Looking back at this year, its ups and its downs, we’ve had the highest of highs and the lowest of lows. And we may, honestly, be one of the final episodes of the Marketing Secrets Podcast.

Hear my honest recap of 2023 along with what’s happening next for ClickFunnels (both the why and the where I’m pivoting towards)!

Anyway, if I can give you a gift that I'm giving myself right now is to kill all your babies and focus on one, focus on your best opportunity. I think especially over the next, I don't know, next 12 months is going to be crazy with elections and chaos and AI and all these things that are happening. I think now it's time to really focus on one thing and try to do your best to capitalize on it. Yeah, so that's my goal.

What's up everybody? This is Russell Brunson and welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. I don't know yet, this may be one of the final episodes, so I don't know, I'll talk about that here in a minute.

All right, everybody. So, man, it's been a little while since I recorded an actual podcast. I've had a couple of replays last month or so. At the time I'm recording this, we're less than a week away from Christmas, which I'm excited for, but, man, I am not going to lie, this has been one of the most difficult seasons of my life. In fact, this year has been hard as a whole sum. I was just thinking back about basically 12 months ago, a little over 12 months ago that my closest friend, my business partner, Dave Woodward, passed away. It's crazy because that came on the back of us launching ClickFunnels 2.0, which has been a crazy ride as well.

Then it's been a tough year, I'm not going to lie. We've had some big ups, some low downs. I think I was at a wrestling tournament this weekend with my son and I was talking about wrestling. I said, "Wrestling, I love it because it has the highest highs and lowest lows. When you win, you win, it's the greatest feeling in the world. When you lose, it hurts so bad, but it's what makes the pursuit and the win feel so great." You know what I mean? This year has been similar. We've had some great wins, but also some big losses.

Obviously the biggest, the hardest one for me has been Dave. He was the one who I would talk to every single day. He was the one that I'd brainstorm with. He's one I have crazy ideas and he helped me implement them. He was the one that was my biggest cheerleader. I don't know. It's crazy how hard that is when you lose that and still having the same mission, the same everything, but missing that person who is such a big, I don't know, just a big part of it all. Anyway, it's been an interesting year and we launched ClickFunnels 2.0. I don't know. It was a crazy... I don't know, launching new software is always hard. Right?

We had been working on it for over two years. We've been talking about it for a year. People were anxious, they were waiting, and so we launched it. It's crazy though because we'd spent a year using it. We built out membership sites, built out funnels, built out... It was working great, it worked great for us. When you launch it in day one, we had 18,000 people sign up in the first week. All of sudden you start finding out what's working, what's not working. I'm so proud of our team. They've killed themselves to do amazing job of support and the dev team fixing things and adding things and improving things.

That's what this year's been, this year's been reactionary of we launched this thing and then the reaction of just keeping up with it. When we launched ClickFunnels, the first time we launched it, there were 10 customers, then 50 customers, then a hundred customers. We were able to fix things in real time as we were growing, but, man, starting a startup where day… you know, the first week you get 18,000 customers is hard. It's something we were not prepared for and ready for, and definitely harder than I thought.

It was crazy because we launched and then right after that, Dave passed. Then just it was hard because a lot of people who I consider friends, people who we had helped grow inside of ClickFunnels, people who had struggled, they came into our training and they had success, they went to Comma Clubs and then to see the negativity, and it was frustrating. Our thought was we gave everyone 2.0, which is this beta software, we let them keep 1.0, so they got both the same price, but inside of that, it was still hard. We had a lot of frustrated people, which is my fault.

I've been working hard to remedy that and fix things, but I love it. I mean ClickFunnels 2.0 is awesome. I think there's a learning curve that we're trying to simplify and clean up and stuff like that, but, man, we've been running ClickFunnels on it now for two years. We've been running our own stuff on it, and it's amazing. We just did the Big Secrets to Success launch on it and it's really amazing. It's just kind of... I don't know, just anyway, launching a startup for that many people is hard. This year's been kind of tough for that and trying to figure out the right decisions, right moves.

Anyway, so I don't know why I'm telling you this other than I think a lot of times my podcasts are like “Russell” all my energy and excitement and stuff like that. I am excited to have energy, but especially today, especially tonight, I'm just worn out and tired. Actually I came over to the book office just to go and spend some time organizing books because that sounds like the most fun thing for me to do and spend time. You probably know the last two years, almost three years now, I've been buying these old books. It's crazy. I had a handful, I had a small collection.

Then when Dave came down with brain cancer, it was crazy because nights, I couldn't sleep. It's what I would do is I'd jump on eBay and I'd search for books. It was the thing that brought me peace and happiness and a relief from the real world. Now I've got these two different offices full of... It's kind of ridiculous if I'm honest with myself, but, man, it's just crazy how much happiness it brings me looking at these books, who are people who have passed on. Most of these are... I'd say 95% of my books are more from people who passed on.

It's just fun for me to sit here and realize all these people at one time were just like me trying to take over the world, trying to change the world, trying to do the best they could. They were writing books. They were publishing stuff way back when it was so much harder than it is today, before Google Docs and things like that. Anyway, I get comfort just looking at how excited they must've been when they were publishing these and writing them and getting them out there. Then they had people read their books and change their lives and just how they must have felt. For me, that's the thing that's kept me going over the last decade of doing this whole ClickFunnels, Marketing Secrets thing is just seeing people's lives change.

So anyway, I don't know what it is. I love this. I love being around these books. I'm sitting on the floor right now next to a whole bunch of them. Some of my favorite authors are right here next to me. Charles Haanel, who's one of my favorites. Robert Collier. Robert Collier, man, a lot of the marketing guys and gals in my world, you'll know him from the Robert Collier Letter Book, but that was a book he talked about his advertising principles, but he learned that by advertising his personal development books. He's got dozens of books he wrote that are so good, and magazines. He published two different magazines that, one, there's only seven issues of, I found four of the seven, I'm still trying to find the last couple. Then a second magazine that he published, each issue is like these little books. They're so cool, and then all these other cool things.

I think about you know that scene from Dead Poets Society, I played it at Funnel Hacking Live where Robin Williams is sitting there with this new class and he's talking about their future and he shares the poem. In fact, I found an original first edition of this book after watching it again. The poem says, "Gather your rosebuds while you may." Right? It's like he starts talking about why is it so important for you to pursue these things now? Gather rosebuds while you may, doing it right now. It's because soon we're going to be gone, and this life is such a short glimpse. Then he has all the class leaning to look at the pictures of these people on the wall. They're like these old, they're not old, they're young people, but there's black and white photos.

He said, "Look at their eyes. They were just like you. They were excited about their future, what they were going to create, what they were going to do." He's like, "Look at them now," he's like, "They're worm food," he says, "But right now they're calling, they're whispering something from the ground. Listen in close, listen in close," so he has everyone getting close. Then from the back you hear him saying, "Carpe diem, carpe diem and seize the day." He's like, "That's what these guys are telling you is our day is over, seize the day."

I think when I'm amongst these books, that's what I feel is just that feeling of seize the day. What are you trying to create, Russell? What are you trying to do? I think for me, I've lost vision that for the last little while, mostly it's because I've been... I don't know, do you guys go through this? This is the vulnerable Russell… I wonder if this is one of those episodes I shouldn't post, but it's been tough when you have a partner that you're pursuing something and you're talking about it, and then you've got, man, over two years now where you don't even want to talk about it as much. It's different.

My business partners who I love to death, Todd's not in the office. He's other side of the country. We don't talk that often. I think while we're so aligned in some things, we also have different visions of what we want and what we're trying to do as well. For me, I think I feel like I got lost on the path for a while. I was just kind of doing a lot of different things and launching different businesses, and it's so interesting. Do you ever do that thing where you teach somebody something and you believe something, then you do the opposite?

Before we had ClickFunnels, the thing that I would do I'd create new business every 90 days, and we relaunch it and launch next one, next one. I love doing it. When we decided to launch ClickFunnels, Todd told me, he's like, "We've put so much into this." He's like, "You need to focus on this for a year." I was like, "Okay, I'll commit to a year." I did commit for, man, eight plus years before COVID hit and COVID, I got bored a little bit. Todd was coding ClickFunnels 2.0. I didn't have as much to do, and so I'm trying to figure out what can I do?

I bought a supplement company, then a second one, then this and that and then all these projects we started working on, but they weren't my core focus. They were just things I was excited by. Because of that, none of them got done. Now I'm looking at year 10 of ClickFunnels and I need to be focusing 100% on ClickFunnels, and I have all these side projects that are just taking time, energy from me and from our staff and our team. I laugh because when… Inner Circle, every time someone would come in and they would have some projects, other projects, the very first thing I would do, I'd have them tell me all the different projects they have.

I'm like, "Okay, number one, you have to kill all your babies." I'm like, "You're allowed to have one business and one only," and I'd force them all to kill their businesses. People would fight me every single time, and then they'd come back and like, "I killed all my businesses and I was able to focus. It's crazy because now I made blah, blah, blah, our business has exploded." It's just so funny because the advice I gave everyone else, in fact, just even last year, I gave people that same advice. They're like, "Well, how come you have so many businesses?"
I'm like, "Oh, well, do what I say, not what I do." Looking back and my advice was correct before, it's just funny. I'm in the process right now of killing a whole bunch of businesses that suck, that I put time and energy and money and effort into that just aren't producing and are sucking away time from my number one opportunity. Right? We all have one core opportunity that we can and should be pursuing. Yeah, so for me, obviously it's ClickFunnels. It's my core thing, it's what I'm committed to.

I'm actually really excited today start looking at, if I'm going to put a hundred percent of my effort in ClickFunnels, what's the thing that I can't or should be doing that'll have the biggest impact, that's going to change things the most? What does that actually look like? I can't tell you yet, but there are four things. I was like, "Holy crap, with these four things, we will crush everybody else. They don't even know it hit them." It's going to be really fun. I got excited by that, energized by that. I'm going to be pursuing those things and working towards them. I think you'll see most of them.

Actually what's funny about these is... Well, you'll see a couple of them. There'll be a couple you'll see. There'll be a couple you will not see, most likely won't see, but they're going to be big and they're going to be moving very, very quickly on them. I'm excited. It's just one of those things that, I don't know, I'm just really excited to jump back in and really see what I can do over the next couple of years and see how big we can grow ClickFunnels. That's, I think, the really good news, but also these books and my vision and what I want to do with the books are still here as well.

Secrets of Success will continue to be my side business. I'll have one that I'm passionate about and I love, partially because it lets me use ClickFunnels every single day. You know what I mean? I'm in there, I'm building stuff, I'm trying stuff. We're finding the bugs, we're finding the errors, we're finding what's not working, and it's giving us a really good loop back. Plus all the 2CCX training and all my other trainings are based on us growing that company, but those would be the two things I'll be focusing on. That's it.

The core focus will be ClickFunnels obviously, and then the side will be my little side hustle, which is these books and what we're doing with them. For the time being, that'll be the focus. Who knows? Maybe in three or five years from now or whenever it makes sense, maybe I'll step down and hand over ClickFunnels to someone smarter than me and focus just on the side business where I'm hanging out with books and all that kind of thing, but definitely for the short-term, it's going to be 100% focused on that.

I'm excited for it. For any of you guys who are listening to this thing, that'd be my a-ha or my takeaway. Hopefully I can give you this year of stress and anxiety and whatever you may be going through because... I don't know, we're all going through stuff, right? We've got stuff we're going through, business stuff, but also we're having a lot of teenager issues that we're struggling with right now. Anyway, it all adds up and I know that we all go through those things.

Anyway, if I can give you a gift that I'm giving myself right now is to kill all your babies and focus on one, focus on your best opportunity. I think especially over the next, I don't know, next 12 months is going to be crazy with elections and chaos and AI and all these things that are happening. I think now it's time to really focus on one thing and try to do your best to capitalize on it. Yeah, so that's my goal.

My goal is, in the next 90 days, is to at least two x, maybe three x the lead flow of people that join ClickFunnels every day. We're over a thousand people a day still join ClickFunnels, and I want to dramatically increase that while increasing stick rate and a bunch of other things. It's going to be fun. I'll keep you in the loop what we're doing. I'll share with you the ideas and what's happening. I mentioned this may be one of the last Marketing Secrets podcasts, not because I'm going to stop podcasting, but we're kind of re-looking at my content strategy as a whole. We spend so much money on paid ads and paid ads are getting so much more expensive.

Even with us, we've got the deepest funnels in the world, you know what I mean? We're pretty good at that side of things, it's still getting harder and harder at scale. That's one of the things that I'm trying to focus on is really getting more focus on organic traffic. With that, I'm like, "Well, this podcast is great, but it could do more. It could do a lot more if I looked at it differently." I remember talking to Rachel Hollis last year and she's like, "I look at all my businesses and they're all doing well." She's like, "I have this podcast I put almost no effort into, and yet it makes me X amount of dollars a year." She's like, "Man, if I focus much effort there as those other places, what would my business... It could be insane."

She doubled down. I went and saw her going from one podcast episode a week to three or four a week and selling ads and sponsorships and making great money off it and building that as her primary business. Anyway, I just keep coming back to like, "Man, if I focus on the organic side and really put a year, two years into it, it could and should be the spot work and it can overtake what we're doing on the paid side," which would be insane. That'd save me a million bucks a month, two million bucks a month probably, so 23 million dollars a year if I can replace that, and maybe I can't. Maybe I still got to keep paying that, but now I get some other traffic for free on top of it and that's even better.

You'll be seeing me going down, so I have an idea for new podcasts that'll hopefully be coming out early in the new year. We're relaunching our YouTube channel, Instagram, we're doing a lot of things to truly focus on organic side, so that's kind of happening here. Yeah, my goal is in the next 12 months, so by this time next December, we'll re-meet here and I'll be like, "Hey, guess what? Right now ClickFunnels has 250,000 active members. Booyah, we did it." Despite the storms, despite the elections, despite all the craziness.

Anyway, it'll be fun. I'm looking forward to it. I'm looking forward to simplifying my life and my stress and my anxiety and still trying to figure out the details on how to do that, but I think it'll be amazing. All right, with that said, I appreciate you guys listening and hopefully a little more raw, vulnerable version of the podcast is helpful for some of you guys who may be struggling this time of year as well. I appreciate you all. Thanks for listening. I'm cheering for you, I'm rooting you on, and let's hit this next year at a level we never have before and have some fun. Thank you guys so much and I'll talk to you soon.