Hey, welcome to episode three of the state of the marketing union. I'm Jason Parker. And today we're talking about the rise and fall of ClickFunnels. And with me is my business partner at Parker and Kirkland, Mr. Charles Kirkland. Charles and I have some unique insights to share about how ClickFunnels actually grow into a nine figure juggernaut and what went wrong.

If you. want to call it that, of course, they've. We're outrageously successful, But Charles, uh, there's so much to say about this subject. So let's start at the beginning. Uh, we, we were, you were, I were here to witness the rise and fall, I guess.

Um, the

Yes,

that, but it seemed like everyone and their mom had a page builder, remember that, and then, uh, ClickFunnels emerged victorious somehow

and I will preface this by saying that me and Jason, being the rocket scientists that we are, we released something that was an amazing page builder and we sold it for a one off price of 27. A friend of mine has something similar. I told him, dude, nobody's going to pay you like 37 per month and lead pages apparently exploded.

So let, let, we have to context this with, there's a lot of history here that people aren't aware of because today, if you said, Hey Jason, I need to build a funnel, you could literally go get any number of. Optimize press any number of solutions, you know, go high level. I mean, there's an endless supply of funnel builders, but back in the day, before ClickFunnels, you had lead pages, you had Unbounce, you had Kyle.

We're like, what was a five minute pages, something like that.

million. There's so many of them.

There was so many, like, I remember doing optimized press acts where you would literally try to string together things, but what made ClickFunnels unique was it had a email component. Where you could send through SendGrid or something like that.

You could build these funnels, collect emails, and more importantly, you actually had a built in shopping cart, or at least, you know, the ability to check out with a one click upsell. That, see, that's the magic of it. Uh, like Unbounce today, exactly. Like it literally was a Swiss army knife where everyone else, including us, had a single blade, a build to a landing page, and that really Was revolutionary.

But quick question. Did ClickFunnels sell right off the start?

No, okay. So of all, the marketing graveyard is littered with all these funnel builders that came out around that time and some of them did really well as launches like on JV zoo and whatnot and made a lot of money, but then they just faded away. So I think, first of all, the point is, I think you made a good point there that it started integrating more tools, um, compared to other pitch builders, which really kind of makes you think, you know, that's probably what. high level did to click funnels lunch. But anyway, uh, yeah, I mean, I just kind of want to get into that. But what I saw back then was, uh, at very first click funnel struggle. So, and it was the brilliance of Russell that kind of made it, uh, you know, and I was thinking it was his brilliance that, that, you know, of marketing that made it, but you might be right.

That it was, had a lot to do with adding email and stuff like that. So, uh, but I came on here prepared to say, yeah, it was the brilliance of Russell's marketing because. At that time, um, they struggled at first with just standard sales pages. They couldn't sell it, uh, and, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think Charles, I think, uh, Russell bought the software from somebody else and then turn into ClickFunnels. And I think that was the case, but he was trying to sell it by a sales page. Ended up, um, I would have given up on it by then, you know, because I think I remember like...