A glimpse behind the scenes at what happened at this week’s FHAT event.

From there you hit a wall. The wall is the problem or the…what is the wall or problem that you hit within your current opportunity that started you on this new journey. Then you have the epiphany. So what was the epiphany experience and the new opportunity you discovered. Then the plan, what was the plan you created to achieve your desire? Then there’s conflict. What was the conflict you experienced along the way? Then there’s achievement, what was the end result you achieved. Then there’s transformation. What was the transformation you experienced?

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Hey Everyone, this is Russell Brunson, welcome to Marketing In Your Car. I’m at the office right now and it’s been a crazy week. We had our first ever FHAT event here in our office the last 3 days. We were here all night every night and it was amazing. But I also haven’t talked to you guys in a while, and I want to do something really quick because one of the big things we talked about at the FHAT event, well it was kind of 3 things.

Day number one was cult building, I mean culture building. Day number two was story. And then Day three was webinars and webinar hacks and product launch sequences and Actionetics sequences and a whole bunch of other ninja, amazing stuff.

But day two was story day, so we did this cool thing where we talked about the hero’s two journeys and a bunch of other things. And I can’t give you everything right now, but I want to give you one cool. So it’s in the book that’s coming out soon, to a funnel near you. After I talked about the Hero’s two journeys, I showed them how we transition that script into the epiphany bridge script, and if you look at it, I wish I could show you, I wish the podcast could show pictures. Looking at it right now, the way this script works is basically, there’s 8 sections.

There’s the back story, your desires, the wall, the epiphany, the plan, the conflict, achievement and transformation. So the back story, what is your back story that give us a vested interest in your journey? Number two is your desires, what is it that you want to accomplish? And inside of that, what are the external struggles you are dealing with and what are the internal struggles you are dealing with.

From there you hit a wall. The wall is the problem or the…what is the wall or problem that you hit within your current opportunity that started you on this new journey. Then you have the epiphany. So what was the epiphany experience and the new opportunity you discovered. Then the plan, what was the plan you created to achieve your desire? Then there’s conflict. What was the conflict you experienced along the way? Then there’s achievement, what was the end result you achieved. Then there’s transformation. What was the transformation you experienced?

So those are the process of telling a good epiphany bridge story. So anyway, I know it’s hard to visualize that, but when you get the Expert Secrets book you’ll see the graphs and images and it’ll be all explained and you’ll love it, I promise.

But when we were here yesterday, or two days ago, whenever it was, the event. I did an epiphany bridge story on Facebook Live, telling my Clickfunnels story. So I wanted you guys to hear that story because it’ll…..going through all these aspects, you’ll see them all weaved in. Everything from the back story, the desire, the wall, the epiphany, the plan, the conflict, the achievement and the transformation.

So I’m going to get the audio and I’ll plug it in here so you can listen to the audio of my epiphany bridge story, which is my Clickfunnels story, the origin story. The origin story of how I got excited about funnels and how Clickfunnels came to be. So I’m going to play that audio for you right now, and you guys will hear my epiphany bridge story. So let me connect to that right now.

Hey everyone, this is Russell, I hope you guys are all doing awesome. So I’m here right now in the room of 48 or 49 amazing entrepreneurs, and we’ve been talking about storytelling and how to tell your story, the origin story of wehre you got started and what got you into what you’re doing. So I’ve been challenging all of them to go and do that, and I thought it would be kind of cool if I just told you guys my story. Some of you guys have heard pieces or parts of this, but probably not the whole thing.

So what I wanted to do is share with you guys the story about Clickfunnels and why this, for me, became my new opportunity, the thing that I’m so excited about and why I have so much passion. Some of you will say, “Russell you’ve been talking about Clickfunnels everyday for the last two years.” And I’m like, “I know, because I’m so excited every day.”

So some of the back story, if you don’t know, I got started in this business, I guess it’s almost 13 or 14 years ago now, and when I did, I was a college kid, I was going to Boise State University, which is just down the road from where I’m at right now. I was a wrestler which means I wrestled and I had to go to school. So I barely graduated. It was barely. I think my accumulative was a 2.1, which means I got a whole bunch of C’s and one B over 5 years, so it’s kind of painful. But I graduated which made my mom happy, which is pretty cool.

But during school, while I was wrestling I started learning about that internet marketing stuff. And you guys remember this is 12 years ago, before Facebook, before Instagram and all these kind of things. We had Google, kind of. In fact, I don’t even remember how we were driving traffic. We didn’t have a website, or anything. I was using Front Page, some of the old timers remember Front Page. I would create these things in Front Page and it was pretty bad. So I was doing that, but I believed that it was possible. I saw people, some of my mentors, like Arman Morin, Alex Mandossian and some of these guys who were making money online.

I was like, if these guys can do it, I’m pretty sure I could do it. So that was my goal that I wanted to accomplish. The other side of that that I don’t share a lot of times, it wasn’t just that I wanted to make money, that was just a desire I had. The bigger desire, I had just gotten married to my beautiful wife, we’re still married today. It’s been almost 15 years this year, which is amazing. I married here, she was working full time to support me, her jobless wrestling husband and I don’t know about you, but I always envisioned that when I got married, I would be the man, the supporter, but it was honestly pretty tough for me. That she was supporting me and I didn’t have anything to contribute other than going to school and wrestling, and it was hard for me.

I remember I was like I got to figure out a way to contribute. I don’t want her doing everything. So that was the real driving factor. In fact, my goal was, if I can make $1000 a month, that would match what she was making, we weren’t making very much money at the time. Then I’ll feel like I’m contributing as well. So that was my goal, to figure out a way to do this. I tried all sorts of stuff.

I was trying Ebay, I was trying Craigslist, I was doing this stuff. I had a $20 a month, which was a big deal for me, I was excited, but none of the things really hit big. About that time I started learning about information marketing. In fact, I was at a post office mailing something I had bought from Ebay in this huge awkward box, I thought it was going to sell huge, and it ended up selling for $1.50 and I lost a ton of money. Then postage, it was a nightmare. I’m sitting in the line at the post office next to this dude, who had a big box full of CD’s, thousands of them. I was like, “Dude, what are you selling?” and he was like, “I have one CD that I sell and I burn it.” And I’m like, “These are your orders for the month.” And he’s like, “These are my orders for this week.” I was doing the math, “how much do you sell them for?” He’s like, “$67” I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” And I had this…..I need to sell information, that is the future.

So I started to try to figure out information. I started doing stuff and my very first product I ever created was a DVD on how to create potato guns, I’m sure some of you guys have heard this story before. So I started making potato guns and it was working really good, but then what I was doing was going to Google and buying ads on Google and making some money back and forth, but eventually I probably had 4 or 5 months of success and then Google changed their algorithm and it got really hard.

And the hardest thing for me during this time, it was me building things in Front Page, and I had to figure out how to FTP pages and images and how to go to Paypal to get the order, it was super techy and I’m not a techy person at all. But after Google changed their algorithm we tried some stuff. I remember one of my friends called me, it was Mike Filsaime, some of you may know Mike, he said, “Russell, I figured out how to make this whole internet marketing game work again.” I’m like “What do you mean?” he’s like, “Is your potato gun thing still making money?” I’m like, “No, I can’t break even, I can’t make a profit.”

And he’s like, “well I went back to all my sites and added these things.” He called them OTO’s and I’m like, “What’s an OTO” and he’s like, “It’s an upsell, a onetime offer.” I’m like, “Oh.” And he’s like, “I added these upsells and people started buying the upsells and suddenly I’m making two or three times as much money from everything I sold. And I was like, “I could actually do that.”

So I remember jumping online I was Googling potato guns, trying to figure out what my upsell would be, I don’t know. All I had was a potato gun DVD, and I met this dude up in northern Idaho who actually made potato guns and drop shipped them. I was like, “Dude, if I sell those, would you drop ship them for me?” and he was like, “Yeah, I’d love to not have to sell these things.” So I partnered with him and I started selling the DVD’s and people started buying this upsell. And it was the first thing I’d made a funnel. I was like, this is a funnel.

And that was this new thing and I was so excited. So I had this epiphany, this is the future. If I can make more funnels, this funnels been making me 20-30 bucks a day, but what if I had 2 funnels, or 3 or 5 or 10? So I started going a little bit crazy and I created funnels in the couponing market, which by the way, is a horrible market. People in that market do not like to spend money. Don’t do that. We did couponing, we did dating, we did weight loss, we did network marketing, I’ve done diabetic supplements. That’s the ones on the top of my head, there’s…..I could show you guys, there’s a trail of thousands of offers, some that worked, a lot more that didn’t work.

But we were doing these things over and over and my plan was if I had ten of them that are each making a hundred bucks a day, or 20 or 30. So I was doing this, and at first it was working but the problem I kept running into was, Front page isn’t…. for people like me it was hard. I would do these pages and mine looked ugly and other people’s looked awesome. So then I had a designer and he would design these things. I would make a front page ugly, send it to him and he would design it and make it look cool. I’m like, put it up.

But then it was up and I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t touch it again. I had one shot. Then I had to bug him. Then I hired a web guy to do edits for me. Then I was using Paypal and I couldn’t do anything else. So then someone invented a one click upsell. I was like, “Dude, I need that.” So I hired a programmer to connect that into the next….it kept getting more and more complicated to the point where soon I wasn’t able to do anything.

I would look at it and be like, “Change that.” And they’d try to change it, but they didn’t. I’d be like, “Move it over here.” And they’d put it in the wrong spot. It would take days, sometimes weeks of going back and forth with the guys in Romania and India and everywhere to try to get them to move an image or make it a little bit bigger. Things that were so common sense and I couldn’t actually do it, and it drove me nuts.

About that time, one of my friends and partners, in fact, he might be in the room right now. Is Todd in here still? He’s already eating lunch, he’s already gone. Todd was one of my partners doing these things with me. He saw my frustration and he’s like, “What if we build something that…” and the joke was, “Russell could edit the website and actually move things and quit bugging us all the time.” I was like, “That would be awesome.” And he’s like, “That’s what we’re going to create.”

And that day we sat in front of a whiteboard and started mapping out what it would look like and how it would work. So we mapped out this vision of what became Clickfunnels, and he went home and actually built it. It was funny, him and another partner we brought in, Dylan Jones were working, he did the editor. They would build part of it and be like, “We need to make this so simple that Russell could do it.” So they’d do it and be like, “Russell, test this.” And I‘d login and be like, “How do I do it?” And they’d be like, “We’re not going to tell you. You gotta figure it out on your own.” I’m like, “Okay.”

So I’d do some stuff, and if I could figure it out, then good. We got it. If I got stuck, I’m like, I don’t know what to do. So they’re like, we didn’t do it intuitively enough. We went back and forth and back and forth for 6 or 7 months and finally I got it. I was like, if I can do this, anyone can. At first it was a tool for me, that was the initial goal of Clickfunnels. I think it was Todd and Dylan like, “This way Russell will quit bugging and I don’t have to design his sites anymore or redo his headers.” All this stuff that was happening. And then after I started using it and I was having success, I was like, “We have to make this a tool for everyone, it will free all entrepreneurs like it freed me.”

So because of that I was able to create funnels quickly. I went from having 5 or 6 guys, and it would take on average almost 2-3 months every time to create a funnel to where I was able to do it by myself in an hour, hour and a half. Sometimes less, which was cool. The cool thing was I was able to achieve that and have success. We started rolling out funnels like crazy. Some of you probably remember seeing a lot of them.

I still do a lot of them because they’re so much fun to do. But the cooler thing for me was the other side. I was able to make money to support my wife and support my kids because I didn’t no longer have to spend three months doing something, my time to be with my kids completely freed up. I have a chance, I go home everyday and play with my kids. I’m not stressing out trying to talk to programmers in India at 3 in the morning and stressing all this stuff. It just works.

That was really the biggest thing for me. And it’s been an amazing thing. In fact, now my kids are using Clickfunnels, they’re building stuff with Clickfunnels. It’s not just, for me it’s not just a product. It’s a mission. I’m seeing people’s lives change. I’m seeing other people who had messages but they couldn’t get them out because they couldn’t move things around on the stupid page, but now the power is back in their hand. And that’s the power of it. That’s what fires me up, to be able to help entrepreneurs with that kind of thing.

So that’s my Clickfunnels Story. So if you guys haven’t heard it before, I wanted to share that with you guys and share why I’m so passionate about this. For me, it’s not just, I talk about this all the time, it’s not a matter of if you’re going to become a Clickfunnels member, it’s when. Because it’s the only way to do what we’re talking about. The only alternative is to do what I used to do ten years ago. Hire guys in Romania and India and the Philippians and have teams of 30 people to move an image. Or you can just use Clickfunnels. It gives you and me, the entrepreneurs the power back, which is awesome.

I hope that helps you guys. I hope you guys see why I’m so passionate about Clickfunnels. With that said, I’m going to check out. If you like this, comment down below. If you have any friends that are like, “What is that Clickfunnels thing.” Share this with them. Tag them down below so they can see why me and why I’m so passionate and probably why you’re so passionate too. Thanks you guys. Talk to you all soon. Bye.

Alright so there’s the example of an epiphany bridge origin story. I hope that was cool for you guys. Again, I wish I could show you the book today, but it’s coming soon. So look for that in the very, very near future and that’s about it for today you guys. Thanks everybody. I’ll talk to you all again soon.