The two founders of ClickFunnels are Russell Brunson and Todd Dickerson. Before we get into how clickfunnels was born and how ClickFunnels grew I first want to touch on the people behind the idea.
Who is Russell Brunson?
Russell Brunson was born in Provo, Utah. As a young child, his family moved to Sandy, Salt Lake. Russell spent the majority of his childhood growing up in Sandy with his brothers.
In his young teens Russell developed a passion for marketing and advertising, he also was very sporty and had a particular interest in Wrestling.
Having a competitive nature Russell quickly flew up the ranks and become state champion in wrestling. Being state champion wasn’t enough for Russell so he kept training, in his senior year he finished second place in a national competition which helped him land a scholarship to college.
Learning and training through college Russell left education being being regarded as one of the top 10 wrestlers in the country.
Although he was a fantastic wrestler and he had a great drive and passion to succeed in the sport his real passion still remained marketing and advertising.
Russells first business was selling an instruction video online to teach students how to make a potato gun. When he first started selling the DVD the cost of advertising was very cheap meaning he could remain very profitable. As time went on the cost of google ads shot up but unfortunately he couldn’t raise the price of his DVD.
Looking for a way to remain profitable he began diving into marketing strategies. It was here he learnt McDonalds Secret. To get a customer through the door to buy a burger at McDonalds actually costs more than the burger itself, as such McDonalds added a simple phrase to the end of their order.
‘Would you like fries and a drink with that?’
Of course most people will say yes this means rather than selling a burger for $2.00 they can sell a meal for $6.00 for example thus making the sale 3x more valuable.
Russell looked at how he could implement this into his potato gun idea, he started by thinking about what other people would need for the potato gun, the first thing that came to mind was that they need the actual kit required to make the gun.
He spoke to a factory that could manufacture them and struck up a deal. This meant he could have the same advertising cost to sell the DVD but could offer an upsell to recoup costs much sooner. This kicked off Russell’s deep obsession with sales funnels.
Russell disliked the complexity of building sales funnels and become determined to streamline the process. Having seen just how profitable the made his business he wanted, no needed, to open this up to the world.
Who is Todd Dickerson?
This guy is the ClickFunnels Enigma, He is very much the ghost in the background. There is very little information online about him to the point that even finding a D.O.B proves difficult.
However here is what we do know.
Todd Dickerson has always been fascinated by software and web development. Back in 2005 Todd started building up websites and integrating them websites with adsense. Meaning that adsense would pay Todd to run ads on his websites. He started making money from these websites that sometimes would take him less than an hour to build.
At one point Todd had upto 1500 websites all running adsense. As a college student he was earning upwards of $10,000.00 a month on a regular basis building out these websites.
Todd was fascinated with making money online and more importantly web development. He adopted the concept of funnel hacking well before it was coined as a term.
When in college he uncovered a guy who had built out this spiders web of website that all linked back to each other and they were all ranking super highly, he reversed engineered this process and learnt the secrets of ranking on google however at first this wasn’t making him any money because ranking on google is not a quick process.
As he didn’t see instant results his attentions turned towards real estate (Like so many people) He started attending real estate conferences and seminars in the hopes to make his millions.
Whilst researching real estate he noticed that one of the websites he made the week before had paid him $30.00 from adsense, he quickly did this maths and realised that if he could keep duplicating these sites that would take him an hour or so to build the money would quickly accumulate, this was when he started seeing his real success with building out websites and running adsense.
From there he went on to create and launch software. He saw a lot of success with a software he designed and built that helped websites rank on google using SEO methods. This was one of the first software businesses that he reached 6 figures with.
Although this was a success he felt like he needed to do more and like a sign from the heavens that’s when he received an email from Russell Brunsons.
How Russell Brunson and Todd Dickerson started working together?
So to cut a long story short, Russell Brunson was in a rut, he had great ideas but no one capable of executing them from a software development standpoint. As a last leap of faith he turned to his email list and simply sent out a broadcast email titled ‘so I’m looking for a partner…’
The email talked about his trials and tribulations and how he was looking for someone to partner up with, someone who could help him with the software development.
He was looking for a partner who wouldn’t require a salary to start with but would be happy to split the profits in almost a share style set up.
At the time Todd had an ulterior motive, he had this idea that he felt would change the world but he knew he needed someone with a much larger reach than himself to sell this idea, he saw Russell as his vessel to launch this product. His original product that he wanted to call ‘Naked Abe app’ (Picture that logo) later became what is now a commonly used ClickFunnels tool called actionetics.
Russell and Todd partnered up in 2011 and made various softwares and completed various projects together.
In 2014 Todd was on a plane to Boise to meet Russell to go over their latest project which was an auto-webiner software (Which as you know is also now available in clickfunnels) when on the plane, he read an article about Leadpages receiving $5,000,000.00 in funding.
At the time Leadpages was very basic and Todd was confident that him and Russell could easily develop a similar software. They sat down together and over a 2 month period mapped out exactly where they wanted to take this new concept and more importantly what they wanted it to do.
They did this by asking questions such as ‘What if it could do this’ if the end of that sentence made sense they would add it to the list until they had a complete package. In 2014 ClickFunnels was born.
How ClickFunnels Grew?
So ClickFunnels is born and you may have heard of them going from $0 to over $100,000,000.00 in just 3 years, well just how did they do this?
So when ClickFunnels was fully built and operational it was originally designed to remain functioning and stable for upto 10,000 users (I will come back to why that’s relevant later).
ClickFunnels attended a business conference where they had a booth directly across from Leadpages, ClickFunnels slogan ironically was ‘can your landing page builder do this’ which was rather a slap in the face to leadpages. At the event there was a pitch or talk from each of the company representatives.
The founder of leadpages got on stage and gave an educational talk about sales and conversions but offered no sales pitch at all. Directly after the founder of leadpages had finished Russell Brunson (who will all know is a fantastic salesman) got on stage and closed on almost 45% of the room which considering at the time they were selling a $1000.00 offer was crazy.
This was really the turning point and Russell and Todd knew they were on to a winner. Fast forwarding on ClickFunnels rapidly approached the 10,000 user (Remember the figure I mentioned earlier) well when they reached near the 10,000 user mark ClickFunnels had a complete crash from over an 8 hour period.
At the time they were looked in with an infrastructure company that wasn’t really suitable to scale ClickFunnels. The infrastructure company they were with stated that in order to switch over they would need a minimum of 8 hours downtime. Obviously ClickFunnels didn’t want this to happen.
Almost as a strike of fortune the hosting company they were with crashed which in turn caused ClickFunnels to crash, this crash meant ClickFunnels had the time to switch over to Amazon which is the forefront runner for software infrastructure.
ClickFunnels were worried that this was really going to affect their business however with good communication and constant updates their customers remained loyal and appreciated the good communication.
I feel being open and transparent has really allowed ClickFunnels to build a ‘tribe’ or culture and start that mass movement that Russell has talked so much about in his book ‘Expert Secrets’ (Click to read Expert Secrets Review)
Once ClickFunnels had built this tribe scaling the business became much easier turning them into this power house they are now.
If you want to test ClickFunnels for yourself, you can do be clicking the below, with this you get 14 days 100% free. You will have to enter some credit card information but don’t worry you won’t be charged a dime unless you wish to proceed and keep ClickFunnels