Level 10 Opportunity - Part 1 of 2 - a podcast by Russell Brunson

How to find and earn your level 10 opportunity. This is the first half of a presentation I gave at Stephen Larsen’s OfferMind event.

On today’s episode Russell shares a presentation from OfferMind about how he founded Clickfunnels and the journey it took to get there. Here are some of the amazing thing you will hear in part 1 of the presentation:

• Hear a funny story about potato guns being shipped to a hotel where an event was held, after the event was already over.
• Find out why even though family and friends were less than enthusiastic about all Russell’s new ideas, he kept talking about them.
• See why it took Russell more than 130 funnels before he created Clickfunnels.

So listen here to part 1 of Russell’s Level 10 Opportunity presentation from OfferMind.

---Transcript---

What’s up everybody? It’s Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast. Right now I am actually in the middle of our Two Comma Club Live event. I’m having so much fun. We’ve got 5000 people registered, had about 3500 people on live for the last day and a half straight. I’m on lunch break and I realized I didn’t have my podcast recorded for this week, so I was kind of scrambling, what would be the best thing I could give you guys?

And I remember there’s a presentation I did at Stephen Larsen’s OfferMind, and it’s not the whole presentation. But the very beginning I kind of went on a rant, but I kind of went off because earlier that day I heard a bunch of people talking about, “Looking for my Clickfunnels, my big opportunity, my….” whatever it is, you know.  And I kind of wanted to just talk about that. How do you find your level 10 opportunity? How do you find the big opportunity that’s for you, that was created for you?

Because a lot of times people are waiting for that to hit them, and it’s like, no, no, no you have to understand that you have to be in momentum and moving forward for those things to come to you. And I kind of shared my journey about how I came into Clickfunnels and how it became a thing. So I’m going to share that presentation, it’s about 30 minutes long, so we’re going to break it over two episodes. So this is episode number one of two about how to find your level 10 opportunity.

I’m so happy to have you guys here in Boise with us. Has the last day and a half been amazing so far? Very cool. I just want to take a moment and just acknowledge Stephen Larsen, or Steve Larsen, whatever he goes by today. He was always “Stephen” in the office, just so you know, because the way he spelled it always changed. But it’s crazy to look back and a couple Funnel Hacking Lives ago he bootstrapped  his way, I’m sure you guys have heard this story, to get there. He slept in the lobby. Two days after that was in my office asking for a job. And then fast forward now a couple of years, was able to bring 650 people to Boise, Idaho on a week beginning, during a holiday, talking about offers for crying out loud. This is insane that you guys are all here. So let’s give him a huge round of applause. I wouldn’t have believed it. So cool.

I got so many fun things to talk about today. I don’t have a normal presentation. Normally I have a million slides and everything like that. Today I want to do more storytime and I want to tell you guys some  stories, have some fun, show you some cool stuff from the book that’s coming out, and a couple other cool things. So that’s kind of the game plan.

But Katherine Jones just messaged me a few minutes ago, I’m not sure where you’re at in here, right here, hey! And she’s like, “If I came all the way to Boise, Idaho and you don’t tell at least one potato gun story, I’m going to be severely upset.” So I didn’t have a potato story planned, but then I just thought of one a second ago. So how many of you guys want a potato gun story real quick? Anyone want to go shoot potato guns after this? That’s the upsell, we’re doing that tomorrow for anyone….just kidding.

No, it’s funny. We did a family event like a month ago in Denver. Who was at the family event with us? And we were trying to get all these potato gun kits shipped there to be able to show the kids and actually do that, and it’s funny because I haven’t sold my potato gun DVD for a decade now, and we used to have this supplier that would drop ship potato gun kits afterwards. So like a week before the event I was like, “We should see if they still drop ship potato gun kits, we’ll get them shipped to the event and it will be amazing.” and this whole thing. So I’m getting Melanie to try and call them, they have no answer, they won’t return our emails, but they still have an order button on their site.

So we bought them at wholesale prices, had them shipped directly to the hotel in Denver. And Melanie told me, and Melanie told me yesterday, “I just got the shipping notice. They finally shipped them.” So there’s a whole bunch of potato gun kits getting shipped to Denver right now. So if any of you guys are there, you can just pick them up. So that’s the potato gun story I’ve got for you guys today. Maybe at Funnel Hacking Live we’ll do some more potato gun building or something. A whole extra late night session.

Anyway, there you go. When Stephen first asked me to speak here, the first thing he did was he tried to make an irresistible offer. Did you guys hear about this already? So he went through the whole process, and then we talked and I’m like, ‘What should I talk about?” and we kind of had a whole direction I wanted to go. So I kind of started initially building my thoughts around that, but if anyone’s been watching my instagram, the last month of my life I’ve been deep trying to get this Traffic Secrets book done, and it’s been a lot. And it’s top of mind on a whole bunch of, it’s just there.

So I’m going to kind of do both. I’m going to talk about the stuff I was going to talk about, but also go into Traffic Secrets because there’s parts I’ve never taught before that I just want to share. Again, I’ve never taught them publically, so they might come out really bad, it could be a complete flop, but I’m not getting paid, so it’s cool. I’m just kidding.

Anyway, so I’m going to start at the very beginning. Initially when he first asked me to speak I really wanted to talk about, because I think it’s applicable to everyone in your journey. And I’m curious right now, how many of you guys have been in this entrepreneur game, trying to make money on the internet, this whole world for more than 5 years? Okay, how many of you guys have been less than 5 years? Less than 4 years? Less than 3? 2? Less than 1 year? How many of you guys found out about this a couple of days ago, you’re pumped? This is awesome. Can you imagine this being your first introduction?

I think sometimes we come into these rooms, I know when I first got in there, man, it’s 15, 16 years now when I first learned about this world and I came into it. And I remember going and hearing all these people talking about stuff, and they’re sharing numbers and stats and I think I had this envisioned in my head that I was going to come in and like 5 days later I was going to be a kajillionaire and that was going to be how it worked, because all these other people were doing it. And I think a lot of people have that believe as well.

Sometimes they come in and start working and doing the process, and if they don’t get it right away, they fall away from it, which is frustrating and it’s hard. So I wanted to kind of just talk about my journey for a little bit because every time I meet somebody, I always get people who are like, “I’ve known you ever since the beginning.” And I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, when was that?” and they’re like, “Back when you did the Dotcom Secrets book. Ever since the very beginning.” And I’m like, “There’s 10 years that I was doing this before the Dotcom Secrets book came out.” Or “All the way back to Microcontinuity.” Who here remembers microcontinuity? I was like, “I was 6 years in when that came out.” I’ve been doing this for a long, long, long, long time. There’s been a whole bunch of ups and downs.

And one of the quotes that is in the new Traffic Secrets book, this is actually the Dotcom Secrets book. We just taped the cover to it. Anyway, oh we totally did. I had someone grab it and they’re like, “I took pictures of it inside.” And I was like, “Yeah, it’s literally Expert Secrets so…” anyway, but in the Traffic Secrets book, as I was writing it and researching and trying to figure out the right stuff, there was a quote and actually from an entrepreneur that lives here in Boise. Anyone here ever heard of ConvertKit? So Nathan Barry is the founder of ConvertKit, he’s a local Boisean as well, a really cool guy. Someone I have a ton of respect for.

And I was writing the chapter on publishing and I’m not going to talk a lot about publishing today, but he had this quote that I ended up putting in the book that just meant the world to me. And I wanted to kind of start this way, as I start this presentation because I want this to be the thing that’s in your guys’ mind as we’re going through this journey together.

So it’s part of an email he wrote, and the subject line was “Endure long enough to get noticed.” And he said, “How many great TV shows have you discovered in season 3 or later? I started watching Game of Thrones after they had released 5 seasons. Pat Flynn had released over 100 episodes of his podcast before I even knew it existed. I discovered Hard Core History years after Dan Carlin had started producing it. This is such a common experience. There’s so much content being produced that we can’t possible discover it all. So instead we wait for the best content to float to the surface after time.

“Step one in building an audience is to create great content. And step two is to endure long enough to get noticed. Seth Godin is very generous with his time, and will appear on almost any relevant podcast, but you have to have recorded at least 100 episodes first. His filter is creators who have showed they’re willing to show up consistently for a long time.”

So when I read that I was just like, man, it’s crazy. And I was talking to my wife about this the other day because it’s still, this whole thing is insanely weird to us, because this started 15, 16 years ago when we first got married. And I was sitting there and I’m learning about all this nerdy marketing stuff, and funnels, and we didn’t even call them funnels back then. But I was learning about stuff and direct response marketing and reading books about headlines and hooks, and all these things, and I was geeking out and I would try to talk to people about it.

I’d talk to my friends, and my family, and my parents, and my brothers, and everyone, trying to explain it to them. And you’re like, for me it’s the most exciting thing in the world. I’d explain it to them, I’d go through and they look at me like, “Oh, that sounds really nice.” How many of you guys have friends or family when you started talking about this kind of stuff, they’re just like, “Oh.” You’re like, “Do you not understand what I’m talking about?” and I freak out, “This guy did this, and this person did this.” I’m telling them story after story after story of all these people, all the people that I saw on other stages telling their story. I’d tell their stories and they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s really nice.” I’m like, “How are you guys not getting this? How are you missing the energy behind this? What am I doing wrong to convey this?”

And I would talk about it over and over and over again and nobody seemed to care. But I cared. It was so exciting for me. So after that I started talking louder, and eventually I had a couple of kids, I was still going to Boise State just down the road, and I had a couple of kids in my classes who started listening and they’re like, “That is really, that’s really cool.” And I’d tell them about them and they got excited and I told other people, and so many people never heard me. I was speaking but they never heard me.

I kept speaking, and speaking and eventually a couple people started hearing, and then a couple more started hearing. But it was slow. And the first decade of me doing this, the groups were not ever big. In fact, the last event I did before Funnel Hacking Live, which was probably about 10 years ago, so probably about 7 or 8 years in I did an event. And we had I think 300 ish people signed up for it. And I was super excited. We did it down in Salt Lake, we drove me and our tiny team, we drove down there and we showed up and less than a hundred actually showed up after they bought tickets.

And I’m in this room, just like, how is this so hard? This is the most exciting thing in the world to me and I can’t get people excited. But I kept talking and kept talking and kept talking because I was passionate about it. Okay, if I would have done this because I thought other people were going to get passionate about it, it would have withered up on the vine a long time ago. But I kept talking and so it’s so fascinating to me today that there’s 650 people in Boise on a week beginning during a holiday talking about offers for crying out loud. This is insane.

We’re going to have 5000 people at Funnel Hacking Live, all talking about funnels and about all these crazy things that are so exciting. That people are buying books, when I wrote this first book, man, I can’t tell you how scared I was. How many of you guys have ever written a book before? Anyone ever heard, do you guys know Ryan Holladay? He’s one of my favorite authors right now. He is going to be speaking at Funnel Hacking Live, I’m so excited. So he’s written some amazing books, but my favorite of all his books is a book called Perennial Seller, which is a whole book about how you create content that lasts beyond the moment.

He talked about a whole bunch of examples of movies, movies that last forever like Star Wars. It’s just going forever. Then you have other ones that make a ton of money and then they die. And in the book he talks about Star Wars, like names some lines from Star Wars, everyone can list off some lines, because the movie is a Perennial Seller. But he says, the highest grossing movie at the time was Avatar. And he said, “Can anyone think of a single sentence from Avatar?” can any of you guys give me a quote from Avatar? See, I didn’t even know that. We got one person who remembers a line from Avatar. Highest grossing movie, but it died.

Friends was the same way. Friends is an amazing show, but when it ended it ended. Seinfeld has lived on. So what seems to work that lasts, and what doesn’t last. And he talks about that, it’s an amazing book called Perennial Seller. And again, he’s going to be talking at Funnel Hacking Live about how to create art that lasts beyond. Its not just for books, but art, movies, courses, whatever your thing is. How do you create stuff that lasts beyond yourself, which is something that I study because I don’t know, I’m in the phase of my life where I’m obsessed with the legacy of this whole thing. How do you do that?

One thing he talked about in the book is how interesting it is with creators where when you create something you go into private. Like when I’ve been writing these books or doing whatever, I’m in private in my own house studying, learning, reading, geeking out, but then when you make it public it’s like, it goes for me from this private thing to this public thing, and the fear of rejection is like the scariest thing in the world.

So I remember putting this out and being so scared. But I was so passionate, my heart and soul and a decade of my life went into this, and put it out there. And I remember sending it to a couple of my friends and just  having so much anxiety like, “What if they read this and they hate it or they don’t like it? This is so important to me.” We put it out there, and luckily they liked it. In fact, Rich Schefren, how many of you guys know Rich Schefren? He was the one I was most scared to read it.

That dude’s read every book on planet earth like 400 times. In fact, there’s a video of him on YouTube that’s worth watching. He shows his book writing process, he buys a book, he rips the binding off of it. Excuse me, first off he reads it all, highlights it. Then he cuts the binding off of it, he scans the whole thing, he sends the scan to one of his Filipino workers and then takes all the highlighted sections and writes them into a PDF. And then he’s done that for like, I don’t know, 7000 books over time, and then every morning he wakes up like, “What am I going to study today?” He’s like, “Copywriting. These are the 30 best copywriting books of all time.” Plugs in his highlights into like an iPad, jumps on the treadmill and he’ll read 30 books in the morning on whatever topic he wants to do that day. The dude’s obsessed, and he has a whole video showing the process. It’s the coolest thing in the world.

I remember sending him the book and I’m just like, “If Rich hates it, I am done. I’m walking away from this whole thing.” And I remember afterwards he called me and he’s like, ‘Dude, your book…” I’m like, “Yeah…” he’s like, “It’s really good.’ I’m like, “Oh my gosh, are you serious?” that feeling.

So I’m sure a lot of you guys have ever felt that or are going to feel it, it’s scary. Especially if you’re fired up, you’re excited about the next thing, the offer you’re going to create, all this stuff. But as you get in the creation mode and start putting it out there, there’s always going to be that fear of like, “I’m going to give it to the world and what if they reject it?” So that’s just, that’s going to be happening.

But I wanted to kind of step back on my journey and I want to talk about all this stuff that I tried. In fact, I printed this out before I showed up here. Who here in this room thinks they made the most funnels. And not like a quick create funnel, and a demo funnel, and you have 8000 in your account. Who here has built more than 10 funnels? Built, launched, live, were pushed out into the world, traffic was sent to them? Who has built more than 20 funnels? More than 30 funnels? 40? 50? 60? 70? Anyone more than 70?

 Alright, okay I was able to find 131. Not just funnels that I played with a little bit, that we built, pre-Clickfunnels in Photoshop and Frontpage. That we built, created, launched and went live. Here’s the first couple of links right here, these are the next ones here, the next ones here, next ones here, next ones here. Every one of these is a funnel we’ve created, built, launched. My designers used Photoshop and I used Frontpage, because I could use Frontpage. In fact, I used Frontpage all the way until Clickfunnels launched, for my nerds out there. They’re like, “What about Dreamweaver?” I couldn’t figure out Dreamweaver. I used Frontpage and that’s all I ever did, and then Clickfunnels.

But these are them, 131 funnels that I could find and I think there’s more. I’m going to try to eventually get them all and put them all in chronological order. But that’s how many funnels I created over a decade and a half before I created Clickfunnels.

I share this with you guys for a reason because so many of you guys are looking at me and saying, “Oh my gosh, Russell created Clickfunnels, now he’s making hundreds of millions of dollars, this is so cool.” It didn’t happen overnight, by any stretch of the imagination. It happened because I kept doing it and kept doing it. I had an idea after idea, after idea, after idea. Most of you guys don’t have your big idea yet. You may think you do, but you don’t.

All these ideas, every single one of these things I thought was my big idea. I put my blood, sweat and tears into it. Every single one of these things took months to be able to create, write the copy, do the design, get the thing. It was a labor of love every single time and most of them didn’t even work. I’m like, “how did that not work? It’s the greatest idea I ever had. Potato guns, seriously! It’s going to be huge.” Of all sorts of stuff. Someday it will be fun to do a whole presentation and show you guys the iterations of like, “I had this idea and this is why. And this one and this one.” It would take days though, just to go through them all.

But that’s what I had to go through. And on this journey as I’m doing this, I don’t really know where I’m going. All I know is I’m just going. I’m moving. Momentum forward, right. How many of you guys feel like that sometimes? I don’t really know where I’m going, I’m just moving forward right now hoping something good happens. That’s good.

I don’t know what it is, there’s something about motion and movement and forward progress, as you do that, God, the universe, whatever you want to call it starts rewarding you 4 things. As I was moving forward I’m like, “This is the greatest idea.” Started doing it, and it’s like, “Ah, it kinda sucks.” But all the sudden, that door opened, I met that person, I found this thing. And I start moving, the next thing. I try this and I try this, and I try this and all these things in this journey started, as I was moving forward, new ideas, new opportunities, new people came into my world that made it possible.

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