Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with the incredible Katheryn Jones Lish, a powerhouse in the funnel-building world. Katheryn first came into the ClickFunnels ecosystem back in 2015 and has since made an impressive career out of building and designing high-converting sales funnels. We just wrapped up the "Sell Sales Funnels Challenge" at the ClickFunnels office, and in this episode, we dive into how anyone can turn funnel building into a lucrative business. Katheryn shares her journey from college student to successful entrepreneur, driven by a passion to impact both her family and the world.

Katheryn's story is one of transformation and purpose. She recounts her experiences, including early struggles, learning how to market online, and how she found ClickFunnels. We also discuss the resistance she faced, such as personal challenges that tested her entrepreneurial aspirations. Despite the doubts of others, Katheryn's faith in her vision empowered her to design a life that balances family and a thriving career. Our conversation touches on the powerful concept of “enabling and providing opportunities” and how this shaped her approach to business and parenting.

Key Highlights:

Whether you're a budding funnel builder or looking to elevate your skills, this episode is packed with insights to help you turn your passion for funnels into a profitable venture. Join us and discover the opportunities that await in the funnel-building world!

The reason I tell that story is just to show that when you break down the skill of funnel building into design, into assets, into strategy, into optimization, into agency, rather than trying to learn the whole thing at once, you can monetize from the very beginning and get paid to learn more, and learn more, and learn more as you grow your business.

Russell Brunson:
What's up, everybody? This is Russell. Welcome back to the podcast, formerly known as the Marketing Secrets podcast, now probably going to be shifting to the Selling Online podcast. I don't know if I'll update it by time you guys listen to this episode, but that's one of my evil plans. So anyway, we're working on a rebrand right now of the show, but I want to welcome you guys on the show today. Today we're going to be talking about one of my favorite topics wrapped in a really cool wrapper. Obviously you know my favorite thing in this world besides my wife and kids, and wrestling, and sushi, this beats sushi for sure. My favorite thing is sales funnels.

Today we're going to talk about selling sales funnels. How can you become a funnel builder and actually get paid as a career, building funnels for other people? And the last couple of days, we've actually been doing a challenge here inside the ClickFunnels office called the Sales Funnels Challenge, which has been so much fun and have had Kathryn Jones Lish up here, who's someone who came through one of our very first certification programs back in the day. She learned how to sell sales funnels, made a huge career out of it. And then since then, we decided to partner up with her program and our program to make something insane. And this podcast episode's going to be giving you guys some of the core beats of what we talked about during this challenge. But hopefully introduce you guys to a really cool opportunity, which is the fact that you can make a career out of building sales funnels for other people. It's going to be a lot of fun. So that said, let's jump into the podcast and hang out with Kathryn Jones Lish.

In the last decade, I went from being a startup entrepreneur to selling over a billion dollars of my own products and services online. This show is going to show you how to start, grow, and scale a business online. My name is Russell Brunson, and welcome to the Marketing Secrets podcast.

All right, so today, you guys, I'm excited to be here with Kathryn Jones Lish, which now we've added a new last name.

Kathryn Jones Lish:
Can you believe it? Your girl got married.

Russell:
It keeps throwing me off. I know.

Kathryn:
I know. No one thought it could happen, myself included. God is good.

Russell:
Congratulations.

Kathryn:
Thank you.

Russell:
It's been a couple of years now. This is old news. Yeah, you got a baby now, too. This is-

Kathryn:
I do, in fact, have a baby. Yes.

Russell:
All right. Well, let's jump ... Sorry, a lot of people just jumped on the podcast, they don't know what we're even talking about right now, so I'm going to take a step back. So I'm excited to be hanging out with Kathryn today, and she's someone who ... when did you first come into the ClickFunnels ecosystem, our world? I don't even know exactly what year that would have been.

Kathryn:
It was 2015.

Russell:
2015? Okay. So it's been a little bit.

Kathryn:
Yeah. 2015. Maybe 2016. I was just learning about making money online. I was using lead pages.

Forgive me, I didn't know.

Russell:
Wow, we put them out of business.

Kathryn:
I know. You seriously did, but that's what I was using for anybody listening. And you know when you're in that phase of business where you're like, "I don't know what I'm doing, so I'm doing everything and I'm on every webinar that's ever existed." So I was on a public speaking webinar, and it was at the very end, and it was a Q&A, and somebody in the chat asked, "What software did you use to book ... say, pitch a product at the end, "What software did you use to build your order form page?" And just on a one-off, the guy was like, "Oh, you use ClickFunnels?" And he just went on. And I was like-

Russell:
"Click what?"

Kathryn:
Yeah. And I just had never heard about it, so I just Googled it, or ... so I just looked it up. And then of course you're targeting me. I got a email for your Dotcom Secrets book, read the book, cried in my college drawing room because I was like, "Finally, this all make sense to me." And then one thing after another, it's amazing. Anybody that's following you, you tell us what you're doing to sell us and we even know what's happening when it's happening.

Russell:
It's so fun.

Kathryn:
And you're like, "Dang it." You're like, "Here's my money. I even know what you're doing. It's not even mind tricks." You're like, "Crap." Anyway, so it started with the book, and then I've gone through all your programs, and ... Anyway, now we're partnering and doing fun stuff now.

Russell:
Yeah, it's so cool. So what we're going to talk about this podcast, and by the way, for those who are going to be hearing in, we made two episodes with Kathryn today, she's here in Boise City 'cause we just finished a challenge together called the Sell Sales Funnels. So sell S-E-L-L, and Sales, S-A-L-E-S, Funnels, the Sells Sale Funnels Challenge about selling sales funnels because there's so many opportunities in the funnel world. You can be a funnel builder, you can be a copywriter, you can build your own funds, you can do eCommerce or info ... all sorts of stuff.

But one of the coolest, I think, opportunities that's out there that most people don't even know about is the fact that you can sell funnels as a living. You can build funnels and sell them, and you can make this. And so for you, one of the first things ... I mean, you did other things, but one of the things that you did initially was actually start building funnels for other people and doing stuff like that. And I'd love to hear just the transition from you learning about funnels to ... I don't know if there's a moment or aha of like, "I could actually do this for people and get paid, and this could be a career for me."

Kathryn:
Yeah. So honestly, how the whole thing started, I never envisioned myself as an entrepreneur. I was just in college, and I kind of bounced around majors, so they're all art majors. I was a piano performance major, and then I was a film major. I was just bouncing around. And then I went and served a mission for my church. I served in L.A., and I served in ritzy areas like Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and then in Compton and Watts. And I remember-

Russell:
Both sides.

Kathryn:
Yeah, exactly. And I remember coming home, and as a true millennial, I'm almost embarrassed to say this, I'm so contributing to the stereotype, but I just came home and I was like, "I don't know what I want to do, but I just want to help people." And I didn't know what that meant, but I knew that it would be easier to help people if I had money. So I came back, I went to my university and I was like, "Hey, I want to switch my degree to business." And they were like, "You have way too many credits. You got to get out. You got to finish your major." And it ended up, again, just being the best thing that ever happened to me 'cause I was like, "Well, I guess I got to figure it out by myself." I didn't know what that meant, so I started reading investing books and personal finance books. And one of my favorite guys is Ramit.

Russell:
I was going to say, "Yeah, Ramit's so good."

Kathryn:
One of my favorite authors ever is ... his name is Ramit Sethi, he writes personal finance.

Russell:
He's got a Netflix series now, which is insane.

Kathryn:
He has a Netflix series. And he's just like a step-by-step guy. For me, I was just like ... "He's like, number one, put your money here, number two." And I was like, "Thank you. Finally someone’s telling me what to do".

Russell:
Was his book ... it's called How to Get Rich, right? Or something like that, How to-

Kathryn:
Yeah, I'll Teach You To Be Rich.

Russell:
I'll Teach You To Be Rich.

Kathryn:
Great book, recommend, 10 out of 10. He's so awesome. Anyway. And then you start getting in all this stuff, and start getting ads. And it kind of bleeds into personal development, which bleeds into internet marketing, all the ads. And I didn't know what was happening. I remember seriously being like ... I'm getting emails. I'm like, "How are these people getting my email?" And the thing that's crazy is I had to have put it in somewhere. I didn't understand how it worked. Or I'd search for something and then I'd get an ad, I'd be like, "That's-

Russell:
How did they know?

Kathryn:
I didn't know. I didn't know about pixels and we're talking anyway. But one thing led to another, people are offering me courses. And again, I'm just like, "I got to make money. I just got to figure out how to make money." And another one of the big polls, one of the reasons why my soul just lit on fire when I found internet marketing was at the same time ... So I grew up the second oldest of eight. So my mom was pregnant for all of the 90s, so God bless her. What a queen. She's awesome. But I loved it. I didn't know anything different, but I truly ... My parents are so cool. We ended up all being friends, it was amazing. So I always knew that I wanted to be a parent, but I also knew I felt this thing inside my soul that wouldn't go away, that I just wanted to take over the world.

I wanted to help, and serve, and contribute, and grow. And so I knew that I wound up impact outside of my home, but I also knew I wanted to be a really present parent. And just logistics-wise, I didn't know how it looked like until I discovered the internet. I was like, "Oh, my gosh." So I discovered internet marketing. And that's one of the big reasons why I cried when I read your book, because it wasn't like, "Yeah, you're not a marketer. I'm so emotional." It was like, "Oh, my gosh, if I'm not an idiot about how I build this thing, maybe I actually could simultaneously ... like I said, have impact inside and outside of my house.

Anyway. So again, I didn't know exactly what form that looked like. I'm on all these different things.

I'm launching courses. I don't even have skills, but I was like, "I don't know." So the first course that I launched, it was to young adults on social skills, which you guys can all judge whether or not I should be selling that. I don't know. But I was like, "I don't don't know anything." I was like-

Russell:
So you made a course on social skills. I did not know that.

Kathryn:
Yeah, and how not to be awkward. And I didn't know. I was like, "But I have to practice, I have to try." And I sold the course for 127 bucks. I think I made six sales. I spent more on softwares, and learning, and courses to do it, but I got in, I got in the game. Anyway. So then I discovered funnels, which it was just so systematic to my brain who just craves order and structure. And I was just like, "Crap, that just makes so much sense to me." You just put things in an order. It's like a step-by-step process, a step-by-step series of web pages. And so I started to do it for myself and then all of a sudden, I realized I could do it for other people. And then I discovered you had a certification program. And I actually was working for my dad at the time. So my dad was an entrepreneur as well. My grandpa was a huge entrepreneur, then my dad bought his company, so then I was ...

Anyway, it's this whole thing.

Russell:
Whole family of entrepreneurs. Yeah.

Kathryn:
I love it, I love it. But my grandpa was an entrepreneur in the 60s and 70s, so totally different game. But I learned about this program. So I told my dad, I was like, "Dad, you got to read this book." So I got on that. I also got my dad on Ramit, so whenever we would have a business question, we'd always be like, "What would Father Ramit and Uncle Russell do?" That's what we do. So my dad, he's like, "What does Uncle Russell think?" I was like, "I don't don't know, let me go check his book," 'cause we didn't know you. You know what I mean? This was 10 years ago. Even today. I was calling him last night, he's like, "How's Uncle Russell?" I was like, "He's doing great, dude. Love him. He's so awesome."

Russell:
And one of the funny stories ... obviously you know this, but I was at an airport somewhere, I don't know. And usually nowadays I get spotted at different places and stuff. And some guy who's very tall, how tall is he?

Kathryn:
6'4".

Russell:
Yeah. Way taller than me. Walks up and he taps me on the shoulder. And he's like, "Hey, excuse me, I don't want to be awkward or weird, but my daughter's Kathryn Jones," or something. I was like, "Oh, hey." Randomly at just some random airport. So anyway, that's why I met your dad for real.

Kathryn:
Yeah. So the Jones family is fans of Uncle Russell. Anyway. So it was great. It was actually my dad that discovered the certification program because of course he got on all your email stuff. And he was like, "We need this for my business. I need this for all my other businesses. If I paid for you to do this, would you do it for us?" And I was like, "I am obsessed." Because I'm working for him, and I'm doing my own stuff. I was like, "Yes." So I do it, and I end up building funnels for them, which was awesome. And at the same time I was getting clients on the other side. It was awesome. I ended up finding two or three people that were ads people, and they were really good at ads, but they needed funnels. And I would just build lead files. They just pay me 500 bucks a pop.

And lead funnels are so easy. And I was good at design, so they look good, so they would pay me.

And so after work and on the weekends, I would just pound out however many leads came in. So anywhere from 1 to 10 lead funnels a weekend, 'cause they're ... you just put it in, put it on the right stuff. And so I would just make all this money on the side. And I was like, "Oh, nice." Anyway. So that's kind how I started. And then I started to find my own clients and it was awesome. But then people started asking me, "Why do your funnels look so good? Blah blah, blah. What does this look like?" And, again, my system's brain turned it into a framework, turned it into a course and everything from there. But that's how it started, is I was just desperate to find a way to be like, "Can I build a business that allows me the flexibility, the actual monetary gain, the influence to have impact inside and outside my house?"

Russell:
It's always fascinated me how people come into our world 'cause so many different ways ... For you, it's Dotcom Secrets then funnels. Some people, it's like they read Expert Secrets and that's their calling. Everyone's got different paths in. It's always fun to see. Now you told a story, the very first funnel you spoke at, you told a story. I love that you shared it 'cause it's probably a little vulnerable, not as much nowadays, but a lot of people when they get started on entrepreneurship, the people that are closest to them, the most important usually are the ones who reject it. It could be a spouse, could be a family member, it could be an ex-boyfriend, it could be whatever. But I know you went through that.

Kathryn:
Oh, yeah.

Russell:
Can you tell a part of the story? 'Cause I think hopefully it'll help other people who hit that. I see so many people who are entrepreneurial, who fill that call to contribution. But then there's someone around them who kind of knocks them off the path. And a lot of times they don't come back from it. And you did, which is interesting.

Kathryn:
Oh, my gosh, yeah. With many stumbles. Here I am, I'm in college, and I cannot explain to you how X among the Os I was. Yeah, it was just so crazy. And so, yeah, I'm working, but I'm staying up late.

My friends are asking me to go out. I'm like, "Sorry, got to watch a webinar." Yeah. Anyway. I was just living such a different life, but I ended up meeting this boy, and you know when you meet someone you're like, "Thank you, you're so easy to talk to." He was like, "We're so charismatic." He was really kind. He was a good boy. Anyway. And so we date for 8, 9, 10 months and we started talking about getting married. And I can't tell you how happy I was. I don't know if you've been dating, someone starts talking about that and you're like, "Oh, we’re not on the same page as you."

But we started talking about it. I was like, "Yes." It felt so good. It felt so awesome. It was just really fun and exciting. And then in our second or third conversation about it, he said to me, he's like, "Kathryn, I got to bring something up to you about getting married." And I'm like, "What is ... I'm thinking he's like, "Venue. Dah, dah, dah, honeymoon."

Russell:
Compliment you.

Kathryn:
And I was like, "Yeah, what is it?" And he looked at me and he's like, "I doubt your ability to mother because of your business aspirations." And I was like, "What?" And at this point, I discovered funnels. I actually was on my own at this point. I wasn't working for my dad anymore. So I was on my own doing a full-fledged thing, full-fledged agency. I had just launched a best-selling book. And it was kind like the first time I was like, "I'm doing this. This is happening."

Russell:
"I'm in." Yeah.

Kathryn:
Yeah, "I'm in." And so we were kind of dating at my first rise, you might say from like, "I don't know what I'm doing," to, "I'm actually making a full-time income." So he repeated, he's like, "Yeah, I doubt your ability to mother because of all of your business aspirations." And he said that to me, and I couldn't understand it. I was like, "What do you mean?" And he's just like, "If we're going to do this, you got to be home. That's how I want to raise my kids. That's how I want to raise my family." And all credit to him, his mom was gone, all growing up. She was a nurse and she worked, and his dad left them, so I get it. I get where he came from. But the way that he expressed it was like, "You're done. It's over. You don't get a choice. You're at home."

And for me, the way that that felt was like, "You're never going to expand, you're never going to grow. You don't get to develop as a human." And that doesn't mean that you don't do it with parenting. I think it's almost exponential or more. But it was just this fact that he was like, "I'm deciding your life." And that somehow business became evil. Me trying to serve, and contribute, and make money, it got painted in this like, "You're doing a bad, wrong thing. You should not want that. You're not pursuing ... the way he phrased it was like, "You're not pursuing the path of God because you should just want to be with your kids."

It was so crazy 'cause I was like, "I'm going to marry this kid." And to have somebody that I loved, and trusted, and I opened my heart to him in that way, and was like, "Oh, he doesn't get it. He doesn't understand or see the situation." Now I understand because the whole reason I got into this was ... again, it's like impact inside and outside my home. I felt the calling to do both. And anyway, needless to say, we couldn't ever get on. He couldn't see how I saw it and I could not see how he saw it. And just it end up not working out. And I genuinely was depressed for six months. I'm usually a get-back-up-on-the-horse kind of girl, and I could not get back up on the horse. And I think so much of it was because it was so identity-crushing for me where I really did question like, "Am I doing the wrong thing?"

And so much of that was because I had never seen anybody do what I was trying to do. And I know that sounds so crazy because there are a ton of female entrepreneurs, but a lot of them ... And again, I'm not saying anybody's path is wrong. I think everybody's path is the smartest. Again, it's their best educated guests. They're doing what they're supposed to do. But the way I wanted to do it was like, "Can I build systems so that a nanny isn't raising my kid, but me and my husband are raising our children?" And again, I'm not married, I don't have kids at this point, but I just felt it in my soul so much. But I started to question like, "Am I wrong for wanting this? Is that bad of me?" And it's so interesting because I think that men and women both think about this differently.

I think just based on the industrial revolution and so many things like gender roles just become what they've become. And I think there's actually a lot of beauty in them, but I also think that they're not set. It was really interesting. I just felt like I want to make sure that I contribute outside my home, I want to make sure I contribute in, and I want a husband that actually wants the same, too. I want a husband that wants to be with our kids, that doesn't just get to see them at these times and these times. I'm not saying anybody's path is wrong, it was just what I wanted. But I really started to question whether it was, and so I just am diving into any material I can find about parenting, 'cause I started to think, "Am I seeing this wrong? Am I being selfish for that? Am I seeing this the wrong way? Am I seeing business the wrong way? Am I seeing parenting the wrong way? Is it possible to do both?"

So I'm diving into any parenting book from New York Times bestsellers to the good word, everything between. And what I found, the theme over, and over, and over again was that the ultimate role of a parent is to nurture. And do you know what the definition of nurture is? It's to enable and to provide opportunity. And I remember when I learned that definition, I was like, "Well, what in the world is entrepreneurship then? Enabling and providing opportunity. That is exactly what you're doing." That's exactly what I'm doing. Once I understood that, I was like, "Okay, old boyfriend, sit down." Because I was like ... then I could see that me being an entrepreneur, which was enabling and providing opportunity was only refining myself for what I was doing inside the home, which was enabling and providing opportunity. And that what I was doing inside the home would one day sharpen what I was doing outside, and outside and inside.

And all of sudden I was just like, "It's actually just the same game. It's just like where are you putting your focus?" And once I learned that, then all of a sudden, I was like, "It makes sense that my soul is yearning to enable and provide opportunity for my children and for others." It wasn't like, "Oh, I want to be a business owner and I want to be a mom." I was like, "I'm just actually looking at this all the wrong way. What I want to do is do what I think we've been divinely programmed to do." God is the creator of this earth. We learn in Genesis 1. That's the first thing he teaches us, is, "I, God, am your father. And so I made you and I made the earth." Like, "I'm a creator. I'm a creator. I enable, I provide opportunity."

And so I think as His children, enable, provide opportunity, and it just made so much clarity for me so that when I found people that encountered me or my path of life, whether it was somebody I was dating, or a college roommate, or a family member, or whatever, it was just okay. It was just like I felt grateful. I felt like God led me to truths that in my mind and heart, it made sense to me. It felt right in my heart. I prayed about it, I was like, "That is true." That is, I think, why I feel called to do all these things. And if you see it differently, that's just also okay, too. And I'm here to believe that God might've called you to live a different life, and that's only rad that you're following that.

But for me, it just really took me to understand ... what it took me to was ... getting to the depth of the question is why am I trying to do what I'm trying to do? Why am I so obsessed with being on these webinars? Why am I so obsessed with trying to learn how to make money online? And it made me pull back the fact that, do I really want money? And it's like, "Yes. And what?" Do I really want status? "Well, sure. But what?" And then when I got to the bottom of it, it was like what my soul yearns for yearns, yearns for. What actually fills it is enabling, providing opportunity. And then when I could see that, and even now that I am married and have a child, that is the game. What's the balance in terms of where I put my focus? But that is the skill set.

That's what I'm doing. And hopefully on this podcast, hopefully when I see my baby in an hour. How can I enable Lucy and provide opportunity for Lucy in the next four and a half hours before she goes to bed? That's my job. And then while I'm on this podcast, how can I enable and provide opportunity for everybody that listens to this? That's my job right now. Anyway. I think it is just brutal when people don't have the same eyesight as you. But I also think it's a gift 'cause it forces you to say, "Well, why do I see things so differently than you? And am I wrong in that or do we just have different views? And it's just okay."

Russell:
Yeah, I think God's made a lot of different people a lot of different things. And it's like for each of us, it's important to find what we're specifically called to do and how it works. My story's not nearly as cool as yours, but I had kind of a similar experience where I had run my business for, I don't know, 15 years. There's business and then there's the spiritual things in life and they're separate.

And I had a big divider. I had a really good coach and she, one time ... I can't remember the conversation, I just remember she was like, "You don't see it, right?" I'm like, "See what?" She's like, "The thing that you built, that is your calling from God." I was like, "What are you talking about? God doesn't care if I make money or if I help people make money."

And she was one of our clients, so she's like, "You don't understand." She's like, "Yes, you helped me make money," but she's like, "Do you realize what you actually gave my husband and I?" Like "What?" She's like, "We were in bondage, and you came and you showed us how to make money, which freed us. And now because of that we go on mission trips, we serve people, we serve our church, we were able to donate money, all these things because you freed the shackles of this." And she's like, "This is the calling God has given you to do this to people, to give it to us. You changed our life because of that."

And I was like, "I never even, in my mind, considered that they were together." And for me, as soon as I realized, I was like, "I believe now that what I'm doing, I believe what you're doing, I believe it is a calling from God. If you feel that call to contribution ... that's what Sharfin calls it, Alex Sharfin, is like, "This call to contribution." I love the way he says. It's like, "If you feel that call to contribution, that is God putting these things in your heart to pull you towards something, that call. And even though it doesn't make sense, it's like your role in His whole grand scheme of things is to do this piece. And it opens up doors for other people." So thanks for sharing that. That was not a direction I was planning on going, but I think valuable for everybody listening.

Kathryn:
Hang in there.

Russell:
Me, specifically. Yeah.

Kathryn:
That's awesome.

Russell:
Okay. Again, we talked about funnel building as an opportunity and as a career, because I think this is the thing that obviously what we've done in the last three days here, we've been doing this Selling Sales Funnels challenge to help show that to people this is a real thing that they can do, that it can become a career for them. I think that people hear about that. Some people get excited and they run, some people get nervous and how does this actually work? And there's all this fear, but I'd love to go through almost the levels of it. The program I first became familiar, you had launched your design hacking school, teaching people that level, and then there's different levels. Let's talk about that first level. Someone wants to come in, they want to start making money, maybe they love funnels, the idea of funnels, they want to figure it out. What's that first level look like for them to be able to start an actual business doing this for other people?

Kathryn:
Yeah, that's what I love about this ... I call it a game of building and selling funnels, is that there are levels to it. So there's some things like brain surgery, they're not levels. If you only know part one through two, you should not operate on somebody's brain. But that's a beautiful thing about funnels, is that it actually really is broken up. So if you only have mastered this first skill, you can still monetize it and then you can master another skill, monetize it. And so what I learned really ... again, my framework brain. 'Cause what a funnel is, if anybody doesn't know, it's just like a series of web pages strung together and it acts as a 24/7 salesperson for you. And so, again, they're just baby-stepping, holding the hand of somebody through the sale. And so what you want to do as a funnel builder is figure out like, "Okay, well, what do I need to put on page one to get them to buy?

And then what do I need to get on page two to get them to upsell? And on three? Blah, blah, blah."

And so my systematic brain was like, "Okay, well, what's the patterns in this?" And ultimately what a funnel all comes down to is you need to have a strategy. So what actual pages am I putting together? Almost like an instruction sheet. And then you need to have the assets. So what are the words? What action am I going to type on the pages? Do I need a video on there? Do I need images? So you need all the materials and then you actually need to assemble them all together. I always say building a funnel is IKEA furniture. You need a set of instructions and you need all the misassembled pieces like video ads, or screws, and wood, and then you actually need to put it together so it looks into something good. And I think for so long the skill was taught of you need to be a master at strategy, you need to be a master at assets, and a master at design.

Russell:
Which is hard to do.

Kathryn:
Oh, well, it takes a while. It just takes a second. And especially if you're doing it on your own and don't have you as a coach, but it can just take a second. And people are like, "yeah, but maybe it's not." But I always like to go back to IKEA. Seriously imagine that somebody comes to you and is like, "Hey, design a set of furniture from scratch and then I not only want you to build out the instructions of how to do it, but I want you to somehow cut the wood in a way that can get them together, and then go build it." I'm like, "I don't even know what you're talking about." But if somebody handed me a piece of IKEA furniture in a box with instructions in wood-

Russell:
They would like, "Yeah," they bought it. They showed up at the house, they're-

Kathryn:
And they're like, "Kathryn, put this together."

Russell:
... "Can you assemble this for me?" Yeah.

Kathryn:
I really don't need that much skill to do it. And that's actually the beauty of funnel building, is that it's such an easy-to-entry market because there's opportunity like that with the design game. So a lot of people ... you're doing a ton of the educational work yourself to get people on board. "This is what a funnel is. Your business needs a funnel, funnel, funnel, funnel." So people go and build a funnel and they realize they don't don't know how to build a funnel. And they also really don't care to build a funnel. They're like, "Oh, I want to sell online dance classes to couples." And they're like, "I could care less about learning marketing. I just want to find clients to sell my actual thing to." So they went through and tried to build a funnel. So they got a strategy, they figured out some sort of strategy. They have a video, they have even words, but they put it together all in the wrong order, all in the ... it's not optimized.

Russell:
And it looks ugly and doesn't convert.

Kathryn:
Exactly. So what is so awesome is that there's so many people out there who have step one and two pretty locked down. And oftentimes they can do that because they are an expert in their actual craft. Like, "I know how to talk about ballroom dancing for couples 'cause I've been teaching ballroom dancing for couples for 20 years." They know how to talk about ... They're pretty close on the strategy if they haven't nailed it already. And then they're really good at their assets. But they go to actually build it in the software and they either logistically don't know how to use the software or they build it and it's butt ugly, or I shouldn't say butt. You know what I'm saying. It's so ugly. In case you're wondering, there's a study from Stanford and Google. People determine the credibility of your website in 0.05 seconds and over 90% of what you're judging is your design.

So you could have the most incredible offer in the world, but if people don't stay on your site long enough to actually see what you're selling, you lost the game. So not only does your site need to look good, it needs to be optimized as well. So it's one thing to have it look good, but it needs to look good in the way that people want it to look good. A funnel that's selling ballroom dancer for couples should be designed differently than if you're selling a fitness program for mom, then should be designed differently if you're selling a fitness program for college boys. Just think about how different a fitness page for mom and a fitness page for college boys. They should look different. The design should be different. Anyway. But that's what I love, is that the market ... there's such high demand for this skill because every funnel, every product needs a funnel. But there's also such demand for this lowest hanging fruit of just funnel design work 'cause a lot of people have tried themselves to build a website, to build a funnel, and it's not making money.

Russell:
They have the assets, they know what they want to do, they just can't do it.

Kathryn:
They know they want a funnel, but they can't get it. And that's where I think this really low hanging fruit of funnel design, the skill that doesn't take long to learn if you know the right way to do it is so amazing, because you don't have to reinvent the wheel, you just go build IKEA furniture. It's like, "Oh, you put together the bookshelf wrong, let's unscrew the bolts and make sure we put it in the right order. And there you go. Your bookshelf or funnel actually works now."

Russell:
A lot of people might be hearing this and say, "Well, that's great Kathryn, but I'm not a designer." When I launched ClickFunnels his year, I'm like, "How do I ... 'cause for me it was tough 'cause I'm like, "There's a dozen different ways to do funnels or more." There's a bunch of things. I'm like, "I can't teach somebody, 'Here's 12 ways to build a funnel and hope they're going to figure it out and understand it." So for me it was like the concept I came out was funnel hacking. So find a funnel you like. You want to sell an ebook? Sell an ebook, and then funnel hack it, right? Buy all the pages. And that's the strategy, is model their strategy. That's what I was trying to show people.

Or you want to launch a book, or you want to launch a webinar. Go and funnel hack someone, look at the strat, that gives you the blueprint, you got to the strategy and then you can go build it. So I called it funnel hacking obviously. When you came with yours, you call it design hacking. So for someone who's not a designer, how do they use design hacking to be able to quickly like, "Oh, I'm going to build ... to know what to build and actually assemble the thing correctly versus just making another worse version of what the person already tried.

Kathryn:
Yeah. And maybe if I can rewind in the story really quickly, I was saying I was just making lead funnels all the time, but at the beginning, they weren't actually converting, and it was because they were so ugly. They just really were. And that's when I came across that study that was people determined the credibility, and I was like, "Dang it." And I honestly was embarrassed. I was like, "That does not look good. I do not want my name associated with that." So I go to figure out how do I design? And everybody was like, "Go back to design school, go learn Photoshop. You need to learn coding." It actually is comical to me that I have made a name for myself in the funnel space as a design girl 'cause I'm not a design girl, I just wanted my craft to work. I'm just like, "I'm just trying to have impact inside my home and outside my home. I'm trying to build a business, and have kids one day." And like, "Dang it."

Everyone's telling me, "Go learn all this design," and I was just too stubborn to do it. And so I was like, "There's got to be a way to not do that." And so that's what led me to this hacking idea. I've been introduced it to you by you, and hacking just means modeling, find the patterns and then model those in your own. And that's when I was like, "I don't need to be a designer. What I actually need to do is just be really exceptional at finding the patterns that are working."

And so for me, it really is simple, comes down to like, "Okay, if I'm building a funnel for the person that sells ballroom dancing, I'm going to go online and I'm going to see ... I'm going to go try to find other people that are either selling ballroom dancing, or are selling fitness classes over Zoom, or anything, any live service over the internet, and just see what their funnels have, what patterns am I seeing, what the fonts are using, what patterns am I seeing with the hero section? Do they have a big picture of the leader in the front? Do they have a huge headline? What is the color scheme?" It's crazy. There's some niches sometimes where it's like, "Wow, yellow is the color, and a dark ... You're like, "Crazy. Everyone's using yellow," but you're like, "Great. I mean-

Russell:
Must be a reason. Yeah.

Kathryn:
Yeah, and that was one thing, too, 'cause I wasn't trying to be a designer, I just really wanted it to work. But I didn't care in the beginning to be like, "Oh, well, how do I know that this works? Or blah, blah." I just kind of assumed like, "Okay, if this person has money enough to do ad spend, which I know that they do because their pages are ranking on Google or I'm seeing them on Facebook, then they must know something more than me," 'cause I'm not paying for ads spend at the time.

So I'd be like, "Great. They are steps ahead of me in their business. They're actually betting money on this page that it works because I can see it's sponsored on Google, or a Facebook ad, or whatever." So I'm going to trust those pages and use those as a model. And so that's just seriously what I did. I didn't try to be a designer. I didn't try to be like, "Okay, let's come up with this cool concept idea," which I do-

Russell:
What’s the right color palette, let me figure out the tone…

Kathryn:
I do have say I meet designers and I'm like, "I wish I had your skills," but I don't. Anything that looks good, that you've ever seen me produce, whether it's a funnel or slide deck, or anything, it's literally ... For these slides that I just did, I just literally went to your selling online event. I was like, "Okay, how do you do this pitch slide?" I said, "Nice, love it." And I just like, "Okay, what is working?

Go on and put it in there." Anyways. And so that's how it works. And so it really is really interesting.

I even think with the game of marketing ... sometimes I think marketing or, "I'm a marketer," can feel so magic almost.

And it's really just an organization problem. Marketing is all organization like, "Can you get the right pieces in the right place?" And so for this term, funnel hacking, which is finding the patterns and modeling or design, finding the design patterns and modeling, it's just organizing like, "Can I find the patterns and can I put those patterns in the same place in my stuff and move on?" And so in that way, I was able to "hack the design system". And that's how it started. And so I think for anybody like, "Oh, I'm not a designer," welcome to the club.

Russell:
Yeah, I remember we first launched ClickFunnels, I was trying to figure out a way to promote it. And so I remember Lewis House at the time, he had hired digital telephony to do his landing page.

I know that because I bought a company from Digital Telephony. They're this amazing designing team. Insane. We tried to hire him one time, they charge ... for a blog design, it was like, I think it was like $70,000 for a site, or if you wanted a full branding package, it was 150,000. And Lewis had paid it. And so I remember one of my first things I did when we were launching ClickFunnels is like, "Hey, check out Lewis's $75,000 site design. I'm going to show you guys I can build." I opened my monitor on left-hand side, I had Lewis's right-hand side, ClickFunnels.

And I literally just went element by element, and I just design hacked. I was like, "Okay." Took his logo, put it right here, color background. And within 15 minutes, I had replicated his $75,000 funnel design. And it was insane. It looked amazing. You wouldn't have been able to tell which one was Lewis's, which one was mine. And that's what you're talking about. You can go and find the greatest designs in the world. You look at what they do and then you're modeling them, right?

Kathryn:
Yeah. And that's the thing that I always find amazing, too, with design hacking, is we're actually not trying to be good designers. What we're trying to do is model or design in a way that converts. So sometimes I'll go through the process. And I have to check myself. It's so interesting, even ... So we did this selling funnels challenge, and we have a certification program that teaches people how to do it. And when I was doing the training for the certification program, I was doing it ... I made a funnel for one of my neighbors 'cause I was like, "Brand new ... Let's see." And one of my neighbors who's trying to sell her online coaching services. So I literally go and I show everybody here's how you find the funnels that are working. Here's how the funnels or the pages to actually take patterns from. So I'm taking patterns from it, I'm writing it all down, and then I start to design it.

And I was like, "I don't like how that looks. I'm going to tweak it." Even myself, I was like, "Actually, it doesn't matter what I think looks good, it's what the market decided." And so I'd go back and I'd be like, "Okay, great learning." But it's amazing 'cause sometimes we catch ourself. We're like, "I don't like how that looks." And there's a difference between, "Oh, I'm designing for things to look pretty, because who cares if your thing looks pretty if it doesn't make you any money?" So it's really interesting. Sometimes you'll see in the supplement world, especially selling to old ... I shouldn't say older people, people that are older than me, 60-

Russell:
I'm getting older.

Kathryn:
So am I. I know. Literally. Oh, my gosh. But if you're selling to older people, if you have a really sleek design, it's really interesting. It converts worse 'cause it's overwhelming. Whereas if you have a website that kind of looks like it's from the early 2000s ... And to me, it hurts me 'cause I'm like, "It's so ugly." But I think that's the beautiful thing about this concept of funnel hacking or design hacking," is you're just ... The true objective at the end of the day is cash flow and sales. And so what you want to do is just find the patterns, and you have to put aside what you care about, how it looks, because again, you're trying to optimize it for the avatar that's going to come through.

Russell:
It reminds me, I had a supplement for diabetic neuropathy about the time we're launching ClickFunnels. And we had same thing. We made the sickest coolest site and did not convert. And then we went and our avatar, they're older, 70s, 80s, 90s years old, and they didn't want to watch videos. We had this best sales videos ever we made, and we shift to this long form thing with no images. It looked like it was built in front page. And crushed. It's just crazy. That's what they responded to. But me trying to be a designer and a funnel builder, all this stuff, and I messed it up until we reverted back to what that market ... and it came back to doing a little research and finding some things.

Kathryn:
Yeah. But it goes back to, I think, this concept of enabling and providing opportunity, which you have to get yourself out of the way to be like, "Okay, my main objective is to help somebody who's in pain to not be in pain." And what you have to do is you have to get the person in pain to actually listen to you. If you're marketing to Gen Zs, you got to figure out how to get them to pay attention to you. If you're marketing to boomers, you got to figure out how to get them to listen to you. And I just think it's actually ... it's just amazing, I think, to come into the game at this point. I mean, you were one of the late stage pioneers of this internet marketing where you took us from physical marketing mail, what's it called, direct response?

Russell:
Direct mail. Yeah.

Kathryn:
I can't even remember. I didn't do it. To internet marketing. But that's why I just think we're so lucky, because you're never having to reinvent the wheel. There's so many people out there that are doing it good that you can model it. And there's also so many people out there doing it bad that you have so much opportunity.

Russell:
To fix it.

Kathryn:
Yes. It's so awesome.

Russell:
Yeah, if you just have basic understanding.

Kathryn:
Yeah.

Russell:
I was going to add one thing 'cause a lot of people, whenever I talk about stuff, they always like, "How do you find these funnels? I don't even know where they're at." And so I'm going to show ... I'm telling my secret, maybe yours is similar.

Kathryn:
I love it.

Russell:
And right now we just built ... at Funnel Hacking LIVE, you saw we launched a new plugin called Barnum PT, which is a free plugin for funnel hacking, you go funnel hack, screenshots and pictures.

So I'm in the process right now, if I'm rebuilding my swipe files, I'm funnel hacking. I'm buying everyone's product. But I'm trying to find different markets. So for me, example, I was like, okay, "Everyone's got a green drink offer." So first thing I is, I grab my phone and I just start talking by it, 'cause everyone knows this is a thing now, 'cause I was like, "Green drink. I want a healthy green drink. I'm looking for some green drink. I want something that's going to be healthy, a red drink, green drink." And I start talking to my phone. And all of a sudden, ads start showing up. And then I go to Facebook and I start searching for a whole bunch of things. And I go to Google, I search, go to Instagram, I search, and then I'm done. And over the next two weeks, I'm going to get hit with 500,000 Google ads.

Kathryn:
Ads, emails.

Russell:
And they pop up. I click on every single ad, go to the page, open up Barnum PT, screenshot, screenshot every single page in the funnel. If I wanted to do baby diapers, I would go and I start typing, saying, "Baby diapers." But I say it next to my phone, type it four or five places and then I sit back and they just all start coming to you.

Kathryn:
Yeah.

Russell:
Is this similar for you?

Kathryn:
Yeah. I just Google search as if I am the person trying to buy the product. And so same thing-

Russell:
See where it takes you.

Kathryn:
Yes, exactly. And so you go, and I click on everything, and I do it. And then what I love about what your process is, too, is oftentimes, yeah, you get the best sample size if you wait for a few days because people are going to re-target you. People are going to do this. We were just talking with our friend, Greg, who does the program with us. He's like, "I click on every single ad. And in my Instagram I have folders for ... these are great internet marketing ads, and these are great this, and this is amazing funnel. It's so cool." But it just really is amazing. If you understand the process for how to find the highest converting items to incorporate into your funnels, when you understand how it works, it's just there. You just get to actually just take it and make it your own.

Russell:
And you start clicking on things. Then Facebook and Instagram will ... the algorithm will get trained and they're like, "Oh, this person's looking for that stuff." And all of a sudden all the other companies you couldn't find, just start showing it magically.

Kathryn:
It is amazing.

Russell:
A fascinating thing, I don't know if you've ever done this, but one time I grabbed my wife's phone, I thought it was mine. I opened it up and I opened Facebook, and I was in this whole new world, this whole new land. I was like, "What is this?" And I was like, "Oh, this is what Facebook looks like for my wife 'cause she's searching for way different things than I am." I was like, "This is a whole different experience." It was so cool 'cause I saw all these other funnels that I never even knew existed.

Kathryn:
My Gen Z siblings, they're all about TikTok, but my parents are also on TikTok. I love it. But they also will be like, "Oh, yeah." They'll always be like, "You're on the wrong side of TikTok," 'cause my mom's on TikTok for gardening videos, crochet videos. She has workout ... like stay flexible videos, 'cause just turned 60 this year. How to keep your mobility. My dad is so funny. He loves back cracking videos, but he also loves Napoleon Hill stuff and business stuff. And then my Gen Z siblings are like Ariana Grande, Taylor ... Not even. That's probably too millennial. I don't even know what they're listening to. But it's so interesting when it's called like, "Oh, you're on the other side of TikTok." And in one way, it's actually amazing that the algorithm just conforms to what you want. In some ways, I think there can be some negative side effects to that in the world, but from a marketing standpoint, it is awesome because you basically have ... it's a search engine tool specifically for products that are marketing. And so you're like, "Oh." Again, if they have money to run ads-

Russell:
There's something happening.

Kathryn:
... it's not nothing happening. And so it's an amazing thing to model.

Russell:
So cool. All right, so that's tier number one. So tier number one, somebody learns the basics of design, how to find those things, look for the things, and then now they can go and start getting clients selling design. So what are the price points? If someone's just doing the design, what could they sell their design services for?

Kathryn:
Totally. It's usually anywhere from three to four figures per build. And typically the way that I have people do it, because again, you're not building the strategy, you're not building assets, it's literally reorganization. It's just like a flat rate per page. And so the more you build and the more you have a portfolio to show, the higher you can do it. And so I would say on average, once people are getting into it, you're making anywhere from two grand to five to six grand per build. Cool.

Awesome. Because again, you're taking all their stuff, redesigning it, taking all their stuff, redesigning it, taking all their stuff, redesigning it. And so some people seriously ... I mean, before we joined forces, that was all I ever told people how to do, was design. And they built this full on business. They didn't even have to read your books, which I always tell them to, don't worry. But they didn't even have to. Because we're not focusing on strategy. We're not focused on-

Russell:
A person's coming to me, "I need a book funnel. I tried, it's not working." You're like, "Cool, let me fix it." Or, "I'm trying to do webinar funnel, it's not working." As opposed to, "What should I build? What should I build?" At-

Kathryn:
Yeah, exactly.

Russell:
... strategy level.

Kathryn:
Yeah. 'Cause they would come to them, and the target audience would always be like, "I know exactly what I'm trying to build. I know exactly what product I'm trying to build, blah, blah, blah." Whereas when you start to go to this next level, which is, "Hey, I'm going to get really good at strategy," which is essentially ... again, thinking of IKEA, I'm really good at figuring out which funnel you need. So somebody comes to you and they're like, "I'm an online ... I'll just keep going with this example, "I teach bottom dancing to couples and I want to take it online." And most times that's all somebody knows. They have no idea what a funnel is. Or if they do, they don't know which funnel type to build. That's when you can come in, and when you start to know strategy, then you can start to charge a lot higher dollar because then you also know how to start creating their assets.

You know how to start building their copy, you know what video scripts to make them. It becomes really, really exciting.

And so at that point, when you master that, you go from three to four figures per build to four to five figures per build. Money is always tricky for people. Everybody comes with money, baggage, good, bad, and ugly. And sometimes selling can feel really hard and all these different things. But the thing that I love and why I don't feel any hesitancy in charging people multiple five figures for a funnel build for me now is because I do understand strategy, I do understand asset creation. I'm really good at design, so I know that what I'm building them is not just like, "Oh, here's some webpages that will never do anything," it's, "Oh, I just built you a selling machine. I built you something that's going to make you money. And when you can build something that makes people money, you can always charge people money. You always have a skillset that people will pay money for."

And what's so amazing about this is, again, is the road to entry is just so easy. You can start making money by just designing, getting things in the right places, and then when you are like, "Oh, I want to start making higher dollar for this," learn the strategy, learn the assets, put it all together, you start making your custom furniture. And you can go from there and turn into a full-blown career.

And then this is something that I love, too, 'cause people are like, "Okay, then the game's over," and it's like, "Oh, no, you only just began," because then what you can do is you can optimize them.
'Cause a true funnel ... If you have a funnel up, the best funnels are living, breathing, optimized changing. You have a hundred people or 500 people go through the funnel, and you should be smarter than when it started. And so you take what you learned like, "Oh, tweak, tweak." Exactly.

And then 500 people more go through, and you tweak, and 500. And so then you can start to charge even more in terms of like, "Oh, you can pay me anywhere from a thousand to 5,000 bucks a month to just keep optimizing your funnel."

Russell:
There's a company we use off and on, and it's 25 grand a month, and they just log into your ClickFunnels account and then they just tweak stuff. And all the traffic's coming in and they sit and tweak stuff and tweak stuff. And it's called CRO. Excuse me. It's called CRO 'cause it sounds fancy, conversion rate optimization. And it's being a funnel builder who's just like, "Okay, let's test five different ideas today. Let's move the headline here. Let's move the button, let's try different things." And you're tweaking to see what the thing ... and it's worth it for someone like me or someone who's getting a lot of traffic because let's say I'm getting a hundred thousand visitors a month through site and I'm converting 3% of those, so ... I should have picked New Zealand, what's the math on that? A hundred thousand, 3%? 3,000, right?

Kathryn:
Sure, yes.

Russell:
Or 300. Anyway, whatever that is. I go from a 3% conversion to a 5%. That seems like, "Oh, you increase a little bit-

Kathryn:
But you have that much volume.

Russell:
Yeah. That could add an extra million dollars a month. Someone's bottom line. That's the reality. So someone will pay, again, $25,000 or more just to sit there and just tweak your page and just see what's going to-

Kathryn:
I remember I saw a training video of yours once, and you actually showed a Google spreadsheet of a video that ... yeah, a guy that somebody had sent you. And it was like, "Okay, here's the 40 active tests we have right now," which I was like, "That's the hottest thing I've ever seen." I love that you have 40 funnels to test on, active funnels, and that was not even all them. But you're like, "Okay, here's the test." And he had the rows highlighted green, yellow or red, and it was like green if that test worked, yellow if it's like, "We need to run a little bit more traffic to decide ... it's still cooking." And then red was like, "Oh, that test didn't work." And it was so amazing to me, again, seeing the volume. And that's the thing, too, whether you have a hundred thousand visitors or even a thousand visitors.

And so it was so cool to be like, "Oh ... I remember it was such a small thing. It was like, "Oh, we increased the conversion to a 6% to a 6.8," and then the next column on it was how much a year revenue did that add? And it was like $217,000 because it went from 6 to 6.8. I was like, "Dang, I freaking love this game." But it's just a game. And I think it can feel overwhelming when you're like, "Oh, tweak the headline, do this." It can feel like random and sporadic, just like there is patterns with design, and patterns with assets, and patterns with strategy. There's patterns with optimization where it's like, "Okay, we know that this is the first thing we test, and then if that works, great. If it doesn't work, this is what we do next. Or if it works great, then we'll also see if the next thing works, the next thing works."

That's just what my soul loves about this game, is that everything is a process and it's just like, "Start here, move forward, start here, move forward, start here, troubleshoot, move forward."

Anyways, that's what I love, too, because then you can start trying to recurring. And then if you love it and you can get smart about it, knowing that funnels and the game is all broken up, you're like, "Oh, I need strategy. I need assets, I need design, I need optimization." If you want to really blow it up, you can start to build an agency where rather than you wearing all those hats, you can be like, "Oh, okay. I actually hate the design part. I'm going to throw somebody on design. Awesome. I hate the strategy part, I’m going to move it to somebody on strategy, but I love copy," or whatever. And then all of a sudden you can increase the amount of clients, and so that retainer just goes up, and, up, and up. So you're not just making three to four figures a build, you're making three to four figures per month per client, and it just actually becomes a living, breathing business.

Russell:
Yeah, it's really cool. And what's interesting is I've seen people who go to build an agency, initially they find those core people and they're running through client accounts, and then eventually they shift from, "I'm just going to charge somebody to do this thing," to, "I want equity in a company." I showed a video on the challenge of Noah Lenz who's a 14-year-old kid, who takes equity for every funnel he builds.

Kathryn:
It's so awesome.

Russell:
There's equity there. And then later it's like when you have your own ideas, your own project or things you want, then you can plug it into that same system.

Kathryn:
That's what I love. I'm telling you what, sometimes I can't believe it. I say this to my husband all the time. I was like, "It's a crazy world we live in that I can just have an idea." Especially when you sell education products, because all education products are if somebody's figured out the pattern to something and then you sell the pattern. That's it. So I sell products on design. It's because I figured out the patterns. I sell products on partnership traffic, it's 'cause I figured out the patterns. But it's amazing. It's just ideas that you have and you figure out the patterns that can get results, and then it's just amazing. I'm like, "I can just film a video." And it's almost like I'm coloring a page online, and then you make money. I'm like, "It's crazy."

Russell:
It's the coolest thing ever.

Kathryn:
It's amazing. But the thing that is amazing, it's not unethical, it really is just the ease right now of if you understand the game, taking product to market and then market to money in your bank account, it can be really fast.

Russell:
And the first time's always the hardest, but as soon as you get through the ... I tell people the first time they're building a funnel for themselves or someone else, you do the whole process. And then after you've done it once, it's like, "Oh, I know all the ... The hardest funnel I've ever built was my potato gun funnel 'cause I had to learn how ... back in the day, how do you set up a domain? How do you point it to your web host? How do you do FTP? How do you-

Kathryn:
I bet that was terrible, 'cause I don't even doing that now.

Russell:
Yeah, it was so many steps. It took me six months just to figure out how to get an image online, and then how do you get front page to connect to this? It was this huge thing. And I finally got it. And I did all the work. And I had to figure out how do write copy, and how do you get images, and how do you hook it to an order for me? It was a nightmare. ClickFunnels makes it way easier now.

But then it was a nightmare. This is what I did it once all the way, and then I bought my first ads, my Google pay-per-click, pushed it to my potato gun DVD, and it was working. And then I was just like, "Oh, I know how to do it." And then the next time I was like, "Okay, step number one, boom." And then second funnel took me a week, and the next funnel ... it started getting really, really fast.

And so it's just getting the process down once. I was going to say one thing, though, we talked about ... initially, usually it's you doing all these pieces. You're learning, and then eventually you start building a team or agency. When you said that, I was thinking about my company.

ClickFunnels is just basically that. There's me, I like the strategy, so I'm like, "Strategy." Then there's Morag. So I tell Morag, who's our project manager, "Morag, here's the strategy." She's like, "Cool. She's got it. And then she goes, and we've got ... I think the best designer on the planet, Jake Leslie, and he's got a team of three or four designers. They go and they design the thing, and then Nick is my funnel builder. He goes and connects all the things and puts it together.

Heath is my copywriter. Heath goes and writes all the copy, and then there's a couple of people, but that's all we've done. I've got four or five people who are insanely good at all the different pieces, and then I have an idea, and then we go through it and then we launch it. And then people, "How you launch so many funnels so often?" It's like, "I got the best team in the world. We could do agency work," but at this point, I do my own thing, so I don't do my own work.

Kathryn:
Yeah. You have your own internal agency and the only client is you.

Russell:
I can make as many ideas as I want.

Kathryn:
I know. It was really fun when we started working on projects together. It was really fun to see your internal processes 'cause I'm like, "Oh, yeah, my agency does that, his agency does this. It's fun to see." But the thing that I loved was you just have a ... it's just like a submit form, and it's just a magic form. Anything you want, if you want to funnel, a video, a design, or anything-

Russell:
Magic goes on from there.

Kathryn:
And literally, I kept asking questions 'cause I'd be like, "Okay." 'Cause, again, from my agency, I'm like, "Okay, I know I wear this hat, but this person wears this, this, this." I'm like, "Who do I talk to?" And they're like, "Just put it in the form. Just put it in the form and it comes right out." And I'd be like, "Okay, we need video for this. Who do we ask?" "Put it in the form." I'm like, "Great." And then you're like, "But it's so beautiful." It just shows you how an agency can work. You genuinely are so removed from the entire process. But I think the beautiful thing about it is you're wearing the right hat. For me, I like to be involved in the process, so I still want to wear this hat, and this hat ... But I just think that's a beautiful thing, too, is you can ... It's just a lever you can pull.

If you only want to do this on the weekends, or before work, or while your kids are napping, because there's low hanging fruit, you can still make money and it doesn't require a lot of time. You can still play. Whereas if you want to make this a full-blown career where you're like, "Oh, I'm here and I'm managing all these people," you can have a million-dollar-a-year agency. And anyway, that's just what I love. Again, the game is accessible to anyone if you understand the patterns involved so that you can reach the appropriate level fruit, I guess you could say.

Russell:
So much fun. So again, this is, I think, the coolest career side hustle, whatever it might be. We had someone on the first VIP Day who was like, "I signed up for this 'cause I want to do this as a side hustle." They're like, "I think this going to be my career." Like, "Yes, exactly."

Kathryn:
Yes.

Russell:
Yes, if you could make 500 bucks on a weekend, you could make 500 bucks a day or whatever the numbers are if you put the energy and effort into it. Okay, the next set of things I want to ask you about around this, 'cause I know that there's the two sides of it. Can I do the actual funnels? The second is how do I find people to be clients? And so I'd love your ideas on ... And we don't have to go super deep, but some ideas like how can someone find clients who are looking for this stuff so they can take those two things and match them together?

Kathryn:
And I just have to say, for all of my analytical logical friends who are like me, this is the scariest part, but it's only scary, again, when you don't understand the pattern. And for me, whenever I feel afraid about something, it's 'cause it's like, "Oh, I don't know the plan. I don't know how I'm going to do it." But once you're like, "Oh, that's how it works?" Then it's like, "Oh, I'll just ... it's a numbers game.

Russell:
It's follow the step-by-step. Yeah.

Kathryn:
It's follow the steps. And so for me, when I was like, "Okay, well, what actually is selling?" Because I think selling can get a bad rep because people are slimy about it. They trick you into buying something that you don't want or they convince you that you have a problem that you don't. It can get really slimy really fast. But when I think selling is done right, it means that somebody has a pain and you provide the remedy. And both parties are happy at the end because the person with pain no longer has pain and the person with the remedy got compensated. And so for me, when I'm a funnel builder, what does the funnel builder do? They build sales funnels, funnels that bring sales.

That's the remedy. I bring sales. So when I'm looking for clients, what I'm actually doing is I'm looking for somebody in pain, and what is the specific pain I'm looking for? I'm looking for somebody that needs sales. And the fun part is that that's everybody in business.

Russell:
Is there any company that doesn't need more sales?

Kathryn:
Exactly. But the reality is that also everybody needs food. But depending on when you catch them in the day, somebody needs food more than other people need food. So if you haven't eaten for 24 hours, that person is a lot more pain than somebody who's like, "Well, yeah, I need food later, but I just had breakfast." And so what I like to do is, yes, every business needs more sales, but there are some people that are in more pain than others. And the most beautiful thing is that people are typically loud about their pain and they gather. It's scientifically proven that people with common interests and common pain gather together. And not just on person, but primarily online. And so you, for example, you're an amazing person that has gathered people of similar interests, and therefore, produce similar pains, right? Then you're like, "Build funnels, online business, blah, blah," but because you're new and they don't know, it's like, "Oh, I built a funnel, but, dah, dah, dah. It didn't pan out the way that I want," 'cause they didn't understand the strategy, or the asset, or whatever.

And so what I like to do is I literally just go to the ClickFunnels group, or online business groups, or internet marketing groups, or on Facebook, or ... I follow YouTube people, look for people in the comments, or Instagram or whatever, but I literally just go and people will ask questions all the time. Literally, we just did this three-day selling challenge. Every example I gave was an example that happened from the day or the day before. I just literally went to the group and I said, "Oh, look, here's a person in pain. Look at the time stamp. It happened four hours ago." Or, "Oh, look, this happened this morning. It happened at 8:27." And literally what pain looks like is people are saying, "Hey, I'm trying to get this funnel work and it's not working," or, "I want to sell this product, but I don't know how to start," or, "Blah, blah, blah, blah."

And all of a sudden you're just looking and you're like, "Ding, ding, ding. That is a person in the pain that I can solve. That's a person that needs more sales, and I know I have the skillset to build something that can bring them sales." And so when I think about it that way, it's just a very logical approach, it's not like, "Ooh, I got to go find somebody to give me money, blah, blah," it's like, "No, I'm just going to find somebody in pain, and I'm going to be a homie about it, and I'm not going to let them wither on the side of the road. I know how to help them, so I'm going to help them." And that can become the game. And so it really becomes ... I think so often we think, "Well, what do I say in the sales pitch? How does it work?" And, yes, there's an art and a science to selling, but at the end of the day, you're just a person helping a person.

And so going into the comments and saying, "Hey, you need help? I know exactly what you need. I'm a expert funnel builder. Do you want to hop on a 15-minute call?" Or, "Hey, I'm going to slide into your DMs, I'm in chat." Sometimes I don't even get on a call with them. I'm like, "Let me just help you in the DMS. We can just take care of this right now." But what I like to always say to my students is this concept of be 10% better. You don't have to be amazingly better, but be 10% better.

So if let's say that there's four people bidding for the attention of this person that needs help with their funnel, what happens if you send a video, just like a selfie video that's 15 seconds long, rather than like, "Hey, so what do you need help with? Dah, dah dah."

If you're like, "Hey, Sally, I saw your post. I'm Kathryn. So excited for you. You're selling this product, awesome. It seems like you're having a bit of a little bit of trouble. I kind of checked out your stuff. I actually have a really clear idea of what you might need to do looking forward. Do you want to hop on a call right now?" And then all of a sudden she sees that I'm not going to abduct her, no stranger danger. I'm normal. I invested in her stuff and that's that. And it took me three extra minutes, then the guy that slid into her DMs was like, "Hey, I can help, dah, dah, dah."

Russell:
Yeah. Anyone. Yeah.

Kathryn:
It's like, "I don't know. Do I want to get on call with you?" Anyway. So that's what I love. And so I think for anybody freaking out, just realize it's not some magic words to say. It's just, "Can you find somebody in pain?" And then just offer them the solution to the pain and be a normal human about it? I think that's it.

Russell:
One of my favorite example, you know Ben Moot? Obviously Ben from my team-

Kathryn:
I love him.

Russell:
I eventually stole him and now he's my right-hand man working on projects all the time. But before that, he was building funnels for other people. And I asked him his process and it was so cool. He's like, "Everyone hears you talk about funnel hacking and everyone understands it, but no one wants to do it." So he's like, "I would offer to do funnel hacking for people. So I charge ... I can't remember, 300 bucks. And so someone was trying ... "Anyone ever seen a funnel that does this?" Or they ask those questions and he's like, "Hey, for 300 bucks, I'll go find 10 funnels for you."

And so they basically ... they write him a check, 300 bucks. He goes out there, he go find 10 funnels, same process we talked about. Go start searching for things, find them, go through the process, funnel hack them. So he take these 10 funnels, and then send them back to the person and like, "Here's the 10 funnels. And by the way, if I was you based on these 10, I would do a funnel like this," and you map out, "Here's the strategy I would do. Here you go." And then the person's like, "Whoa, that's insane. That's amazing." And then the next question is like, "Cool, so you can do that on your own if you want. You can hire me, I can do that for you." And 95% of the people who he did the funnel build for hired him to do the thing later. It's like, "You know about this market, you understand it, you see the vision. This is it. You understand the strategy. This is insane." And it was this most simple, non-threatening thing.

And you could do funnel hacks for people for free, just like, "I'm going to go do it for you for free." And just give them recommendation. You putting forth that effort is what gets the person like, "I could hire the 14 people that slid in my DMS saying, 'How can I help you, sir?' Versus the person who went out there, and did the data research, and showed them on a silver platter, "This is what I would do if I was you. And like, "Please help me."

Kathryn:
And that's what I think about clients, too, or even in selling, launching a product, we build it up to be so much more than it is. And it's so interesting, even with getting healthier, losing weight.

Everybody actually knows what to do. What do you? You move more and you eat less or eat. Better. At the end of the day, that's what it is. And there's always going to be circumstances. Some people have crazy hormones or whatever, but at the end of the day, basically everyone knows at least how to-

Russell:
Burn more calories than you eat, and you're probably going to lose weight 9 times out of 10.

Kathryn:
We know that, and yet, we still hire coaches over, and over, and over, and over again. Why? Because we're just afraid. We're afraid to take the steps or we need accountability to take the steps. And I think about that so often with selling, too. Everybody knows what to do, actually. Like, "I don't know how to find clients." You do know how to find clients. Just go find somebody that's hurting and help them. But we're almost too afraid to do it. And I almost wonder ... sometimes I'll make deals with myself. I had talked about this the other day with somebody when you were there, but I was like, "You're not allowed to freak out until dot, dot, dot." Where I'll be like, "Oh, what if the assignment isn't to make money? What if the assignment is more something I can control where I'm like, 'Oh, I actually have to have conversations with 100 people and try to pitch 100 people on selling my service.'"

And only after a hundred people am I able to freak out. But the assignment isn't to make money right now, the assignment's just to go talk to a hundred people, and that is something I can control. And if money happens, great, if it doesn't happen, whatever. But I've learned this phase honestly from dating. I learned it from my friend and she called it the two-week data where she's like, "Sometimes you're dating a guy and you're like, 'I don't know.'" She's like, "I just got so overwhelmed. Some days I'd be like, 'Oh, I love him, the next day, I'd be like, 'He's so annoying.'"

And she goes, "I call it two-week data." And she goes, "For two weeks, I'm not allowed to do anything. I'm not allowed to feel happy, sad, whatever. It's just data acquisition. So if I have a great day on Monday with him, but he's kind of a loser on Tuesday, whatever, data. And then at the end of the two weeks I can look at all the data-

Russell:
You put it all together.

Kathryn:
... and be like, 'Oh, it's overwhelmingly positive or overwhelmingly negative, and therefore, I have enough data to make my decision." I was like, "That's so smart."

Russell:
She should tell the guy before the date, "You got two weeks, then we'll decide if we're going to go on a third date."

Kathryn:
I know, but I'm like, "That's kind of genius." So I started implementing those principles. You're not allowed to freak out until dah, dah, dah." And so it's like, "Okay, before I call quits, or sleep on this opportunity, or decide to have a major freak out or whatever, it's two-week data or whatever." And so I'll be like, "Okay, until I pitch this X amount of times, it's just data." And even though it's hard, and my nature is to attach ... 'cause you put so much into it. My nature is attached my worth sometimes to that funnel. So if that funnel does great, "I'm incredible," if that funnel does terrible, it's like, "I've never done anything good in my life." But when I make these contracts for myself, because so much of the game of creation, not just funnels but creating anything in general, there's a physical production part to it. And then there's also this emotional component to it.

So many people have the skills to be incredible entrepreneurs and funnel builders, but they lack the emotional fortitude to actually start. Or there's a lot of people that are like, "I can do anything," but they never learn the skillset. And so they kind of suck, too. And it requires both. I am definitely, I think, more steady in my skills. I think my technical skills are pretty great because I've done so many reps. And sometimes I just get scared, and I get nervous. And I just want to do such a good job for people and my family that I can get quickly critical, and blah, blah, blah, and all these different things. And so I just have to make deals with myself to be like, "Kathryn, remember, it's all just a game and it's all just to help you with this. So don't waste energy on that. So you're not allowed to freak out until dah, dah, dah."

So that might be something, too, of people considering this game. Before you even learn the skill set, just go try to sell 10 people. If somebody says, "Yes," then you can be like, "Okay. Well, I guess I'll go learn it now." But I think we build it up so much in our head because we're trying to make it something more than it is. Or if they say no to me, they're ... they say no to this deal, they're saying no to me. When in reality, what's actually happening? We're trying to help people in pain be out of pain, and that's all it is. Anyway. For anybody who freaks out like me, just ... I literally write contracts and sign them with myself. You're not allowed to freak out until dah, dah, dah.

Russell:
June 17th. Day to freak out.

Kathryn:
I know. And you want to know what's so interesting? Is when I get to the end of those contracts, whether goes good or bad, I'm not freaking out because it becomes a very logical, non-emotional decision because I have data sets before me.

Russell:
The emotion happens in the peaks and the valleys, you know what I mean?

Kathryn:
Yes.

Russell:
And you get a bunch of those and it starts ... it flattens out to the point where you're like, "Now I need to make a decision that's not so scary."

Kathryn:
Well, it's interesting. So McCall and Tanner, my brother and sister-in-law, they came and spoke a few days at your selling online event. And so they came back, I was like, "Tell me everything," 'cause I always want to hear these behind the scenes. I just love everything you guys do. And so they're telling me and they're like ... and they said, "You want to know one of my favorite things that I learned from Russell?" And I was like, "What?" And you've been saying this new selling online event, it's one of the best highest converting funnels you've had in a while. It's just crushing it. And so you sell this product at the end, and it was actually my brother that told me this, he's like, "Man, I just loved it." And he goes, "Because all of a sudden, they pitch and they come off. And it kind of took a while for the first five sales to come through." And he's like, "When Russell heard that, it wasn't like, 'Oh, shoot, only five sales?' It was just like, 'Okay.'" And then they just moved on.

And then you don't freak out and you continue through the portion of it, and you had day two, day three or whatever afterwards. And the follow-up sequences, and then it ends up becoming one of your highest converting funnels. But there was an opportunity for you to be like, "Oh, those first few sales didn't come in as quickly as we wanted," to, "I'm calling it quits. You guys suck. This is so bad. We got to rewrite the whole thing," but we don't even play it out long enough to see if it actually works and turns, and then it turns out to be one of the best converting funnels. And so Tanner and McCall, they just came back and they just realized that, "Oh, we didn't realize how much more steady we could be in this process." 'Cause it is so fun. It's so rad when you have the table rush. And it's so awesome when you're like, "Oh, my gosh, I sold out this thing before I even got off live." It's so fun.

And also, people are people, and sometimes people need time whether to buy or whether you need time to learn how to do the skill. And again, I just think there's just so much beauty in allowing yourself time. Don't pull the plug before you even give yourself a chance to win.

Russell:
Yeah, that's cool that's what they got out of this. That's fascinating. Okay, so I know we're going to be doing another podcast interview here in a little bit, going deeper into traffic, and joint ventures, and partnerships and stuff. But I want to wrap up this one with ... obviously we've been here this whole week doing this selling sales funnels challenge, I guess.

Kathryn:
See, you're better. You go for the tongue twister. I just say, "Sell funnels."

Russell:
I kept saying, "Sell funnels," and everyone's like, "Okay, cool." Like, "Sell funnels." Like, "Yeah."

Kathryn:
We are selling the funnels.

Russell:
"You've been talking about sell funnels for a decade, Russel. It's not a big deal." I'm like, "No, it's a big deal because-

Kathryn:
S-E-L-L.

Russell:
I'm like, "It's S-E-L-L S-A-L-E. Sells." Anyway.

Kathryn:
It's either the best of the worst idea we had. If the name changes, you guys will see. I thought it was clever, but I don't know.

Russell:
It's very clever. So the sell sales funnel challenge, and I'm assuming hopefully we'll have an evergreen version up in the future. So if someone goes to sellfunnels.com, S-E-L-L ... oh, sorry, sellfunnelschallenge.com.

Kathryn:
sellfunnelschallenge. Yeah.

Russell:
S-E-L-L funnelschallenge.com, we may have an evergreen version. We do it during the challenge, made an offer for somebody to come into our training, our certification program, which is kind of cool, behind the scenes, obviously. You had your design hacking program that you sold for years, four, five, six years now, and had tons of success helping people do that. Level number one, which is like find a client, do the build that's anywhere from a hundred bucks to a couple thousand bucks.

And you took that program, which was fun, it's during ... those who watched it live, you went and showed 20 minutes of screenshots of like, "This guy's first challenge was like a hundred dollars, 500,000. This guy made $34 in his first funnel," all sorts of things. There's this person after person.

So we took your program, which has been insanely helpful for people in our ClickFunnels community forever.

And we took the ClickFunnel certification program, which dives deeper into the strategy and all that kind of stuff, and we smoosh them together into the coolest train program ever for someone who wants to learn how to become a funnel builder to be certified to be able to do this. I'd love if you just ... I don't know, we have tons of time, but briefly talk about what the program is ... specifically the timeline, 'cause different it's than you're going to learn a whole bunch of stuff. This is like, "Here's the sprint we're going on to get you to this result, this result, this result." I'd love you to talk about what that looks like from the outside.

Kathryn:
Yeah. Well, at the end of the day, people opt in to sell sales funnels because they want to make money. And so what we did ... I flew to the boys, we all worked together, and we said, "Okay, there has to be three primary objectives that they determine all. If anything that happens in this program, it's to make the funnel builder money, is to make their clients money, and both as quickly as possible." And so if there's anything in this program that does not directly contribute to it, it's fluff, it's out.

Russell:
No matter how cool it is. And I had some cool stuff that-

Kathryn:
And he did. I did tell him kindly. I was like, "Russell, it's amazing. And it's not for this program." I'm like, "Just sell to them. Make a payment already for the-

Russell:
You have to understand the different way our brains work. So as you guys may or may not know, in the last 18 months, or sorry, last two years I've bought over 18,000 books. I'm building a library. I just want to have every piece of resource known to to man at my fingertips in case they ever want it, even though I'll probably never read most of the. And a lot of my program's that way. It's like, "You have every resource you ever need." And we first came, you're like, "Wow, are people stressed out?" I'm like, "I wouldn't be stressed out." And you're like, "My brain does not work like a library.

Mine works like a path." You said a path, a step-by-step ... 'Cause you're like, "Let's take your library and let's plug just the pieces. Someone needs to go from step one to result, and then from that result, the next result." It creates a straight line.

Kathryn:
Because I have a very OCD checklist brain. And my husband is a lot more like you where it stresses me out. He could take a book, and he'll just skim through it, and read a few pages, and then he puts it back on the shelf. And my brain is like, "What do you mean?" I'm like, "You didn't read the book." For it to fill checkmark read for me, I'm like, "I read the cover, I read the acknowledgments. If there's an appendix, I like to go through the appendix," so it's not done. And so for better or worse, that is how my brain works. So when I go into a program that has like, "Oh, and you also get access to this, and this, and this," I feel like I have to do it all before I can start. And so for me, I'm like, "Oh, no, please don't give it to me. I'm here because I want this result and I don't want anything else."

I've taught people in other programs and stuff how to actually create a course, and the prompt I always give them, and this is exactly the prompt that we went through for this, is for those new funnel builder coaching certification program, is I say, "I want you to imagine that it's you and your customer or whoever's going through the program with you. You're locked in a room, you're not allowed to eat, you're not allowed to sleep, you're not allowed to go to the bathroom, you're not allowed to leave until they achieve the result. How are you going to get it for them?" And at that point you're not like, "You know what? This would be a cool extra training. Go watch out in the corner for a few hours." It's like, "I need a sandwich. I'm starving. Get the job done."

And so that's what I always like to think of. You will be locked in that room and eventually you will die if you don't eat, and if you don't sleep, and then you're going to have to go to the bathroom in the corner. It's going to be ugly. So how quickly can we get you to that result? And that's just how I want programs to be made. So that's how I make them myself. And I think a lot of people are like that because there is so much information online, and if you find a guru like you, who actually knows what they're doing, it can be really wonderful, but sometimes it really can be super overwhelming. And I actually think that the best programs have both, where you have a very clear path. And then if you want to dive deeper, you want to become an expert in certain thing where you have some crazy extenuating circumstances. It's like, "Great, you got the library in the back."

And that's what this new program is.

And so it just takes you ... assuming you know exactly nothing and you've made exactly $0 online, but you to make money selling sales funnels online, it takes you from step zero, to step one, to step two, to step three. And so what we focus on is, "Okay, great, let's get you money as quickly as possible". And so rather than learn the whole gamut of, "I need to learn design, and then assets, and then strategy, and then optimization, and then we'll go try and make money," a lot how college is like, "Go through four years and then good luck." We learn a micro skill and then we monetize the skill, and then we learn a micro skill and then monetize, learn, micro. And so in my old program that we incorporated into here, people started what's called the money by the weekend challenge because it's just like, "Okay, I don't have to learn the whole thing, I just need learn a little thing." And like, "Can I?"

By the time I buy this on a Thursday to the time Sunday ends, like, "Can I go monetize this?" And people do. It's amazing. So that's what it looks like. So we first teach you all through design like, "Let's teach you how to design, let's teach you how to monetize design." And then you can decide at that point, "Do I want to build a full business out of this or do you want to learn the next step?" And so if you do, then we teach you strategy and assets. That's where we dive really deep into your concepts, but we put them in chronological orders. We take your beautiful library brain, and for me, little OCD people, we-

Russell:
Here's step one.

Kathryn:
Yes, exactly. So you guys know I'm going through this content and I'm like, "Okay, for 12 minutes and 14 seconds to minute 15 minutes and 11 seconds." I'm like, "Go click that." That's what we need.

Russell:
What about the other three hours? They're so fun to talk about.

Kathryn:
And I'm like, "It's in the library. That's where you think is. You don't need it, okay? Because we're locked in the room." Anyway. But then we teach you strategy and assets and then we monetize it.

And then if you want to learn more, we teach you how to optimize, tweak this funnel, headline here, blah, blah, and then monetize it. And then if you want to scale it, we teach you the principles of building an agency so that you can scale and go from there. That's what I love about this new program, is that people do get results really quickly because it's learn, monetize, learn, monetize, learn, monetize, rather than learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn. And then like, "Good luck monetizing. Hope it works out for you." It's like, "No, the whole point is to get almost ... it's almost like you get paid to learn. It's really, really amazing. So it's amazing program. It's so fun.

It's been so fun morphing both of our frameworks and strategies together in a really chronological order. It's been so fun.

Russell:
It's pretty cool. I'm proud of it 'cause something that one of my sons, he's like, "Dad, I think I could be a funnel builder." This is something I can plug my kids into. If I had a friend or family member that lost their job, I would buy this for them. 'Cause, again, it's not something that's like ... a lot of programs I have is like, "You're going to learn how to become an expert and how to write." That takes a lot of time. There's a lot of things have to happen for you to be able to do this. This is like you're leveraging other people's stuff. You're coming in and just being that key integral part that makes it go live for them. It's just so valuable.

Kathryn:
'Cause you don't have to be the face of it. You don't have to provide a product. You let other people provide the product.

Russell:
They create the product, you create the ...

Kathryn:
You just build a selling machine. And so it really is amazing. So we honestly have had 10-year-olds going in. Stephanie Blake, you talked about her. She's really being a community. Her kids have gone through it. It's been a really beautiful thing. But because it is step-by-step, whether you are a 10-year-old, or in your 60s, or 70s, or you've never done anything before, or homeless, every single one of those avatars have been through the program and made money with it because it's just like, don't try to learn the whole thing, just learn step one. Did you do step one, great. Now step two.

Russell:
Which badge do people usually make money their first dollar by?

Kathryn:
We broke up the program, and so, again, because I'm trying to get us out of the room as quickly as possible, so I'm going to die, I broke everything up into micro challenges. And so people on average are 15 to 20 hours away from their first sale. And so that's over the course of six little challenges that you have there.

Russell:
So some people could do it in 15 to 20 hours straight, or you could do over a week, or over a month, but depending on how much time you put into is, that's where most people are getting their first sale?

Kathryn:
In the 15 to 20 hour mark. And that's what I really love when we were going through the challenge today, I was like ... the average college degree takes you 1,800 to 2,400 hours, and that's over four years. And-

Russell:
You don't get paid at all along the way.

Kathryn:
... you're not getting paid. And even at the end you might not get paid. But what we're saying is not only are you learning a skillset, you're actually monetizing the skillset in 15 to 20 hours. And people are like, "That seems too good to be true. What does this look like?" And what I have to tell them is because it's a step-by-step process, it's because there's such high demand and it's because we're not trying to learn the whole gamut, we're doing the lowest hanging fruit. And again, some people didn't believe me, so what I would do is I would ... one of the biggest ways I sold this product was through joint ventures.

So I love this. I would go into people's groups, I would pitch the product, and then what I would do is me and my assistants, we would wait and we'd get the email list of everybody that joined and we'd stalk them in my Facebook group over two weeks. And to get to earn a badge, I'd have ... take a screenshot and post in the group. Then what I do is I'd go back into that same group I pitched in two weeks later and I would literally just be like-

Russell:
Here's the 46 people.

Kathryn:
So I wouldn't even agree. Once I learned this, I never agreed to do a joint venture unless they'd let me come do a re-pitch 'cause we do 25 to a hundred percent of sales. 'Cause we'd just go, we'd stalk people and in two weeks time, they'd already get results. And then we'd come back in and we'd be like, "The only reason we could think that you didn't join this program is because you thought it'd be too good to be true," and be like, "You want to see what your own kin, what your own people have done in the last two weeks?" And we'd just be like, "They did this. They did this. This person made money. They did this, they did this, they did this. Do you believe me? They did this, they did this." And be like, "Whoever your group leader is, so awesome, they decided to open it up again. So three more days," and we do, again, 25 to a hundred percent of original sales.

But that is also the beauty of this skillset that ... The reason I tell that story is just to show that when you break down the skill of funnel building into design, into assets, into strategy, into optimization, into agency, rather than trying to learn the whole thing at once, you can monetize from the very beginning and get paid to learn more, and learn more, and learn more as you grow your business.

Russell:
The coolest thing ever. So I'm pumped for everyone who's on the challenge. They had a chance to go for last three days through this. We made a special offer. Most people jumped in and are going on that path, which is really cool. For people on the podcast, obviously, number one, hopefully we have an evergreen version of the challenge. If you go to sellfunnelschallenge.com, you'll be able to see that in the near future. But if you're like, "This sounds like the thing for me, I want this to be my career. I want to go dive in, I want to go through that. I want to get on the path ... do you remember the link off the top of your head?

Kathryn:
Oh, you bet. It's ingrained. It's tattooed on my arm. No, I'm just kidding. www.funnelbuilders, with an S, .com/allin.

Russell:
All in. Okay, so grab it. If you're at home, listening to this in your car, pull over real quick. Grab a pad of paper. And say it one more time. funnelbuilders ...

Kathryn:
funnelbuilders.com/allin.

Russell:
All in. So check it out there. And there's a spot where you can go, and you can get started, and jump into the path.

Kathryn:
Hang out with Russell's strategies mixed with my OCD brain. I mean, what could be better? Come on.

Russell:
With more could you want in life?

Kathryn:
Could on, guys. Come on.

Russell:
And if you're an adult and you're like, "I got a kid who's useless," plug him into the program. I'm just kidding. But if you got somebody struggling ... You used talk about your dad, you were working with your dad and your dad's like, "We need this," and he plugged you into-

Kathryn:
It was awesome.

Russell:
... our first version of this program, which helps you go through this. So for any of you guys, it could be for you, it could be for spouse, could be for a kid, be in it for a Christmas or birthday present for somebody. This could be their future, this could be their career. You can go give them a college education and spend 60 grand a semester at Duke or whatever, or Princeton. Or for a fraction of a fraction of a fraction, give them this thing that within 20 hours they can make their first sale, and then keep going, and keep going, and growing into ... and this could be the coolest career in the world. This career opens up so many cool doors. That's how I met Tony Robbins because of the skillsets. Most of the famous people I know is because of this skillset.

Kathryn:
Because they had a product, but they needed a funnel to sell it, right?

Russell:
Yeah. I remember when Tony Robbins launching his book, he hadn't launched a book in 20 years. It was his first finance book. And so Tony's a busy guy. I met him a couple times before, I didn't know him great. And I just shot him text message, "Dude, you're launching a book. Do you have a book funnel?" "What's a book funnel?"

Kathryn:
And you're like, "Ding, ding, ding."

Russell:
The next thing I know, Tony Robbins calls me on the phone, "Hey, you need a book funnel?" "What's a book funnel?" "This is how it works." He's like, "What would it take to build one?" I'm like, "Well, I have the software called ClickFunnels, it builds funnels, but I need to film you. So doing all the sales videos, so can we hang out? And can I film you?" I was like, can I come spend a day at your house and film you?" He's like, "Nope." And I'm like, "Okay. Well, how can I film you?" He's like," I'm speaking in Las Vegas next week. I can give you an hour in the hotel room." I was like, "Done."

And a week later I'm in a hotel room filming Tony Robbins. We put together a book funnel, launched it on ClickFunnels. He loved the platform. At the hotel, we showed him the whole thing.

He loved it. "Next funnel, I can have you speak ... It was just crazy because I was like, "He needs a book funnel. I don't know how to build a book funnel." "Hey, man, you have a book funnel?" Boom, open this huge door. Anyway. So it'll change your life. Yeah, this skillset's the number one thing you all needed to learn to master. Anyway, thank you for hanging out with me this whole-

Kathryn:
Well, thanks for introducing me to this world. What a beautiful place it is. It's so awesome.

Russell:
It's so much fun. All right, everyone who's been listening at home, hope you guys enjoy this episode. If you do and you're ready to get started, go to funnelbuilders.com/allin. Or if you want to watch the whole challenge, hopefully have an evergreen version up soon, go to sell, S-E-L-L, sellfunnelschallenge.com. Got it?

Kathryn:
Nailed it.

Russell:
There you go. All right. Thanks, Kathryn.

Kathryn:
Thanks, Russel.

Russell:
Appreciate you.

Kathryn:
Bye.

Russell:
See guys all soon.