Listen in behind the scenes of all the ups and downs of another one of our recent “virtual real estate” acquisitions.

That night we were all stressed out, and we're like, "We made a big mistake. We shouldn't have bought this. It's losing money every single day. The buyers are not buying ClickFunnels." Like, "Oh crap, we wired tens of millions of dollars for this company, and we got 100 people messaging us for support. We didn't know what to do."

Hey this is Russell Brunson and you are listening to the Marketing Secrets Podcast, I’m so excited to have you here today. We’re going to be walking you guys behind the scenes of one of our recent acquisitions. We bought a company. We spent over 40 million for it. There's some big ups, some downs, and a whole bunch of stuff I'm going to show you guys, behind this scenes, what we did. I'm going to talk about what the company was. One of the front-end offers were why we were so excited by this specific company, what happened when we bought it, and how everything crashed to the ground, the things we learned to get people to actually migrate from their platform to ClickFunnels, a bunch of things we'll do in the future, and a whole bunch more. I hope you guys enjoy this episode.

I want to put this intention for you guys as you're listening to this episode today, as you're listening to it, again, I'm walking you behind the scenes of this acquisition we did. And you may or may not be looking to acquire a company. It doesn't matter. The lessons I learned along the way will be good for you no matter where you are. You're going to learn about funnel structure that works really, really good. You're going to be learning about things to look at if you were to buy a company, or things that probably you should be doing in your business, if you ever want to sell your company, and a whole bunch more.

As always, if you are enjoying this podcast episode, this is something I do for free for you guys because I love you, the only way that I know that you guys like this is if you rate and review. So please go to whatever podcast platform you are on, rate and review, leave comments. That helps me to get this message out to more people. Also, don't forget that if you go to marketingsecrets.com, you can see the video version of this. If you are listening to the audio, you can watch the video. You can get the transcripts, the show notes, and a whole bunch more.

On top of that, if you have any questions for me specifically you want me to answer during the podcast related to this specific business or any of the crazy businesses we're working on, there's a spot there where you can ask the questions. Those do come directly to me, and we'll be taking the best questions and they'll be on the show. So again, you go to marketingsecrets.com, and right there you can submit your questions on the homepage, which is exciting.

This episode is actually brought to you by a really cool software company called doodly.com. If you go to Doodly, you'll find out about hand-doodle software. We'll talk more about that, but they are definitely sponsoring this episode because they owe me about 40 million dollars right now. And so with that said, you guys, let's jump into the podcast and have some fun.

All right, everybody, I'm excited for today's episode. I'm going to be talking to you guys about the biggest acquisition that ClickFunnels has had, the biggest company we purchased. But it's interesting because it's not a traditional company. It's not ones that you'd be like, "Oh, they bought HubSpot, or they bought Mailchimp." In fact, most people don't actually know the name of the company. In fact, I don't even know the name of the company. I know the name of the offers. There were a whole bunch of really good front-end offers. The most famous one, the one that sells the most is called Doodly. You've probably seen it before. It's that hand doodle Sketch software that draws videos. And there's another software called Toonly and a couple other ones. But we bought the entire suite of the company. I'm going to tell you about that. Why we did it, the reason, some of the ups and the downs and a whole bunch of stuff in between.

But I want to actually go back in time because there's a longer backstory to this I think that's actually important to understand why we did it. And so the backstory was back to when I was in college and I was just first learning his whole internet marketing game, and one of the guys I me was also, I think he had graduated from college, but he had a full-time job and he was also dabbling in internet marketing, and his name was Brad Cowns. This must have been like, man, early 2000s, like 2001, 2002, something like that. And we got to know each other. We would talk to each other on Yahoo Messenger or something. It was before Skype. It was way back in the day, which is before Slack and before Facebook, before all those things, and we were trying to figure this whole business out.

I had some offers I was selling, he had some, and we just got to know each other back then, and we would talk all the time, just all the things we were learning along the way. And I remember, I think his first big product that I was aware of, he had a lot of success with was a software product called SEO Elite. He eventually had one called Keyword Elite. He had a course called SEO Mindset, but he was a big SEO guy back in the day. And that was the first set of products he had.

Eventually, he created a product called Fat Loss Factor, which was a weight loss offer, which literally was my favorite funnel back in the day. Every time I would launch a new funnel, I always show my designers Fat Loss Factor. I'm like, "Make it look like this one." And so they used to always tease me, "That's your favorite funnel?" I'm like, "It is. Stop making fun of me." But it was actually a weight loss program, and he had hand doodle software that doodled out the sales video, and it converted great. He made tons of money with it, and then eventually he sold that business or that product. And then Brad was in between and didn't have a business.

And I remember by that time, he actually joined my inner circle, which was a huge honor for me because someone who's been my friend at that point for 15 years and he joined my inner circle and he showed up, and it was funny because the inner circle, everyone would get up and talk about their business, and Brad got up and he's like, "I don't have a business. I sold my business." And we're like, "Oh, do you want to talk about it?" He's like, "I don't know yet. We're trying to figure out what to do."

And he's super introverted, even more introverted than me, too. So I think his time on the inner circle was just ... Yeah, I don't think he ever came back to another meeting. He was just like, "Well, I didn't have a business and I didn't have anything to talk about." But shortly after that, I remember me and him messaged back and forth, and he said he wanted to create a doodle software. He's like, "I had a ton of success with it. I want to create doodle software." And I was like, "There's a lot of people who have created doodle software. That doesn't seem like that big of a market. Why would you even do that?" But he really wanted to.

And those who don't know, so the hand doodle software is actually the first ... This is internet marketing history lesson for you guys. The very first hand doodle software, or not software, but hand doodle video online was Mike Geary's The Truth About Abs video, and it was hand doodles by Vince Palko, who used to run a company called AdToons. He still does it on the side, but he was the one who invented this whole hand doodle software thing, the hand doodle video concept. And he did a whole bunch of the weight loss market. Then I hired Vince. He did probably 10 or 15 of them for me. And then after that, people started building hand doodle software to mimic what they were doing.

So anyway, so Brad had used his doodle software for Fat Loss Factor. He decided he wanted to create his own product, so he did. And he created the product and he launched it, and I didn't hear much about it. And again, I have two or three friends that actually sell hand doodle software. So I was just like, "Oh yeah, it's hand doodle software." And it seemed like a year or two later I was messaging Brad, just asking him how it was going. And he told me, he said, "We're selling 500 copies of this doodle software a day." And I was like, "Wait, a day? Like 500 new buyers a day?" He's like, "Yeah, this is amazing." And then he's like, "I took the model we figured out, and I created a new software called Toonly." So Doodly was the hand doodle software. Toonly was a cartoon version, you have a cartoons and stuff.

And he said, "I have 500 buyers a day." He's like, "We're making tons of money," but he's like, "But I don't have what you have with ClickFunnels." He's like, "I don't have a backend. I wish I had a continuity program. All these 500 people a day, I could put them into where I was getting paid monthly, but I didn't have something like that." So he had Doodly making money, then he launched Toonly and was making money. He was working on one called Claymately, which is going to be clay figures, like doodle, but it'd be clay characters.

Anyway, so the next two or three years, I kept going back and forth with him. And I remember he showed me, he's like, "I figured out this model." And so this what I want to share with you guys. If you get nothing else from this episode, it's figuring out this model. So he said, "I want to show you this model that I figured out, and it's the reason why I'm able to sell 500 copies a day." And he said, "It's a different way to structure the funnel." He said, "I look at most people who were just selling like, 'Here's the software. It's 67 bucks a month, or it's 100 dollars one time or whatever.'" So he said, "What I did is I created the doodly.com homepage. If you go to that homepage, you notice that there's the sales page for the sales letter software, and inside of it, it's like $67 a month for the software." And he's like, "But I don't drive any traffic to that page." He's like, "I have a special page. It's doodly.com/whatever, Facebook or YouTube," or wherever he was driving the traffic from.

He's like, "You go to that page. Instead of selling it monthly, we have a one-time fee where you pay 67 dollars for lifetime access to the software." And the page, it literally says it's like, "Special offer just for Facebook visitors. Normally 67 dollars a month if you go to the homepage, but because you're here, it 67 dollars lifetime access right now." So that was the first thing, this irresistible offer where you go from 67 dollars a month to 67 dollars lifetime. That was the offer that got 500 buyers a day to come in, right? But as you know, whoever can spend the most money to acquire customer wins. That's the game in the funnel world, right?

So he was making 67 dollars from everyone came in, but then his first upsell was a whole bunch of templates for people who were using the software. And he sold that for 97 dollars one time for three or 4,000 templates. And his take rate on Oto1, which is 97 dollars is 60%. More than half the people were taking it, which is crazy, and they ended up selling two and three. But the funnel was just killing it. And so he was spending, I can't remember, two or 300,000 dollars a day and making profit on that and just killing it.

Anyway, the metrics were crazy. All these buyers were coming in, but the biggest thing he says, he's like, "I don't have continuity. I don't have a ClickFunnel, so I need to build something." So he spent the next couple years building out this video hosting platform called Voomly that he was going to host all these videos on. And after he created it, it was actually really, really good. It's a good competitor to Wistia or Vimeo or something like that, the big video hosting platforms. And so what he was going to do is make it where, when someone creates a video, then they could host it on his video platform, and that would be the continuity that he was going to make from it.

And then for some reason, he created the continuity, the platform, and then it never really took off. I don't know exactly why, if I'm completely honest. I know he tried to launch it one way, and then he tweaked it to be this course creation platform, and then he just never really figured it out. And this is about the time that 2020, '22, I don't know, all the whole pandemic stuff was happening, chaos was happening, and Brad said he wanted to sell the company. And he actually reached out to me because this was about the time when we were talking to people about potentially buying ClickFunnels. He said, "Hey, do you have somebody that you could introduce me to?" So I was like, "Yeah, I have this really good business broker."

So I introduced Brad to this business broker. Brad went to the business broker and started trying to sell his suite of products. So Doodly, Toonly, Claymately, Voomly, Talkia, there's like 10 different front-end products he was trying to sell. And so it hadn't even crossed our mind that we were potentially going to buy it. We were just out there doing our thing with ClickFunnels. And by the time we decided we weren't going to sell ClickFunnels, and instead we were going to build ClickFunnels 2.0, and then one of the big things that I kept thinking through was, "I want to figure out ways to have more non Russel-based front ends. My face is on the front end of all of our front end products and our courses and our things that bring people into ClickFunnels, which is cool. But if we ever want to sell someday or go public or whatever the next step would be, it's weird if I'm the only person. If I get hit by a bus, what happens to the company?

So the question was like, "How do we build more non Russel-based front ends?" And at about the time is when we met Dan Kennedy, and I told that story in a different, or not met Dan Kennedy. I knew who he was. But when Dan Kennedy's company was for sale, and that was one of the big reasons why we bought that company, was Dan's written 40 books. There's 40 non Russel-based front ends we could have on the platform, which was amazing. And so that was the thought. And then all of a sudden, Brad messaged me one day. He's like, "Hey, we've got three or four people looking to buy the platform and just want your opinion on something we were talking."

And all of a sudden, I had this idea that popped my head. I was like, "He's getting 500 buyers a day just on doodly.com." It's like counting toonly.com and the other ones. I was like, "What if we bought that company and we put these 500 buyers a day, got them into ClickFunnels. What would that look like? These are non Russel-based front ends. They're software front ends. There's this thing. He's figured out the model, he's figured out this thing, he's crushing it. We should buy that, and also now we have all these different front ends that aren't my face on them." And so that was the thought. We started going back and forth talking to Brad and talking to the broker. And it was so funny because we introduced Brad to the broker, the broker then ended up selling the business to us, which is just this funny, weird thing. And so he got a commission check even though, yeah, I should've gotten that commission check, but that's how it worked.

So I'll look at my notes, see if there's anything want to talk about. Oh, a couple things we did. So again, there are 500 buyers a day coming into Doodly. Plus there was that, I think, 250 or so coming through Toonly. He was working on this product called Claymately. Anyway, the opportunity seemed really, really good for us. We took all the customer lists for Brad's company and from ours just to see if they're the same customers, and there was only a five percent crossover. It was like 95% of customers were not ClickFunnels members, which in our mind was like, "This is this huge thing." And so we're all excited. We decided to buy it. It was extremely expensive, as you can probably tell. His company was killing it. So it was our first big acquisition. We had to get a bank loan, and it was stressful and all those kind of things.

And when we were at the 99 yard line, we were about to close this whole deal, this is where a sudden a whole bunch of craziness started happening. So I'm going to tell you guys some of the problems we ran into. And so this is not the highlight reel of, "We bought this company. It's super successful." This is like, "All the rest of the stuff we learned along the way that I wish I would've known. It would've saved me so much time, energy, and effort." And hopefully this will help you guys if you decide to buy a company or things like that.

So first problem we ran into is right when we were about to close this whole deal is the same time that Dave Woodward, who was our CEO at the time, who was running the company, got his brain tumor. So that was the first thing of just we lost the person who was running the entire deal, which was ... And a year later, it's still just been a really, really hard thing. So there was that part, which was hard. The second thing is we'd never bought a company before, so we didn't know how it works. So we're buying this company with Brad, and all these products, and there's a 100 employees, and so we buy this company, and then you would close on the day of close, and then Brad's like, "Okay, here's the company. Good luck, you guys."

And I never even thought through ... I think most companies that are buying companies have a mergers and acquisitions department that onboards people. We didn't think through any of that stuff. So we bought the company, wired them the money, and like, "Oh, we have this company, and all of a sudden we have to hire 100 people. We have to figure out contracts. We have to figure out ..." And it was a nightmare. We didn't have any migration plan. And again, I lost Dave. So now it's like, "Russell, what are you going to do with these 100 new employees?" And I was like, "I have no idea." So that was really, really stressful and painful for a long time, actually. I mean, I would say probably six or eight months, it took us just to figure that thing out.

We also found questions we should have asked as we were going through due diligence. The company was basically Brad, and Brad is insanely talented. So there's Brad, and then there was 100 people that worked under Brad. There was no organization, there were no managers, there were no ... All the stuff that you have in a typical company, Brad didn't have any of that. He's just super talented and managed all these people. So when Brad's whole company was gone, all of a sudden I had 100 direct reports reporting back up to me and everyone asking me 1,000 questions, and I was like, "No wonder Brad wanted to sell his company. I don't even know what to do right now." It was crazy. The operations was not in place for that company. And so that was really, really hard to figure out.

Brad, like I said, is also a genius. Brad was running his own ads. He would be checking ads hour by hour, minute by minute, making tweaks and changes, again, which is probably why he wanted to sell the company. He was so involved in it. And so when we had our ads to take it over, they're not checking every single ad set multiple times an hour like he was able to do so. He was optimizing, constantly tweaking the funnel and tweaking stuff, and it was his sole focus for four or five years. He was building it up. And so when we took it over and we're plugging into a machine with media buyers and people and all sorts of stuff, and there's different divisions from funnel team and from ads team. And so instant we took it over and it went from being really, really profitable to not profitable almost overnight, where now we were losing money. We were, every single day, losing tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and was just trying to figure that out and trying to not have this thing ...

Anyway, it was crazy. But we're like, "It's okay because we have this huge customer list. People are coming in. And so the big first step, step number one, let's get all these people into ClickFunnels. Maybe we'll add 10 or 20,000 people in ClickFunnels. It'll change. It'll make it all worth it." And so we promoted this big webinar to the Doodly and the Toonly and all the customer lists. We had this big webinar. We had three or 4,000 people registered, and we're like, "This is going to be amazing," and I did the funnel hacks presentation. And in my head I'm doing the math, the numbers, how much money we're going to make, how many people are going to signed up, do the presentation. And about halfway through the presentation, I look over to the comments, and they were not going well. People were upset. They were complaining. "Is this is a sales pitch?"

It was weird. I'm used to selling to people in our industry who are internet marketers who understand marketing, and what I quickly realized is that the customers who were buying Doodly and Toonly were not who I thought they were. I thought they were marketers using videos to market their business. What I found out really quickly, these people who were buying them were people who were creating videos to teach school. They were making these videos for their classes. They were Kindergarten teachers, they were people who were making presentations, they were doing trainings. It was course creators, not business owners and marketers. And these people had never been to a webinar. They'd never been sold to.

I was reading the comments, and I remember as I was reading the comments, I started stressing out, which makes me nervous on the webinar. And then in the webinar I started talking faster and people can't understand me and people are more angry, and I did the pitch. The whole thing, it was bad. I'm not going to lie. I got in the webinar and I remember sitting in the room afterwards and I was like, "What did we do? I thought these people were potential ClickFunnels customers, and we're now seeing that they are not. It's different customers." And we're just like, "Oh my gosh, this is huge mistake."

We sold a few on the webinar, but it was not slam dunk by any stretch. It wasn't a base hit. I know I went from basketball to baseball, but I didn't know how to say that in basketball. I don't know. Anyway, but yeah, that night we were all stressed out, and we're like, "We made a big mistake. We shouldn't have bought this. It's losing money every single day. The buyers are not buying ClickFunnels." Like, "Oh crap, we wired tens of millions of dollars for this company, and we got 100 people messaging us for support. We didn't know what to do."

And all at the same time, Dave is now going through getting a tumor and chemotherapy and all these things. Anyway, it was a really heavy, really scary season. And we had Funnel Hacking Live happening, and we closed Dan Kennedy's company the same week. It was a lot in a really short period of time. Anyway, yeah. So there's what was really happening behind the scenes in case you're all wondering. And so then we were trying to figure out, "Well, what do we do? I don't know." And I was like, "The biggest thing is we have to figure out how do we bridge the gap from these people who have courses to they need to funnel? There's a gap there, and we can bridge the gap, but we have to bridge the gap because there's not a direct correlation right now. How do we do that?"

And so I hired a copywriter who I thought was a really good copywriter. I'm like, "Write a video sales that we're going to hand doodle the software out and we're going to give it to the Doodly customers that explain why someone creating content videos needs a funnel." And so I paid someone 10,000 dollars, like, "Just write this thing. I need it quick." And they wrote the sales letter and it was the worst thing ever. I don't know if you've ever hired copywriters before. Usually it's either a slam dunk or it's the worst thing ever, and this one came back as the worst thing ever. I'm like, "Gosh, spent another 10 grand, and this video sales card I can't even use. It's literally unusable." You don't get a refund when copywriters write bad copy, by the way. You're paying for their time not for the end result. And I was like, "Well, we got ..." Yeah.

So amongst all this stuff, I'm like, "I'm so tired. I don't have time for this, but I have to write sales letters." So I sat down and I wrote an entire script that we were going to hand animate. And so I wrote this script, which I was really proud of. We found one of the animators who'd done a lot of work with Brad to do doodle videos. I said, "Here's the script, doodle this video out." And then we found somebody to do the Toonly videos. I said, "Here's the same script. I tweaked some things for Toonly. I need you to make a Toonly version of it." And so now someone went and they spent a month or two going to making a hand doodle video and a cartoon video.

In fact, if you go to Doodlyfunnels.com, you can see what a video looks like, or toonlyfunnels.com, you can see what the video looks like. The whole goal was to take people who are buying Doodly or buying Toonly and bridge the gap so they would want to become funnel builders. And so much of marketing is just bridging gaps. So you guys understand that. If you think about it, whenever you're trying to sell whatever your product is, you're selling a book. Someone may not like, "Why do I need traffic secrets? This makes no sense." Well, I need to bridge a gap. Like, "Well, do you have a business? A business needs customers, right? Customers are traffic. That's why." So I had to bridge this gap where they're like, "Oh, I actually need that thing."

So all business is about that, figuring out what is the result that you offer people? What is the thing people are looking for? How do you bridge the gap between those two things? And so Doodlyfunnels.com and Toonlyfunnels.com were a sales video to bridge the gap between where they were today and where I need them to go to actually buy ClickFunnels. So we created those two things and we ended up sending an email to the Doodly owners to go to Doodlyfunnels.com and all the Toonly owners to go to Toonlyfunnels.com. Whoo. That's a mouthful of words to say. And from that, it was cool because we started seeing people actually start signing up for ClickFunnels through these different funnels. We're like, "Oh, thank heavens. Not all is lost. We can bridge the gap. We can convince these people why funnels is what they need to really get to the next level."

So we made those bridges. And then after we had those things and they were working, then we went back and said, "Okay, let's go and let's actually add the Doodly Funnels offer as upsell number three in the funnel." And so we went back through and added upsell number three. So now when you go, if you buy Doodly, you'll see Doodly for 67 dollars, then there's a 97 dollar lifetime pack, and then there's another offer, and then it's ClickFunnels trial, which is basically the Doodly Funnels video, and then we push people to trial. And we have that on the Doodly funnel and the Toonly funnel built into the funnel now.

And what's cool is that every single day now, people who are coming into these funnels and now outside for ClickFunnels, and so we're getting a consistent stream of income. In fact, as of today, I asked Kevin, I was like, "How many people are coming through there?" And he said, "Well, if you look at all of our referral sources, we track them all through affiliate links. We can see what's happening. Here's all this stuff comes to Facebook and from these top affiliates and stuff." But doodly.com, that funnel is one of the top 10 ClickFunnels affiliates. That's how much, I mean, new trials they consistently bring in. It's one of the top 10 lead sources we have right now, which is amazing.

So it's finally starting to work. I need to give credit or credit is due. When all the stuff was happening and we had 100 employees reporting back to me, we didn't have Dave, we added someone to our team, Kevin Richards, who's been one of the greatest gifts in my life over the last year. He came in about two weeks after Dave left with his tumor and came in and I basically was like, "I'm drowning." I'm like, "Here's all the stuff." And he came in and has become our CMO, our operational person, our, what's it? CMO, chief marketing officer. CMO and COO of ClickFunnels, where he came in and was able to help with the ClickFunnel side, but also coming into this acquisition say, "Okay, here's all the employees," interviewing them all, finding out who they are, finding managers from all of them and firing people who weren't doing anything, getting things set up, figuring out systems and processes and build out this entire org structure.

Now it's like, "Oh, now this is actually running like a business is supposed to run." And so Kevin came and set all that stuff up. Kevin is the one who took the Doodly funnels, Toonly funnels, after I built the sales video and the initial sales letters, and weaved them into the ClickFunnels funnels. And so he's been just insanely helpful for us to get these things in place. And so, yeah, I wanted to put that in there because how do you juggle all these things? When you're struggling, it's finding more help. It's finding the right people. It's getting the right people whose skillset is to do these things. And so I was lucky I was able to find someone to help with that.

Okay. And then afterwards, one of the other cool things is now that we have everything in place, now that we've been focusing, and I think last month was the first month where the funnels got to the point where they're profitable again on the front end, which is amazing, and now we're scaling profitably. And so it's taken almost a year from acquisition till now to where it's like, "Oh, now this company is actually making some money." In our heads, we were like, "Oh, this is going to be a slam dunk. We're going to buy, and it within 12 months from now it'll pay for itself. It's all going to be free money." And it didn't do that. It's taking a lot longer, but it took us a year to get the structure, the people, the offers, the bridge points, all those things in place to where now this becomes a really good front end engine to bring people in the ClickFunnels and things like that.

Okay. A couple other things, just where we're going so that you guys can watch over the next couple weeks, months and years, I told you guys before that Brad had built a video hosting platform called Voomly, and after he'd done it, he launched it, but then he changed it to this course membership platform, which competes with ClickFunnels in one thing. And so we came back and said, "Look, video hosting is the big thing. Wistia.com and Vimeo.com are huge companies. They do video hosting. We can do video hosting with Voomly just as well, if not better than them." Plus, Brad had built this really cool engine into it. It's like a video funnel engine where you can have a video and you put the player on it and imagine watching a sales video.

It's like huge on adventure. So someone watch is two minutes of a sales video and it stops. it's like, "Wait, are you a man or a woman?" And you're like, "I'm a man." And all of a sudden you click a button on the video player and it loads up a next video, which is speaking specifically to a man, or you could have a survey where it's like, "Are you just getting started? Have you been doing this a long time or are you super advanced?" And you pick it, and it changes the video. And you can build super complex video funnels through the Voomly player, which is insanely cool.

Anyway, so we pulled out some of the core stuff that was in it initially, and we're getting close to relaunching that video hosting platform. And one of the biggest features is the video funnel players, which are insanely cool. And so we have that, plus you'll see we've gotten all these software, Doodly, Toonly, Talkia, all these different videos inside of Brad's platform. We've built similar to Adobe cloud or things like that where all the software is built in one thing. And so you'll see the new version. It hasn't launched yet, but basically, if you buy Doodly or Toonly, they'll all cross-sell inside of the software. And then whenever you make a video, it automatically will host that video on Voomly for free up to a certain amount of videos, and hopefully it'll get us to the point where we're moving all these people who are video creators, because we've got literally hundreds of thousands of video creators, get into where they're hosting on our video hosting platform, using video funnels, and it'll grow dramatically.

On top of that, we're also going to be taking these Voomly video funnels technology and plugging it into funnels. So ClickFunnels members will hopefully stop using Vimeo and Wistia and YouTube to host their videos and start using Voomly instead, because, first off, it's a better platform. Second off, you're able to do video funnels, things like that. And third off, it's just going to be super easy integration. And so over time, I think Voomly, just the video hosting platform, could be a 20, 30, 40 million dollar a year business just by itself, which is another big reason why we bought the acquisition because it was like, "There's this thing here that has not been used yet that I think there's a lot of value in that that can be worth a lot of money. We just have to figure out the right way to do it, get it working correctly, and plugged in the whole system."

So that's the update on that acquisition. Again, Doodly is the software most people know, but Doodly, Toonly, Voomly, Talkia, Claymately, there's a whole bunch of ones. And there's a marketplace for Doodly and for Toonly stuff. There's automatic script, which is a funnel scripts clone. Anyway, there's a whole bunch of stuff. So like I said, a whole bunch of front-end offers that are software, they're non Russel-based, that are bringing people into the ClickFunnels world. And so anyway, that's one that's been ... There are a lot of things we've learned on the way. We learned that you need to have somebody in place of migrating people over.

We learned that you've got to make sure when you're buying a company, you're not just looking at like, "Ooh, the marketing." Like, "the ads are converting. The funnels are good. Da, da, da, da." It's like, "Who's looking at the operational side of things? Who's going to manage these people? What's it going to look like? Are people actually doing something? When Brad, the owner of the company leaves and disappears, what's going to happen? Is there a process running ads, or is there one super genius who is doing all this stuff? And if he leaves, and he is leaving because he sold the company, what happens? Do the ads just crash?"

So many questions that I wish I would've asked initially, that now we've acquired a lot of companies over the last couple months. We've known now to ask the right questions. So hopefully that helps some of you guys. Hopefully some of the conversations about bridging the gap, figuring out, again, the source, the lead source is coming from, and then what I'm trying to sell. How do I bridge the gap? Think about that with anything you're doing. If you're buying ads from Facebook or from YouTube or podcast ads, or if someone's listening to ... Let's say they're listening to The Mixergy podcast and you want to sell them your book on, I don't know, traffic or funnels or something, how do you bridge the gap? Just because it's like, "Oh, they're going to want this." Just because they're humans doesn't mean they're necessarily going to want it. You have to bridge that gap for them. And the gap could be an email, it could be a video sales letter, it could be a webinar. There are a lot of ways to bridge that gap. You have to strategically think through it.

By me just taking my existing webinar that I had converted for internet marketers for the last 10 years and trying to put it on these course creators, it wasn't a bridge that they were able to follow. I had to create something very specific and very specific for them. And same thing can happen when you're buying ads. Again, the landing page ... In fact, if you look at Doodly.com, the landing page for YouTube ads is different than the landing page for Facebook ads. If you're on YouTube, it's like, "Hey, you're here on the special YouTube ... You came from YouTube, so this is a YouTube special for YouTube people only." And so there's a page specifically for that bridges the gap between the traffic and the thing you're trying to sell. And there's a specific one for Facebook and TikTok and Instagram. And so we're bridging that gap to be able to match the traffic with the actual person.

And hopefully that gives you ideas of as you're buying companies or you're thinking through even creation of companies, what are the big things that are the most valuable? The front-end funnels were valuable for us. A video hosting platform that hadn't been used yet is huge for us. There's so many ways we can monetize that. Yeah, so it's just looking at all the different assets and trying to figure out things work. So I hope that helps you guys and gives you an update. If you haven't used Doodly or Toonly yet, you should go check it out. But I would go to the homepage. You'll see it's 67 dollars a month, and then just wait and we'll re-target you, and you'll get an ad somewhere that'll give you the lifetime deal. So there's your guys' homework is go let us stock you some ads and go find it out. But then look behind the scenes. Buy slowly. Watch the funnel. Look at the process.

When you see behind the scenes what happened and what's happening, you'll see, "Oh, this is why Russell spent 40 some odd billion dollars on the company, because of the funnels." For you to go and funnel hack that and look at the process is worth at least the price of buying the software. So go buy the software, funnel hack it, watch it, and then figure out, "How could I reverse engineer a funnel like this for my specific business?" In fact, on another episode in the future, I'm going to talk about one of the other acquisitions we bought was specifically because we understood the Doodly funnel structure and we saw some other software that didn't do. And I'm like," If we buy that software and apply that funnel, boom. Game over." Anyway, I'm trying to give you guys hints to see what's going on in my head, as I'm looking at offers and deals and how to grow and scale our companies. Hopefully this was helpful for you. So thanks again, and we'll keep you on the journey, showing you guys behind the scenes at Doodly, Toonly, Voomly, and the entire suite of products.

All right, this is Russell. Again, I want to thank you so much for listening this episode. If you enjoyed it, please share it with somebody who could benefit from it. Let them listen to it. Hopefully, you guys enjoyed it. And again, if you have any questions for me about this episode or any episodes, go to marketingsecrets.com. One the homepage, you can submit a question. Those come directly to me, and I'll ask them on one of the next podcast episodes. On top of that, when you go to marketingsecrets.com, you can see the video version of this podcast, you can see the show notes, whole bunch of other stuff. Plus all the other past episodes you can go and binge watch them there. I thank you guys again for listening to The Marketing Secrets Podcast.