How To Build A Virtual Real Estate Empire By Fixing, Flipping, And Investing In Small Cash Flow Funnels…
If you don't have a business yet, or you're struggling, or you're in the middle of trying to grow something big, this could be a fun weekend project or side gig you do, just to have some fun growing a business. And so have some intentions, how can I use this either for my existing business? Or how can I do this as a side business? Or maybe it's a business you do with your kids.
Hey, this is Russell Brunson. You are listening to the Marketing Secrets podcast where you're going to learn different ways to market and to grow your company. In today's episode, we're going to be covering what we call virtual real estate. I'm talking about a whole bunch of cool things from like, how do you wholesale funnels? How do you license funnels? How do you fix and flip, which is hard to say, how to fix the flip funnels, how to buy and hold funnels. How do you create financing deals? And how to find virtual real estate funnels that you can use to grow your core company. It's a lot of really cool things we're covering during today's episode.
I want you guys, as you're listening to today's show, to think of an intention. As you're listening to this, don't just listen for enjoyment. I want you to enjoy the episode, but I want you thinking, how can I use this in something I'm doing? And this could be simple as looking at the funnels you have that maybe aren't working as well and how can use these strategies to make them better? Instead of finding a company and flipping it and fixing it up, or things like that. How can you apply these principles to your own company?
Number two is if you don't have a business yet, or you're struggling, or you're in the middle of trying to grow something big, this could be a fun weekend project or side gig you do, just to have some fun growing a business. And so have some intentions, how can I use this either for my existing business? Or how can I do this as a side business? Or maybe it's a business you do with your kids. I recently, I'd ended up not buying it, but I almost bought this sock company, because I thought it'd be really fun to do with my kids. It would've been a perfect virtual real estate company I could do with them, to give them a side project to learn these marketing principles.
So, have an intention as you go through this, of how could you actually use this in your real life? And on top of that, if you enjoy this episode, please rate and review. Again, this is a new podcast format I'm testing out. If you like it, it would mean the world to me to go to Apple, to iTunes, wherever you are, and actually rate and review this podcast and this episode. And on top of that, share it. If you enjoy this, share it with your spouse, with friends, with people that work with you. This is the best way to get this show out for me, is for you to share other people. So, that'd be amazing. And then if you want me to answer any of your comments or questions on the show, if you go to marketingsecrets.com, there's a spot there where you can actually leave a live question.
I am listening to those when you send an audio question email to me, I listen to it and the best questions we'll be picking and pulling for the show. So, make sure you go to marketingsecrets.com. At that site, you'll have chance to see the video version of this. If you're listening, the video version of this podcast, you can get notes, transcripts, a whole bunch of other things. And so, make sure all those things are marketingsecrets.com and go look for the virtual real estate episode.
On top of that, the last thing to share is that this episode is being sponsored by me. I figure that if somebody else can make more money off my audience than me, I don't deserve to be doing what I'm doing. So, I'm going to be the main sponsor for this show. So today's episode is being sponsored by the Traffic Secrets. You can go get a copy@trafficsecrets.com, just cover shipping and handling and it is amazing. So, Russell, thank you so much for sponsoring your own podcast. Go get your book at trafficsecret.com. And I think that is it. So, that said, you guys, I hope you enjoy this episode of the Marketing Secrets podcast.
All right, so on today's episode, I want to talk about a concept that we call virtual real estate. And this is not a phrase I made up. In fact, a lot of things I do nowadays are things that really smart marketers were doing when I first got started online and then they stopped doing and I bought the ideas or the principles or the concepts from them. So, when I got started way back almost 20 years ago, one of the big things that was the hot topic, the shiny object of the day, was Google AdSense, kind of like we've got crypto as the shiny object today and NFTs are the shiny ... there's always something, that's like the new hot thing everybody's focusing on and that's where their attention's at.
And so, if you rewind back in time, 18, 20 years ago, when I first got into this game, the big shiny object was Google AdSense And what was happening is that people could create these websites and they were really ugly websites because the reason is you made money not somebody spent time on your site, you made money when someone came to your site and then they saw AdSense, they clicked on the link. They clicked on the AdSense link and left. That's how you made money. So, literally the whole concept was make these really ugly sites, getting ranked really high in Google for competitive keywords, and then you make money every time someone would come to your page and they would leave.
And I had friends making $50,000, $60,000, $100,000, $200,000, $300,000 a month by making these crappy, ugly websites. I remember at the time, John Reese came out and he was one of the guys who was making a ton of money doing this. He coined the term virtual real estate or VRE. And he started saying, "You got to create these VRE properties," these virtual real estate properties, and each property, you set up the site, you get it ranked in Google and it makes $500,000 a month. And he's like, "You make one." It's just like having actual property, buying a house that cash flows $500,000 a month. He says, "You make one and then create a second one and a third one."
And I remember back in the day, people came out with different software programs. There was one called Traffic Equalizer. There was a whole bunch of other ones that came out that would make these sites even faster for you. And then I had friends like David Fry, who went and he'd built a whole team. He had in his basement of his house, I think, or maybe his office, he had this production where it was like they had all these different people and there was all these high school kids, come home from high school and they'd have computers. And there was, I don't know, maybe 20 or 30 computers in the room. And the first guy, all his job was to do was go buy domains. So, he had above his desk, he had this checklist step one, two, three, and the guy would come home from school, sit down, he would just buy domains.
And then it would go to guy number two and the second desk was like, "Hey, your job is to go and do these five steps." And he had a whiteboard with the five steps for that guy, the next thing. And he built literally a shop of people that would just come in and they'd buy a domain, set it up, run Traffic Equalizer, do the back links, do the thing, and they were just mass producing. So, he was creating 10, 20, 30 of these sites a day and ranking them and getting paid money. And it was like buying virtual real estate. It was like going to Boise, Idaho before it's Boise buying all the property and setting up houses and then playing Monopoly. And it was the thing for a long time.
And in fact, John Reese even had a newsletter called the Virtual Real Estate Secrets newsletter, and he published it. And I was a member of it for two or three years, where you'd get these newsletters in the mail where you'd be talking about virtual real estate. And then as all good things do, they come to an end.
Google slapped it, they stopped paying out these things and it stopped being profitable. They stopped ranking sites that were ugly. The only goal was to get people to leave, because they wanted to rank sites that had good content and things like that. And so, the whole industry disappeared overnight. In fact, I had a lot of friends who were making insane amounts of money who went bankrupt at that time and never recovered.
So anyway, there's a whole nother lesson for another podcast episode we could talk about, but the concept of virtual real estate was so intriguing to me and afterwards, John shut the newsletter down, forgot about it. And when I came back and bought pretty much everything from John Reese, from trafficsecrets.com, marketingsecrets.com, he also owned virtualrealestateseekers.com. And I bought that from him and I bought the concept and all the intellectual property and things that around it, because I love the concept.
I always thought about this in our world of funnels and building businesses, that a lot of times, and I'm probably one of the people that causes this, I'm all about building a business that you're passionate about, that you love, that you can change the world and you can do all these things. If you read Expert Secrets, it's all about creating a mass movement of people, you can change their lives. And how do you do that? And I still believe in that. That's what my mission is ClickFunnels is.
But I think sometimes, I probably overwhelm people because some people are like, "I just am trying to figure out to make an extra a hundred bucks, or an extra 500 bucks. How do I do that?" So, there's a time and a place for that.
So, at last year's Funnel Hacking Live. I did a special nighttime session and I called it Virtual Real Estate Secrets. In fact, the subtitle was, "How to build a virtual real estate empire by fixing, flipping and investing in small cashflow funnels." And it was really fun because before that event, I wanted to show people that while I still think that everybody should be building a business that's literal goal is to go and change the world, there is a time and a place. Let me build a virtual real estate property where I can create an offer, set up a funnel, drive some traffic to it. It pays me 500 bucks a month, or 200 bucks a month, or whatever that is. And maybe I create two, or three, or 10 of those things and they're all cash-flowing and I can have a really good business doing that as well.
And so in that presentation, I shared a whole bunch of ways that we're doing it. Some of the ways I showed how I was finding virtual real estate products and I was flipping, or I was fixing them up to flip them. So, we're buying them because I know it's only making X amount of money right now but if I do these tweaks and these changes, I can get it to make this much money then I can resell it and make a profit. Just like we do on houses.
If you watch HGTV, that's the whole model. They buy a cheap house, they come in, they rehab it and then they flip it, make more money. So, talk about flipping and ... Fixing and flipping. Whew, there you go. Fixing and flipping funnels. I was talking about finding funnels that are cashflow funnels, are just going to make us a hundred bucks, or 500 bucks, or a thousand bucks a month and a whole bunch of cool ideas.
In fact, before HFL, I think my team was going to kill me, about six months prior, I was like, "Let's build a bunch of case studies." And so we started doing a whole bunch of case studies that I shared in this presentation. Now I know some of you guys are going to go to those pages now and be like, "Are they still live? What are they doing?" The reality is most of those sites, while they were fun and we got some money coming from them, when all said done, the time and effort I was putting into it versus some of the other projects, weren't as big. So, I shut a lot of those down. Some of them are still live, as you'll see, but I wanted to actually share that presentation with Funnel Hacking Live for you, for a couple reasons.
Number one is I want you guys, again while we're talking about building empires and businesses and we'll do a lot of that here in this podcast, I'm also going to be showing you a lot of the virtual real estate that I have. Why did I buy Zuma Juice? Because it's a virtual real estate property for me. Au Bon Broth, the bone broth company, why did I do that? LadyBoss? Why did I buy LadyBoss from Brandon and Kaelin? In my mind, these are virtual real estate properties, that we're creating and we're finding and flipping and fixing and flipping, or we're buying to hold them, or we're getting cash for them. In my head, this is what we're doing.
In fact, literally the company that holds all these we call ... The company's name is Virtual Real Estate. These are virtual real estate companies that I'm collecting, that I'm acquiring and I'm using the skillset that we teach every single day in Marketing Secrets and funnels and ClickFunnels and Funnel Hacking Live and all the books. We're using these principles to take these little businesses, set them up and have them cash flow without me having to spend a ton of time, and energy in them long term.
And so, I wanted to share this as episode number two of the new podcast and the reason why is because a lot of my episodes are going to be showing the VRE, the virtual real estate, that I'm doing behind the scenes. And so, I wanted to give that to you guys as just a context. So, as I start showing you as more of these things, you know what we're doing and why we're doing it, and you got some of the strategies as well. Because a lot of you guys, you've been following me for a long time. You've been listening to podcast episodes for a long ... In fact, we pulled it during the break. How many episodes have we done in Marketing Secrets? 551 episodes prior to this. And then the Marketing In Your Car was like… 251. So that's like what? Almost 800 episodes. A lot of you guys have binged through all of them. You've read the books. You've been to funnel Hacking Live, you've done this stuff and maybe you don't have a business yet. Maybe you're struggling trying to build the empire and have the mass movement. It's like, look, you have the skill sets right now. You can go and you can create these little properties. You can find sites that are making a hundred bucks a month, they're going to make you 500 bucks a month because you know, have the skill sets, you just need the thing to apply it towards.
And so, hopefully this will be fun. This was a fun presentation. I think it was lighter, it was enjoyable. People had a great time with it. And so, I'm going to show you guys this presentation from Funnel Hacking Live. Again, the title was, for this presentation, was Virtual Real Estate Secrets: How To Build A Virtual Real Estate Empire By Fixing, Flipping And Investing In Small Cash Flow Funnels. In this presentation, you're going to learn how you can wholesale funnels. You can license them, you can flip and ... This is the hardest one ever, you can fix and flip them. You can buy and hold, you can do creative financing. And you can also use these virtual real estate properties to grow your core company, which is what we're doing with Magnetic Marketing, we bought from Dan Kennedy.
The reason why we bought that virtual real estate property was number one to cash flow and make money, but number two, it also is a tool to build click funnels. And we'll talk about that in the presentation as well. So, that's the setup for this. With that said, we're going to take you guys back to Funnel Hacking Live 2021, where we were in Orlando, Florida. And this is the late night session I did and it's one of my favorite sessions I've ever done. I haven't shared it anywhere outside of that live event, so I hope you guys enjoy it. Take some notes and let's start building your own virtual real estate empire.
So, today's been a lot of fun. We've gone deep on a lot of topics, a lot of stuff. And typically after the first day one, number one, everyone feels a little bit overwhelmed. Like, "Oh my gosh, that was crazy. That was only half a day. We got three more days of this stuff." How many of you guys feel that a little bit, where you're just like, "Whoa, I feel a little overwhelmed. I'm excited though." So, I wanted to do this special session. This is something I've never taught before. I think about this a lot. I talk about it with my team a lot, but I want to do this session tonight. Hopefully it'll be fun, I don't know how long it'll go. It might be 20 minutes, it might be two or three hours. I have no idea, we'll see, play it by ear. We're going all night long.
But this is something, because I think a lot of times there's people that come into our community and they come in and also we're talking about starting a movement and changing the world and all these things. And sometimes it gets overwhelming. I understand that. And when I got started, if I would've came into this room, I might've been that way as well. Like, "Whoa. I don't know about changing the world. I'm trying to change my own life right now. I'm trying to change my family's, I'm trying to change my situation." And so I wanted this presentation to be a fun one to get the wheels in your head spinning and start thinking about things a little differently because there's a lot of ways to make money in this business. It's not just, I'm going to build this huge empire. A lot of times you can do it smaller. You can do it in a way that's just a little bit differently. So, that's what I want to talk about today.
So, my title of my presentation is actually Virtual Real Estate Secrets. If we can throw it up here, which I'm excited and the title's actually, "How to build a virtual real estate empire by fixing, flipping and investing in small cashflow funnels." You guys want to talk about this?
Yeah.
This is going to be fun. And so to lead this one off, obviously I use the word virtual real estate, and some people are like, "Wait, you're talking about building houses. Are you're talking about selling houses on the internet?" Like no, I'm talking about properties, virtual properties. How do we make money with virtual properties, virtual funnels? And not so much how do I make millions and millions of dollars, but how do I make some revenue? How do I make cash flow from little funnels? Because yes, I'm so excited. I try to teach you guys how to build funnels, going to make you tens of millions of dollars. And that's what gets me excited. But how many of you guys would be really excited if you had a funnel that's making you, I don't know, a couple hundred, a couple thousand bucks a month? How many of you guys would be excited if you had two of those, or three, or 10, or 50 of them?
So, that's what I'm talking about here, just to give you guys something to think about, and maybe this is for you, maybe it's for one of your kids, maybe it's for a spouse, or maybe it's for somebody you know. But I think it'd be fun topic just to talk about inside of our community because we don't talk about these things a lot.
Now, when I think about real estate, I think about HGTV. I think about all the TV shows where they're literally doing this with properties and there have been real estate gurus teaching you how to make money in real estate for way before I was ever born. I was talking to Joe McCall, who I think is here somewhere in the room. Joe's one of my inner circle members and someone who I just have so much respect for. In fact, I got in trouble, I bought a whole bunch of real estate that I shouldn't have, and Joe magically got me out of it. So, I love that guy. And I messaged him ahead of time, I said ... He's one of the big real estate gurus, a whole bunch of real estate gurus. I'm like, "What are the core ways that in the real estate world, they're teaching people how to make money?"
And he said, "Well, there's a lot of things, a lot of different angles and stuff." He's like, "It really comes down to four core things." And this is traditional real estate. So one is whole selling. That's where you find someone, they may not want to sell the house, but they need to sell their house. Maybe they're going through a divorce, or maybe something tragic, lost their job or something, they have to get out of their house. And so, there's opportunities where real estate gurus teach people how to do whole selling, to get a property and to sell it, or to flip it, or whatever. So, that was the first thing.
The second one, this is what you see all over HGTV, the fix and flip, where they find a house and they're like, "Oh, this house is horrible." And then they get the new kitchen and the new ... all the things, all of a sudden they got this beautiful house and then they sell it and they flip it. And then there's buy and hold where you buy a house, you fix it up and then instead of selling it, you just hold it and you cash flow it.
And the last one that he mentioned was creative financing. There's a lot of different ways you can do cool creative financing, no money down and things like that. So, as I do this presentation, I was like, "Okay, these are ways that people do money in traditional real estate. How does this relate to what we do as internet nerds?" I mean, internet marketers. And for me, a lot of you guys don't know this, I actually got my start when I was in college, my dad actually bought me this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Who here's read this book?
This book was one of those things that was the turning point in my life. I was in my house, my wife and I had just gotten married. We're in this little house, we're living there and he gave me the book and this book sat on ... the next to my bed for months and months and months. And then finally, one day I couldn't fall asleep. I look over, I'm like, "Oh, I hate reading. There's the book my dad gave me. He's going to ask me next time I see him. Fine, I'll read." So, I open it up and I start reading the book and I got hooked. Again, this is one of the best books ever. So, I read the entire book that night. I can't sleep, the wheels in my head are spinning. I'm sitting there like this, wide awake.
Next morning, my wife wakes up and rolls over and she's like, "Oh." I'm like, "Hey." She's like, "What's going on?" I'm like, "We're going to buy a duplex." She's like, "What?" I'm like, "Yeah, we're going to live in one half and rent out the other half and we're going to live for free. And we're going to have tons of extra money. It's going to be amazing." And my lovely wife said, "Okay." And then we went and we bought our very first property within a week or two after reading this book.
And this was our first house we owned together. We bought it, we lived in the top and there was a basement apartment that we rented out. And this was our very first house ever. Look how cool my hair was back then, it was awesome. And I was excited because I thought that was one of my futures, buying real estate and investing and stuff like that. But we had problems. The problems were these things called renters. Anyone here ever had a renter before? It was really bad. And it wasn't just one bad, it was bad thing after another. And I'm sure you guys all have stories, but after about two or three months in this place we were like, "We do not want to have renters let alone in our house, living below us because that's even worse."
And I was like, "Well, that was how I was going to make money. I got to figure something else out." And that's got my wheels spinning. And this is really how I started get into the internet business during this time of my life. But this house, we had to fix it up. So, I was trying to do the whole flip and fix thing. So, this is my buddy, Nate and I, and we had to learn a whole bunch of skills. I found this picture the other day. We learned how to do sheet rock, tile, painting and landscaping. We literally went to a Home Depot and I was like, "I need some tiles." They're like, "How many?" I'm like, "A couple boxes?" They're like, "Two?" I'm like, "Sure."
So, I got the boxes and then me and Nate are stirring up the plaster and we're putting it down. We're slapping things all over and all the tile starts shifting and moving around. We're like, "Oh." So, we called the Home Depot dude like, "Dude, the tile's shifting." He's like, "Well, how much of the mortar did you put down?" We're like, "A lot." He's like, "You don't put a lot down." I'm like, "Oh." He's like, "You need these little things to keep the squares." So, we raced back and bought those little tees to space it out. But by the time it already hardened it was horrible. And the tile was wavy and people were tripping on it. So, that was my first flip and fix. Anyway, it was bad. It was really bad.
But in theory, you guys understand that's how this works. You find a property, it's beat up. You learn how to tile. You learn how to sheet rock, you learn how to paint. You make it nice. And you go from before to after, you sell it, you make a ton of money. Or, if you decide you want to keep it, the opposite of that is you go create a property, or you get a property. You're getting it all nice. You get a property management company, you plug it in and then you're done. That was the dream I was sold for real estate was literally get a house, hire a property management company. The house is going to cash flow you a thousand dollars a month. You pay the property management company $200 a month and you get $800 a month for free, for doing nothing. I was like, "This is the most amazing thing in the world." But again, we had renters and it wasn't ideal for us and our marriage. And so, we didn't do more real estate after this, but that was the concept.
So, I want to explain that because I'm not talking about real estate with you guys, but I want you to understand, these principles, these concepts are the same when we start transitioning over to virtual real estate. With virtual real estate, the goal what I'm trying to do is try to create these funnels, create these little funnels that I can go and I can create them and I can create them quickly. I create them in a weekend. I create them over a couple day period of time. I set it up, I set it up and then I go and I hire Facebook ad agency, just like a property manager thing. They drive ads to it and I'm done. I walk away and hopefully this thing cash flows a hundred bucks a month, or 500 bucks a month, or a thousand bucks a month, depending what the offer is.
And for me, when I got started, literally my potato gun offer, you guys have all heard the story a bajillion times, but that was my mindset. I was like, "I know the potato gun thing's not going to be the biggest thing in the world. But if I can get this thing making some money and I do second one and a third one, these are like real estate properties only they're digital and there's no renters. There's no plumbing. There's no broken tile. I just set it up. I buy some ads and it just runs itself."
So, with the potato gun product, my initial goal, or not my initial goal, but this one was making me when we first launched about 30 bucks a day profit. I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing in the world." I remember about that time is when I started thinking bigger. I'm like, "I want to make a million dollars. How do you do that?" So I remember sitting down one day with a calculator, I said, "A million dollars divided by 365." I was like, "What would it take to make a million dollars in a year?"
So, I did the math. If you did a million dollars divided by 365, it equals $2,739. 73 a day, literally the best number in the world. And that was my goal. I said, "Okay well, I'm making 30 bucks a day off my potato gun site. If I had another one that makes a hundred bucks, another one makes 200. And eventually I get a portfolio of these things, just like people do with real estate. If I get a portfolio, collectively this portfolio might go to the point where it's making me a lot of money." And that was my initial goal when I got in this business.
That's why at last year's Funnel Hacking Live I showed you guys, I launched over 150 different funnels. This is what I was doing. I was creating one here and creating one here. And we're trying set up these little properties and what's cool is that some of them made really good money. Some of them flopped, but collectively as a whole, a bunch of them did. And then from that process of trying this one and trying this one and trying different ones, that's when the bigger opportunities started coming, where all of a sudden I got better. My skillset got better, I built better funnels. Different opportunities came in. Eventually I wasn't just building little duplexes, I started building mansions and started building things like this, but I learned it, I got my skill set by doing these little, virtual real estate properties.
So, that's what something I wanted to propose you guys to start thinking, through those who are in this phase like, "What could I do? What little things can I create that I can literally get it built out on the weekend, set it up, get a Facebook ad agency and I can step back and this same cash flows me a hundred bucks or 500 bucks a month. And I can do that again and just have some fun with this?" Does that sound cool to dive a little deeper into that?
So, we talked about real estate, the tools you got to learn, you have to learn how to do sheet rocking and tile and all these things to get a house right. In virtual real estate, the tools you have are all the things you guys have been learning about. Everything you learn here at Funnel Hacking Live, everything you learn about when you read my books, these are the tools you have to become good at. Katherine did a session today on funnels. It's like, this is the tool set. This is the skillset you got to learn. Just learn to do tile if you're doing house, you learn to build a funnel.
Jim talked about copy. That's why we did the copy workshop. If you get good at copy, that's a tool you're be using to build out these sites, design ads, traffic, these are all the different tools that we can use. And so, over the last four or five months, I started having some fun with this. I knew I wanted to talk about this at Funnel Hacking Live this year. So I was like, "I'm going to go and create a whole bunch of virtual real estate properties. Just for fun, just to show you guys' case studies." And so, I'm going to show you guys, some of them are done. Some are partially done. Some of them are all sorts of different places, but I had so much fun creating these things. So, one of the first things I did is I was like, "I need to go find things that are for sale." I don't want to create something from scratch. And I'm not going to go build a house from the ground up because then I got to become a contractor and stuff like that. I was like, "I want to go find a house that's for sale. I'm going to buy it and fix it. And either flip it or sell," or whatever I'm going to do.
So, there's two places I went to initially to go buy websites really, really quickly. And these are two that are awesome. So, one of them flippa.com and Flippa's a whole marketplace with tons and tons of people selling websites. The other one is called Shopify Exchange. And there are like, I think 10,000 people, who started Shopify stores don't understand funnels, or don't understand traffic, or don't understand ads or copy, or all the things you guys know. They did all the hard work to go and find the offers, contact the places, get all the whole ... the drop shipping stuff, get everything finished. And they can't figure out how to drive traffic or make any money. And so they sell them on the site. And so I literally spent hours just going through and like, "Oh, I could buy that one. Oh, and that one." And like, "Oh," and there's tons of them. And most of these people, again, they do all the hard work, getting the website, the Shopify store done and ready, and then they don't know what to do with it.
They're like, "I'm going to sell it for a thousand bucks, 500 bucks, 10,000." There's all sorts of pricing. So, these are two places I went to and you guys can go there and just geek out and look for cheap virtual real estate. And so that's what I did initially, is going to both these sites and start having some fun. And then my goal is to go through and look at these things and find a property that I can look at and say, "Hey, my skills that I have right now, I know that I could actually get this thing to look good." Now, some of these sites are horrible and they're ugly, but some of them I'm like, "This site, I get this one. I can make money with this one." And so for you, what my goal is going to be for you guys, tonight or this weekend, is to go to these sites and look through them and just see based on what you've learned this weekend, what are the things you can take, and you can grab, can start tweaking with? So, I'm going to go through different sites and some of the fun projects I've been working on in my free time, over the last couple weeks.
Okay, case study number one, I've always wanted to start a tie company. So, I spent two years in New Jersey knocking on doors and I had to wear a tie every single day. And so, when you're wearing white shirt and tie every single day, your tie is the only color you have. And so, ties became something we'd trade, we'd barter and we'd fight over different ties. So, we love good ties. And I remember I had this companion who was with me on my mission out there. And he used to always say this thing, he'd come out in his new tie. He's like, "Check this out, I'm flossing this new tie." I was like, "What? You're flossing a new tie?" He's like, "Yeah, I'm flossing this new tie." And every day he'd come out and he's like, "I'm flossing this new tie." And so, I always want to start a tie company talking about flossing ties.
And so, I wanted a tie company, but I don't know how to start a tie company. I don't know any of these things. And so as I started going through trying to find websites in the back of my mind, I've always know that I think it'd be fun to start a tie company someday. So, I started going through and I started looking at all the things I've been learning and a couple things that I've learned at Funnel Hacking Live, Perry Belcher spoke at a Funnel Hacking Live, and he showed his funnel. Have you guys seen this funnel before? This is a funnel where he gives away credit card knives. But on the back end, he sells access to his membership site.
This was another one of Perry's sites. Perry had a custom suit company. They sent high-end custom suits and he wasn't driving traffic directly to the suit company. Instead what he would do is he would go, and he said, "The people that wear custom suits, they also happen to want ... " what? Cuff links. So, he was like, "I made these cuff link funnels where I give away free cuff links, ran Facebook ads so people got free cuff links, and then those leads came in and they started buying custom suits. I was like, "Sweet." Because I don't want to drive ads to a tie store. That seems kind of hard and weird. And so as I was going through Flippa and I was scrolling through, all of a sudden, I saw this site that was for sale and this was the site.
It was called dimpleclips.com I think. I looked at Dimple Clips and it was for sale for 19,500 bucks. And these little clips you put on a tie and whoever wears a tie? You know when tie your tie right and of sudden you get that cool dimple and you look like you're amazing? That's like, yeah, you got to do Double Windsor, you get the tie, it just pops and makes it cool. So, this dimple clip, even if you tie a horrible knot, you throw this thing on and boom, that fast, you got a dimple and you look amazing.
And so I saw this and went, "That's pretty cool." But I was like, "But I don't know if I want to pay 20 grand to invest in this idea that I don't even know if it's a good idea or a bad idea." So, I went to the site to go see if it's actually selling ,what it looks like. So, I went to the side, Dimple Clips. And the very top, there's a little button that said wholesale. I was like, oh my gosh, "I can buy this stuff wholesale." I don't have to pay them 20 grand to buy the entire company, I could just buy the things wholesale. So, I clicked on the wholesale thing and sure enough, for $399, I was able to get 1,500 dimple clips that I could then take.
So, total investment in this business, I'm in 400 bucks, I buy the dimple clips. We get them shipped to our office, my entire team's like, "Why in the world did you buy 1,500 dimple clips?" I was like, "Because someday I want to sell ties. And I know that people who buy dimple clips, guess what they want to buy? Ties." So, now we're in business. We go in really quickly. We set up a site called flossingties.com. I said, "We're going to give away the dimple clips on the front for free plus shipping." After someone gets that, then we're going to upsell some ties. I call Bart Miller because Bart's the one who dresses me for Funnel Hacking Live. It's like, "Dude, Bart, do you know anyone who sells ties?" And Bart's like, "Yeah, I know a lot of people who sell ties." I'm like, "Cool, can you ship me six ties?" And he's like, "Yes."
And then he ships me six ties. And then we put that as the upsell. And guess what? In like, I don't know, eight hours, we're in business. We are in the dimple clip business. We are selling these things and now we're driving ads to it. People are coming, they're buying the dimple clips. We order for them, bump them a whole big old pack of dimple clips. And then the upsell number one are these ties. Now these ties, are they awesome? I don't know, I have no idea. I don't know if they're going to sell or not. The good news is I only have one of each. So, I'm just testing the market right now to see people want them. If people say yes to these ties, I'm going to be like, "Hey, Bart, give me 2,000 more of that tie because everyone's buying that. And we sold a whole bunch of them."
If nobody buys them, then I'll try to find some more ties or we'll do something else. Or, we'll just shut this thing down because I'm in 400 bucks this point and a couple hours of work. Virtual real estate. After we get the thing finished, we're going to go get a Facebook ad agency. We're going to plug it in. And this thing will run autopilot and I'm in the tie business.
How many of you people here actually run a Facebook ad agency? Raise your hands. Okay, everyone look around. These are the people you can partner with. These are your property managers. You just finish the funnel, you hand it to them and then they're done. There's a lot of Facebook ad agencies inside of our community here. We hand it off, we plug it in and boom, we're in business. And this thing, I don't know what's going to do yet.
We just got this done last week. My team's like, "We're literally in the middle of Funnel Hacking Live and you want to launch a tie company?" I'm like, "Yes, of course I do." So we launched this thing and again, I don't know what it's going to make. It might be 500 bucks a month. Might be nothing, might be 10,000 bucks a month. And maybe this one hits and we're like, "Oh my gosh, we are in the tie business, let's go deep." We'll maybe build a huge company off it but probably not. But maybe.
This is what you have to understand. So many of you guys are sitting back and you're waiting, you're waiting for your click funnels. You're like, "Okay, someday I'm going to get the idea that's going to be amazing." And you're going to be creating these courses, doing this insane stuff and you're waiting and you're waiting and you're waiting. It's like, we got to get you in the game. Just pay 400 bucks, just getting the game and start playing this game because you're going to learn so much stuff. Even if this fails, what did I learn? I learned how to find an offer, how to find some products, how to create an upsell and a down sell. You're going to learn how to use ClickFunnels, how to drag and drop things. I learned how to connect a shopping cart to the actual funnel. And when someone buys it, how to ship them out the product, I learned all these things for the $400 investment. It's not that scary, but now I can see if it's going to work.
Again, I told people before, ClickFunnels was my hundred 50th funnel that we launched. If I would've waited for this to be the very first funnel I would've launched, I'd never been worthy to find this. Does that make sense? Because I tried the first thing and the next thing and the next thing, and as I did that, as I was in momentum, moving forward, new opportunities came to me better, just came to me different, things came to me. And so for a lot of you guys, this is some of the stuff you can start thinking about just to have some fun, just to practice.
I told my potato gun story all the time, because that was just something for me to try out and to test. If it failed, it wasn't like I was a failure. Turns out no one wants potato guns. Turns out no one wants dimple clips. But what if they do? I don't know. Okay, there's one example.
All right, let's share another example. This one I'm going to go deeper into on day three. I'm going to tell you everything, but this is another fun one. So, we started a site called burlappable.com, and this came back because I was hanging with Alison Prince. Have you guys met Alison Prince? She's one of my favorite people in the world and Alison's got this really cool software, that's a trend generator. And so it shows you different trends. And I was like, "I want to build some virtual real estate, give me a trend Alison." And she's like, "Okay, burlap's hot, bags are hot. We should make a burlap bag." I'm like, "Sweet. How do you do that?" And she's like, "Well, there's whole selling sites." So we found a whole selling site that sells burlap bags. We grabbed the bags, we put them up on our website and within 45 minutes we had burlappable.com selling burlap bags. We started driving traffic and guess what? It's making money. And we'll tell you more about this later, because we're going to go deeper in this case study. But again, this was just a thing and I take it, set it up in ads agency and this thing can start making money all day, every single day. And my total investment was a couple hundred bucks to buy some bags and now we're in business.
Here's another fun one. This one goes into licensing. Who here's ever heard of licensing before? Okay, licensing's where somebody else did all the hard work and then you pay them to be able to just have it all for free or for really, really cheap. So, I wanted to build a chicken coop product because somebody told me that they made a bunch of money with chicken coops. I was like, "Are you serious? That's amazing." So I bought chickencoopsecrets.com. But I was like, "But I don't know anything about chicken coops." My wife keeps trying to get me to buy chickens and I'm like, "I don't want chickens." And she's like, "But we can have our own eggs." I'm like, "I don't want chickens." And she's like, "But eggs are really, really expensive." And I'm like, "But I don't want to own chickens, that creeps me out."
So I don't know anything about chickens. So I'm like, "I don't know how to create this product, but maybe somebody else has already created a product on chicken coops." And so I went to clickbank.com and in ClickBank, there's a marketplace of hundreds of thousands of funnels. And it's cool thing is ClickBank, the marketplace, shows you based on what's selling the best. So, this is the secret. The first page, those guys are making tons of money, do not contact them. The second page, third page, fourth page, you get to the 40th page. Those users are making no money right now. Yet they did all the work. They created the product, wrote the sales letter, have the upsells, have the down sells, but the product doesn't sell anymore. So, I went to ClickBank. I typed in chicken coops in the thing and a whole bunch of things popped up, a whole bunch different offers.
And so I went to every single one of them and I messaged every single chicken coop site. And I literally said, "Hey, can I license your chicken coop product?" And this dude, Johnny Wang wrote back. And Johnny said, "Hey, what's your proposal?" I was like, "Sweet, man. I'll give you a thousand bucks to license your product and the sales copy." He said, "Sounds good. What's the timing?" I said, "It's in perpetuity." And we signed a contract and that fast, I got the entire product and for a thousand bucks, I'm in business selling chicken coop plans. And that's licensing.
Now what I do, I grab that, throw up a Facebook ad agency, step back, and who knows? I don't know if it's going to make a hundred bucks a month, 500 bucks a month. I'm in business. I test that whole process. ClickBank literally is the graveyard. Hundreds of thousands of dead funnels. Hundreds of thousands of them, in every topic you can dream of. This is not the first time of licensing ClickBank. Go there all the time, I try to find something. Sometimes I need a bonus or upsell or something. I'm like, "Ah, maybe someone already created it." I go to ClickBank. Oh, on page 46, some dude created something that already does. Message him, "Hey, can I license your product?" And usually somewhere between 500 to a couple of thousand bucks, depending how good it is. I license the product, the sales letter, everything and boom, I'm in business. Throw into a funnel, chickencoopsecrets. Let's go. All right. Plug in a Facebook ad agency. And now I'm in business.
Are you guys getting this? Is this fun? Good. Fix and flips. This is one, I almost feel bad about this story but ... So, a lot of people ask me, where do you get all these things coming to you? Sometimes I'm finding them, sometimes they're just as you're in motion doing things, more deals and offers will come to you.
So, I had a buddy, we both wrestled at BYU together and we were in the same weight class, so we hated each other because we had to always compete against each other but he's really cool. And anyway, we graduated, a couple years later I was having some success in business. He had his own business as well. And one day, I don't know, something happened and he got in trouble and he messed him. He's like, "Hey man, I need 20 grand." I was like, "Dude, we used to fight every single day. You're awesome. I'm not ready to check for 20 grand."
He's like, "No, I really need $20,000 as an emergency. I know you got it. Can I have 20 grand?" I'm like, "No, no." And then finally he's like, "Well, I have this website. It's called VyGone." And he is like, "Right now it makes about $2,000 or $3,000 a month. If you give me the 20 grand, I'll give you the cash flow from the website for the next 10 months until it's paid off." I was like, "No." He's like, "Why not?" I'm like, "Because dude, 20 grand in my pocket, today's worth more than 20 grand over time." I'm like, but I will buy the website in the company from me for $20,000. And he was like, "But dude, this is my livelihood." I'm like, "Yeah, but this is my 20 grand." And so eventually went back and forth and he said yes. So, I gave him the $20,000.
He gave me VyGone we put it the site and it started making money. And all it was, if you look at the site initially actually, it was two YouTube videos that drove traffic to it, and that was the site. That's why I was like, "There's no waste making money." And it was. So we went back, we tweaked the site, got in ClickFunnels made it look really, really nice. And then I'm like, "What other tools do we have?" About that time is when Jamie Cross spoke a Funnel Hacking Live in Nashville. How many of you guys remember when Jamie spoke? And she did this presentation called the five minute perfect webinar, which took my 90 minute webinar. She shrunk it down to five minutes for e-commerce sellers. I was like, "Sweet." So, I literally took that piece of paper. If you guys remember this, Jamie spoke about it.
Jim Edwards created one page piece of paper, that you would fill in the paper and it would take your product and plug it into a perfect webinar. The five minute perfect webinar. We took that, we did it ... in Funnel Scripts, there's a digital version. So, I filled out the form in Funnel Scripts. I clicked a button. Boom, it popped out the five minute perfect webinar for VyGone. We hired two actors, I had each of them read the thing while we filmed them telling their stories. Within a day, we had two, five minute perfect webinars to sell VyGone. We gave them to the ads agency. We set it up and boom. Now, VyGone is back on and it's selling people these cold sore zappers. It's up there. And now we have Facebook ad agency plugging it in and driving sales 24 hours a day, seven days a week, virtual real estate. What? I'm not going to show you guys how much it all makes.
This one I'm more close to my chest on this one because it's a medical advice. And anyway, this is going to be for me a fix and a flipper after we get it up a little bit because I don't ... Anyway, we'll leave it there.
All right. Buy and hold. Now, this is what I'm really, really excited for. In fact time you guys came in today, you saw on your seat, a little packet of something called Zuma Juice? Okay, so Zuma Juice, I talked about this earlier today. So, Zuma Juice is actually one of my friend's companies and he launched his company and I remember watching him and he was so passionate about and he was having so much fun with it and he's an amazing copywriter and marketer and everything.
I remember just watching his journey and after he launched this green drink, one of my favorite things was the actual sales video. And so, it's interesting, I contacted him later. I was like, "Dude, that video was so good." I'm like, "Who did it? Did you hire the Harmon brothers or something?" He's like, "No, here's who I hired." He's like, "I wrote the scripts and we hired the actors and everything." I said, how much did the whole thing cost you?" Because I knew what we had paid the Harmon brothers to do videos like this for us. I don't remember exactly what he said, it was multiple six figures he spent to create the sales video. I'm going to show it to you guys, because this is the reason why I ended up buying this business. So this is the sales video. I'll click play real quick and you have a chance to see why this business was so powerful and why I wanted to get it.
You already know you should eating fruits and veggies. Your doctor tells you, your mom tells you, even the government's told you. One to get more of the good stuff is green juice. Do you like yours chunky? I like mine a little chunky. But to get even one sip of that healthy produce, you have to pass through the three levels of health net health, shopping, shopping, and juicing. What about, I don't even want to think about cleaning?
Oh, shopping for fresh fruits and vegetables is a pain. You spend all day cruising the produce aisle, emptying your wallet just to try to fill your basket. And when you get home, you still have to chop it, all of it. Is this your kitchen or level six of fruit ninja?
After all of that shopping, chopping, juicing and cleaning, your reward is a small glass of sludge. Look, I'm crazy about my health, but I'm not that crazy. The folks at Zuma Juice had this wild idea that people, you, might like green juice, if it was simple, convenient, and didn't taste like a cows burp. So while each glass of Zuma Juice is packed with six different greens and grass, three organic spout concentrates, seven organic vegetables and 13 fruit super foods and herbs, it also tastes really good and no shopping or chopping required. Just add cold water, shake it up and you have an energy packed, immune system boosting green juice that you can take with you anywhere. You mean like this?
Yes, there are other powdered green drinks on the market, but most of them taste like oh, something that you scraped out of a lawn mower.
Wow, a really expensive lawnmower. Or worse, they have that really nasty synthetic vitamin aftertaste from, well, from the nasty synthetic vitamins they add to them.
Zuma Juice has a refreshing natural mint flavor with just a hint of vanilla. And unlike those calorie dense juices you get from your juicer. Zuma Juice only has 30 calories per serving, which makes it a perfect drink for in between meals. Oh, I'd drink this every day.
Now, I don't want to sound like your mom, but you really should be getting more fruits and veggies in every day, don't you think? If you want a tasty way to be healthy, feel fantastic and get energized, order your Zuma Juice now. It costs a lot less than juice, or even those fancy coffee drinks. It travels easy, kids love it. And best of all, you'll actually want to drink it. Try Zuma Juice, the delicious green juice with all of the green goodness and none of the yuck.
Have you guys ever heard the term, a Rembrandt in the attic? So, what that means is basically, imagine there's two people going to go to purchase a house. They walk through the house like, "Oh, it's a nice house. It's probably worth $250,000." And everyone goes to the house, but then one person goes to the house and they're looking through and they go up in the attic and they open up and all of a sudden they see an original Rembrandt and they're like, "Oh my gosh, I know the value of that painting. That painting is worth millions and millions of dollars."
And so they come back out and like, "Hey, I'll give you $4 million for this house." Or, "I'll give you $2 million." Another person's like, "This one’s worth $250,000." But for the other person, because they know the value of the house, they know there's a Rembrandt in the attic, they're willing to spend way more.
For me, when I start doing more of this investing stuff, I'm looking for a Rembrandt in the attic. For me, when I saw this funnel, I was like that video is the Rembrandt in the attic. That video is so valuable. I know how good it is. I loved it so much, I started using the product, but then I went to funnel hack it during Funnel U issue number 18. I went to funnel hack it. I bought the product, went to the next page and there was no upsell. There was no down sell, there was an order form up. There was all these things that we're missing and I was like ... The guy's name's Luke. I was like, "Luke, why do you hate money so bad? You're not doing any of the things you need to do to blow up this business."
And over time, the business ran for a couple years. And then I don't know all the details, but I know there was a fight in the partnership or something happened and they ended up shutting the site down and it was down for a year or two. I remember, I always remember that video. I'm like, "Man, that video is so good. That alone was worth so much money." So, I started messaging Luke. I was like, "Hey man, can I buy Zuma Juice?" He's like, "Why would you want to buy it, it's dead?" I'm like, "Because that video is so good." And went back and forth for years, literally year after year, I kept messaging. They're like, "No, no, no."
And finally, when COVID hit, one day, I was bored and I was like, "Luke dude, don't you want free money? Literally it's just sitting there on your hard drive somewhere. I will give you money. You can split it with your partners, whoever had it. And it'll be awesome." And eventually, for about one fifth what they spent on the actual sales video, I was able to acquire Zuma Juice. And now what's cool about that is then what's the next step? We talked about this earlier today. I have this asset, it's amazing. The next thing I do is I got to figure out what is the control today? I have not run a supplement funnel in seven years and said, what's the control. We talked about this earlier today. What is the control? I got to figure out how do supplement funnels work nowadays?
So I went through, I started going through the whole process. Oh yeah, nevermind. I was like, "That was a slide from earlier today," I'm getting my slides crossed up. So, I went through, we started funnel hacking a whole bunch of supplement funnels. From that we figured out this is the control. This is what all successful supplement funnels are doing today. I said, "Okay, now that we know that, we need to create a couple things." We knew, this is what the sales page looks like. The order form bump. What the price point is, where to upsell number one, upsell two, the down sales. We knew all the things we needed to create.
So, because of that, we needed to recreate the product. The product hadn't been sold for four or five years. We got the product recreated. And some of you guys got that one. If you had the green Zuma Juice, that's the green drink. But then the upsell path, I'm like, "We need to upsell." So, someone just drank their vegetables, next thing they need is their fruit. So, if you got the red pack, that's our Zuma Juice fruits. And so, the upsell is the fruits. And so we went through, we took this control and then we built out every single step in the process. Let me go back.
So, sales video, took the sales letter, order form, upsell, down sell. Again, we just took the control of what's working. We modeled for Zuma Juice, put it in there and this is actually ... Literally the package you guys got today is the first set of the packets we just got back. So, this has not gone officially live yet. I do believe you if guys want some, there's a postcard with the link you guys can go and buy it. And if you do buy it, we'll send you guys the share funnel to this supplement funnel. So you guys can have that and you can use it inside your ClickFunnels account as well.
But again, we got this all done. We did the hard work, got it finished. And now we're going to step back, we're going to plug in into Facebook ad agency and it'll just run itself, virtual real estate. And this one, I have a lot of hopes for, I think this one's going to do really well, but again, I invested some money up front. I invested about one fifth of what I would invest in a rental property. And this thing will cash for me a lot more than the 500 or 600 bucks that a rental property probably got me. And it's a little bit bigger project, but so much fun. So exciting because look, I was looking for that thing. I knew that that sales video was something I could turn into something bigger.
When you guys are looking at these sites and start looking for opportunities, there's going to be things like, maybe you're really good in webinars. You see something like, "Oh, if I just plugged a webinar into this business, I could blow it up." Or maybe like, "Oh, I need a challenge funnel. I could plug a challenge funnel." Or the copy was horrible. "I'm going to copywrite it, if just put the copy, I could make it better." Or maybe it's the designer. Maybe it's the flow, but you're just looking for what are the skill you guys have? Do you know how to add tile? How to add paint, how to do something like that? If you can figure out these skill sets we're teaching you, you can go to any of these businesses and start plugging things in and get things working really quickly. And it's so much fun.
I think I have one more, or maybe two more I'm going to show you guys. The next one is a company called Au Bon Broth and this one's not live yet. But how many guys have ever seen me drink bone broth? In fact, here's a picture of me drinking my bag of bone broth. If you follow me on Instagram, I met this lady who is, she's written five or six books on bone broth. I was at a mastermind meeting with her and she was bouncing off the wall. She was so excited about everything. And she's a doctor. She says, "I'm a doctor." She's like, "No matter what somebody comes ... When they come to me, the only thing I prescribe them is bone broth. I don't care what it is, I give them bone broth." I'm like, "What?" And she's like, "Yeah, it cures everything. Fixes everything. Two cups of bone broth today will change your entire life."
I was like, "Are you sure? Because that seems really weird." And she's like, "No, I swear." But she's the doctor, so we believe doctors. So I was like, "All right, well if you're that excited." And she's like, "Me, 10 years ago, I was tired. I was depressed. I had all these problems." She's like, "I started drinking bone broth and changed myself as well." And so I got excited, I went to go buy bone broth and I bought a bag of bone broth and I drank it and it was disgusting. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, this is not worth any amount of health." I tried another one and another one. And eventually I found this company, Au Bon Broth and I started ordering it. I drank the first one. I was like, "Oh, this actually tastes good." I was so excited.
And so, I used to buy this frozen bone broth, my poor wife, I'd fill our whole freezer full of thousands of these bags. And every morning I went out and I'd drink it on Instagram. And everyone's like, "You're literally just drinking bone broth out of a bag." I'm like, "Oh yeah. That's why I have this much energy. That's why I'm so excited. That's why I look like I'm 12 years old. I'm actually 60 but this bone broth has made me so young."
Anyway, literally obsessed with this stuff. You can ask anybody. My whole office is like, "You're so weird, Russell, nobody else drinks the bone broth out of a bag." Then in the middle of corona, I tried to order some more and guess what? It's gone, they're out of business. I was like, "Dude, need some bone broth." Like, "You can't." I'm like, "You don't understand. I'm addicted. Give some bone broth."
It's like on Tangled, when the old lady, when she doesn't sing the song, she starts getting all ... I'd be out here on Funnel Hockey Live, like 90 year old and you guys are like, "What happened to Russell?" And like, "The bone broth, give it to him." So, anyway, I kept messaging him, trying to get a hold of the company. Finally get a hold of the owners and they said, "Hey, COVID hit. We had some problems and supply chain management. And we had to shut the company down." I was like, "Oh my gosh, dude, I love you guys' product." And they're like, "We love it too. But unfortunately this is where we're at." I was like, "Okay, this is the deal. We need to bring this back. What's it going to take?" And he's like, "Well, we're out of money. We're out of stuff. We need to order to get all sorts of stuff."
I said, "Okay, how about this? I'll be your business partner, I'll finance the whole thing. We'll get it back up and running and then we're back in business?" And they're like, "Seriously?" And so we negotiated back and forth and they ended up giving me the majority, a big majority of the company. So, I'm the majority owner of the company now, for free, didn't cost me a penny other than I was in charge of getting the production back online and then building out the funnel, and then launching it. And so, it didn't cost me any money outside of the hard cost to get the business back up and running. And then the next step was like, "Hey, now I'm selling bone broth again. What do I need? What's the control? How do we sell bone broth?"
So, we went and funnel hacked every single bone broth, every single, similar funnel we could find. We figured out here's the control. What's going to work? And then we started going through and building out the actual funnel. The funnel's almost done, we're hoping in ... Right now we're in production of actually making all the bone broth and things like that. And we hope in about two months now it'll be done and will be launched and live and then guess what I'm going to do? I'm going to step away from it. I'm going to plug into Facebook ad agency and boom, bone broth will be paying me for the rest of my life. And that is how much fun these things can be. You guys getting this? So much fun.
Okay, I got one more. And this is one for those of you guys who are like, "This is all really fun and exciting Russell, but I have my core company. I'm trying to focus." Which is good, we all should be focusing. This is like my, let me unfocus you for a few minute presentation. I apologize, but I know how you all are. You're like me, you like the shiny objects. So, these are some shiny objects. So, this is one for those of you guys who are trying to focus, this ties back a lot what Kaelin talked about earlier today. You can also do this with your core company to figure out different ways to bring more people in. So, virtual real estate to grow your company.
So, a little while ago, we were doing for Two Comma Club X members, we were doing an event in Boise. This is probably two months ago, talking about physical products and things like that. I showed this case study to Perry Belcher. How many you guys know Perry Belcher? Perry's awesome, one of my favorite people. And he has this site, I think it's ceohats.com or freeceohats or something. And on the site, he sells CEO hats. It's a hat that says CEO on it and that's it.
I remember seeing it and I was like, "That's weird." So, I bought it and there was no thank you. There's no funnel or anything. And I was like, "Perry's a genius. There's something behind this." I'm like, "What are you doing?" So, I call him, I'm like, "Dude, I bought your CEO hat. How are you making money in this deal? Because literally there's no order form bumps or upsells, or down sells or anything." And he said, "Russell, guess who buys CEO hats?" Like, "Who?" He's like, "CEOs." I'm like, "Oh." He's like, "This is attracts all the best CEOs to me and my goal is not to make money really quick in a funnel. My goal is to get a list of CEOs and I sell them seminars and coaching and masterminds." I was like, "Oh, Perry, you're so smart. So smart."
So, I was showing this at our little Two Comma Club event, Two Comma Club X members. And as I'm on stage sharing this case study, I was like, "Dude, I should make some entrepreneur stuff and sell it ... " I have ClickFunnel stuff. But my guess is if you buy a ClickFunnel shirt, you probably already have ClickFunnels, am I right? So I was like, "Crap, I need shirts that aren't entrepreneur, but shirts, or hats, or things that aren't ClickFunnels, but are one step further out, outside the market, which are entrepreneurs."
All of a sudden I was like, "Wait a minute. I remember I bought this entrepreneur shirt back in the day from this site." And I'm like, "What's the site? What's the site?" I was like, "Startupdrugs.com." And I was like, "Oh my gosh." I went startup drugs.com went to site and guess what? It was gone. I was like, "What?" And so I went back to the Wayback Machine, which is this ... if you go to archive.org, there's a thing called the Way back Machine. You put in a URL and it shows you all the snapshots of that website from the beginning of time till now. So, I went back in time till I found someone with contact information and I realized Maxwell Finn. Who's one of our Two Comma Club winners was the old owner of the site.
So, I messaged him on Instagram, dude, "You own the site. Can I buy it from you?" And he's like, "I can't, I sold it to somebody else." I'm like, "Who'd you sell to?" So, he told me the guy sold it to, I called that guy up. "Can I buy this site from you?" There's over a hundred different ... sorry, it's on the next slide. There's over a hundred different entrepreneurs T-shirt designs that were done, that were amazing. And I was like, "Can I buy it from you?" This guy's like, "Sure." He's like, "I set it up six months ago and I think I forgot to pay the hosting bill because I just went to the site and it's down." I'm like, "Oh yeah, sweet. Can I buy it from you?" And really quickly, we acquired the site. It's not officially live all the way right now, but we purchased this with the goal of now relaunching these T-shirts. I have over a hundred different entrepreneur T-shirt designs. I'm going to be selling and guess what happens? An entrepreneur's going to see the shirt. They're going to buy the shirt and then guess what? I'm going to be able to tell us entrepreneur about? Funnels. You need a funnel.
You need to read Dotcom Secrets. You need to get ClickFunnels. You need to be showing up here. And so that's why we made this acquisition because now I can use this as lead generation to get more people in. This is way easier than me writing another book. I just wrote a hundred books, but they're all just T-shirts and I can bring people in on these funnels as well.
And we're tweaking, we're taking that, we're doing this really cool thing where T-shirts are going to be competing. Anyway, a lot of fun things, but people are going to come in on the Startup Drugs, buy T-shirts. And then from there we'll push them into ClickFunnels. And then after that's done, set Facebook ad agency to sell T-shirts, to get people in our world.
So, this is how we're using these principles, you guys. Number one is like to get us into momentum, get us started, get us creating different things. Number two is start finding more opportunities. Number three, plugging them into your existing opportunity to grow them faster, there's so many fun things. But I want to recommend for you guys, this is your homework assignment this weekend when Funnel Hacking Live is over, is I recommend even if you're not going to buy any sites, just as an exercise in the skill sets you've learned over the next four days, go to either flippa.com or go to the Shopify. If you Google Shopify Exchange, this site will show up and just look at different things with not a goal necessarily to buy them but to look at them and say which one of these things has a Rembrandt in the attic that I understand, that I can do something for?
I was in Myron's session. I learned about selling it. I could really easily take this offer on page 42. If I took that and I took some of sales principles, I learned from Myron, boom, that could be the thing. We were over here, this is a Shopify store. They just need a funnel. If they had a funnel, this thing would actually have made money. I can do a funnel.
I think tomorrow or the next day, you hear Raven and talk about supplement funnels or all the different people that are going talk about things over the next couple days, like taking challenge funnels or this or that. And you're taking these different pieces and applying them to some of these things and just look at it from as a consultant. If you were a consultant trying to consult these businesses, what are the tools that you guys have gained over this weekend that you could plug into these things? And for some of you guys, there's going to be some crazy deals. You're going to buy a T-shirt site, or a supplement store, or a tie thing. Whatever might be interesting. Some of you guys, this will be a new business for you. Some of you guys, it's just going to be you flexing this muscle of creativity, like, "Okay, I learned all these things. How would I apply to that business and that business and that business?" Until you see, "Oh my gosh, that's the one I could actually do something really cool with that."
And so that's what virtual real estate is. That's what I want to show up to you guys just to get the wheels in your head spinning. There's your homework assignment this weekend is to go there, put on your funnel consultant hat and try to figure out how you would do it, what you would do and have some fun with it. Act like they paid you to be a consultant and then build out a funnel. I build out a map, I do this, I do this, I do this. And who knows, maybe one of these businesses is the right thing for you.
So, that is how you build virtual real estate empires by flipping, fixing and investing in small cash flow funnels, you guys enjoy that. Ah, very cool, very cool.
All right. Hope you guys enjoyed this episode of the Marketing Secrets show. If you did, please share it with a friend with a business partner, with a spouse, with your kids, whoever, that's how you can pay it back to me if you enjoyed this episode. I hope you loved it. And on top of that, if you have any questions for me, again, go to marketingsecrets.com. At that site, there's a spot where you can go and you can ask me questions, plus you can also get all the show notes, the video versions of this episode and a whole bunch of other cool things, again at marketingsecrets.com.
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