Join me as I chat with Jonathan Courtney, Co-Founder and CEO of AJ&Smart, as we dive deep into how to build million dollar sales funnels. Jonathan shares his strategies and frameworks for creating sales funnels that will 10x your conversion rateEpisode Timestamps: 00:00 Intro03:04 Sales Funnels explained (Websites vs Funnels) 15:53 Ugly funnels convert better!17:52 The magic formula and example 125:28 What businesses should use funnels34:11 Example 1 continued 44:58 Pixeling + retargeting = marketing gold50:15 Example 2: Book Funnel56:27 The MIFGY secret (Most Incredible Free Gift Yet)1) Websites are not FunnelsWebsites = brochuresFunchannels = $$$ machinesMost businesses confuse the two. Don't make that mistake!2) The magic formula:Facebook/YouTube ads → Landing page → Free valuable content → Call bookingThis simple funnel structure has generated MILLIONS for AJ&Smart3) Ugly funnels convert better! Jonathan's "ugliest" funnel:• 4 years old• Looks terrible• Generated $20M+ revenueLesson: Done is better than perfect. Launch fast, iterate later.4) The power of long-form content:1-hour training video → Deeper engagement → More qualified leadsPeople who invest time watching = more likely to buy5) Pixeling + retargeting = marketing goldTrack visitors, show them targeted ads across platforms.Build an inescapable marketing web!6) Email marketing isn't dead, it's EVOLVINGCapture emails → Drip feed value → Segment based on behavior → Targeted offersSmart email funnels = predictable revenue7) Physical products STILL WORK in digital ageFree book funnel = game changerPeople love holding something tangible. Use it to your advantage!8) The MIFGY secret (Most Incredible Free Gift Yet)Stack one-time bonuses on your offer. Create FOMO.Even high-end brands use this. It just WORKS.9) Key takeaway: Funnels aren't sleazy, they're ESSENTIALTop brands like Eight Sleep, AG1, and Whoop all use these tactics.It's not about tricking people. It's about guiding them to solutions they need.10) Want to dive deeper?Read "Expert Secrets" and "DotCom Secrets" by Russell BrunsonStudy Facebook Ad Library to reverse-engineer competitor funnelsWant more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideas Work with me and my team: LCA — world’s best product design firm to build apps, websites and brands people love. https://latecheckout.agency/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Community Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses: http://communityempire.co/FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND JONATHAN ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/JicecreamLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-courtney-4510644b/AJ&Smart: https://ajsmart.com/
Could this be the most impactful Startup Ideas podcast episode? Jonathan Courtney walked through his $20 million funnel and exactly how you could do the same. I know that sounds kind of cheesy and tacky, but we talked about ways to 10x your conversion rate, and he just tells the secrets. This is incredible. One of my favorite episodes. You're going to love it. And it was a lot of fun.
you see this chalk okay i don't want to look at your rock climbing sweat for some reason this might be the most requested podcast oh no on the startup ideas podcast people want to know and understand funnels and how to build funnels we've got jonathan courtney uh we've got jay to the ice cream we've got
Jay Ice Cream, Jice Cream, whatever you want to call him, the Prince of Ireland, the King of Berlin.
The Prince of Ireland, yeah.
The legend of Berghain. He's here. He's going to talk about funnels. We're back, baby.
Hello. Hey, man. Hey. Hey, audience. I'm very well prepared for this funnel chat, as you can see here. I've got my slides. and my thing to create the slides. So it's going to be fun. So I did say on the last episode that I was on that I would talk about how to basically kind of do a funnels 101 sort of session. So yeah, I mean, just maybe good to know upfront.
I'm not like a funnel marketing teacher or something, So if anyone's like, oh, he doesn't teach it good, that's not actually my job. My job, I make funnels to make money for my own business and occasionally for other people's businesses. But I'm not a teacher of this topic. I just do it. So if there's... Maybe occasionally you'll have to just jump in with questions.
You also know about funnels, but maybe you can imagine yourself as the audience if you have things where you're like, that maybe wouldn't make sense to people. Yeah, I think that context is important. I don't have a funnel marketing course that you can buy from.
Perfect. I love it. I know you're not a funnel teacher. You're wearing a hat backwards. If you were a teacher, it would be four words.
Yeah, now I'll sell it to you.
Exactly. Okay, let's dive in.
Okay, so I think a lot of people don't really understand what funnels are. And I think also a lot of people shy away from the concept of funnels because they are not often used in, well, I think people mix up like websites and funnels. That's the first thing. So what is a funnel, first of all? Well, a funnel is really just a step-by-step process from turning someone from being a complete stranger
or non-customer so it could be someone on your list so a complete stranger or a non-customer into a paying customer so that's what a funnel does
different to a website a website is more like your brochure a website is more like here's all of this stuff that's going on okay so just to give you an example this is the our website so just a website is a place where there's just all of the stuff that you do it's just loads of It's almost like walking into a grocery store.
You don't exactly know exactly what to do, but it's a place for browsing. It's a place for just kind of getting a feel for a company. But it's not really a focused thing which is telling you, do this, then do this, then do this. It's not going to necessarily take you from being a stranger to a customer. It's really a brochure of stuff. So that's what a website is. So this is our website.
I'm gonna use this as a comparison to what one of our funnels look like. Websites are what we call or what people in the kind of funnel world call shadow funnels. So website is a shadow funnel. It's almost just there to prove that you're actually a real company. And sometimes it's almost just there so you yourself can figure out what you do and just have like a home for your stuff.
but you actually can't reach the funnels from the website and you can't reach the website from the funnels. They're completely separate projects. They're completely separate URLs and they're actually living in their own separate worlds and like, project teams, concepts, all of that kind of stuff. So you can see here on the website, it looks nice. It's a nice looking website.
It's professionally done, but soon you're going to get a very shocking comparison to how much we don't care about that kind of stuff when we're making a funnel because funnels are really about making money, generating leads, generating call bookings, and those things need to be changed and messed around with a lot. So this is a website.
But Jonathan, I spent so much time building my website in order to do those things. What do you mean that my website isn't designed to drive leads and create customers?
Yeah, well, first of all, I think unless you're running, unless you have unbelievably good SEO and you're spending good money and have good talent to get the Google ads to go towards your website, unless you have a lot of brand recognition, your website is not going to sell things for you necessarily. Your website is still the place where people are going.
People are not necessarily going to your website as a first thing that the first time they find out about you, they're going there later to see, wait, let's just make sure this is a real thing.
So like, for example, if you get a recommendation for a great spa in the city or something or a great barber, maybe after you get the recommendation from someone, then you'll check the website just to make sure. But it's not often, especially with high ticket things, you know, things that cost money.
a lot of money, the website is more there just to make sure, okay, these guys are real, they work with people, but we're not making any money. Not a lot of money is being generated from the website itself. So yeah. And by the way, we haven't had a nice, we didn't have a nice website for like the first 12 years of the company.
This website only, or 14 years of the company, this website only launched, last week and we only did it as a branding exercise. So yeah, websites are not like necessarily how you make money or how anyone makes money. And that can be pretty confusing because
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people will tell you to spend a lot of money on your websites and they'll tell you that you should like have the perfect brand and all of this kind of stuff. Um, that's not the way, and that could make sense if you're a lifestyle brand and the goal is to like build up this mystique around the brand and all this kind of stuff. Maybe you're a Michelin star restaurant.
Um, there's a lot of places where maybe funnels don't make sense, but if you're selling what, what we sell is we sell, uh, training to corporates, which can be pretty high ticket. We also sell training to individuals, which up to, you know, $14,000 per participant joining one of our trainings. We also, of course, sell then digital hybrid coaching versions of that.
So from about 5,000 euro or $5,000 to open-ended, that's our range of things we're selling. But we're not trying to be like You know, we're not like a Michelin star restaurant that has to have the branding perfect everywhere. So, yeah, funnels are where we then most people find out about us through a funnel and how our funnels work. Again, completely separate to the website. In fact, unrelated.
And you're not even going to see the same branding on them. Our funnels, which I'll show you one in a minute, they basically could start as a Facebook ad or a YouTube video that leads you into a super focused page, which tells you one thing and has one call to action. And the whole goal of that funnel is to do one thing. And that one thing could be book a call with us. or buy something.
So it's usually one of two things. And we always have a couple of funnels running at the same time. But just a first conceptual thing is that funnels and websites are not the same thing. And actually, what's really complicated in this world is that people who make really nice websites are generally not good at making funnels at all. Because funnels require really good copywriting.
And mostly, it's about conversion optimization for that specific flow. So for us, it's called booking generation. Whereas someone who's really good at making a website is maybe very good at visual design, UX design, but they can't tell you how to make money and how to sell stuff. And yeah, a funnel is just a completely, totally different separate thing to a website.
Does that kind of first step make sense?
The first step makes sense. I just want to add one. I want to add my point of view and how I see funnels and websites differently. A website will, on average, convert 1% to 3% of people. to buy something or book a call or something like that. That means that roughly 98% of people who come to your website don't do the thing that you want them to do, which no one talks about. It's crazy, right?
It's the most leaky ship on the planet, a website. Now, a funnel, it isn't crazy for a funnel to convert at 10%, 15%, 20%, 25%. And I want to see what your funnels look like. But that's one of the reasons why funnels are so important. Because if I can tell you, you can 10x your conversion rate.
What is the impact of that on anyone who's listening to this, any idea that they have, any product that they have, any business that they have? 10x of your conversion rate is quite literally probably one of the biggest things you can do to actually grow your company.
Yes, and I don't even know how people... When I meet somebody, let's say somebody who's selling an in-person training... when I talk to them and they're like, how the hell are you selling out these $14,000 training sessions? Like, because what they do, actually, this is a great example, a really great example of how someone else does something versus how we would do it.
And I'll just give you the exact example of this right now, like visually. I think it's important to see this stuff first before going into like the nitty gritty details. So if you were an outsider and you were guessing how we make money with, let's say, let's just choose our online training, right? So our online training is called Workshopper Master. It's like a mixture of online and coaching.
That's me like a thousand years ago. So if you were from the outside and you were like wanting to compete with AJ and Smart, right? You were like, I'm going to... figure out how to make money the same way AJ and Smart makes money. So you go to our website, facilitator.com, you go to the page for the product you wanna copy and you're like, okay.
So they basically have this landing page and through this landing page, people book application calls And then that's how they make money, right? That's how it works. That's how AJ and Smart works. And if you would make that mistake, you would essentially fuck yourself up because that's not even slightly how we do it. And that's often not how companies do this at all.
Like they have their like facade, right? But that's not how this company makes money. But often people will copy the facade and not know why it's not working for them. Another quick example of that could be this. If you look here at our in-person training, I was having a chat with a guy yesterday who I'm helping sell an in-person event.
And he was like, how the hell... He said that he put an event... online in January this year and it's like $4,000 to come to it. He only needs to fill 50 seats and he still hasn't filled it. And it's like happening in November and it's one month from now and he's only sold like 20 tickets or something. And he said it's been a super manual process.
So I asked him, okay, so like, what was the process of selling it? What campaign did you do? What funnel did you run? And he said, well, we just put it on the website and no one's buying it. And it's just crazy to me that anyone actually does this. It's totally shocking to me that this even happens. Like it's...
If that was how we sold, if that's how we expected to sell out three events per year at $14,000, my business would not exist because no one would ever buy it because it's too high ticket. And also, why would you buy it? It's just on the website. You can decide whenever you want. So... We don't do that. We build funnels, right? We build single purpose funnels to solve these problems.
And these funnels are very ugly. No attention is paid to the design. And the copy in the end is not even aligned with our brand because the copy is very much whatever marketing style copy is working for this particular funnel. And it's not like...
totally insanely misaligned like fuck you motherfucker it's just that the style of copy is not the style of copy we would ever put on our own website because it's not representative of what our brand is but it works really well for the funnel so our funnel yeah so maybe and maybe this is where you're going but it sounds like you're saying I have a secret but I can't tell you
Will you be showing us some of your secret funnels?
Yes, I'll show you everything.
Well, I don't want everything because I know you, Jonathan. If you show everything, this won't get approved on YouTube. So let's...
True. That's true. So I'll show you kind of one or two funnels that are running today and that people can actually look at live. That's the beauty. The cool thing about me actually not really being a marketing teacher is that I am just running these things for my own business right now. So I can just show you the live things that you can see today. Yes.
And I'd love to be able to also show you... So we're also doing this for one or two other companies, but I'm not allowed to... This is the kind of thing where we do that secretly behind the scenes that I don't want to talk about them publicly, but all the same principles apply. Okay. Okay. Let's open up a funnel or let's have a look at how we do this
in funnel style versus website uh versus website so step one is always or the the first part of the funnel for us is always either facebook ads meta ads or youtube ads if you're wondering why we don't run linkedin ads it's just because they don't tend to work as well for us that's the answer to the question we're just choosing the ads that give us the best roi
So these are the current or like a selection. Facebook is a bit weird. It's like, doesn't actually always show all of them. Could you zoom in a little? Yeah.
Not everyone has as good as eyes as you do.
Okay. Um, let's see a nice one to go through. Okay. I'm just trying to think of a good, my team does. Look at this. Look at this. Um, we make some silly fun ads. I'm just thinking of which funnel to go into. You guys can go into all of these funnels. I think these are just the ones that are working the best right now. Okay, whatever. Let's just choose this one.
So this is an ad, one to boost your facilitation career. This ad is just being targeted at people who are reading a certain type of book that we think could be in our industry. So for example, we'll type into Facebook ads, Hey, anybody who's reading GameStorming, who's read any of IDEO's books, who's read The Lean Startup, whatever, show people these ads.
So there's a lot more that goes into it, but you can actually look at that if you go yourself to Facebook Ads Library and figure it out. So... This is an ad that leads to a super focused landing page, which is full to the absolute brim. I'm just making this a little bit smaller so I can zoom in a bit more. It's full to the absolute brim with copy. Like it's insane.
And this, you click here, you end up here, become a high paid facilitator in 90 days or less. Very like QVC style copywriting. Wait, I don't see anything.
I just see the...
oh here we go boom okay you get brought to this page this page most people open it up in mobile i actually haven't seen it on desktop in a long time and it's bringing you to one thing and that's a free training this free training is actually a one hour long training that gives you a sense of what it actually would be like to get trained by us
So it's a one hour training using a format, which I learned from going to lots of marketing conferences and just watching other people. And this format, a lot of it I stole from this book called Expert Secrets, which I showed on the last episode. But there's this section of that book called Epiphany. By the way, this funnel has been running since 2020. and it hasn't changed.
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So for my own businesses, I wanted that. I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg. I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses. I wanted to rank high in Google. That's why I like SEO and that's why I use boringmarketing.com and that's why I invested in it. They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money back guarantee.
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And this is one hour and 10 minute long session with me teaching you basically the basics you need to become a facilitator and also all the things you need to do to actually build a career as a facilitator. This is a new intro we added this year just so people wouldn't be confused why I look like this in the whole training. And then I look like this in the ads.
So it's actually the only update we did in four years. So people watch the training. After a while, this button appears. After people have watched it, I think we have it like if they skip forward, they can kind of hack it, but they have to watch it for like 15 minutes or something before it appears.
And at the end of this video or multiple times through this video, I mentioned that if you want to know more, you can talk to my team. I keep mentioning this over and over again. And I'm showing I'm basically giving away a lot of information here, like a lot of information. I'm teaching a lot of stuff that you could go away with.
But there's going to be certain people who are watching this who are like, I actually love this. And I'm not the type of person who wants to read, you know, 30 books and take two years to do this. I actually want to speak with the AJ and smart team and see what type of training I might be able to get or I might be able to get from my team. to make this happen. So then... Wait, wait.
I need to interrupt you for a second. So what you're saying without saying it is you make an obnoxiously long video.
Yes. It doesn't have to be obnoxiously long. This funnel has an obnoxiously long video.
I know, but having an obnoxiously long video and an obnoxiously long German as well. Different hairstyles. I'm kidding there. is really impactful because when you, there's a lot of people who don't have time to actually go in and listen to this. And then that's when you get them deeper, deeper in your funnel. So that's one insight that I'm learning from this. That's one thing.
They would never have watched this one hour long video if they hadn't had to unlock it.
and if it was easier to find you know basically they're finding this because they came through a facebook ad they have no like the the url is insane they have and this is not on purpose it's just the nature of a funnel not having a place that it lives on your website so actually if they do just close this and they don't enter their email address they won't ever find it again but
because they entered their email address, we can now kind of, first of all, people can watch the video. And if they enter their email address, we essentially play out the video over email if we see that they didn't watch the video and we play it out to them over multiple days and still end with this call to action to book a call.
But yes, having them focused and watching this video in a funnel is a lot more effective than having that just on the website.
Okay, second thing, because I don't want to lose people here who are watching this and listening to this and are like, cool, this might work for a workshop company, but I run a software business. I run an e-commerce business. I run an agency. Does this work for other verticals? What are your thoughts?
Yeah, it definitely works for other... The company that I learned it from is a software company that uses it for themselves. And that's ClickFunnels. They basically sell software using this process, using funnels, and they also sell lots of other different types of software. And there's also lots of other software companies doing it.
However, okay, I think there are some people, there are some situations where So it makes sense. It makes absolute sense for any situation where you'll want to turn a stranger into a customer. That's basically the system for it, right? Turning strangers into customers. But it doesn't have to be a one hour long video. That might not work for a software company.
For a software company, we might want to do something a little bit more simple. There's millions of different types of funnels and campaigns that you can run. I'm just trying to think, is there a company where it wouldn't work? Yeah. Anything where extreme prestige is important, like a Michelin star restaurant.
Although I have seen high prestige things like doctors that are like, you know, they'll charge you 250K per year to take care of your blood work and all of this. I've seen things like this using funnels. I don't know. It works for basically every... Yeah, it's not going to work for... A large corporate is not going to do this. OpenAI is not going to do this today.
I think it's best for bootstrapped businesses because you're getting the direct ROI from the ads. Whereas if you have loads of funding already, then maybe you can just brute force it with branding and different types of deals and having a huge sales team. So I think it works really well for bootstrapped businesses. My speciality is selling...
uh, training either in person or online, either to large corporates or to individuals and training can be literally, um, you know, teaching people design, teaching people facilitation, um, teaching people public speaking is a big one at the moment. Um, and I can teach, I can, um, build funnels for those types of things.
I can also build funnels for agencies looking to get high ticket projects, like designing websites, doing marketing for people, that kind of shit. But I personally haven't done it for a software company, but I've just seen it. That's, I don't know if that answers your question.
Basically it works for most types of verticals where you just wait, you just walked off screen. It's like that.
It was getting on here. Bye.
Yeah.
Okay. Cool. I haven't seen too many, but there are verticals. So I shouldn't say, yeah. Okay. Well, I'll tell them before this episode comes out. So we have this separate company to AJ and Smart called Partners, where we partner up with companies to do this. We don't do it as an agency. We basically advise them on building funnels, but they have to be able to execute everything themselves.
The things that I'm not comfortable selling or where I think it's way harder, number one, if you don't want to run ads, it's very difficult. Number two, if you have no list at all and you have no experience doing any type of marketing, it is a bit of a, it's not super easy to go from zero to a hundred. Then I even recommend, I'm like this person who wanted to do the partners thing with us.
I was like, I think you need to hire someone in house who can do it because I can't really advise you. I can't help you do this if no one can execute the work. So if you're like totally unaware of how to build landing pages, how to do copy, that kind of stuff, It might be more difficult as well. And if you're not, if you don't want to hire anybody to do it. Cool.
Then again, a website doesn't do anything. So you need to do something. You got to do something.
Yeah, totally.
Okay, so I'll just continue this funnel for a second to show you where it goes. Also, people will say, yeah, like one big worry people have is like, well, that funnel, like the funnel I'm showing you now, which is four years old, they're going to be like, that looks shitty. Like that doesn't really represent the brand. And what I would say to that is,
The general vibe and feeling of that funnel, I was able to pull that together in a couple of hours in this ClickFunnels program. There's so many different other ones as well. Mostly by myself without having to think too much about it. And initially it was just to test one product, right? I was just trying to see, can we sell this one product using this type of funnel and
My goal later was to turn it into something much nicer. But what actually happens is it does really well. And every time we try to make it look nicer, it does worse. So the like shittiest looking funnels we have tend to be the seven figure funnels. And the nicest looking stuff we have tend to not make any money at all, which is very annoying because we're like also a design agency.
So why do you think that's the case?
I think lots and lots of copy tends to work well. Like really good, convincing copywriting and a kind of scrappy look to it. I don't know. It just seems to work fine. I don't know why. Well, I think the simple answer to it is when we try to make something look nice, it has way less text.
Like look at the comparison between this and we're less willing to fill it up with text as well because we don't want it to look ugly. So like... There's this, which is our kind of I keep changing the size because I'm on a massive monitor here and it's just easier for me to see. So this is like our, you know, nice looking thing. You know, it's kind of there's not so much text right up top.
Then you have, and I know you can't see this right now for a second. Then you have this, which I think looks absolutely dreadful. And actually I see that this line, this has actually also broken itself here, but whatever, who cares? This looks horrible. I hate it. Actually, I just realized like, look at the difference between the size of this button and this button. I'm actually disgusted.
But it's just packed full of information that somehow seems to work well and people seem to need. And we A, B test the crap out of this kind of thing. So I don't know. This is just, this funnel is annoyingly popular. Like as in this one has generated this year. So this launched in 2020. This one funnel, which I can barely look at,
Will has already passed 20 million revenue in it, but in its lifetime, just to be super clear. So in the last four years, actually, it started officially in May. So in the last three and a half years, this one funnel has generated 20 million revenue and it looks like shit. And I don't even like the video anymore. I'm like, I've made so many better things than this since then.
And I'm embarrassed that people see it. But actually, when people see it for the first time, they really like it. So I just have to get it out of my head that new stuff has to be made all the time.
Here's the insight. If you aren't disgusted with your funnel, you've launched too late.
Actually, yes. Yeah. I mean, dude, most people who are not like... I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs have a severe lack of urgency. and a lack of willingness to just see what happens if I get something out there. I, you know, I talk to a lot of, a lot of friends who run companies ask me about funnels because they're like, okay, I believe you. Now I want to do funnels.
I've seen the numbers and I'm like, cool. So like, here's what you have to do. And then they're like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Maybe I'll get around to that next year. And I'm, you know, I just like, well, whatever. See ya. So I'll just show you, will I show you the rest of this funnel?
Yeah, let's do it.
Cool. All right, let's see. By the way, audience, I know maybe you were expecting that I would show slides or something. But again, I'm not a teacher of this. I just want to show you the stuff that's live. OK, so now you can see that I'm showing a type form now. Is that what's on screen for you?
Yep.
OK, so we've added that we add this type form when our lead flow is low, too high. So when we have a lot of lead flow, as in where our Facebook ads are working really well and loads of people are booking calls, we add in this survey. But when the lead flow is low, when ads are expensive, when not so many people are coming in, we turn it off. So it's just a way to add friction.
So this is a friction increasing survey that we'll add in before you have the ability to book a call with us just to avoid our team getting put onto like calls that kind of suck. I haven't seen this in a long time because the team messes with it every day. I even spelled my name wrong. Let's see. What do you currently do for work? I don't know. Okay. I'm just going to,
What would you like our help with the most? Okay. And this is also a great question. How committed are you to achieving your goals and overcoming your challenges? Like, especially if I'm going to sell someone an in-person training, I don't want someone who's like, eh. We'll see. You know what I mean? It's going to be way harder for me to teach them then. Why are you interested in the program?
Dunno. This is Jonathan testing. I actually need to say that to my team because they're going to read this. If it proves to be your best next step, how much can you invest in yourself right now? This is really...
an interesting way to just split people up because if they say less than a thousand euro then we just recommend that they use our free stuff which is way easier for everyone okay this is an important one if you're accepted into this particular program in this particular funnel how soon do you want to get started immediately what's your best email address greg at grungus.com
dot kiam where are you based greg and let's see if i get accepted to do a call yes okay schedule your call so now i'm gonna book i'm actually gonna not Do this. So we only allow people to book calls three days ahead of time. That's because if you allow someone to book a call next week or four days or like this, basically what happens is you can guess they'll be like, ah, forget it.
And they'll just won't turn up to the call. You need to have people join calls with very close to the time when they've actually watched the video and when they're actually interested in doing the thing. So after the call booking, it's just in their calendar through Calendly. That's called a VSL funnel. It's called a video sales letter funnel. The structure is always the same.
You're from your YouTube channel or your Facebook ads. I'll show you how we send people from YouTube if you're curious. So YouTube channel or Facebook or your list, you're sending people into a free training. you do have to come up with a training.
That free training then essentially shows people how knowledgeable you are and how much you understand the problem and how much you also for sure have the solution. And then you're saying you can either do two things. One is you can learn all the things I did, get all the experience I have. That will take this long. Or you can take the headache. That's the free version.
And then the headache-free version is jump on a call with us. We can tell you If working with us will help you or whatever. And we have funnels like that for kind of all the different parts of our business. But what's interesting is, so we've spent ludicrous amounts of time on money and money built last year.
One of my teams spent a ludicrous amount of time building a beautiful, high end, stunning looking funnel for corporates only, only for corporate training.
And this funnel, the one you just saw, which is clearly not targeted at corporates, this generates us the most amount of corporate training leads and the most amount of corporate agency leads, even though we're not actually trying to sell that using this funnel. They just learn about us, they see our teaching style, and then they wanna jump on a call with us.
So one person who came through this funnel in September who was interested in coming to one of our trainings recently booked us for a 300 K internal large training session at their company. So that's, that's funnels work. Funnels don't just work to sell individual low ticket things or individual courses or things like that. They're also conversation starters, which I think is really important.
And no one ever books a conversation through our website pretty much ever. Yeah, that's a VSL funnel. A lot of other funnels are the same are a similar structure. I can show you another one if you're curious.
Yeah, let's show show us another one. And then I want to see if I want to end up on on YouTube and how you actually how you actually do that.
I can just show you on YouTube first because it will relate to this funnel. It will be easier for me to find something specifically for this funnel. Let's just search. It's always tricky showing. Can I go into a private mode? I don't want anyone to see what shit I'm looking at on YouTube.
I definitely don't want to see that.
All right, let's see. If I search... So with YouTube, this is actually a great example of how people also don't manage to really monetize their YouTube channels because they don't really understand how to do it. I know you can't see anything right now. I'll show you a few ways that we funnel people using YouTube.
How to design a workshop, let's choose this one. All right. OK.
Here we go. So share. OK. Here is a... A 36-minute video of me going through teaching people how to run workshops in fairly good detail. And what I'm constantly saying during this video is if you want to have a deeper dive into this, go to the comments and click on this link. And this link actually, in this case, brings you straight to the exact funnel that we saw.
So we're trying to capture their email addresses. We're trying to give them another more focused pitch on what we do, but we're using this education element upfront to warm them up for even going into the funnel. So this is an example of where if I click here, I know it's not gonna open it straight away, but it brings you,
straight to here right where we've been already so also what's really great is if your team if you're running a team like uh let me just actually this is a really important point if you're running a team and they're making like you're running a company you're making content and you're the ceo of the company you're like i don't know if any of this content is doing anything
That's often what happens when I'm talking to someone and they're trying to figure out like YouTube and podcasts and all of this. They're like, I don't know if this content is actually doing anything. The first thing I ask them is, okay, and they're like, oh, my team members are making all this content that doesn't really make sense. I don't really know if they're doing a good job.
Maybe I should hire someone else. And then my first question is, where are you sending people from your content? And they're like, oh, we have loads of places, like depends on the content. Sometimes it's this, sometimes it's that. My first step for them is your content team's only goal from today on is to send people to this one funnel that we're gonna create together.
There's no other place where you send people and all of your content, always the CTA is sending them to this one place. And then your other team, your sales team, and your actual internal marketing team who's building the funnels and trying to make money, they have one goal. Their only goal is to get more call bookings.
So one day I want to bring some of the people we work with together in a call like this as well, just so we can talk about the different funnels. But we worked with a public speaking guy. And
we sat with this team, we flew over, we sat with this team and after listening, you know, three or four hours to all the different problems, I realized the number one problem they had is you guys don't have one metric that everyone is following. And that metric from today on is,
fill up and we like the there was a sales guy working there so it was fill up this guy's calendar so every day when you start the day your goal is to fill up this guy's calendar when you're making when you're making new content your only goal is to fill up his calendar and within like a month it was just full all the time because they had that one goal and because now they have one funnel which had one goal of filling up the filling up that funnel so our youtube channel for almost all of
2021, 2022, and 2023, it only links to one funnel, and that's it, just the same one you saw over and over again. Um, it also links to some other places. So I want to show you just a quick example of another slightly different type of funnel, which is easier to make.
So this is more of a lead generation funnel, which also drip feeds information about our company and eventually leads into a more hard, like a funnel that leads to a sales call like that. So I'll give you an example. So this
While you're pulling that up, question, are you pixeling people and then retargeting them around the internet?
Of course. Heavily.
So can you explain how that works for people?
Yes. So I'll show you exactly an exact example of it just to give you a feeling for it. So when someone lands, when someone finds this video on YouTube, okay, this is called how to prioritize ideas in meetings fast. It's a really good detailed video with templates, with all that kind of stuff. One of the templates we put basically behind an email wall, but we wouldn't even need to.
And we tell them to go here, when they click here, This is like a random landing page made in ClickFunnels. I mean, how long would it take someone to make this landing page? 20 minutes?
I don't see it.
Oh yeah, sorry. A random landing page. A really simple one. Look, what's even funny about this is that nobody on my team even put an AJ and Smart logo on here. So it's like it's there is no way in hell you're even finding this website anywhere else. So this is a perfect example of a funnel. It's just living on its own somewhere out in the middle of nowhere.
So this is this page has a Facebook pixel on it. And this allows us to know. this person who's using Instagram or Facebook or any meta product was interested enough in this video, the previous one I just showed, to go to this page.
So even if we don't have their email address, we're going to be able to show that person ads and see if they're interested in other things that we're offering as well around the internet. So the Facebook pixel allows us to say... But by the way, the Facebook pixel has gotten a lot less powerful since... Yeah, since they changed... iOS changes. Yeah, exactly.
But it still allows us to get some information. But the main thing here is collecting their email address, collecting their name, and being able to give them this template and then being able to drip feed them emails that slowly warm them up to the other things like... open them up to the universe of AJ and smart without, you know, website dumps it all in one go. A funnel lays it out step by step.
That's really the difference. It's all separate steps that you actually can't see. So when someone fills this out, they don't know that the next step is like a six email chain that we've already written two years ago. Um, but that's a really simple like lead capture funnel or lead magnet that that we would run from YouTube and then send those into a drip campaign.
Well, there's two different types of campaigns that they could go into actually. One is that they could go into the funnel. Usually what happens when it gets more complex, first we'll try to put them into this VSL funnel that will sell them a high ticket program from $7,000 to like $14,000 to any sort of big ticket thing.
If we figure out that they have no interest in things like that and they're like not going to buy anything for more than a thousand, then they go into campaigns like Black Friday. So that email address will then be kind of marked and segmented as this person's not interested in high ticket. This person's just a beginner or interested in low ticket. Let's test them out again on Black Friday.
So we're just collecting email addresses, even though it's like, We're collecting email addresses and trying to get the money back as quick as possible with the VSL funnel. But then we have the template that you just saw there where we might not make money from that customer ever, or it might be two years later. So there's kind of different ways of looking at it.
Another type of very, very successful funnel, the most successful funnel we ever did. Oh, actually, I'll just show you another thing. So a lot of people have blogs and make content, but they also don't know how to monetize people from the blogs and content. So they just keep collecting leads, but they're like... I don't know.
I think collecting and hoarding leads isn't as interesting as being able to actually monetize them quickly. So we also have a kind of unbranded or well separate from everything else blog, which used to be called workshopper.com, which is why the URL is still this. And it's basically our SEO play, but the SEO play, where does it lead? Always SEO.
Let me guess. The funnel. Exactly. The ugly, disgusting funnel.
Exactly. And there's another type of funnel we'll lead them to within here. Here's another funnel, which you are aware of. Well, it's not exactly a funnel, but it's... It's a call to action where we can then funnel them into this training. And that's joining a free community. You are the expert there with your super successful community.
But we have one other thing, which is a book funnel, which is insane. Let's see if I can find workshop or play. I don't even know if this thing works, to be honest.
Here we go. Let's see. All right, so I'm going to bring it.
So here's a link out to a funnel. This is a book funnel. This is a free book funnel, it's called. And we've basically turned it off. So we've increased the friction so high that it's not even useful anymore. But you can Google book funnels. Nothing is more effective, nothing, like in marketing, than holding a goddamn book in your hand
And this like all of the all of the stuff you can learn on a YouTube channel for free, all of the stuff that you can download PDFs, whatever, it's all out there. People don't give a shit if you tell them there's a physical thing that they can have that has all of the information in it. a very large percentage of your audience will want that physical thing.
Don't even bother thinking of the logic behind it. It just works. And also, it's easier to talk about a physical book than it is to talk about anything else. Now, I told you this is kind of switched off. So today what happens is you just buy it and then you get sent into our newsletter and then that newsletter sends you to that funnel that you saw. But what it used to do is you would buy the book
We basically were doing it for less than cost price. So now we're charging, I think, close to cost price, but we make no money from it. Number one, this book gives you shit tons of marketing because people love to post pictures of themselves holding books. We didn't ask anyone here. I'm pretty sure we didn't ask anybody here to do that.
I was laughing. I was laughing to myself a second ago because I saw someone wrote, thank you, Jay Ice Cream. Yeah. Really? Where does it say that? Top left. Keep going up. There's a woman.
Yes, you're right. Fuck. That's brilliant. Oh, these are. Yeah. So like this book now, this page is outdated. This has had like 250,000 downloads and like a ludicrous amount of actual physical copies shipped. But initially, again, people didn't understand the only point of this page was to collect the email address and bring people into a funnel.
And that funnel was called a 2K funnel, which was a different type of funnel. And since it's not going to work right now, I have to explain it. 2K funnel is basically you go, you buy, you get the book either for free or you're paying a small price. I think we had like two euro or something. Then the next page is like, hey, your book is on the way. It's going to take six weeks, as we told you.
Do you want to watch just the summary of the book now? And that's the video that teaches you about what's in the book, plus gets you to sit down and listen to what we do and what we offer. And also gets you to, in this case, because it's a 2K funnel, we actually offer you something to buy right there and then, which was a course, which is called the Design Sprint Masterclass.
which was 2,000 euro, so 2K. I don't know what the A stands for. I can't even remember. I don't know who invented the name of that thing. But the idea there is you actually get, you know, you're paying for all of the Facebook ads for people to come in.
And then there's some extra little elements which you can do where you can liquidate the costs of the Facebook ads with a small upsell in between, like selling a workbook after that first step. So we did all of these steps. It was crazy. It's just so complicated. The amount of physical shipping we had to do nearly killed us. However, the last step is, hey, you don't want to wait for the book.
Here's a free training right now on everything based on the book. I didn't come up with this idea. It's genius. And it worked so well. And the only reason it's not switched on right now is that when it's switched on, it's
very explosive and it creates a lot of also support questions like people the book arrived with a bend on it and all this stuff so we now have like a company who helps us do that for our next book And so, yeah, next time we'll pay more attention to how difficult shipping is for workbooks and for all this kind of stuff. But yeah, that's a different type of funnel. You're collecting the lead.
Guys, printing stuff out for marketing, showing people stuff, showing you holding stuff sounds so cheesy and silly. It works so goddamn well. It's unbelievable. It's crazy. um yeah there's a lot i mean this is a you only have 15 minutes left so i've got no time left because i got i gotta go build some funnels you know what i'm saying
It's funnel time, baby. White. Yeah.
I should have cleaned myself before I came on the show. I'm trying to think. I really want to give people as much value as possible. There's a book called Expert Secrets and Dot Com Secrets, which I definitely recommend you guys read. They're very good. They really teach the concept behind funnels.
I think you think that all the big companies are not like, for example, you'll sometimes you look at this stuff and you're like, it's not prestigious. This style of marketing, which is called direct response marketing, it's not prestigious. But some of your favorite brands use this exact type of marketing. Eight Sleep uses this type of marketing. AG1 uses this type of marketing.
Magic Mind, they use this type of marketing. You think these kind of cool brands don't use it. Look at their emails. Look at the style. Look where they're funneling you through. Look at the urgency they use. Look at the deals they use.
This style of direct response marketing is being used everywhere, except, okay, sometimes not by Apple, maybe not by Google, but occasionally they do use the MIFGI concept, which is epic, which is, that's the thing I'll end on, is the MIFGI concept. And that is free. I'm actually going to show you how AG1 uses it.
What is the word you just said?
It's MIFGI, which is called most incredible free gift ever.
I kept saying it and I was like, what is this genius of a man saying?
So a MIFGI is most incredible free gift ever. And it's about stacking one-time free gifts onto a current offer, which you would think is like too cheesy to work, but it works so well and dramatically increases conversion rates to the max. Like this is AG1's most recent campaign.
where not only did they have their welcome kit and the travel pouches, but they also added this AG1-D3 and AG1-Omega-3, and they present these very clearly as free gifts. They present it very clearly as a limited time offer. You also might think, well, I'm an agency or I'm selling really high level shit. There's no way that I can be doing stuff like this. These are consumer products.
It's so much easier to do it with consumer products. we are doing MIFGs to the max all over the place. Like when we're talking to a client and they're like, okay, there's this, you know, 200K deal and we really want to close it. We say, if you close it this year, we'll give you an extra 30 licenses for your team. Things like this. Like it's about, and that's a free gift.
And we'll also send you printed versions of the workshop as a free gift. And it's really so unbelievably powerful that, And I didn't know about it until last year. Now I see it everywhere. The free gift concept. Again, it's a QVC thing, but a lot of these companies use it like all the time. And it's always a limited offer.
And I got like, look at just to show you how many of these emails I got, uh, Just another example of it. Time is running out, limited time offer. So yeah, and like they use urgency, even though they obviously like, they don't need necessarily to use urgency, but at the same time they kind of do because it is a campaign.
And if you're doing a campaign, if you're doing a one-off thing like this, a lot of the creativity at AJ and Smart is, what's the Mifki this time? That's one of the most common things you hear people talking about at AJ and Smart when a new campaign is coming up. It's like, what are the Mifkis? Time is running out, limited time offer.
And they're just presenting it in different visual kind of lineups, but it's the same thing, basically. Yeah.
And somehow it doesn't feel that cheesy.
I don't think so. I don't think it feels cheesy. I feel like I actually want to have that thing. Yeah. And it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's kind of, It's like a line between cheesy and not cheesy, but you just got to look at what companies like Whoop also do it, you know, like get it now or buy this version of it and you get a premium band as a free gift, things like this. We'll give you a...
13 months instead of 12 months as a free gift. If you buy during this period, um, eat, um, Endel, one of the most like, you know, high brow digital design products for me, for this audio, you know, Endel.
Yeah.
They have, they had such a hardcore free gift campaign, uh, last black Friday, which was you get 12 months of Endel now instead of paying monthly. And we give you an Endel bag as a free gift. By the way, I bought it and my bag never turned up. But I forgot, you know? But I wanted the bag.
Okay. I had high expectations for this pod, but this... This was beyond my wildest imagination. Thank you.
I hope your audience finds this somewhat valuable. I know it's a bit of a surface level abstraction presentation of all the funnel stuff, but there's going to be some people in your audience who I think will dig deeper. much deeper into this topic now and maybe be excited.
And then there'll be loads of people who are like, nah, this is like scammy shit and I'm never going to look at it and copywriting sucks and all that kind of stuff. And it's all about brand.
And I hate that Jay Ice Cream guy, you know? Why do you keep bringing him on the pod?
Yes. Thank you for having me back, even though I've been a little bit off the record.
You've given a gift to thousands of founders listening to this. I really do think this is going to make a really, really, really, really big
difference uh in their businesses and i think uh if i'm listening to this build some funnels like go have some fun build some funnels um and and look at look at other people's funnels go to facebook ad library type in your competitors names and click on their ads and see if they're running funnels seriously that's one of the best ways to learn what funnels to run for your industry see what other people are running for their industry black
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, funnels.
You have any plugs at the, you know, what do you want people to do?
Oh, I definitely want people to check out our new website and thank my team for it because they put so much hard work into it. AJsmart.com, we redesigned it. We went more in the direction of what Greg recommended, which is the more Holdco style. So thanks for, you know, kind of, you know, Greg...
is the is the pioneer and i was reluctant um but we've redesigned the whole aj and smart ecosystem so check that out uh there's nothing to buy i just would like you to say nice things about it on twitter so i can uh tag or screenshot that and show my team because they worked so goddamn hard on it so if you see anything nice on the website maybe you could screenshot that and tag me on uh
x at j ice cream and i will show this to my team that would be amazing and what would also be amazing is if you liked comment liked and comment you could subscribe too but like and comment just because the more you do that the more viral this video will go and the more i think it'll change people's way of creating startups.
And with a free gift. Yes. Actually, and to be really honest, you know, people think it's like a thing, you know, oh, comment, whatever. This episode only exists because so many people commented asking us to do it to the point where you were like saying on Twitter, yeah, people are actually getting annoyed about the fact that this episode isn't happening. And then I felt actually a little bit like,
of pressure that i didn't want to let your audience down so it actually really works i was reading the comments and i was like oh shit i can't just offhand say that i'm going to do something to your audience and then not do it because they fucking they don't forget totally and i and by the way people who are comment
I look at every single comment that you comment and people were commenting, I want that workshop for funnels. I want that workshop for funnels. And I was screenshotting every single one and I was WhatsApping.
Yeah, he sent me a lot of these screenshots.
And I was like, bro, get on the pod. Yes. Get on the pod.
Well, I hope it was valuable. Please let us know. You know, because again, because I don't have this, like I'm not teaching this thing. If you have questions in the comments of things I could have gone into maybe for another part to let us know, because I don't exactly know what people want to know about this.
Cool. That's the pot. I'll see you later. Hopefully you'll come back again.
I definitely want to. I'm going on a little, after that website launch, I'm going on like a health sabbatical for the next few weeks, but then I'll be back.
I'll be back.
I appreciate you having me on, dude. I know I'm like a bit chaotic.
What's Bridges, by the way, before we end?
Oh, so anybody in your community who knows what this hat is from, I automatically love you. Maybe I won't say it, but in the comments, if you know about this hat, you might've already commented on it, but if you know it, then you're my type of person.
Cool. All right. Later, dude.