Russell Brunson was looking to make money when he was in college. “The plan was [to] find something people were searching for that no one’s selling, [make it] and then sell it to those people,” says Brunson.
He was a student athlete, and, on spring break, he and his friend made a potato gun for fun. They found plans online and bought supplies at Home Depot.
“The next Monday, I was back in school, and I was like, ‘What can I create? What can I sell?’” Brunson says. He typed “potato guns” into a website called Overture to see how many people were searching for that term—the answer was 18,000 people per month.
So, Brunson and his friend borrowed a camcorder, filmed themselves making a potato gun and sold the DVD online. He then spent $5 on a Google ad targeting that specific audience and sold the DVD for $37. He did well for a while but, when Google changed their algorithm, the ad price shot up. “It got to the point where I was spending $50 or $60 [per ad] to sell a $37 DVD,” says Brunson. He had to pause his business for a while.
Eventually, his friend figured out a solution. “When you go to McDonald’s and when you order a Big Mac, the first thing they ask you is, like, ‘Hey, do you want fries and a Coke?’” says Brunson. “It’s an upsell. If you add an upsell after someone buys your product, they’ll make more money from everyone buying it.” The duo realized that if they upsell the potato gun DVD by including a kit with the parts needed to make the potato gun, they could, then, beat the price of the ad.
“We started selling the DVD for $37 [with a kit] for $200 and then I turned the ads back on…It was still costing me $50 to sell [the] DVD, but one out of three people who bought the DVD bought the $200 kit,” says Brunson. The net profit beat the net expense of the ads.
From there, they branched out into other industries. Brunson met the world’s fastest reader and collaborated with him on a course to teach speed reading. Next, Brunson moved on to couponing, dating and weight loss. Friends and family wanted to know how Brunson and his friend had become successful, so they started teaching small groups how to do the same thing, which they called “sales funnels.”
“Right now, we spend a hundred grand a day [on] ads and it’s all profitable because the funnels pay for it all,” says Brunson.
He and his friend spent two years building software, now called ClickFunnels, which helps make the process of selling anything online simple.
Russel Brunson’s 3 tips for success
With several books on the market and a following of over a million entrepreneurs, Brunson has tips that can help any new business be successful:
1. Find your superpower
The first thing people need to understand, says Brunson, is that everyone has something inside them that people will pay for. “For me, it was potato guns,” he says. “But the reality is every single person has unique experiences. You’ve gone through stuff in your life and, even though it [may] seem like common sense [to you], it’s your superpower.”
2. Find the people who were “you” five years ago
The next step is to figure out how to find your people. Brunson suggests reflecting back on who you were five years ago to find your customer. “They’re struggling,” says Brunson. “You can go back and say, ‘Hey, I can shortcut [your] success.’”
3. Pay attention to your mindset
One of the biggest problems people come across, Brunson says, is that they don’t believe in themselves, so they self-sabotage.
There are three parts of the brain that matter, says Brunson. The conscious, which says, ‘I want this thing,’ the subconscious, which holds the stories we tell ourselves over and over, and “instinctive fear,” which says, ‘You aren’t good enough or worthy,’ he explains.
“We work with entrepreneurs [to help] them consciously choose what they want. And then, after they choose it, [we say] ‘How do you feel about that?’” says Brunson. “There [are] ways you can test…how you actually feel. What’s that subconscious story that keeps coming back…How do we rewrite that story? How do we change that belief inside of you?”
This is usually the biggest part of the battle, he says. “I became aware of my patterns that I didn’t even know were happening every single day,” says Brunson. “But [if] you can be aware of them, then you can override them and you can change.”
Photo courtesy of Russell Brunson.
