collective, which starts at $1497 a month, and it gives you live phone support, gives you 9 user accounts, a bunch of other really cool things.

And then when people sign up for that, they actually get the coaching program for free, which ends up being a thousand dollar a month discount from what we sold coaching at last year. Plus, they get live phone support, plus they get user accounts. So it’s literally like the best offer ever, but the hard thing is the way we had to sell it goes against everything that I personally believe.

If you’ve gone through the 10x Secrets training course you know I talk about, never use phones to make orders at events, it’s the stupidest thing ever. You have to take paperwork from all these people, run to the back of the room to get the social proof, all these things. But we had these crazy limitations where we couldn’t do that because now it’s a software subscription, so people have to upgrade their Clickfunnels account, it’s the only way to get it.

So we had to shift things around and it ended up doing really good. It didn’t do as good as the two years prior, but we also knew there was going to be a whole bunch of things against us because we were explaining a whole new thing, that people didn’t understand. It’s confusing, they’re not filling out order forms, they actually have to login on their phone and we have to figure out how to get internet to work with everybody.

And it’s like AT&T and Sprint, or AT&T and Verizon worked in the room, but the other carriers didn’t. So then we had to go and hire, or pay 50 grand for internet access, so people who couldn’t get on could get internet. It was just kind of a stressful crazy thing. But all said and done, I think we ended up getting close to 500 people who upgraded to the new Clickfunnels Collective, which was awesome.

And then the event, now I want to talk about the event. The event was amazing. All the speakers were so good. I know I had 11 presentations this year, which is the most I’ve ever done. I just get addicted to being onstage and talking to everybody. I’m like, “This is my event, I want to be onstage as much as I can.’ And it was crazy because Bart Miller helps me do my clothing, he had, I think I had 10 different costumes this year, 10 different outfits.

So every time I spoke I had to change, get new clothes on, it was kind of ridiculous. But it was really, really cool. So the first couple of days I was stressed out because I was onstage so much. I didn’t get to hear all the presentations. But the ones I heard were like, they were so good. Just another caliber, another level, which was just amazing. So we had all of those.

And then the last day I had a chance to sit in the audience. So I remember, day four for me was amazing because it was the only day I had a chance to listen to every word of everyone. And that day I was so proud of Heather Quisel spoke. And I knew she was going to be, I knew she was going to be really, really good, but she was beyond that.

It was great, it was insane. And that was awesome, and Garret White came and spoke, and obviously I had some fear from last year, him speaking and kind of how the event left. And we talked a lot about that leading up to the event, and he came. And he’s the only speaker who spoke at all six events besides me, and it was by far his best one ever. It was so good.

It just, I can’t even tell you how good it was. And I know some people left the room because he uses the F-word, and I hate that, because man, what he left was the best….I’m stuttering trying to explain how good it was. It was amazing. After that we had Tony.

And this year, I don’t know if you guys saw or heard the podcast episode where Tony did the intervention with me, or watched the YouTube video, but I asked him and his team I said, “If Tony would be willing to do interventions this year, not just teach but go in the audience and actually work with people directly, that would be really, really cool.”

And it’s crazy, before the event I went back there and he couldn’t even walk. He’d done a whole bunch of these different stem cell shots in his legs to try and recover the night before something, and literally his team was carrying him to the side. He was trying to warm his legs up, he’d been trying for like 5 hours to warm his legs up, he couldn’t even walk, it was crazy. I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, how is Tony going to do this for the next 3 or 4 hours?”

He’s back there trying to warm them up, and he kind of gives me a hug before I go and introduce him, and he’s literally not even standing. He’s in so much pain. So I go out there to introduce him and I’m like, what do I even do? This is crazy. I don’t even know what to do, you know. So I introduced him and he comes out, and within a minute or two his adrenaline kicked on and you couldn’t even tell.

He was out there jumping and doing crazy stuff. It was amazing. He went out into the audience and did interventions with a whole bunch of people that were so powerful. And he ended up going for I think over 4-4 ½ hours, which was like, we didn’t get done til after 7.

And it was the best I’ve ever seen Tony, and I’ve seen Tony a lot live, and it was the best I’ve ever seen him ever. I just loved it, it was amazing. And all the other speakers, I wish I could go deep on all of them, everybody did so good this year. That last day was special for me, because I think it was the one that I was least stressed, so I had a chance to, I wasn’t running around running the event. I was actually participating.

But man, this year’s speakers were just off the charts. Everybody, it was, I could not have hoped or prayed for more. And those who were there, I know you guys just ate it up. We ended up raising money for charity, not as much as in the years past, we ended up raising, let’s see, a quarter of a million for OUR and then we had $52,000 for the quilt, so probably $350,000-ish, for OUR.

And then Village Impact, we gave a check for $200 and something thousand, because every time you guys build a funnel inside of Clickfunnels, we donate a dollar to village impact, so we did a $200,000 check for that. And then we raised another $120,00 from people in the room to build wells. So it was enough to build two wells in Africa, in Kenya for kids to get water, which was awesome too.

So that was the event. What else happened? There were so many cool things. But for me, it just ended really well and I felt satisfied afterwards. And it was just like, I was happy and I’m excited about the future and where things are going and our shifts and our changes. Oh, we also watched a documentary with everyone called the Two Comma Club, which was really cool.

We, there were so many, if you weren’t there I’m so sorry. You guys need to come to these events, seriously. If you knew what was going on, how it would touch and effect and change your destiny from that point forward for the rest of your life, there’s no way you would miss it. Oh, and by the way, Tony Robbins did his entire presentation without swearing. Yes, it was so cool. So thank you Tony for that.

A couple other speakers dropped the F-bomb, so I guess they made up for Tony. But for the most part we try to keep it as clean as possible. Anyway, so that was what’s happened the past couple of years at Funnel Hacking Live. Next year we’re coming back to Nashville. This last year we had about 4500 people, and I think next year, the capacity you get up to 5000.

Just so you guys know, how far, how events work if you want to do an event in a hotel, which is a better way to do events because it’s warmer, it’s like, I don’t know you’re in a hotel and it’s awesome, about 5000 is about as many as you can get into an event in a hotel. If you go beyond that, then you have to start looking at convention centers, which are, I do not like convention centers.

They’re colder, they’re like, I don’t, you go to a big huge thing, and there’s hotels around it, you have to walk to it, you lose the feeling of it. I don’t know if we’ll ever get, you know despite the fact that demand is growing, we’re over 100…well over 100,000 customers now, I don’t think we’re going to grow the venue, because I like doing the hotels and I don’t want to lose that feeling.

We’ll probably just keep raising the prices. I don’t know, supply and demand, whatever it takes. Anyway, that’s my goal, at least as of right now, keep it in hotels. So we’ll have 5000 next year, I hope one of those 5000 people are you. If you knew how much stress and energy and money we put into this, man, you would do everything in your power to make sure you were at the event.

Next year’s event is going to be different though. I’m not sure if I’m going to sell anything at next year’s event. We’ve talked a lot about potentially not doing it at all. Just doing 100% focusing on the teaching and training and all that kind of stuff. So I don’t know. I’m not saying we will or we won’t, but I do know that next year is going to be way different.

Oh, one cool thing we did this year which was brand new is we did a session called FunnelFlix, which we, I brought a big couch onstage and me and Devon and Todd like hung out on this couch watching FunnelFlix on the big screen, and what people didn’t know, it’s cool, we’re scrolling through FunnelFlix like, “Oh, that’s a new course, what’s this.” And we click on it, and it’s like Frank Kern, you know, and all the sudden the video starts playing, it’s Frank and all the sudden, boom, the walls open and Frank Kern walks out.

And no one knew Frank was coming, it was a huge surprise. People went nuts. And we had 7 or8 speakers like that, who all came up, and were all surprise guests, they came out during the FunnelFlix presentation, it was so awesome. We had so much fun. So anyway, so there’s a kind of history, re-cap of the last 5 or 6 years from my point of view. What happened, how sales went, what was good, what was bad, you know.

And I think every event has been special and unique for different reasons. My personal favorite still was just the Orlando event, just because of OUR and the first time we sold coaching at that level and the feeling afterwards. But I would say this year’s event was probably my personal second favorite one. It was good. It ended so well and I was happy and everyone was happy, we served at such a high level.

Speakers were better than I could ever dream for, and it was just really, really special and awesome. Anyway, I’m excited. The goal every year is how do we make this better than last year? And I’m not sure yet how to do that for next year, but I’ve got a little over a year to figure it out.

So I’m here to support you guys and make sure you have an amazing time. If you don’t have your tickets yet for next year go get them at FunnelHackingLive.com. I promise you we will make this show worthwhile. With that said, thanks you guys. Have an amazing day and we’ll talk to you all soon. Bye everybody.