Russell Brunson
Co-founder and CEO, ClickFunnels · 2 appearances on the record.
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Russell Brunson is the co-founder and CEO of ClickFunnels, a software platform designed to help entrepreneurs build automated sales and marketing funnels. He is also an author who popularized online funnel frameworks through books such as DotCom Secrets and hosts The Marketing Secrets Show.
25statements → 15claims → 1claims resolved → 3.84/5average certainty → 1.52/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 50said about them ↓
1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 14 not checkable as stated how the 15 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
15 assertions · 4 insights · 6 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 15 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 14 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Russell argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Russell Brunson Began His Career Selling Potato Gun Guides and Custom Software
“One of my first products was actually a guide teaching people how to build potato guns, which I was an expert. I was an expert at so that, and then I started building hiring people to build software for me. So between software and how to information products, …”
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Russell Brunson on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Russell Brunson said on Top Founders that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Brunson: The only purpose of a business is making its owners rich
“The only purpose of a business is to make the owners rich. And so like, I kind of believe that, like if you do that, then it creates jobs, it creates all these other things.”
Brunson: ClickFunnels makes $30-$35 per book customer on $10-$12 ad spend
“So we'll spend anywhere from 10 to 12 bucks on Facebook to acquire a book customer, but we'll make 30 to 35 dollars to the book funnel. So we actually are profitable up front and then we introduce that person to ClickFunnels.”
Free Books Lost $12 on Shipping But Drove $32 in Backend Revenue
“No, well, the book was free. We lost money on the shipping, shipping, seven 95 anywhere in the world. So on average, we would, we lost about 12 dollars per book, but because of the sales funnel we averaged 32 dollars every free book I gave away.”
Raising Venture Capital Forces Founders to Serve the Board Over Customers
“Cause as soon as you start doing that, your customer no longer is your customers, the board of directors, and you start making choices that don't really serve your customers as much.”
Brunson Advises Founders Against Doing Equal Equity Splits
“I wouldn't normally ever, I would never advise anyone to do equal shares ever, because I don't think it's smart typically, but for this, it just works.”
Working for Free Initially Creates Case Studies to Sell High-Ticket Coaching
“I wish I would understand the power of working for free for people. When we launched our coaching program I started by finding someone who I knew I could help and I worked for free, dramatically expanded and blew up their company and then use that case study a…”
Brunson: ClickFunnels would consider acquisition offers starting at $1 billion
“So that would probably be the number that we'd start. We start being interested in that.”
ClickFunnels Reached 10,000 Paying Members and 50,000 Trials in Year One
“We just passed our one year mark with click funnels. We had over 50,000 trial accounts that people have gone and actually put a credit card in. And we currently have over 10,000 active members who are actively being rebuilt.”
ClickFunnels Reached $1.2 Million in Monthly Recurring Revenue
“Last month was 1.2 million. Month before was like 1.18.”
ClickFunnels Turned Down a $35 Million Acquisition Offer in Early 2016
“We got an offer last month for thirty-five million. We turned it down.”
The Three ClickFunnels Co-Founders Each Retained Roughly 27% Equity
“I think it's like 27% each. And then Dotcom Secrets has the rest.”
80% of ClickFunnels Customer Acquisition Is Organic, Compared to 20% Affiliate
“And I would say about 20% of our customer acquisitions from affiliates, the other 80% is organic, either from my company or from just, I don't even know how some of these people show up to be honest.”
ClickFunnels Boosted 14-Day Trial Rebill Retention From 40% to 64%
“And as of like six months ago only 40% stick through the rebill. We did a whole bunch of optimization. Now we're up to like 63 or 64% to make through the first rebill.”
Brunson: Bootstrapped ClickFunnels was profitable from day one
“And then we were profitable from day one and we've been extremely profitable since then.”
Brunson: Paying for users' custom domains dramatically reduces churn
“So one of them, we found out if they set up a custom domain, like their likelihood of, I don't know exact numbers, it drops dramatically. So now when you go through our onboarding process, first thing we do is we actually, we set the first domain for them and …”
Brunson: Giving free t-shirts for watching a demo slashed churn
“One of the biggest things we did initially to decrease churn is when someone kind of came on and was like, hey, here's the 13 minute demo video showing you how to use the software. If you watch it, we'll send you a free t-shirt. And that alone dropped churn by…”
DotCom Secrets Generated Between $6 Million and $7 Million in 2015
“It'll do between six and seven million dollars by the end of the year.”
DotCom Secrets Sold 26,000 Copies in Its First Month
“Month one, we sold 26,000 copies since then. We sell a lot of them. I'm not sure exact numbers are probably at 30 or probably 40, 40 something thousand copies now.”
18% of ClickFunnels Customers Pay $300 Monthly, While 82% Pay $100
“And so somewhere, you know, between there, the average I'd say about a little, about 18% of our customers are paying the 300 dollar a month level and the rest are a hundred dollar a month level.”
Brunson Self-Funded ClickFunnels With Over $1 Million From DotCom Secrets
“It was over a million dollars when all said and done.”
Co-Founder Todd Dickerson Built the Initial ClickFunnels Software Solo in Six Weeks
“Todd came in and within a month and a half had built it by himself.”
ClickFunnels Gave Away Eight Cars to Top Affiliates in One Month
“In fact, we gave away eight cars last month to affiliates.”
ClickFunnels Generated $1 Million in Profit Hosting Its Last Live Event
“Like our last event, we made a million bucks putting on events. So it didn't cost us anything. We made 10 XR from tickets.”
Russell Brunson Began His Career Selling Potato Gun Guides and Custom Software
“One of my first products was actually a guide teaching people how to build potato guns, which I was an expert. I was an expert at so that, and then I started building hiring people to build software for me. So between software and how to information products, …”
The other half of the tape: Russell Brunson's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 44 times in 24 episodes on Top Founders. 6 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Nathan Latka 18Daniel Fazio 6Scott Brandley 3Andy Fletcher 3Kevin Moenne-Loccoz 2Kean Graham 2Zach Smith 1Steve Olsher 1
Statements about Russell Brunson, by other people (6)
Fazio: SaaS founders should offset CAC by selling paid onboarding courses
“In terms of other SaaS founders growing their sasses, I feel like a lot of them will spend an absolute ton of time making these giant support articles and all these videos when you guys could just package this up in a course and use that as your front end offe…”
ClickFunnels scaled to hundreds of millions while Leadpages stalled at $17M
“He was able to grow that business, which was not that dissimilar from Leadpages to, like, several hundred million Leadpages, because of churn, stalled out at 17.”
Fazio: Growing a Twitter audience requires executing Brunson's Dream 100 strategy
“Your first function is to do Russell Brunson's little dream 100 thing. You need to post a lot of value, have threads, make a giant pinned thread on your profile, just give an absolute ton of value. And now what you're doing is you're finding other big accounts…”
Ryan Deiss regrets letting Russell Brunson pitch ClickFunnels on his stage
“When you ask Ryan Dice, one of his biggest
Regrets about digital marketer is that he let people like Russell Brunson go on his stage a decade ago, and now ClickFunnels is worth two billion dollars, right?
And even as, you know, as traffic and conversion summit…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2024 7 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2021 13 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- Turning a $500k Course Into a $20k MRR SaaS Play. Next Russell Brunson?
- How Funnel-Builder SaaS Convertri Used Affiliates to Hit $1.5m in ARR Without Raising Capital
- What a 440 Person Amazon Community Looks Like (and its $1m+ in Revenue)
- FlowChat Goes From $0 to $40k MRR in 4 Months Using 1 Tactic
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2019 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2018 3 mentions in 1 episode
2017 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2016 12 mentions in 8 episodes 2 per episode
- Smart Way to Buy Profitable Land with Mark Podolsky of Landgeek
- The Clever Way This 26 Year Old Is Making $128k/mo PROFIT with Regan Hillyer Episode 236
- EP 417 SPECIAL: Warner Interviews Latka: Con Artist or Brilliant Genius?
- He's Making How Much from Text Message Marketing? EP 288: Chris Brisson
- His Underwear Story Was Secret Until Now with Franklin Cole
- Mom of 4 Teaches How To Land First Paid Speaking Gig with Carrie Wilkerson of The Barefoot Executive
- People Hire Him Behind The Scenes to Launch Their Crowdfunding Campaigns, $40m Raised with Zach Smith of Funded Today
- Secret Art of Getting Your Product Into Walmart with Vincent van de Poll of GROM
- every mention in 2016, scene by scene →
Appearances (2)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| 950 How Clickfunnels Grew From $14m to $60m in ARR in 18 Months | Mar 1, 2018 | 7m |
| Why We Turned Down a $35 Milllion Acquisition Offer With Russell Brunson of ClickFunnels | Feb 17, 2016 | 11m |