This is Russell today, and ... hey everybody! I love that click-a-button, all of a sudden people start jumping on. It gets me so excited!

So hello, hello everybody. Welcome to today's periscope. Yes, give me ... I love the hearts! Get's me excited! In fact, you click the hearts, I'll give you guys a money button [cash register sound 00:00:21]. What's up Brian? What's up Paul? How's it going? Jeff Barnes is here [cash register sound 00:00:29]. Oh yeah, Ricardo, I'm dropping the goods today, every day.

(laughs)

Mary C has looked at my book right now, as we speak. Oh man. Show me the money button, show me the money button [cash register sound 00:00:40].

Hello from Brazil. Chad, what's cracking? Chris Wilson, we are talking about some awesome stuff. Yes this is my office, you guys. This is where I do most of my stuff. This is the office.

Jeremy, let's click funnels. Andy Mac is in the his house (laughs). All right, what's up guys? Everybody cool, I am live and excited. So we're not gonna spend a ton of time today. Ooh, from Los Angeles to Hawaii. We'll wait for that wrestle. Great question. I wrestled 165 in college and 145 in high school. Beau Tellin is working on his funnel now. Beau, probably. Beau? Awesome. Ricardo's working on a funnel.

Man, I'm getting questions dropped like crazy, but that's not the point of today's training. In fact, today we're going to be talking about bootstrapping versus VC, because I had some interesting comments this weekend that made me kinda laugh. Sasha said I'm younger than expected, but I look more mature, right? I'm young. (laughs) No, I'm actually pretty old. I've got five kids, so I'm not too young.

All right ... oh thanks! Wyndham said loved my personal [inaudible 00:01:47]. Thank you for that. Appreciate that.

Okay, so if you guys want to hear about how to launch your money without VC, launch your business, give me a double-tap. I need ... bootstrapping, [inaudible 00:01:56] (laughs).

All right. I need, I need ... Give a triple-tap if you really want to know, 'cause this is the key. B Port Leg Bambi picked up three new clients the last few days, that's awesome. Mark Banger thought the video was awesome.

Cool, all right. We're past 100 people. Now I can get started with all the good stuff.

Okay, so this weekend, I can't remember if it was on one of my blog posts and two or three other places, I saw people talking about VC money. Like, "Oh Russ, I want to get my business started but I don't have any money." Okay? "I don't have any money." That's what everybody always tells me. What's up Cristinio with [inaudible 00:02:30] in Brazil. Okay, Wyndham's bootstrapping 2K.

So, and I tell people all the time, do not freakin' even think about VC money, first off. I think it's just nutso. In fact, we had Neil Patel out here last month and he was like, "Why don't you take on VC money?" And I was like, "'Cause ..." And I told him like 10 horrible things. He was like, "That wouldn't happen to you." And then, like, we start talking about one time he took VC money and exactly what I said happened to him. So, hmmm ... Definitely, don't want to do VC stuff, right?

But the bigger part - you don't need to. Like, that's the coolest thing about this business, the online business ... you do not have to. Okay? I have launched, I think since I've been started, I think it's been eight ... eight different companies I've launched, there've been over a million dollars in sales, with zero VC funding capital anything. We all kind of bootstrap them. And so I want to kinda walk through some of the concepts for you guys.

So the first thing, and I did a periscope once a little while ago, so if you missed any of my past periscopes, we do archive them on blog.com, seekers.com. So you see when I talk about Dream 100, I've done a lot of training about Dream 100. But the biggest thing is like when you're first launching a company, if you don't have any cash, that's fine. You've just got to be creative. You've got to be resourceful. You can't keep thinking about, "Well I have no money for Facebook ads, or for Google ads, or for any of these different ads. Someone wants to see the white board. This white board, check it out. It's not a normal white board. It's multiple white boards inside of white boards, inside of white boards. It's like a dream inside of a dream, inside of a dream.

Anyway, so ... where was I going. Sorry ... got [inaudible 00:03:54], got all these hearts flowing, tons of hearts. I got people's comments ... it's hard for me to focus. But it's important.

All right, so I'll do a 360 ... opposite of what I'm talking. So basically, I didn't have money for any of those kind of things when I got started, and most of you guys don't either. And you shouldn't have to worry about it anyway. Like you do not need money to launch a company. All you need is your passion, your excitement. Like what you care about is the first thing. And then you've got to find, you know ...

Initially, like all of marketing, selling anything ... Let's say I want to sell my money button, or I want to sell this wallet, or I want to sell my car, or whatever it is. Like, I've got to find a distribution channel. Like how do I get this out to people that want to buy it? Okay? And so a lot of us look at like, well, who's got a distribution network? Well, Zuckerberg's got one, so I'm going to give him some money to put my ads on Facebook, and then this other thing, right? Or then you want to create a product, but I don't have any money to go and create the supplement, and the this, and the ... all these different things, right? And so everyone's stressing out about it.

So one concept I want to kinda go through with you guys first off ... if you want to be successful without having to give up equity and VC and all that kinda stuff, is you've got to learn the difference between resources and being resourceful. Okay? This is key, because I always hear people all the time, whenever they complaint about how they can't do something, or why are not able to do something, it's always a resource problem. "I don't have the time. I don't have the money. I don't have the capital. I don't have the brain power. I don't have..." Whatever it is. They don't have the resources. Some resource, right? All right. If you agree with that, give me some hearts. Give me a double-tap or a triple-tap.

Okay. The biggest issues I hear is that they don't have the resources, okay? Yes, I learned from Tony Robbins. Simon Cryer knows. Okay? You've got to look for ... if you don't have the resources, you've got to be resourceful. How can I be resourceful? Okay? Resources and resourcefulness sound very similar, but they're completely different, right? So you've got to learn how to be resourceful if you want to bootstrap.

So for me, when I got my business first started, I had zero dollars. Okay? Some of you guys have ... If you've got any dollars, then you have more than me. Okay? So that's the first key. I didn't have anything, so I was like ... Well, I didn't even know what VC money was. Like honestly, I didn't know how to raise it, I didn't know that was even a possibility. All I knew was that I needed to hustle and make some money.

And so the first thing I did is I went to a forum, a group of people that were in the same market as me, and I was like, "Hey, I've got an idea. This is what my idea is." And a whole bunch of people were like, "That's a good idea." I'm like, "Cool. I got no money. I've got a little bit of time, but zero money. How many of you guys want to partner on this?" And I had like, I don't know, I think I had 200 or 300 people like, "I'll partner. I'll partner." All these people saying they would partner. I'm like, "All right, cool. Well how about this ... If anyone puts in $100 in this project, we'll all be partners. We'll split it up between everybody." And they're like, "Okay."

And so what happened is within two days, I got 50 people to send me $100 ... 52 people, actually ... sent me $5,200. We took that money. We hired some programmers. We launched our first start-up SAS company and that was the beginning of it, right? And from there we were able to leverage that and to grow it. Okay? Because I was resourceful, I didn't have the resources. Okay? It's the big key.

Now, when you're launching something ... Initially, I like starting businesses that don't take a lot of capital, right? Supplement businesses you can do in private label. Okay? We've started supplement companies for literally under $100. So you can start a private label supplement company quick. Info product companies are very low-cost. Coaching companies, low cost. Like, starting with things that you don't have a huge share of costs, right?

So then your only start-up cost is the distribution channel. How do you get your message out to people? All right? That's the question. Is that a question for you guys? How do I get people to see my products? If you have issues with that, give me a triple-tap. And do tons of hearts. If I can answer ... I can solve the problem for you, if you guys want. But I need a lot of hearts, or I'm not going to solve it. All right, still Flaky 11 says (laughs). Steven Larson said, "Gosh, yes!" I need more hearts then. I need, how about ... quadruple tap if you really want to know this. 'Cause this is it, you guys. This is it. The only thing you should have to be ... all you have to worry about is your click funnel subscription. That's it. Everything else is easy.

All right. So this is the thing. There are different distribution channels online. Tons of them, right? You've got Zuckerberg's over at Facebook, you've got Larry and Sergei's over at Google, you've got the dude who started Twitter. Like, there's distribution channels that we know of, right? And we're like, "Okay, I got to go and buy ads over there." But there's tons and tons and tons of distribution channels that don't cost you any money up front. Okay? For example, when I first got started, I started looking around and I couldn't afford Google ads. In fact, I had zero dollars in the bank, so I couldn't afford any ads. If you're on your phone courtesies tap the screen and it gives me a heart. Or double tap, gives me more hearts. Triple tap gives me tons of hearts. That's what a tap is. If you're on your computer, I think you can click too, but I don't know.

All right so ... And so I started looking at it, I'm like wait, I can't afford getting in this pretty Facebook, I didn't have any money for Google ads, so I'm like I got to figure something out. And I started looking around, I started finding people who were in the same market that I was in. Who were selling similar things as me. I was like, okay, well I got to get to know these people. So I did this really weird thing where I tried to become friends with them. And they I eventually became friends with them. Hey, did you see Philosophy show those click funnels? So do I?

Anyway, so I started becoming friends with these guys, and anyway, I just called them on the phone, got to be friends with them, and eventually I made good relationships. And some of these guys had email lists. They were distribution channels, so they were customers. And I'm like, "Sweet. This is awesome." And so ... you see Curtis is tapping now. Triple tap. Triple tap. Quadruple tap.

So I messaged one of them. I said, "Hey, I've got this product over here. I've never sold it before, but I think it's awesome. Do you think it's cool?" And the guy was like, "Yeah. This product is cool." I'm like, "Sweet. Do you want to send an email to your distribution channel, to your list, offer my product?" And he was like, "All right." So, I was like, "I'll give you ..." Actually, I think I gave him like 100 ... I think I gave him 100%. I was like, "I will give you 100 ... anything you sell, I'll give you 100% of the money. I just ... I want to sell something of mine. I've never sold anything before. How exciting would that be if somebody bought my thing!" Right? Like how many of you guys would like that, if someone bought your thing? That would be ... If you want someone to buy your thing, give me a double tap at least.

Yeah, this is exciting, right? So I'm like, "If you sell some of my things, I'll give you all the money. I just want to see people buy it." So he sent in a little email to his little list. The list wasn't huge. He had 3000-4000 people. And from that list, they went to the website and I think we have like 13 people bought. So it wasn't a ton, but for me it was like Christmas. Like people bought this thing that I made. And so they bought this thing, and then I had this little pop-up on the side. This is pre-squeeze pages. Had this little pop-up, and 217 people joined my list. Okay?

So I was like man, I've got 217 people on this little tiny email list, and like how ever many, a dozen customers or so. And that was the beginning. That's how I ... now I had something. I had an asset that I could use, right? It wasn't a huge asset, but 217 people. So I went to somebody else, I'm like, "Hey man, you've got a cool product. I love it. I've got a cool product that I love, and I think you should love too. How about this? My list is small, but I'll send an email to my list to sell your product, you send an email to my list and I'll sell my product, and we'll see what happens."

So I sent an email to his ... to my little, tiny 217-person list, I think I made two or three sales. But then he made two or three sales for me. But guess what ... my pop-up grabbed another, I don't know, 20, 30, 50, 100 people or something like that. And started growing, okay? And I started taking this list that was being grown, and I started leveraging it to sell other people's products and then they would sell mine. And that's how we started beginning it. Okay? It wasn't me going and spending $1000 a day on ads in Facebook, it was me finding partners and people and people that are the same level as me. Okay?

It's hard when you're a beginner to go like, "Hey, I'm gonna go talk to Russell Brugson or Tony Robbins or whoever and get them to promote my stuff," 'cause it's probably not going to happen. Sorry, doesn't happen that way. So what you've got to do is find somebody that's in the same level as you. Someone that maybe only has 100 people or 1000 people on their list, and do a partnership. And cross-promote and help each other out. That's how it begins. And then you get the list. You get the money, then you reinvest that.

Okay? I was listening to a podcast. Ryan Lee, by the way, a shout-out for Ryan Lee. He had a podcast. He had one of my buddies, Mike Lovich on it. I think his podcast is happyness ... H-A-P-P-Y-N-E-S-S, I think. Anyway, really good. And Lovich talked about how when he launched his first company, he had this thing, he started trying to sell it and nobody would buy it. And so he said finally he got Ryan. He met Ryan and Ryan promoted it, and he made some sales, and he said that first set of sales he made $2000 or $3000. He said now it was like gambling, right? You go in the casino with $100 that you're willing to lose. So you gamble it, and then you win back $1000. Now that's house money. Now you can go and spend that money and you don't have to worry about it, right?

So when Lovich did it, he said he launched his company, Ryan was the first person promoting it, he made a couple thousand dollars. He then took that money now, that house money, that he doesn't care if he throws it away and gets rid of it, now he went out and started buying ads and started driving traffic. Giving Zuckerberg some money. Other people that had distribution channels money. Okay? But he's reinvesting the money he's already earned. Okay? That's kind of the big key here. And that's what I really want to kind of drive home for you guys. Okay?

So it comes back to what we talked about earlier. Like resources versus resourcefulness. Okay? Most of you guys don't have the resources right now. Okay? Plain and simple. If you had the resources, you still should do this. Okay? You got out there, find people at your level, do partners, do cross-promotions, start building each other's lists, and then the money that comes from that, now you can go and reinvest that back in.

Now, a couple things to be warned of. First off, I had a close friend who did this process. What's up, Mike? Mike B is on the periscope. So I had a friend who did this process but he did it ... he almost did it right. He came out there and he launched this thing, and he made some money, and it was awesome. He made ... I think he made like a $3000 or $4000 high-ticket sale. He got this big sale, right? He made a bunch of money. And I was like, "Dude, that's awesome!" I'm like, "Take that money and dump it back into ads now!" 'Cause he did the first one we're doing, free stuff and leveraging some relationships he had, and did some cool stuff, and he got the money back.

And then he went and he spent the money. And he missed it. And now his business has not grown. And now he's struggling. He's trying to do hustle again to get another thing to happen, and that was the problem, was that he took this money ... he took the house money. That's not your money yet. Okay? You should have reinvested that back with Zuckerberg or whoever, right? Some kind of ads to get people to your side. But he didn't. He took that money and he spent it and his business has not grown because of that. Okay?

People say, "Russell, how did you go from having a supplement company that was tiny to a supplement company that was making, you know ..." Before we sold it, we were at about $6,000,000 a year, okay? Play at a [inaudible 00:13:46] ... I want to come! Anyway, what I tell them is that, like, we tested really, really small, and as soon as something worked, we took that money and I guess, well, I didn't take it out of the company. I didn't go and spend it and buy something. I took it and reinvested it in some ads. Then more money came back. I took that money and reinvested it in ads, and more money came back. And I kept doing that. And after five or six flips like that, boom, you're rich.

That's it. That's the secret. I don't need VC money. Okay? All I need is a good idea, I need to make ... find a partnership, find somebody, find someone's [inaudible 00:14:14], figure out how I can partner with them, or whatever it is. Get out and promote. When the money comes in, take that house money. Reinvest it. Reinvest it. Reinvest it. And it does not take that long. So whenever you're right, screw VC's. We don't need them. Steven S says, "Funnel-tastic!" Yes.

So that's the key, you guys. You don't need VC money. You don't need any of those kind of things. As soon as you do that, you give away equity. Okay? Right now we're competing with a company that gave away all of their money to VC's and now they're ... and it just ... it drives me crazy. It makes me laugh. It's great for me, because they're all competing. Like, I was talking about it with someone. I said, like, right now their customer is the VC person. That's the dude who they've got to make happy. That's their only customer. Where we're trying to serve you guys. We're trying to serve our customer. People who are using our tool, who are benefiting from it, right? And so that's the difference, is that I haven't sold my soul. I'm selling it to you guys. I'm trying to serve you guys and give you guys. You are my customer. I don't want some dude who gave me some money a while ago, who now owns my soul. And that's the difference.

So, hope that helps you guys a little bit. But that's the key, is take the stuff and reinvest it. Now I know that, especially starting a business, you need some, you know, you want to take money out of it. And so just be careful with that. Don't take a lot of money. You take a little bit of money out. Like when I made my very first sale. It was a $20 sale. And my wife and I were going nuts. We had just gotten married. I had zero dollars to my name. So I made $20. I took her out to eat on the $20. Which was cool, but then guess what? That person refunded. (laughs) And then I didn't have any money.

So I learned sense then. You don't take all the money out. Take out a small percentage, maybe 10% for yourself. But everything else has got to be dumped back in until it's gotten to that point where you're past critical mass. And it's going to take a little while to get there. And you're going to have to work hard. And you're going to have to kiss people's butt sometimes, and you have to be really nice to people and you're going to have to go help them, and all sorts of stuff you're going to have to do. But it's worth it. So it is really, really worth it.

Real Russ David said, "Why'd I sell the supplement company?" Because there's this thing called click-funnels that is way more awesome. And I love it more.

Liz said, "I still pay myself $500 a week total. Reinvest, reinvest." See, Liz went from less than a year ago, Liz was just getting started in this business, to now she's about to cross the million dollar mark in a year. Without any VC money, with her hustling, with her taking it, reinvesting, reinvesting, and boom, boom, boom, and now look at that.

All right, so ... thanks Luke. Luke was [inaudible 00:16:35] fun to see that yesterday. All right.

Well, thanks you guys. If you like that ... I do ... I'm creating an info product on supplement biz but I don't have it done yet. So we will have it soon.

Cool. If you guys had a good time today, give me at least a double-tap. If you had a great time today, give me a triple-tap. And if you had an "Aha" moment, or something motivation or inspiring that you realize now that "Holy cow, I can do this! I don't have to make a million dollars tomorrow. I just got to make a little bit, reinvest that, reinvest that, and within the next year from now, I'm going to be exactly where I want to." If you guys want that, give me a quadruple-tap.

All right. Awesome, you guys. Well that's it for today, I don't want to spend too much more of your time. I just wanted to share with you guys because it was on my mind this weekend. I heard a bunch of people talking about VC money and it drove me crazy. I'm like, "Why don't you just reinvest your earnings? It's so much easier!" And you get to keep it all at the end of the day. So, that's it. [cash register sound 00:17:23] There's the money bunny ... money buddy ... (laughs) the money button for you guys. Have an awesome day and I will talk to you guys again tomorrow. Same time-ish, same place-ish. Have an awesome night and we'll see you guys tomorrow.

I don't want to hang up ... you guys are still talking to me. You're giving me hearts. For those who hung up, they're missing this part now. Thanks everybody. You guys are all amazing. All right, I'll hang up for sure. For real this time. See ya guys