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(VRE) ClickFunnels Acquired GERU.com - Find Out WHY...

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(VRE) ClickFunnels Acquired GERU.com - Find Out WHY...

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Episode Recap:

On today's episode you'll learn about the Geru.com acquisition, why we bought it, what the "Rembrandt in the Attic" is for this funnel... and more!

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I remember when we first launched the Inner Circle way back in the day and I was teaching everyone do a webinar a week. Everyone was writing webinars... afterwards they messaged me on Vox. They're like, "All right, my webinar's going live. I've got 500 people registered. I'm so excited." And I Vox them back and I'm always like, "Hey, just so you know, really quick, it's probably going to bomb...

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Transcript:

So today I want to talk about Geru. So the first question is what is Geru? How do we find it? Why did we buy it? And what in the world are we going to be doing with it?

So the story actually dates back to almost 20 years ago. Some of you guys who have been around my world, you've heard me tell the story about the very first person I ever saw who broke the four minute mile in internet marketing. And it was John Reese. John Reese was the first person to make over a million dollars in a day selling a course. The course was called Traffic Secrets. And a decade and a half later, I bought the domain from him. I wrote a book called Traffic Secrets and all that whole story.

But I originally came back to John Reese. John Reese was the first real big internet marketing guru. He was the first person to do these big numbers, these big things, and everyone was following him and studying him. And it's interesting because back then he had the best names for everything. He had Traffic Secrets. He happened to own Marketing Secrets. It's weird. That's the name of this podcast now. He owned Product Secrets. He owned a whole... All these different things. And I think now I think I've pretty much purchased everything that John has ever created. I bought Marketing Secrets from him. I bought Traffic Secrets from him. I bought basically every business he ever created, I've given him money for it eventually.

And shortly after we launched ClickFunnels, he created a really cool product called Geru. And what in the world is Geru? Geru is funnel simulation software. So it's kind of like what ClickFunnels is except for it doesn't actually build the funnel. It creates a simulation. So you can say, "If I was to build a funnel in ClickFunnels, what would it look like?" Similar one. I'm going to have a landing page. And then after they go in. After they put their email address on page one, then they're going to go do a sales page. And then if someone buys a product here, they're going to go to an order form. And if they say yes, there's going to be upsell one and then a downsell. And then upsell two and a down. And you can map out the entire funnel. What you want it to look like.

Which is kind of cool, but there's a lot of software you can map out a funnel. You could just do it on a pad of paper or a whiteboard like I typically traditionally do. If you ever watch any of my trainings, 99.9% of them, I'm on a whiteboard mapping out a funnel. So that part's not difficult. But what Geru does that's really, really cool is after you map out the entire funnel, it gives you the ability to simulate. What would happen if we sent traffic in it? And what would happen if this page converted this rate and this rate? And so what you can do is on each page say... Let's say the landing page converts at 30%. So you set 30% and let's say the sales page converts it 5%. And say upsell one converts it and so you guess what you think the conversion rates are going to be.

And then you can actually set up traffic and have traffic flow into this funnel. And say I'm going to go on Facebook. And let's say on Facebook it's going to cost me $3.00 a click or $1.50 a click. Whatever you think it's going to be. And on YouTube it's going to cost me this much. And so you build out a simulation of what this funnel could possibly look like. And then you click a button and say if this is the conversion rate numbers and this is how much it costs me to get traffic, how much money is this actually going to make? And you can click a button and sit back and watch. And you see traffic going through it and see the numbers popping out.

At the end of the day you can see hey if this funnel converts to what my guess was, I'm going to break even. Or I'm going to lose money or I'm going to be rich. And so you can see it and you can look at the simulation and then say, "Man, based on the numbers right here, this funnel's not going to convert. So if I'm going to make this work, I need to either lower my ad cost or I got to increase conversion on upsell one or the order form." And you can just play and you tweak around with it until you figure out what it needs to be for this funnel to actually be successful.

Now if you look at that, you can say, "Do I think that's going to be possible?" And if it is, then you take that funnel map, that simulation, whatever it is. And you would go into ClickFunnels and then actually build it out and you can launch it to the world. And what's cool is after you launch it to the world, you can actually look at what the stats and numbers look like. Go back to the funnel simulation software and plug it all in. Okay, this is what it actually cost me on Facebook. What it actually cost me on YouTube. This is what the landing page conversion actually was. Upsell conversions. You build it up. And then you can see based on if I keep driving traffic to this, I'm going to go broke or I'm going to be rich. Whatever that might be.

And it gives you the ability to say, "What do I need to fix in this funnel." If I got the landing page conversion from 12% to 17%, what does it look like? You tweak the numbers, click the button and okay, if I can get this page increased by 5%, then the funnel starts working. Then you go back to ClickFunnels and you can make those tweaks and changes and keep working until you get that 5% conversion.

And so that's kind of what Geru is. It's funnel simulation software. And it's a tool that I was using for a long, long time for myself. Our team and I, before we launch any funnel usually it still started with me doodling on a whiteboard because it's hard to break bad habits. It's not a bad habit. I love white boarding. That's step number one. From there, we usually take it and we build it into Geru. And we'd run the simulations and say, "This is what we got to get for this funnel to work. This is how much ad cost need to be." We'd have fun simulating it. And after we had it mapped out and perfected and everyone on the team knew this is what the funnel's going to look like. This is where our goals are, this is what the numbers are going to be. Then we go into ClickFunnels and we actually build it out. So again, we used it as a tool for a long time. In fact, when we launched the Traffic Secrets book, the first upsell I wanted to be was an account to Geru.

And it's kind of funny because I went to John Reese at the time. I said, "Hey, can we buy licenses from you and be able to put these in as the upsell?" And John told me no. And I feel bad because again, trafficseekers.com was his domain name I bought from him and it became the book. And it's because he wouldn't sell me licenses to Geru to give to all of you guys, we ended up finding another company. There's something similar, I don't think they did as good of a job, but they built a similar software and that became the upsell. And I think, anyway, I know John was frustrated by that. I felt bad. I tried to sell his software as the upsell. But anyway, it didn't work out. So we sold some other software and fast forward, I don't know, a year or two later, John came back to me and said, "Okay, I'm ready to sell Geru. Do you want to buy it as well?"

And because I'd bought basically everything else he'd ever sold, I was like, "Oh, should we do it? Should we not do it?" And that brings us to the decision, should we buy another company? We had just bought Magnetic Marketing. We had just bought Voomly. We were in debt. A lot of money, especially from buying Voomly. It was not cheap. As you guys, if you listened to past podcast episodes, know, it was really expensive and we're just like, "Oh, we didn't want to buy another company." But there's one thing we got from the Voomly acquisition. If you guys listened to that episode, do you remember the funnel I walked you through what Brad Callen did different on that funnel that made that company blow up? Why was it doing 40 million a year's because of the way the funnel was structured?

Okay, there's a lot of people that sell hand doodle software. The reason why Doodly and Toonly not branded that business was worth so much money, why I had made so much money is because the way that funnel was structured. And as John came and offered us to purchase Geru from, and I looked at it, I said, this is a cool product, it's a cool brand, it's cool software, all these things. But I knew that the funnel wasn't structured correctly. This was the Rembrandt in the attic. Again, referencing a past episode, if you listened to that episode on the podcast about a Rembrandt in the attic. I knew that what I could do with Geru by just shifting the way the funnel was structured to modeling what we had done in Doodly and Toonly. That now this could become a front end where I could sell a thousand, 2000, 3000 copies of Geru a week.

And what's cool about that is on the backend, someone who buys funnel simulation software, guess what else they probably want? They probably want funnels software to actually build the funnel. And so there's a direct, immediate, perfect match between geru.com and clickfunnels.com. And so for us, I saw the Rembrandt in the attic. I know that if I could take Geru, if I could shift the model and shift the funnel structure to model what we did in that was done in Doodly, then I could scale Geru to a really high level. And then all the Geru customers would then want to buy ClickFunnels in the future, which means we could use Geru. It's a complete breakeven company. Sometimes you heard me talk about breakeven funnels before. But Geru, the goal is not to be a breakeven funnel, it's to be a breakeven company, an entire Geru company.

If I can just get it where using this model, I can get, again, 500 or 1000 brand new customers a day buying funnel simulation software. And then from there, if we get half those people or a third of those people to become ClickFunnels customers, that is the big secret. And so that is the reason why we bought Geru. So the question then is like, well, what has happened with it? We bought the company, I think it's been five or six months now. And the initial step one of the process was again, keep things working. So keep traffic, keep things happening, but then the right, some improvements on software we want to make. So it was getting the dev team to make these improvements, some tweaks and changes and things just to make the software a little bit better for all of our ClickFunnels customers. And then the big one was to transition the funnel structure from what it was before into the model that Brad Callen had perfected with the Doodly and the Toonly funnels.

And so that's what we've been working on for the last couple of months, and I'm happy to announce. Well, by the time you guys watched this, that funnel could and should be actually live. And so you have a chance, if you go to geru.com to see it. I'd recommend go to geru.com and then leave and let the ads follow you round. And when they do, that's, you'll see the secret behind the scenes funnel. Again, if you watch the Doodly episode, you probably know a little bit about how that funnel structure works, but that's kind of what we're doing right now. And so I'm excited to roll this out because I think it's going to become a really, really big front end for ClickFunnels. One of my goals, probably two or three years ago, I sat down with our team and I was like, I want to figure out how do we create more non-Russell based front ends?

It's crazy that Russell wrote a book and Russell wrote another book and Russell has a webinar, Russell, all these things. It's tough because Russell is ClickFunnels and there's never any separation. If I get hit by a bus, what happens? ClickFunnels struggles because all of a sudden the face of it left. And so one of my big initiatives for the last couple years is like, how do we create more non-Russell based front ends that aren't my face on there? Which is a big reason why we bought Dan Kennedy's company right now. Dan Kennedy is a face for ClickFunnels. He's written like 40 books. We have 40 potential funnels coming in, all bringing people into magnetic marketing, which then brings people into ClickFunnels. Buying the Voomly business, Doodly, Toonly, those are all non-Russell based front ends. Geru is a non-Russell based front end. You'll see many more of these rolling out over the next year or two because the number one goal, my number one personal goal is to make it where Russell is one of the faces of ClickFunnels, not where I am the face of ClickFunnels.

And so that's kind of where we are working on and trying to do. And so that's one of the big reasons and the motivations behind it. And so I'm excited now that you guys kind of know a little bit about it. First off, for you guys to go get the software, test it, play with it, see how it works, see what you like about it. And please let us know in the comments like, "Oh, I wish you did this. I wish you did this." Again, there's a couple competitors out there that have little things. Some have features that I don't think are important, but others are features like, "Oh, I know we want to add those things in." So please, in the comments down below, if you're watching this on YouTube or if you're in the podcast, take a screenshot of this on your phone and tag me in and say, "Russell, I'd love for you to add this to Geru."

Let us know those things. We're looking for feedback as we're doing the new relaunch rollout of it. But as a whole, this software is solid, it's powerful. We've been using it now for a couple years as customers, and I'm excited now to have a chance to bring it to you guys as an amazing product that you'll be able to use to build out and map out your funnels before the time.

One of the other really, and this is one of the coolest things, one of the most powerful benefits of Geru... As powerful as it is for you as a marketer or as a team to be able to do funnel simulations. If you run an agency, that's one of the other real big powerful purposes because when you're running agency, a lot of times you're going to a client and you're like, "Hey, we're going to build you a funnel." They're like, "What's a funnel?" And then you know, you try to explain to them, then you build them a funnel and you give it to them like, I don't know what this is. And then you launch it and then they're like, "Oh, I thought I was going to be a billionaire. I'm poor." And they don't understand it. The most powerful thing you can do as an agency is to help your person understand.

So you map out here's what the funnel's going to look like. Here's page one, page two, upsell. This is what it's going to look like. Now let me show you what happens. We're going to put a $100 a day into Facebook ads and if this page converts at 1%, you show them the whole thing. This what it looks like. It means that you're not going to get any leads, but if we get this to convert at 3% or 8%, if we're going to ads cost here, whatever the thing might be, and you show them like this is where you start getting profitable customers.

And then if we get it to 12%, then we can go from a $100 a day to a $1000 a day and that's when your company blows up. But then you show them what it looks like before you ever give them an actual funnel. They have a chance to look at and understand it. And then what happens is when you come back and you build them a funnel and you launch it and you're like, "Hey, we spent a $100 and broke even, your client's not angry. They're like, "Oh cool, it means we're at 3%. So what percentage may I get you to make it more profitable?" And then they understand the process. And so it's one of the most powerful agency tools in the world. In fact, I think upsell two, I believe, not that you're in the funnel yet, but when you get there and you should get there, I think upsell number two is an agency account where you can do that. Where actually you can build out the funnel simulation and it doesn't even say Geru anywhere.

You can brand it with yourself sauce. And it's like, "Oh, Russell's Funnel Agency made this really cool software. Let me show you how the simulations..." You can show people and makes you look like a rockstar, even though we're doing all the work on the backend. And so there's so many cool things here, but as an agency, it's the powerful tools you try to map out and plan out your funnels ahead of time. For you post after your funnel launches, you're like, "I don't know what do I do now?" You can plug all things in like, oh man, my ad cost is too high or this is too high. But it gives you the ability to really see exactly what's happening and then from there, be able to call your funnel audibles. I've done, at Funnel Hacking Live now; two different times, I did presentations about Funnel Audibles.

And it's funny because I've had multiple people afterwards ask, what is a funnel...? What is an audible? I didn't know what that was. So what an audible is in football, if a quarterback comes with a line of scrimmage and they call the play, this is what a play's going to be. And he sits there, looks out over, and all of the sudden, he's like, "Oh my gosh, this play's not going to work because that guy's there and that guy's there. This is not going to work." He calls an audible. So last second, he's like, "Hey," he yells out to this team, he has the number like Blue 32 or whatever thing is right. He says something different. And all the people hear that. They know that the play's changed. The saving the play we were planning on, we're changing it to this play. That's what a funnel audible is.

So same thing is true in we call these funnel audibles. Because most of the funnels we launch don't just crush it day number one, some do, which that's amazing, that's rare, few and far between. What normally happens is you build a funnel, you launch it and it doesn't do that well or it does okay or break evens or it loses money. And most people are like, "This funnel thing's a scam that Russell Brunson's full of crap. That John Denver..." Anyway, so that's what the the funnel audibles are about knowing before you go into time, that's like most funnels don't work the first time. It's like we're trying to make our best possible educated guess based on we do our funnel hack. You look at what's working in the market, and then we do our best stuff, the best copy, we had the best videos, we do our best shot, put it out there, and then we see what's going to happen.

And the majority of the time it's not a huge home run. In fact, I remember when we first launched the Inner Circle way back in the day and I was teaching everyone do a webinar week, do webinar weeks. Everyone was writing webinars, they launch and it was every night, every time someone to launch a webinar. Well, I didn't do the first few times, this is why I started afterwards is they'd messaged me on Vox. They're like, "All right, my webinar's going live. I've got 500 people registered. I'm so excited." And I Vox them back and I'm always like, "Hey, just so you know, really quick, it's probably going to bomb. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But if you go into this with your hopes this high and then it crushes, you're going to be broken. And tomorrow you are going to be Voxing and you're going to be crying and you're going to be miserable and you're going to be angry and you're going to want to refund, it doesn't typically work the first time."

At first you're not going to be that good. Your message is going to be good. All the things aren't going to be right. But you get it out there and the market tells you like, "Hey, this is great, or this was not great." And then you can make the tweaks and the changes based on that. And so I would warn people that in Inner Circle, before they do the first webinar, they do the webinar, they come back, "Hey, I did it. I only sold three things." I'm like, "Cool. But now we know what's wrong. Now we can make the tweaks and the changes. Where did people drop off? What were they saying? What were happening in the comments? Did people like the offer? They not like the offer?" All the things. Now we have data, then we can make some good decisions. And so for me, the same thing, we launched the funnel to get the data back so we can make the tweaks and the change.

It's like, "Oh, cool, upsell number one's crushing it, but the landing page sucks." So how do I fix the landing page? I need more curiosity. I need, and again, if you been around my training, it's either the hook, the story, or the offer. What's the hook? What's wrong? One of these things, either hook, story or offer is wrong on the landing page. We got to fix it, whatever the thing might be. And so Geru gives you the ability to do these funnel simulations very, very quickly ahead of time before you launch the funnel. But then after you launch the funnel, look at it and see from the high view what's working, what's not working? Cool, let's try just tweak this, let's change this, and stuff like that. So anyway, I'm excited for it. Again, I think Geru's going to be a powerful tool for all my Funnel Hackers, which is one of the main reasons why we acquired it.

I think it's going to be an amazing front end to get more people into my universe, into ClickFunnels, a non-Russell based front end that we can hopefully generate a lot of customers at break even or better. And so it'll bring people into ClickFunnels, but also help people who are ClickFunnels members and help serve them so they can be more successful. So anyway, it was a fun acquisition. They're having some funnels right now. I'm hoping you have this initial launch. Similar to when we launched Dan Kennedy's business, we did the first launch and it covered the cost of the company. I'm hoping same thing happens to Geru. We're basically, we do this new rollout, the new launch, and hopefully from the initial launch to our ClickFunnels customers, it'll cover the entire cost of the business that we bought. And then from there, it's just pure profit.

So yeah, hopefully you guys enjoyed this episode. We tied in a lot of different principles from other episodes. The Rembrandt in the attic. We tied in how we took the funnel structure from doodly.com and we modeled it. We're here in geru.com. My goal with this podcast is that we're keep giving you guys these ideas and these strategies, but you start seeing how to link these things together, hopefully gives you glimpses inside of my mind and the mind of those of us here at ClickFunnels who are building things to see like, "Oh, I see why Russell did that. I could do that in my business."

And as you're looking at companies potentially to buyer, to acquire, what's the Rembrandt in the attic? Do you find it right? I see the Rembrandt in the attic again for this one, it's so simple. I change the model, boom, we launch it to our list, we break even. We covered all the costs of the actual company, and now we've got this amazing tool to grow and to scale and get customers into ClickFunnels for forever. So anyway, I love this game. Hopefully you guys are enjoying following along with us as well. And with that said, if you enjoyed this episode, please, if you're watching on YouTube, comment down below. Let us know again, features you want for Geru, any other questions you have about why we did this acquisition, how it's going to work.

And if you're listening on a podcast, same thing on your phone. Usually you can see the actual podcasts. Take a screenshot on your phone, click the buttons, take that picture, post it on social and tag me and let me know because I look at those. I like reading them and it gives me ideas for future episodes. And on top of that, if you have any other questions you want me to answer on the podcast, if you go to marketingsecrets.com, there's a spot where you can actually ask your questions and your answers. And they may become a future podcast episode in as well. So thank you so much for listening, and you should go get your account at geru.com, G-E-R-U.com. Bye, thanks everybody. Talk to you soon.

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