When was the last time you got to be a fly on the wall for a live coaching session? Ali Abdaal recently interviewed me for his podcast & youtube channel where I dive into a powerful business coaching session for his business!

In this unique and public coaching session, we explore the complexities of scaling a $5 million business to $10 million while detaching the revenue stream from the founder's direct involvement. This conversation delves deep into the balance of leveraging personal branding for growth and making your business self-sustaining by building strong value ladders and evergreen strategies.

Throughout the session, Ali and I tackle the challenge of turning sporadic launches into consistent revenue streams without losing personal freedom. We explore how to take successful live launches and transition them into evergreen funnels that can continuously bring in sales. You'll hear my take on solving "math problems" (like optimizing funnels and conversion rates) versus "drama problems" (psychological barriers that prevent scaling), and why getting clarity on these distinctions can unlock exponential growth.

Key Highlights:​

Tune in to gain insights on creating a scalable business that frees up your time while continuing to grow your revenue!

What I'm getting from that is actually in my mind, I've been thinking, oh, the goal is 10 million because various people have said, oh, it's useful to work back from a revenue goal. But just changing the framing of it more towards, no, the goal is to change more people's lives with these products. And yeah, sure, the videos are good and sure the book is good. But really the people, for example, going through Productivity Lab and some of the people who've gone through YouTuber Academy have genuinely had their lives changed, and are just raving fans now.

Russell Brunson:
Hey, good morning everybody. This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Seekers podcast. I hope you guys are doing amazing today. I got something really cool for you. So almost probably two months ago or so, there's a YouTuber who I follow, who I look up to, who I love his stuff. His name's Ali Abdaal and he came to Boise Idaho to speak at the ConvertKit event, which is funny because you look at ConvertKit and ClickFunnels are both out of Boise Idaho, two great tech companies doing amazing things. And anyway, Nathan Barry over at ConvertKit does his, and they just changed their name to Kit, I think it's Kit.com now, anyway, he does his big events here in Boise Idaho and brings in amazing speakers. So once or twice a year we get a handful of rock stars show to Boise to come and speak.

And I saw in his Lineup that Ali was coming to speak and I was like, oh my gosh, this is amazing. So we messaged him and asked if he wanted to hang out. We can get to know each other a little bit.

And luckily for me, he knew who I was. He bought my stuff in the past. He'd been in my email list for since 20 years, since he was 14 years old or something crazy. And he also said he always thought I was a scammer, which was kind of funny. And then read Dot Com Secrets and it changed his life, and he went from making very few dollars to making a very lot of dollars online and it was really cool. And so we had a chance to hang out. And if you listened a couple episodes ago, man, probably two months ago now, I did a podcast episode where I was interviewing him about how he grew his YouTube channel and stuff like that.

And it was really cool. In fact, it was an awesome episode. If you want to go deep on YouTube in understanding that world, I highly recommend going back in the archives and finding the episode with him talking about that. But then after I got done doing the podcast interview with him, then he was like, "Hey, can I do a podcast interview with you?" And first I was like, "Sure, I'd love to." And he's like, I want to do it like this. We're basically pretend like I just hired you for a hundred thousand dollars and I want you to coach me through my business to show me what to grow. I was like, "Ah, you are very smart." So he flipped it into a consult call where basically I had a chance to sit with him and just consult him on his business, look what he was doing and show him how to grow and scale it beyond where he's at right now.

I think he said, I can't remember the top of my head now, I think it was $5 million or $6 million a year and wanted to know how to get to 10, 20, 30 million a year. And so that was the context of the conversation and it was awesome and we had a lot of fun. And so anyway, that's what this episode's going to be. We're going to show you guys the behind the scenes of the consultation with Ali Abdaal, showing him how to take his info product business and scale it. And I hope you enjoy it. It's a really fun one. And before I kick you guys into the episode, just one other note. As you guys know, I have my Inner Circle, which is my high-end coaching and mastermind group, and it's one of my favorite things I do in this business. And we meet together a couple of times a year.

We mastermind, we have a hundred entrepreneurs at any given time and it's amazing. Now, one really cool thing about the Inner Circle is when I first launched Inner Circle back in the day, I facilitated all of the mastermind sessions. Over the last three years, I haven't, I've got facilitators who facilitate, but I miss doing it. So this session, I'm actually personally facilitating all the Inner Circle mastermind groups, which are starting in three weeks from now. And the Inner Circle's almost sold out. There's a handful of spots left. And so if you are someone who has done over a million dollars in sales and you have interest in becoming part of my Inner Circle and have me literally facilitate your coaching, there's a lot of cool things that happen in Inner Circle. There's one that happens next a month. We come to Boise for two days and I will facilitate a mastermind group with you and about 25 other amazing entrepreneurs.

That's number one. Number two is then in the beginning of part of next year, we have a big group Mastermind where we can hang out with all hundred other Inner Circle members. And then number three, we have a thing called Deck in a Day where you come out and I do a one-on-one consult with you. So if you get value from Ali's consult, imagine me doing one-on-one with you specifically inside your business. The only way to get that done is number one, be Ali and have a huge YouTube channel and ask me to be on it. Or number two is to be part of the Inner Circle. So if you're interested in potentially joining the Inner Circle, we do have a rigorous application process to make sure you're a good fit. But if you're interested, now is the time I would need your applications in this week because our first Mastermind meeting start the very first week in October. So yeah, if you're interested, now is the time. And if you go to innercircleforlife.com, that's all spelled out Inner Circle F-O-R L-I-F-E dot com.

If you go there, that'll take you to the registration page where you can go and you can apply and be part of Inner Circle has some more details. It shows you some of the cool people that are in it. And then you could be out here boys and get in your own consult here in the next couple of weeks. So anyways, check that out if it makes sense for you, innercircleforlife.com. And then outside of that, I hope he has enjoyed this episode with my consultation with Ali Abdaal on how to grow his internal product business. And I'm sure you'll get two or four or 10 or a hundred things from this that help you in your journey as well. Thanks so much, and I hope he has enjoyed this episode. In the last decade, I went from being a startup entrepreneur to selling over a billion dollars in my own products and services online. This show's going to show you how to start, grow, and scale a business online. My name is Russell Brunson and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

Ali Abdaal:
Okay, Russell. So I was hoping we could pretend or act as if this is a business coaching session. You have people rocking up to your office for consults and stuff, people in your mastermind. So if I rocked up as a new client or something, how would a business coaching session with you, what would that look like?

Russell:
What does it look like?

Ali:
How do we start?

Russell:
It depends if we just met. If we just met, I try to figure out what in the world do you do? So I know what you do, which helps a lot. But I guess the biggest question is there's always a gap to where you are and where you want to be. What's that gap? What's it look like? I know where you're at right now, where are you trying to get to and then we can figure out what's missing.

Ali:
Okay, so last year we did about 5.5 million in revenue. We're operating at about 55, 60% growth, operating profit pre-tax, EBITDA, whatever the number that is. And that's cool.

Russell:
What percentage was it?

Ali:
55, 60, something like that. And what I would love to do in the game of entrepreneurship is to go from 5 million to 10 million, and also ideally try and dissociate the business revenue from me having to show up and continuously film YouTube videos. So I guess those are our two main things.

Grow revenue, but do it in a way allows me to take a month off without the business then tanking.

Russell:
Yeah, for sure. Where's the revenue breakdown, like core sales versus other stuff versus where's that 5 million come from?

Ali:
Yep, nice. So about two million-ish is from our content, which is AdSense on YouTube videos and sponsorships. And the other three million-ish is from course sales. And so last year the only course we had was our part-time YouTuber Academy, which is just a single product. We were doing that as a life cohort for about three years. And then last year we switched it to evergreen, we did a final cohort, did a big launch, did 2 million for that launch, which was nice. And so we have that as a thousand dollars self-paced course now. And we also have a 5K a year coaching-y program for YouTubers, our YouTuber Accelerator, where my team gives people one-on-one support for growing their channels. We think 5K for 12 months is probably way too cheap given how much of a nightmare it is to fulfill on that. So we're now thinking of counting that-

Russell:
And people charge for something similar.

Ali:
We were feeling like, "Oh, we need to give so much value." And then we're like, "Oh crap, we've signed ourselves off for this 12 month thing." So we're thinking of turning that into 5K for three months, which feels a bit more reasonable. We're thinking of turning our YouTuber self-paced course into a thousand dollars a year community membership type thing. We're thinking of maybe adding in a $300 product. But then a month ago we created a new value ladder for productivity, which is the thing that I'm known for. It was a bit accidental that we ended up making all this money from YouTube because I'm not known for the guy who teaches people how to grow on YouTube. That's not my schtick.

My schtick is how to be more productive. So we launched Productivity Lab, which is a thousand dollars a year membership community, and we sold 500 spots within 48 hours, and we capped it at 500. And that's been going for a month now and people love it and it's great. And so we really want to scale that up, but without diluting the quality of the community by having too many people in it, we're thinking maybe adding a one-on-one productivity coaching offer on the back end and maybe a $300 course at the top of the value ladder as a way of getting people in. So I just threw a lot of that. I don't know if any of that makes sense.

Russell:
A hundred percent. Right now. So basically each of those you sold during a launch, so you did a launch, I'm guessing that you were sending emails, you were creating videos specifically for it, and then anything else is happening when you're launching this?

Ali:
So we start by building a wait list by funneling traffic from socials and from YouTube occasionally, and from my newsletter, into this wait list, we build up a wait list and then we do a launch sequence, like 10 to 15 days worth of emails to that wait list. And then that's how we do the launches when we were doing launches for our YouTuber academy and when we did the launch for Productivity Lab. But where I'd love to get to, and I'd love to get your take on this is for me, launches are quite a stressful way to run a business. And when we were running live cohorts for our YouTuber Academy three times a year, it was a real fingers crossed this one week where we can get sales out of a four month period, let's hope we make enough money. And that feels stressful. So I'd love for the revenue to be a little bit more chill, a little bit more recurring, which is why we like the idea of turning YouTuber Academy into evergreen self-paced course.

Russell:
Yeah, the launch game that people live or die by it, sometimes they hit a launch and they get 3, 5 million in sales and then a year later they did a launch again, and this time it hits a hundred thousand dollars in sales, but they built up thinking it's going to be as big, all that kind of stuff.

Ali:
We had exactly that.

Russell:
It stresses me out.

Ali:
During the pandemic, the course completely printed cash straight after the pandemic, it stopped printing cash and we were like, "Uh-oh." All of our projections were based on just continuing to print cash. Money does not grow in trees. That's all kind of bad. So I want to avoid that kind of state of affairs.

Russell:
So right now if you're not doing the launch though, sales aren't coming in, is there evergreen working now or?

Ali:
Yeah, so we have one evergreen product, so actually if I draw it out it might be easier. Nice. Oh, nice thick pens. So we have our YouTube value ladder and we have our productivity stuff. So on the YouTube we have a $1 self-paced course which upsells people into a 1K self-paced course, which in theory gets people to apply for the 5K 12 month program. But we-

Russell:
When you said apply, so you call them on the phone to sell it or what's the cost?

Ali:
Yeah, we had a sales guy, so they would apply and then the sales guy would go on the call with them and then if they were the right fit, great. We've closed sales for this right now because we want to revamp the offer, because it was a bit much.

Russell:
So each, this is a dollar just for-

Ali:
Oh, it's like a YouTube for beginners course. So roughly we get maybe, I don't know, 200 sales a week of this, 200 per week. Roughly 4% of people take the upsell to the thousand dollars product. And overall of the thousand dollars product, we get 20 to 30 sales per week. So this is doing 20K a week, but I'd love-

Russell:
This is evergreen coming through?

Ali:
This is evergreen and this is currently closed because we are trying to figure out what to do with it.

Russell:
And is this they buy this as an upsell in funnel or is there some other mechanism that you're selling this in?

Ali:
Oh yeah. So they could either buy this directly, there's a $27 order bump, thank you for that idea, of which maybe 30% of people take that. And then also they could just buy this directly. So a handful of sales each week trickle in from the upsell, but a bunch of sales come in directly from them just landing on the thinker because this is really aimed at complete beginners. This is how to get your first two videos out there, whereas this is more like the whole shebang, everything about growing on YouTube.

Russell:
Yeah. Okay. And then do you sell this through a webinar or just a VSL or-

Ali:
A landing page. A really, really long landing page that really needs to be shorter, but that's the only way we sell this.

Russell:
Is it copy based or video based or what's on the landing page?

Ali:
There is a video at the top, but then there's shit tons of copy.

Russell:
Why do you want to make it shorter?

Ali:
I don't know, it just feels like it's a bit too long actually. Interestingly, our conversion rate on this landing page is about 0.4%.

Russell:
Oh dear.

Ali:
0.4% conversion rate on this landing page. So from a person visiting landing page to sales, that’s 0.4%, which feels a bit low. Because it's mostly organic. We started doing paid a couple of months ago and I actually don't know what the conversion rate is of paid versus organic. So that's actually something to think about, P versus O.

Russell:
And then the organic side, do you have a video specifically promoting this or every video in your description approaching this or what's…?

Ali:
Got it. Good point. So we have every video promoting this thing, but also I have a handful of videos on my channel that are how to grow on YouTube. Those get evergreen traffic.

Russell:
Very specific.

Ali:
And I casually mentioned, oh by the way, I've got of course, and I think people are clicking on those, and we have UTM tracking, but I haven't looked at it in a while, so that's a good point.

Russell:
Cool. Okay. I understand that.

Ali:
You understand this? And then on this end, we basically have this 1K per year community membership type thing, which we launched last month. The idea behind this is that it's Peloton for productivity. So every day there's like Zoom co-working sessions. Every week we're doing facilitated weekly planning. Every month there's a session. Every quarter I do a quarterly webinar to plan your next quarter. We want to do in-person events and everything. And all of this is 1K a year. And at the moment we've got 500 people in this. We've been doing it for a month. They're all really happy. And we'd love to scale this value ladder and also this one to get us to this goal of 10 million in a way that doesn't require me to always be showing up and showing videos.

Russell:
And the revenue from this versus this, this is...

Ali:
This did about 3 million last year. And this so far has done well 500K.

Russell:
Oh yeah, 500K a year. Cool. Which one are you more passionate about?

Ali:
This one.

Russell:
Really? Interesting.

Ali:
I love talking about productivity. I no longer love talking about YouTube. This is our YouTuber Academy, and so I'd love to get to the point where, to be honest, my team is now more YouTube experts than I am. It's so systemized that I just rock up and do my thing. And so my YouTube producer is an actual expert on how to grow on YouTube. And so I want him to be doing mini courses and webinars and stuff within the YouTuber Academy, because he's boots on the ground. Our editors are fricking amazing and so I want them to be doing stuff. I don't know anything about video editing anymore. So it's like... Yeah. Whereas this productivity is my jam, this is what I enjoy.

Russell:
Was it hard to sell the thousand a year thing for your-

Ali:
Yeah, so we had a wait list of 30,000 people, so they signed up before they knew what the price point was and we did some post sign up segmentation and found 70% of them were making under two grand a month so they wouldn't qualify for the product anyway. But no, we sold 500 within two days. Within the first 10 minutes we got half the spot sold. So it seemed like there was a lot of demand for this offer, but also my whole shtick is productivity. We've got 5.5 million subscribers for productivity and this was the first time we've released a product other than my book, which is about productivity.

Russell:
Very cool. Did you close down signups for that or just...

Ali:
Yeah, this is now closed. Yeah. And we're building a wait list. We've now got 50,000 on the wait list for this. But again, our post thingy segmentation is a bit dodge, so I don't exactly know how many of them would actually qualify to buy this product.

Russell:
And you're making them qualify by how much money they make or by what?

Ali:
One of the questions is how much money do you make and that's helpful.

Russell:
Do you only sell people who qualify or do you sell it to anybody?

Ali:
As in we sell to anyone, but more because it's a low friction sale, they can just sign up. But I'm assuming that if someone makes less than 2K a month, they're not going to buy this.

Russell:
You'd be blown away.

Ali:
Really?

Russell:
A hundred percent.

Ali:
I'm also assuming that if they're outside of the US, the UK and Europe, they're also not going to buy the thing, which broadly holds. 70% of our customers are US. Average age is 38, so they all have jobs/ are entrepreneurs.

Russell:
Yeah, I'm going to tell you a funny story about Hermosi. So when Hermosi shifted from going out and doing gym launches for people and he started selling the license to his product. The very first phone sale he did it, he sold it for 6K and the guy was like, "Done." He's like, "Oh." So then the next call he is like, "It's 8K." And the guy's like, "Done." He's like, "Oh." So the next guy is 10. He kept going up until eventually it landed, I think it was $36,000 a year to sign up. But it's crazy is the average gym owner only takes home $25,000 a year. So they were paying more than their yearly take home for this thing because they believed it was going to help them to make more. So anyway, just from a pricing standpoint, people will buy what they want, not what they necessarily can afford or need. Anyway. And price elasticity is huge, especially on something like this where if you have someone launch a YouTube channel, how much money a year could or should they be making off of a YouTube channel?

Ali:
Oh, if it's big then stupid numbers.

Russell:
But for an average person, someone who's the person who's coming in here and starting, what do you think year one?

Ali:
Nothing. I think for beginners to YouTube, YouTube is not a make money scheme. It's only a make money scheme for a very small number of people.

Russell:
Is this positioned as a make money thing?

Ali:
No, it's positioned as a we'll save you time on the journey of growing your YouTube channel. Maybe you'll make money, maybe you won't, but I guarantee in two years if you do it every week, it'll change your life. That's our whole pitch. And our most common customer is the 38-year-old accountant who always wanted to start a YouTube channel because she has a passion for knitting and wants to share that, and doesn't really care about making money from me. And of course if she made money from me, it's a bonus. So that's about 70%.

Russell:
They just want to talk. That's crazy.

Ali:
Yeah, they just love it. And 30% is, I'm an entrepreneur, I've got an offer I want leads, help me out.

We also in the background, we're trying to do a 10K a month thing, which is done for you videos where we have, I think your friend Ryan Dice as our first client. Oh, So we're working with him to try and do done for you for his YouTube channel.

Russell:
He is filming and editing or just editing or what?

Ali:
So he's filming the stuff and then we're doing all the editing, the titles, the thumbnails, the whole shebang. So one of my team members is leading on this and trying to grow this as a mini agency.

Russell:
Yeah, that's really cool.

Ali:
That's a bit of a experimental one.

Russell:
You see if you like that business… Okay, awesome. So with any business there's like a thousand things you could do. Someone's looking at if this was mine and say I bought this company from you tomorrow, what would be the first thing I would do? And so I think I would focus here first because bigger revenue and I feel like also right here, you're not ready to turn this into 5,000 people. You said you're nervous about just the fulfillment and keeping the community.

Ali:
Yes.

Russell:
You have a thing, you want to make more money, but you want to keep the community small. It's like-

Ali:
Yeah. I want to-

Russell:
It's a weird-

Ali:
I know. So I want more people to come into this, but I don't want the experience to be diluted.

We're trying to figure out ways to do this. Do we do quarterly launches where I do a quarterly planning webinar and then we do a 90 day cohorts so that then they're in a smaller group of people and so they feel as if they're part of a small group, we're thinking of spilling them into Harry Potter houses within that. So there's another small group. And so if we can nail how do we cut this community into smaller groups that they feel that personal connection in, then this can really scale.

But we haven't nailed that yet. So we're still in the experimenting. Our next cohort for this is launching next month, and so we're going to let in a couple of hundred more people in, experiment with this 90 day model and just figure out how do we get this to scale without it ruining the experience.

Russell:
Is there a progression over time inside of here, for your program is like they're trying to get to this level and is there progression in it or is it more circular?

Ali:
So the idea, the promises will help you double your productivity. And so they do a survey at the start and a survey at the end. And actually we're actually pretty close to doubling people's productivity, is just doubling in just a month, which is nice. But it's not like it's going to take your business from 10K to a hundred. It's more like, hey, these are just generally useful habits where every day you rock up and do some deep work. Every week you do a weekly review and it's just a thing that keeps on going.

Russell:
The reason I'm asking is, and I know when I saw this problem, if there's a progression of, okay, someone comes into this and they're going to go through this and then they're going to graduate or get a certificate or something, they've accomplished this, now they're going to move to the next step. And there's milestones. Is there milestones that someone can progress through or is it more circular? It's just like you keep-

Ali:
It's more circular. It's more like CrossFit, like exercise classes. Fundamentally you keep showing up to the exercise classes to stay in shape. It's that sort of idea, but for productivity.

Russell:
Got you. Okay. There's probably some version, because my biggest fear on this one for you is I've noticed with people, if there's a subconscious block to growing something, they won't grow. And so right now you have a subconscious block, because you don't want to mess up the community. And so for you to go from 500 to 5,000 members would not be hard technically. And subconsciously you're going to fight it, because you're like, "Ah..." You know what I mean?

Ali:
Interesting.

Russell:
So yeah, usually it's almost always psychology that keeps people back. Very rarely tactics.

Ali:
Okay.

Russell:
So that'd be the thing is I think if you can fix that problem, then that one will open up. Again, I don't know the answer, but we're doing this right now in our certification program because we had the same thing where people are coming in and all of a sudden we're selling it throughout the year. So you come in and you have someone who's been going through the program, they're great funnel builder, they're doing all sorts of stuff. But then the problem is brand new person comes in and they're asking questions, and the person who's been doing this for a year and a half is annoyed by this whole thing.

And so the way we're restructuring ours, and it's really, really cool, but it's based on there's modules and milestones. So I look at a timeline here where it's like you come in and then this is the first milestone. So in our world, it's you make your first 10K as a funnel builder, then the next milestone there's 50K, and there's 100K, and then there's a million. So these goals you are moving towards. And inside there there's these little badges that people have to do to get the next goal.

Ali:
Nice.

Russell:
And then what's cool about this is we have a process where it's when you first come in, you have me, the guru teaching, but then internally there's mentors. So people who are past the 10,000 mark, part of their role to get to here is to become mentors. So they're coming in. And instead of being annoyed like, oh, this person's a beginner. They're like, "Hey, I am going to mentor." So they help get somebody to this spot. And as soon as you get to the spot, then you get the new mentors who have been here, but then you also become a mentee for people who are behind you. So now they're moving towards, but also pulling back.

And then what's cool, then you can keep dumping people in here and they're going through this. And when someone's on a call or question you are like, "Oh, well I'm on level three right now. I'm on level four." Then they know exactly where they're at. And then you or the people how to help them like, "Oh, I was stuck level three too." The biggest problem is you got to figure out how to do... It helps move the progression. So this gives you the belief we could have 5,000 people and it doesn't get overwhelming for the community. If you can figure out some version of this for your, I don't know exactly what it look like, but-

Ali:
Nice, that's what-

Russell:
Until you're pumped about getting 5,000 people in there, it's going to be hard for you to get more than that. You know what I mean?

Ali:
Yeah. Because right now, if we 10Xed it overnight, I'd be like, "Uh-oh."

Russell:
You're subconscious mind will definitely burn that to ground before we lets you get there.

Ali:
Okay, interesting. Yeah.

Russell:
Yeah.

Ali:
So once we nail, yeah nice, something like there's milestone, small group experience, something like that, at the point where I feel like, "Hell yeah, we can scale this to 5,000." Then it becomes a lot easier to do.

Russell:
Yeah, there's always it's either a math problem or a drama problem. And-

Ali:
A math problem or a what?

Russell:
A math problem or a drama problem.

Ali:
Oh okay.

Russell:
A math problem can be solved with, okay, we just create a funnel, drive some of that, that's easy.

The drama, it's not real, but it's in our heads and that'll sabotage us solving the math problems.

Because we're like, "Ah." You know what I mean? So that'd be like solve that, then we can talk about the funnels there. This one, I feel like this seems like it's all in place where if you went to 200 a week, you wouldn't stress out.

Ali:
No, I would love that.

Russell:
Yeah, you'd be fine. So this is the easier one to solve right now it's just a math problem versus this is a drama problem.

Ali:
Interesting. That's fun. I'm going to label this. This is great. I have never heard of this framing of it before, but that's cool. So this is math and this is drama.

Russell:
Solve the drama and then we'll do the math. That'll be-

Ali:
Yeah.

Russell:
I got it from Brooke Castillo who's the greatest life coach of all time. She came to our audience and started talking about it. It's either math or drama. And it's funny, because we did a whole Q&A and people stuck. And every time they come in it's like, okay, before answers, is this is math problem or drama problem. It's drama. Hey, it's just solve that because it's not real. It's psychology versus actually solving it.

Ali:
Damn. That's really, really good.

Russell:
So then go attack like, okay, it's the math problem we got to solve is just this, because everything else is all you got to raise this for 15K or something. But the basic thing is this is the bottleneck.

Then if you fix that, because if you get 20, 30 a week organically off of 0.4 percent conversion rate, if you fix this piece that becomes 200 weeks, not hard. You're going to still get the organic and then it gives you ability to turn on ads. So wish I could see this page. So this page right now, I'm assuming you're saying it's-

Ali:
Yeah, it's really-

Russell:
Video sales letter of you selling it? And then long form-

Ali:
Looooong.

Russell:
How long is the page do you think?

Ali:
Tens of thousands of words. We've just recently we're working with a CRO agency. We've installed Microsoft's Hot Jar equivalent, whatever it's called, found out what areas the heat map are more. It's like, "Okay, cool." Some of the testimonials are outdated. Some of the growth graphs that we have are outdated. So there's basic things that we can do to tweak that.

Russell:
So the bigger thing is I am sure there's ways you optimize this. Usually optimization go from 0.4 To 0.6 Or something. So it's not a radical shift. The radical shift is shifting the funnel the way you're actually selling it. Because selling a thousand offer through a video sales in a long form page, it's a tool, but it's not the most effective tool.

Ali:
Oh, okay.

Russell:
What do I mean? So shifting the tool is how you do it. For me to sell a thousand dollar course, there's two tools that are the best in the world to sell a thousand dollar course, and one is a webinar, one's a challenge. And so it's shifting the tool. Because on a webinar, if you get people on a webinar and they watch the presentation, if you do a good webinar, 10% of people who come to the webinar will buy. So it changes the math of it all.

Ali:
And are we talking live or are we talking about fake live or are we talking about-

Russell:
The very first time is live, and I do it live a few times until you master the pitch and then you transition. So for example, I launched ClickFunnels. We tried six different times to launch ClickFunnels and I was trying sales letters, I was trying tools that work, but not well. And I was trying to think of the thing. And then four or five months into ClickFunnels, I got asked to speak at an event. And all the older versions I was selling just a trial. "Sign UP for a trial." And it was costing us 200, 300 bucks to get someone TO sign for a trial. It wasn't working right? So my friend's like, "Hey, come speak for my event and I want you to speak, and then at the end of your presentation, I want you to sell ClickFunnels." I was like, "Nobody's buying ClickFunnels." He's like, "Well make a thousand dollar version that you can bundle it together and then make an offer."

So spoke at this event, did the webinar, and in a room with 300 people, we signed up 100-something people. I was just like, "Oh my gosh, this is amazing." So I did the webinar. So it wasn't webinars, it was on stage, but I did the presentation and it crushed. And it was interesting is when I was leaving the hotel to go fly home, I was in the lobby and there was this lady around to me. She's like, "Oh, your presentation was awesome." She's like, "The problem is I'm a coach and so I can't use Click funnels." I was like, "What do you mean?" And she's like, "Well, during your presentation you showed how you use funnels to build a supplement company, but I don't have a supplement company. I'm a coach and I can't use click funnels." And I was like, "I have coaching funnels too.

This works for coaches." And she's like, "Are you serious?" And she had no idea. So she ran back into the event room, it was still going on another day, and she grabbed one of her friends, they grabbed order forms that came out. Both of them handed me an order form. "We had no idea this would work for coaches. I thought it was just for supplement people." I was like, "Oh my gosh, I need to mention the fact." So on the fly home, I take my presentation and I added in two or three slides like, "Hey, if you're a coach, this is how it works." And if you're a... This is how it works." So I could tweak the webinar a little bit. So then when I got back home, I started lining up webinars to start doing more of these webinars.

And I remember the very first day back, I had two webinars lined up. So I did a webinar in the morning. I think I had 600 people register for it, did the webinar and we did $30,000 in sales off the webinar, which is not bad. I was like, "This is pretty good." But then before the next webinar happened, I had another webinar that night that had that same amount of people registered. And my business partner, Todd, he went and he exported all the questions from the first webinar and he was like, "Hey, just so you know, a minute 12, everyone's asking this question, they're confused."

I looked at my slides and I'm like, "Oh." So I just resolved that. I added it. And then he's like, "Over here, they were confused." So we found all the sticking spots. And so I found all those things in the offer. They were confused about the offer. So we tweaked that a little bit. We changed some stuff
And then I did a webinar, same size audience, and that time we did over a hundred thousand dollars in sales. And I was like, "Dang." So then after that, then Todd exported the questions again, and we did that 70 times.

Ali:
70?

Russell:
70 webinars. To the point where it got so good. I can do the webinar by memory now. But every concern before it came up, I was able to resolve it. If you watch it, you had to buy. And so long-term, definitely evergreen it. But short-term you got to do it at least three or four times to go through that process of just figuring out what those things are.

Because the first time, you never know, but the audience will tell you exactly where they're confused. So that's what I would do first, let's create a webinar that's selling this thousand-dollar course and just do a live one to your audience. We test it. In fact, I literally see this right now. Last week I bought Salesfunnels.com. So we did a webinar there. We had 10,000 people register, did the webinar, found the mistakes, tweaked it all, and then that was last Thursday. So today I'm doing it again. We got 4500 people registered for today. I'm going to do it again and then we're going to tweak it again, and I'll do that three or four times. And then now we'll have the evergreen version, then we'll turn it on and then we'll have 30,000, 40,000 people on to watch that webinar for the next two or three years. We used to driving traffic and it's just crushing thousand of sales.

Ali:
So the ads are getting people to the webinar and then you're just measuring the effectiveness of... And that's figured out your-

Russell:
Then you figure out, okay, it's going to cost me $10 to get someone register for webinar. From there, we get 30% show up rate and 30% show up rate, we get 10% to buy, and the follow up sequence usually will double the sales. And so you just look at the math on that. It's like, "Okay, cool." Right now we spend $10,000 a week and we make $30,000. So then you then go to a hundred thousand a week, make 300,000, go to a million a week. It is just ramping up the equation. Just like a slot machine at that point, put money in, you get it back out.

Ali:
Damn.

Russell:
But that's the magic. For this, that's the best way to sell this is creating a webinar and it's doing it three or four times. Once you're an audience, once it's gold ads, it's traffic and you perfect it. And then now you evergreen it and then moving forward that thing's just selling for you 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Ali:
Dude, that's sick. Can I do webinars on ClickFunnels?

Russell:
A hundred percent.

Ali:
Sick.

Russell:
Yes.

Ali:
Perfect.

Russell:
You better do them in ClickFunnels, they don't work anywhere else.

Ali:
Okay, talk to me about challenge. How does challenge work?

Russell:
The challenges are very similar to webinars. Webinars traditionally it's a ninety minute presentation. So everything's coming registered. Ninety-minute presentation, you make an offer, make the software at the end of it. And then there's the whole follow-up sequence and all this stuff.

Challenges, traditionally people do a three-day challenge or a five-day challenge. It's the same script as the webinar, but it's broken. If you look at my webinar script, it's basically, this is the clock. So this is an hour, so I break it down into four quarters.

There's four things you teach during the webinar to break false beliefs to get them to want to buy. And then the second half you're going to do 30 minutes, which is your pitch. And so it's a ninety-minute presentation. With the challenge, it's the same structure, but it's broken up by day. So day number one, you do basically this part and this part. Day number two, you're doing this part. Day number three, do this. And day number four is this. This is broken up longer form. So it's nice for educators because here, I have 15 minutes talk about this. You got an hour or an hour and a half, you get more teaching time.

You get more time in front of people. The challenges were great. The only downside of challenges is, I don't know, doing the five-day challenge, five or six times to perfect it. It is a lot of work and it's harder to evergreen on challenges, because there's more break-off points. There's people registered and people show up at day one, but not day two and then day two not day... There's more breakage points. Whereas here, I'm a webinar guy, I love webinars, because I can maximize how people are showing up and selling. And I can control this and tweak this a lot easier than a challenge. But we have people in our community who just kill challenges. So they're both good tools. It just depends on the style you like better.

Ali:
That's very interesting. And if we turn this into a 1K for 12 months type offer where you get access to the community as well and events and stuff, say the same thing, a webinar is better to sell a 1K product.

Russell:
A hundred percent. Yeah. That price point, selling a thousand or offer off of just a straight sales page is very hard. One of the hardest. So 0.4% is not bad on a thousand dollar offer. I would say that's not bad at all.

Ali:
Okay, cool. That's your thought. Yeah, because the conversion rate on this one is 20% because it's a $1 product. I'm like 0.4%? I heard industry average was 1%. Surely you can double it.

Russell:
Not on a thousand offer though. But then the other thing is like's cool, if someone registers for webinar, they go through. So if you look at my webinar sequence, so the way I do it is we start the sequence over every week. So there's Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. And so this is the sequence. So what we do is we buy ads Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and half a day Thursday. And then Thursday I usually perform my webinar. It doesn't have to be Thursday, it can be Wednesday, for me, for my audience, my time, I've found that's been the best time for me. And then that's done. And then what happens on a Friday, then you give them a replay. Saturday, then what I try to do is I try to think about different modalities. Everyone consumes things different ways. Some people like to watch YouTube videos and be like podcasts, some people like to read.

So I'm trying to give them different modalities. Because some people are going to show up live, some people will never show up live. So you might get 20 to 30% who actually show up live. Then 70% didn't. So then I'm charging those other 70%, get them to watch a replay/ because they want it, they just want it on their time schedule. So then they have a day or so to go through and watch it here on Friday. Then Saturday I start shifting, okay, what are the modalities? I'm like, "Oh, the way we position is those who didn't have time to actually watch the webinar. I got a clip notes version of the webinar. You could actually read the whole thing." And I'll send them to this page right here.

So this is the cliff notes of the webinar so they can watch the shorter video, read it all. And so what happens is you start picking up a lot of people here, but most of them already went through the sequence. So the conversions will go up no matter what because there's so much pre-framing that happen here and here. Then you get people to read it. So it has a different modality than people who buy here. And then usually Saturday and Sunday, this is where you try to bring in urgency, Sunday and then even Monday. And so what happens here is then we give urgency and scarcity. So basically it's like this campaign shuts down Monday at midnight.

And so you got to Monday to decide to go all in. And so it goes down there and then Monday at midnight, the offer closes down for everyone in this cohort. And so if they click on the links after midnight, it redirects them back to the registration page, then go re-register, but it starts the whole sequence over. But it does close down, I can't buy anymore. And then Monday we start back over, new ads, new funnel, start driving traffic and then just keep it going through.

Ali:
Bloody hell. And so can people then buy this evergreen. Oh, okay. So they really can, but also-

Russell:
People always say, why do you close it on the card if they can still buy it? It closes down. This sequence closes down and the offer disappears. You can't buy it through this funnel. They can go find this page, they could buy it or they can go and go through the whole sequence again. But it's legitimate urgency and scarcity. Then we close this down at midnight where it's like you can't buy it.

So this is what happened last two weeks or last week we did the webinar, 10,000 people registered. As soon as Thursday started, we turned off the registration page for the next week. Boom. And so what's been happening is last week, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, people are still registering from the ad. So we had 4,000 people that line up for today and then we'll hit that one.

And so today the flip the new registration page and just keeps rolling and keeps rolling and-

Ali:
Wow, that's so cool. Yeah. And then do you connect these up to your CRM through ClickFunnels and stuff as well?

Russell:
Yeah, ClickFunnels is the CRM. So it’s all in one.

Ali:
Oh it is.

Russell:
We do everything in ClickFunnels. Yeah.

Ali:
Nice.

Russell:
Yeah.

Ali:
That's so cool.

Russell:
And that's it. And then I said you can still do YouTube videos and push to like, hey, go watch my web class about whatever, which is great.

Ali:
But that's a nice pitch, because it's a free thing. And they're getting value.

Russell:
And then from ad standpoint, putting ads, webinars on ads is the best way we do it. Of all the things we drive traffic to, the thing that's most profitable is paid ads or webinars because we're making more money back here. But also we get so many leads coming in. And the other thing you can do is that also is like this right here. So when someone registers for the webinar on the thank you page, you go, "Hey, by the way, go to my dollar thing." So you'll start selling tons of these too just by having it in the sign-up flow.

Ali:
Okay, question, should we have a $300 midpoint between these two things? Because we're thinking of making this a thousand dollars a year as a thingy with all of the stuff, or a lighter version of the YouTuber operating system for 300 as a self-paced course?

Russell:
Yes. I say yes, but where you position it in your sequence is key. This would still be the thing I'd sell on the webinar, because it's got the highest price point, easiest for you to make money back and be profitable. And then what we typically do is after the campaign closes down for them and Monday midnight closes down, Dean Grossfield and Tony Robbins do this the best. They called it the no customer left behind campaign. So when Tony and Dean did the big launches, they close it down. A week later, they message everyone like, "Hey, I hope you enjoyed the challenge or the webinar. If you did enjoy it, if you signed up, congratulations, excited to work with you. If you didn't, we don't want to leave anyone behind. We want everyone to leave with something." And so they have this other offer.

So the offer they put out is Tony Robbins innercircle.com. It's a hundred bucks a month and you get a Tony Robbins lucky hat and you get whatever, it's a hundred bucks a month. And they send everyone to that after the sequence is over and they do 8 or 9 million dollars a year off of this offer that's on the backside of it. So what I would do is after you've gone through this, you've in your best case trying to get this, then when the campaign ended, I'd come back and say, "Hey, for those who weren't able to get started, we have this really cool thing. Maybe you could afford it. This is something to you started and get you blah, blah." So that's where I would position that in the sequence.

Ali:
So that's when it comes to ads. But let's say if an organic lead from YouTube were to go to youTuberacademy.com or whatever, would you show that, "Hey, we've got 300, we've got 1000, we've got apply now?

Russell:
In your description you mean?

Ali:
No, just on the page. If you go on youTuberacademy.com, it will say, "Hey, welcome to YouTube Academy. We have these three things for you. We've got a 300 thing, we've got a $1000 thing, we've got a 5K thing. Is that-

Russell:
I think that's fine for organic. But in the paid world, no one ever sees that. They always-

Ali:
They only see the funnel.

Russell:
They only see what you point them to.

Ali:
Yeah.

Russell:
So yeah, I wouldn't have any problem with that somewhere else. But again, I'm not as good organically, so none of my people would ever see that. It'd be hard for him to find it.

Ali:
Yeah. This is the thing. Even with Brendan stuff, I signed for his experts academy through an ad, and I was trying to find it on Google. I was like, "Why does he make it so hard for me to pay money to him? Because I'm trying to recommend it to people." I'm like, "I literally can't find the URL." But yeah.

Russell:
And that's why.

Ali:
Yeah, that's the one.

Russell:
We want to be able to control the buying situation. Because you think about it, socially of all this chaos, all these people, and it's like, for me it's like, hey, take chaos or ads, whatever. It's like I need to move them to a spot where I'm controlling the conversation. And that's cool about the funnels. It gives you the ability to slow things down and take them through the logical sequence of events you need to be able to make the argument of why they need to buy your thing and all that kind of stuff.

Ali:
I always struggle with this. So Jakob, who's our head of marketing, he's been pushing me to do webinars for ages. And he'll make the slides. And then when it comes to the sales bit at the end, I blitz through it and I like my energy towards it. It's very like, yeah, but you don't need to buy the thing. It's all good. And he's like, "Bro, what are you doing?"

Russell:
You're such a content developer. You don't want to sell. Like, "No."

Ali:
Yeah. Any tips?

Russell:
Yeah. That's really funny. Yeah, a lot of people struggle with that. There's two things. There's the math and the drama. Which one do you want?

Ali:
I think the drama problem.

Russell:
Here's the drama. The drama is people feel uncomfortable selling because they feel like they're doing something wrong or I'm doing this to you, which is what keeps people… And so especially people who are really good content developers, they've been giving so much content for free forever. As soon they're asking specifically for you to do something, it feels awkward.

So the big thing is just I think really understanding that, at least my belief and what I've experienced, if people don't pay and they don't pay attention, they get free stuff and they feel good. But then the people who actually do something, it's like a funnel. The number of people who actually do something is smaller or smaller. The people in my world have had the most success, are also surprising with people who invested the most amount of money. Because they pay, they pay attention, they keep showing up. And so I realized for me, people I'm serving, and I love these people, I care about them, I want to be successful, but if I actually want them to be successful, I have to convince them to make an investment themselves to get them off the sidelines and into the game. So that's the thing. So when I believe that, and it's not just lip service, but I subconsciously believe if I don't convince this person to buy, then I can't actually help them.

Then it shifts everything. When I'm speaking on stage, I'm selling. I literally pray before I go out there. Please help me to have the ability to convince these people so I can get them actually to be successful. I can't do it just by giving them free stuff, because they're not going to commit. I need to get them to do something. So for me it's no longer hard for me to sell because as much as I love and care about these people, the only way I'm actually going to be able to get them to do the shifts they need is I have to get them to invest themselves so they won't. So that's the biggest problem.

That's the drama. So you got to convince yourself of that. And then the math is just like, "Here's how we structure that. We have to structure it." You know what I mean?

Ali:
Yeah.

Russell:
Does your guy, does he do his pitch side similar to how I do mine, stacking some of that? So the biggest thing is the people I've seen who have been uncomfortable with it's the ones who are trying to be me. There's a way to make it your own that's not me. I have my method. And a lot of people try it my way and they're like, "I feel so uncomfortable." Yeah, well, you're not me. The psychology is there. The psychology is you're making them offers, and you're making an offer. And there's value to each thing. And if I show you, when I was trying to learn how to speak from stage, I went for four or five years, I was going to two or three events a month just to watch people speak and how they're selling.

And what most people would do, I think we've transitioned a lot in the last couple of years, but what most people do is they would talk about what they had to offer. They're like, "The first thing you're going to get is this, and then you're going to get this." And they share, this is the thing that they have that's worth $10,000. And then this is the bonus that's worth a thousand dollars. This is my bonus worth $50. And then this. And they get down to usually the last bonus is the worst one.

And then from there, so the price, it's worth $5,000, but I'm only going to charge you a thousand dollars. But the problem is a human mind, you probably know this better than I do, but human mind only really remembers the last thing that it was told. Especially in the moment. So right here I'm telling you there's a $5,000 offer, but all you remember is that bonus you gave me is not worth $5,000. And all sudden you have this internal conflict.

I'm like, it'd be for a thousand dollars. You're like, "But that's not even worth a thousand dollars." They forget about the thing. So the way the stack works. And again, I do it more salesman style because that's my style. But if you understand the psychology, the psychology is if you're making an offer, the first thing you got to do is here's the first component of the offer and you explain it, you talk about it, you show us why it's awesome, and then what we do is create a stack slide to show, so the first thing you're going to get is this and here's the value associated with it, so that's how much it's worth. Then you're going to do the next thing. You talk about that. And then you come back and then you have to stack it so you show the next thing.

So what that means is you're going to get this thing plus this thing. If you add those two things together, this is the value of it. Then you introduce the third thing, so on and so forth, and then the end of it, you come back. And then you have all of the things they're going to get in the offer, and this is where you introduce whatever the value is. Then they associate with this, not this. So that's the psychology, so you can do it in a way that's less Russell Brunson, used car salesman, pitch me, "Maybe you want to call me, right?"

You can do the Ali version, which could be different. It could be as simple as not even using slides. You could print out a copy of the course. This is the first thing you get, it's going to be amazing. I'm going to put it right here. And this is the course I'd sell for a thousand dollars. And this is the next thing. And you can figure out your version. It's just a psychology of helping them see so that they see everything they're going to get that the price differential makes sense.

And that way when you drop the price, it's like, "Oh, this actually is a really good value." You know what I mean?

Ali:
Yes.

Russell:
I've seen people who've done it, they write out the things on a whiteboard and they cover it with tape and they just pull it off. Oh, that's what it's going to be. I see other people who don't do slides at all. They're just explaining it. And they explain the parts and they show pictures of it or you know what it is. So just figure out a way that you feel comfortable. Because you're just going to your friend and saying, this is the cool, let me show you all the cool things I'm going to give you for a thousand bucks. And then you think about it that way, hopefully.

Ali:
Yeah. If I had someone looking over my shoulder and being like, "Hey, what's in the course?" I'd be like, "There's this and there's this. And there's a camera confidence course bundled in and also there's a credit score button there." But for some reason when it's on a webinar with slides, which I guess slides that someone else has made, so maybe hearing you say it-

Russell:
And you didn't even have to do slides. I am a slide guy, so I do slides. Dean Graciel, see if you watched him, Dean's got one slide and it's this one. He does the entire thing teaching, doing it his way. He does stuff. And the very end he's like, "Here's my slide." And so it doesn't have to be, again, think of the psychology. It's like taking the structure and psychology of it, and then making a version that's your own, especially your people are coming off YouTube. They're used to seeing you in a very similar line. I would do it at your desk. I'd make it look like a YouTube video, and just make it feel your style. Don't do my style. Do your style.

Ali:
Yes. Nice. Yeah. I think in my mind, I had to copy you. Because I've seen you do this on YouTube a bunch of times and I'm like, "That feels weird." But you saying that, "Oh, I can just do it my own way." suddenly makes me feel, "Oh yeah, I can do it my own way." Yeah, I think I'm more the Dean style than the you style. I was like, "Great." I've seen him do it as well, and it comes across as very nice. Yeah, it's so friendly. It's nice.

Russell:
See for me, it's I do it my way for a couple reasons. When you teach, if I'm teaching for whiteboard, I'm freestyle, I'm going. When I'm trying to sell, I don't freestyle because there's very certain things I need to do, so for me to remember where I'm going, it's all slide driven. So for me it's like the slides helping to remember the story and the thing and where I'm going, so that's why I do it that way. Some people don't need that or some people have their own style. We talked earlier about YouTube videos. You got your three things, here's the three things they're going to cover. Just follow that process and make it your own.

Ali:
That is very cool. Okay, next question. This is absolutely sick by the way. Thank you. So we had a great chat with Ryan Dice. And one thing we were talking about is I was saying this thing around we want to try and dissociate business revenue from me showing up to make YouTube videos.

The problem is right now our entire company is... Oh whoops. It's like Ali Abdaal Company and they're the content team. And then there's sort of the commercial team, which has these two courses, the YouTube course and the productivity course, and we're doing some software stuff on the side, but we don't need to talk too much about that. What Ryan suggested was that think of YouTuber Academy and Productivity Lab as almost separate entities with Ali Abdaal Media as your content arm. So that means the team for Ali Abdaal Media can just be focused on creating content and growing the email list and driving book sales. Great, nice and easy.

YouTuber Academy team would have a head of growth and a head of product and they can know Ali Abdaal Media can drive leads to this and drive leads to Productivity Lab. But actually these guys are now trying to get their own paid ads and stuff. And having a dedicated head of growth for this thing, which is 2 million a year, trying to grow it to five. And then this is probably going to do 1 million this year and we're trying to grow it to five. This would also need a head of growth and a head of product, and so then Ali Abdaal becomes just one of the lead gen channels for each of these two different products. And by separating them out into their own mini business, mini companies with their own ClickFunnels account, their own CRM, their own landing pages, their own whatever, it means that these then become more saleable assets, whereas no one's ever going to buy Ali Abdaal Media.

Russell:
I would buy it. Just kidding.

Ali:
What's your take on this approach of separating out the different products into different websites assets?

Russell:
I agree. My structure is very similar. Because I've got Russell Brunson, I don't call it Russell Brunson Media, but it's like there's me doing the stuff I'm doing. And then we've got the ClickFunnels company, we have the Russell Brunson, they call Marketing Seekers, which is all my info product businesses. Then I've got Dan Kennedy's business we bought, I got Seekers to success with my personal loan business. And each of those has their own team of an integrator, operator who's running it and things like that. Then just like you have one content team, we have one ads team who are working across all of them though.

Ali:
That would make sense. It would make sense for ads to be a shared service across the business, like media buying and stuff.

Russell:
Seems like other HR stuff like that is all shared. But it's not so much focusing on the business and the growth. It'll just atrophy and die over time.

Ali:
We have one marketing guy who was previously trying to grow all the things and it's just split focus. Similarly, we found for social media, when our social media person is trying to grow all the platforms, they grow at a tiny rate. When she focuses on just one thing, it grows massively. It's, yeah, the focus thing. I keep on seeing this so often in business that I always forget that it's a thing.

Russell:
Yeah, for sure.

Ali:
Speaking a little bit philosophically, one drama thing I often run into is, this is a good distinction, math and drama, a drama thing I often run into is do I even need to grow the business at 10 million? What's the point? I've got enough money. Am I just being a capitalist pig, greedy, blah, blah, blah. And then part of me's like, no, I enjoy the game of entrepreneurship. This is fun. I love talking about this. That's so cool. I'm looking forward to diving in and thinking about these funnels and things. Do you get this sort of drama with people that you coach and talk to?

Russell:
Yeah. It's different cultures too. You think about it in America is probably a different culture than Europe, right?

Ali:
Oh yeah.

Russell:
I think you guys struggle with that more than here, where here it's cutthroat, yo, we're capitalists. That's American culture. But overseas other places we work with clients, it's definitely harder, I think sometimes.

But I think for me it all comes down to the motives of it. If this is your game, if you're an athlete, you want to be the best athlete in the world. There's people who go on a team that are there, but they're not trying. But you think about this with if your sport is an entrepreneurship business and you're an athlete on the team, what's the point? If you're not trying to do something? Yes, I have enough money, Michael Jordan, yes, he won championship. But what else are you going to do with your life? I feel like the time we're here on the Earth, it's a short period of time, obviously. But at the same time there's not a lot to do. It's like I spend time with my wife, my kids, and there's still eight hours a day to do something.

I can watch Netflix or I can create something of value that fuels me, but it also changes people's lives. Yeah. I think at least for me, when I started transitioning less to I got to make $10 million to if I make $10 million, the amount of people I'm going to be able to affect is double. That fires me up even more so, just realizing that part of it. And then you start seeing the ripple effect of that. When we launched ClickFunnels, that was one of the cool things. Initially it was a vehicle and tool for me and my business partner, Todd, to make money. And then we started seeing people having success like, "Whoa, those guys are making money." It became more exciting. "Look how much money these guys are making." And then the obsession became helping them. And then what was cool is then these people who were all smaller on entrepreneurs, they started hiring teams and people.

And I remember one time we did an audit.

We tried to figure out just ClickFunnels active users, how many employees each person had was on average like 2.5. So that's 250,000 employees that have jobs because of the ClickFunnels ecosystem. And then I started looking at each individual entrepreneur like Kaelin Poulin launched LadyBoss, and they had 1.5 million women on the email list who were following them. They had a hundred thousand active customers who bought their products, who lost weight. And I was like, that one entrepreneur then affected a hundred thousand plus people. And you start looking at the ripple effect, how it starts going. And then for me, that's what fires me up more than the 10 million.

It's how many lives are changed because you did this thing? That's the more exciting thing. And this actually, I'm going to caveat this, because this comes back to a question you asked an hour ago, but the ads, how do you create ads long term?

But if you start looking at this differently, the first level of ads people have is them telling the story like, "Hey, I'm Ali. I'm successful. Want to be successful? Go watch my webinar." Which is good, but then what's better is when you come down and you talk about your customer's stories. This is a much better story and it's a much better ad. Having this person come on and be like, "I went through Ali's course and blah, blah blah and it changed my life. It was amazing. You guys want to check it out too. Boom." That ad will out convert you doing the ad. And you have tons of these people. Every time you give someone a success story, you capture them telling the story and that becomes the ad which fuels the thing. We're talking about you have whatever Alex told you, 30 ads a month or whatever.

It doesn't have to be you doing 30 ads, get 30 people success stories, and those people each create three ads. Now you got ads for next 90 days. So it's like looking at that, there's the first tier, which is most entrepreneurs focus on themselves. And then the second tier, which most people never get to, is the focus of the customers, and then that becomes the success stories that drive the business to the next level and beyond. So anyway, it gets more fun that way. Because then it's like we changed someone's life and you capture that. So for us, when I started realizing this. When someone would have success and then we went to Comma Club or something, we fly them to boys and we fly to them. Dan Usher, our team, he bought a camper trailer. And it took four months off and just drove around the country to people's houses to capture these stories.

We brought them back and they became little mini-documentaries. They became videos, they made ads. They became all this social assets. And hearing Gabe Schillinger in San Francisco who was a musician, the fact that he never won a Grammy, but he's got three or two Comma Club awards on the wall, selling his music beats. That's way more fascinating than I sold a potato gun 25 years ago. Let me tell you my story. That's inspiring, that's fascinating, and it opens up a whole new world of people. It's also tough because in our audiences, people either like me or they don't like me. Or they relate to me or they don't. But when Kaelin Poulin came and she did her whole story, she's a female entrepreneur and all of a sudden that brought all these female entrepreneurs in our world. When I had somebody else tell a story, it brings different segments of the world in that may not relate with me or with you or whoever it is. Anyway, so that maybe hopefully answers two questions a little bit.

Ali:
Yeah, no, that's great. What I'm getting from that is actually in my mind, I've been thinking, oh, the goal is 10 million because various people have said, oh, it's useful to work back from a revenue goal. But just changing the framing of it more towards, no, the goal is to change more people's lives with these products. And yeah, sure, the videos are good and sure the book is good. But really the people, for example, going through Productivity Lab and some of the people who've gone through YouTuber Academy have genuinely had their lives changed, and are just raving fans now.

And if we could get more, those are the people we're serving and shifting from that, I want to get to 10 million revenue because it's fun and more towards I want to serve more people because it's fun and just nice and it's what I do. And I need something to do to pass the time. That makes it feel a lot better and probably means that I'd be less subconsciously sabotaging myself on route to... Yeah. And then that guess the revenue takes care of itself.

Russell:
The other thing is you start taking these people and you start putting them on a pedestal, then other people will aspire to that as well. It's like, "Oh my gosh." Especially if you start bringing these people on your YouTube channel, they're telling their story on your YouTube channel. The other people are like, "Oh my gosh, if I'm successful, maybe you'll have me." So they start working harder. We started doing the Comma Club awards and people started seeing it. Then they're like, "I want that." And they all started. They became more aspirational and started working harder because they wanted that thing too. You know what I mean?

Ali:
Nice. Dude, thank you so much. This has been absolutely wonderful. Any final parting advice? We've spent a couple of hours together so you have a sense of what my stuff is. Any unsolicited feedback, any advice? Anything you would say?

Russell:
Yeah, I think the biggest thing, like I said, we just need the right webinar, the right funnel to sell a thousand-hour course. You have so much traffic and eyeballs on the front end for free that I'm so jealous of. And I think converting those people through free web class will make you money. But then again, the ability to turn ads. I think scaling to an extra $5 million when you turn ads on is not going to be that difficult. The profit will shift, I think you said earlier, 60% of profit margin. When you're doing paid ads, you're closer to probably 25, 30% is more. So just realizing that as you're doing paid ads, profits shrink a little bit, but I think getting to 10 million, so you get the ads thing working, you'll be able to scale past that a lot quicker.

Ali:
Got it. That makes sense.

Russell:
Remember when Hermosy first joined Inner Circle, the first call, he was like, "Michael, goal, if I made 20 grand a month, that would change my life forever." I was like, "Dude." I can tell by talking he was going to be insanely good. I was like, "If we only make you 20 grand a month, we did everything wrong." Same thing, to get an extra 5 million in sales. Right now, you're doing what, two product launches a year? And you're at 5 million, whatever it is? You turn on evergreen where can buy every day instead of twice a year, you should at least double. You should at least get 10 million, if you don't go aggressive. If you go aggressive with that, I think you get 20, 30 million just by pushing it hard. So I don't know.

Ali:
Thank you. Oh, final question. Any key hires that you think? Important who's to help facilitate this? At the moment we're working with an ads agency, but should we bring it in house? We've got about 20 people on the team, about 10 on the content side and about 10 on the courses side. I wonder who are some key hires to think about?

Russell:
That's such a hard, so specifically ad stuff. In the short term, obviously you don't want to shift your focus, we need learn how to build a paid ad team. But over the long term, it's also tough working through an agency because agency by definition is you have a percentage of their focus and their time, which makes it harder. Because ideally, if you had somebody who's in-house long-term who's looking at all the content you're making right now, how can I take that? How can I turn that into paid ads? Because you're doing more content than anybody right now. You have so much out there. Every video you put out there could turn into four different ads. But you need someone who'd be able to see that. But an agency's not going to do that.

They're going to come back and like, "Hey, here's six scripts." They're going to give you that versus someone maybe thinking somebody, just an ads focused content person on your team who's only goal is watch what you're doing, and then from there, figure out what are the sound bites we can turn into ads to push to the course. And pulling those things out for an agency, because the agency's just not going to give you the hands-on you need. But in the short term, you also don't want to build an ad agency. That sucks too. So maybe having someone on your team just focusing on pulling that kind of stuff out.

Honestly, maybe you already have this person, but somebody who is in charge of the funnels. Watching it, optimizing it, tweaking it, looking at stats, looking at numbers. It's funny. I don't know if you know Andy Elliott, he's very sales-driven. I went to his office and he's got 90 sales guys and two people running their funnels. It was so fascinating. Because in my office and we've got one salesperson and 30 people working on the funnels. Because I'm funnel-focused. We're optimizing, conversion and numbers and stats, and trying to figure those things out. So having someone who can do that, because the difference in getting your landing page conversion from 30% to 40% doesn't seem that big of a deal.

Other than that means you get 25% more people to show up to every single webinar, which is insane. Over time, that's an extra 2 million a year by just having someone focusing on that. Or focusing on getting show-up rates or focusing on all those little pieces. It's just like that's a little hinge that swings a huge door, because so many traffic's coming in there and sales on the backend. It's like having someone who's just focused on the funnel and the optimization of it would be probably the other one that I think would be really helpful for you.

Ali:
Amazing. Great stuff. Nice man.

Russell:
Sweet man.

Ali:
Good sesh.

Russell:
That was really fun.