GUEST BIO: 

Known as the Michael Jordan of Internet Marketing, co-founder of GrooveKart and CEO at GrooveFunnels and MikeFilsaime.com, Inc., Mike Filaime is one of the founding fathers of funnel marketing.  His companies have done over $150M in sales and he has created some of the most influential software and strategies that have fundamentally shaped the methods and technology of today's marketing industry..  His prior experience includes serving as co-founder of Marketing Genesis.  Filsaime is a graduate of the New York Institute of Technology where he studied Computer Science and Suffolk Community College where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree.

TAKE AWAYS

How putting all your energy into giving away your product free eventually adds up to big bucks.
Why selling the hype instead of the product instantly obliterated the biggest barrier to signing up. 
The genius of creating an “anti-upsell” page that built massive goodwill and credibility.
What made his “mouth breather” COVID-era ad an unbeatable control.
Why you should spend a ton of time optimizing this one component and not even think about generating traffic.

RESOURCES/CONTACT:

(Groove Digital Website)
(Groove Funnels Website)
(Groove Pay Website)
(linkedin)

TRANSCRIPT:

Speaker 1 (00:00):

In this episode, we talk with Mike [inaudible] of GRU funnels, the viral funnel and page builder that is scaled to 200,000 users in less than six months. We talk about how they scale their fall to spending 25 K a day on ads and how they have become an eight figure business. In a short matter of months, Mike talks about his entire strategy of how he thinks about funnels, offers, framing of those offers, and ultimately how to scale those to the moon. Mike is a legend when it comes to online marketing and his launches are some of the biggest ever. So enjoy this episode and we'll see you in there.

Speaker 2 (00:42):

We want to rewrite the game. We don't want to create another me too. Pagebuilder we want to, we want to do something that's never been done before. And, uh, you know, we've got a lot of very lucky in a lot of ways because they said, you know, I said, how much is that going to cost? And they said, it's going to cost about 60 grand for about three months,

Speaker 1 (01:09):

Listening to the rich ad poor ed podcast, where we break down the financial principles that rich advertisers are deploying today to turn advertising into profit and get tons of traffic to their websites without killing their cash. These advertisers agencies, affiliates brands are responsible for managing over a billion dollars a year in ad spend. You'll hear about what's working for them today. They're rich ads and we'll roast their Epic failures and crappy ads on the internet with poor ads. Let's get into it. Welcome to another episode of the rich dad, poor ed podcast. This is your host, Zach Johnson. I'm with Mr. Dillon carpenter. How are you doing today, Dylan, man, I'm moving and grooving. And I'm looking forward to this one. Yes, I am so excited for today's guest, everything. You know, that we're all about here at the rich ed port podcast is bringing you some of the best marketers on the planet that are scaling winning ad campaigns, as well as really bridging the gap between finances and marketing and today's guest invest in not only brand and ads and direct response marketing, but has a totally new perspective on, on how to think about investing in your brand and in your growth.

Speaker 1 (02:20):

So a really famous guests also needs no introduction. Um, but, uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna take a stab at anyway. I mean, you've been all over the web, uh, for the last, like what maybe two, three months straight and as one of the co-founders and partners at groove funnels and has a, just a litany of experience in online marketing, uh, prior to, to grew funnels. So without further ado and along getting this intro any longer, um, Mike Filsaime, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, guys. I'm happy to be here and I too am moving and grooving excited to be here

Speaker 2 (03:01):

100%, 100% attendance,

Speaker 1 (03:04):

100%. Oh my gosh. I love it. Well, congrats on, uh, just the launch of, and the success of, of grew funnels so far. I think, uh, you know, the funnel that you've designed here is absolutely brilliant and, and honestly following you for quite some time, it really does feel like accumulation of your life's work, uh, that is thought through in every aspect of the product through, through the funnel. And, um, it's so excited to see how viral, uh, this, this launch has gone for you. So congrats,

Speaker 2 (03:38):

Thanks. Uh, you want to present, right? There's a culmination of everything that I've done online has been put into this, uh, into this platform. So all the way back to the early days, you know, my first, very first, uh, you know, software product was something called Powerlink generator and all that, you know, that I learned in there, uh, you know, that, that was the 4runner two pretty links if you know, people ever heard of or use that on WordPress, that was basically, you know, WordPress was taking off and I was fighting WordPress. Like, no, I've had I butterfly marketing, I have dynamic sites and I just, I just couldn't keep, you know, we couldn't compete with, with WordPress. It was free. And then so instead of me adapting my software products, like viral friend generator and, and, um, and Powerlink generator and butterfly marketing and these different things into WordPress, I other people went and created awesome different plugins, and I kept thinking a little bit bigger and, and so on and so forth.

Speaker 2 (04:34):

So yeah, grew funnels has a bit of, you know, my very first, uh, marketplace product that competed with ClickBank pay.com. Um, it has Powerlink generator, butterfly marketing, viral friend generator. Uh, and then, you know, uh, you know, from there, you know, things like webinar jam ever webinar, which I was co-founder, I sold obviously in 2016, this is a culmination of, of, of all of those things, but not just hack together. It's really what I learned and, and wanting to create the perfect all in one solution. And that was originally going to be Kartra, you know, that was my, you know, my, uh, my, my product originally. And, and, um, first we did webinar jam. We didn't expect it to, uh, to become the, the second largest webinar platform in the world. And every webinar became the largest automated webinar platform in the world. And that kind of, uh, I don't want to say distracted us, but it needed a lot more focused than we thought we were going to need and the kind of delayed Kartra.

Speaker 2 (05:35):

And while that was happening, you know, another partner came into the business and, uh, you know, I kind of Steve jobs myself, like what happened, you know, fired from his own, his own company. You know, um, it sort of happened to me. I went from 50% ownership to the 33%. I lost control of my company, uh, sort of became an employee in the company and you, we, we got along good as friends, but, uh, not, not the greatest as partners. And, and so I took a buyout and, uh, in 2016 and 2018, I had to start from scratch with, uh, no employees, uh, just, just a little bit of capital and an idea, uh, and, uh, and set out to reclaim, you know, what I had planned to do, and that, that's why that's why the group digital brand was started.

Speaker 1 (06:21):

Well. So that's what I want to know, you know, being in technology, you know, and being part of several software companies before FunnelDash at lead pages and Ontraport, like I have a little, you know, quite a bit of insight, I should say more than a little bit of insight of like what goes into building all these tools. I mean, between brew funnels and groove sell and affiliate and pages of member and video and mail and desk and plug, I mean, one, the foresight on that, that brand is amazing and impressive, but I mean, how long have you been building this? Like, where is this dev team? And like, how are they so incredibly efficient to crank through so many, uh, so many different features and products?

Speaker 2 (07:04):

Well, the, the first product that we had group card, um, which is a Shopify competitor, uh, group card was in development for about two years. Uh, when I came on, uh, I was approached by matzoh serralta, uh, who's, who's developing. And he reached out to John Cornetta, who was, you know, doing, you know, uh, hundreds of thousands of dollars, uh, uh, with Shopify stores. And he asked John, Hey, I need help marketing this. And John said, look, I know everything there is to know about e-commerce, but I'm not a branding guy. You'd probably want to talk to Mike. And, uh, right at that point, you know, I, um, I was looking, I was looking to start my own company, uh, but I definitely knew the advantage of at least having a platform that I could start with. So they were called ultra fun cart at the time.

Speaker 2 (07:53):

And so the very first thing I said is we're going to change this name. And he absolutely hated groove. And trust me when I tell you, he absolutely loves it now, but he was a little married to it. And I said, he said, why, why do you want to go with groove cart? Um, and I said, because bruv male group sell group that all of these things are available for about 2,500 to $5,000. And he was, and they just didn't get it because as you guys don't, you can't buy a domain with a.com today. It's, it's, it's fairly impossible. About 50%, we were able to, we were able to buy the ones that didn't matter. We got the.net and we were like, looking for glute groove, blog.net. That's not going to, you know, we're not going to hitch our company on that, but we have to pay for group pay group funnels group.

Speaker 2 (08:36):

So all these different things we paid for, and I was secretly buying them on, on a 12 month payment plans. A lot of these things you could buy for like 250 or 500 a month for two months payment plans. And, you know, my partners were a little worried, like, you know, why is he, you know, we've got group card. Why is he thinking so big? But I was you, Stephen Covey says, you know, begin with the end in mind. And I knew that, you know, my job was to come here and create a brand. So that, that was the first thing was, was looking, where are we going to be? And now we sat down in Boca Raton, and first met for the very first time in July of 2018. So it, we just crossed two years from, you know, from that meeting. And so in, in, in, um, December of 2018, we launched group card.

Speaker 2 (09:25):

And as soon as that money came in, uh, I had, uh, said to the partners, Hey, I want to go into, I want you guys are familiar, obviously lead pages, click funnels. I said, I want to go back into the, the place that I know best. And that's, you know, that's an all-in-one platform. So we originally started with group pages and I brought in the guy that built Kartra pages and the guy that he re re re uh, hired after he left with Kartra. And these two guys, uh, said to me, look, you know, I have a framework that I've been working on for two years, but it's based on the same bootstrap technology that we did with Kartra. We wanna, we want to rewrite the game. We don't want to create another me-too page builder. We want it, we want to do something that's never been done before. And, uh, you know, we got a lot very lucky in a lot of ways because they said, you know, I said, how much is that going to cost? And they said, okay,

Speaker 3 (10:21):

Um, that's a great, they said, it's going to cost them about 60

Speaker 2 (10:25):

Grand for about three months. And I said, well, that's probably a hundred grand for about, for about six months. Okay,

Speaker 3 (10:33):

Exactly. Yeah. So, uh, so,

Speaker 2 (10:37):

Um, you know, I want to, I want to go out and raise the funds for this thing, but I don't want to do it the normal Silicon Valley ways. I don't want to investors, I don't want to give up any part of the company. Um, so what we're going to do is I'm going to, I'm going to create this Kickstarter style video, and we're going to go out and we're going to, we're going to sell group pages, um, for $497 for life. And if they buy, it's basically, that's your perk you back the product, and you don't get anything right now and you help us back. It, what ended up happening is that promotion did 1.3 million it's first time around. And when that money came in again, you know, my partner said, uh, you know, how about now, are we taking distributions? And I said, no, we're gonna, we're gonna now move the scale up.

Speaker 2 (11:22):

And I'm adding group sell and affiliate. And we started doing, uh, doing that. And then we started realizing, Hey, you know, we can actually put some more onto, onto this. We can do group male. I want to add group video and I want to add group member. And so we started doing that. And, uh, you know, we, we hired another developer. Who's actually a minor partner in the company, his name's on route, and my group had, uh, access to talent. And the talent was, you know, we were, you know, Matt, uh, Matt analysis fighting it, saying, you're not going to be able to get talent, you know, for, for $3,000 a month. Uh, but sure enough, we did, but sure enough, we want to percent did. And we outgrew even that as well. And, um, wow. Um, things just started taking off, uh, better than we had ever, ever, ever thought.

Speaker 2 (12:13):

So I just kept, you know, we were at the roulette table, right. And red just kept coming up and I said, let it ride, let it ride. That's kinda like what I was doing. So we ended up building a, uh, working with a company. Um, I'll give them a plug there. Uh, when we had, uh, 40 people on dev, we couldn't get to 41. We put on one, we'd lose two. We, we really hit the point where we couldn't do the hiring and explaining and all that stuff anymore. So, we, we reached out to a company called daffodil in India. Um, yeah, they, yeah, they have a couple of different solutions, you know, they'll do the project for you. They'll help you grow your team. Or the third solution is the one we wanted was an ODC, get created an offshore development center where I basically said this 42 people that I need on the team.

Speaker 2 (13:02):

I want your very best people. Cause they have 400 people in the wings. And the 400 people they have is kind of like Stanford university. They were, there were 40,000 people trying to get into daffodil. They've pre-screened everybody. And then I told them, I want the cream of the crop. You know, I was very, very serious with them. And, and let me tell you, the people we got are just insane. So we hired 40 people. They gave us 18 on day one and it took us another 30 days to, you know, to get the other. And we're, we're still putting on a couple more here and there. But the way that we built the platform first was with, with the foundation was, was with a UI kit. Um, and then these tent poles, everything basically had, you know, the same authentication system, certain navigations, certain integrations, all in one app.

Speaker 2 (13:50):

And then, then there are so many things that when you're creating an app, it's the admin dashboard, it's the, you know, the, the notifications for the signups of transactions, all that's about no joke, 70% of the app. So when you have that already built and you say, okay, we want to go create the survey tool. Um, it's like, okay, well you have a UI function, you have all of these different things. And what would normally take, you know, maybe, uh, two years to build, we can build out a major tent pole in about three to four months, uh, I would say, uh, and that, and then a hero tent pole, something like groove mail takes about nine months, you know, which would normally take about two years. So, uh, so w we started our first line of code on May 1st of 2019, and we're going to finish the product, uh, December 31st of 2020, and that's a 1717 products, uh, that will be completed.

Speaker 1 (14:43):

Wow, man. Well, look, I've, I've seen, uh, gosh. Yeah. My days at Ontraport, they had, you know, something not even close to this, this technology stack, we've seen it take years, you know, sometimes even like five to 10 years with dev teams, you know, here in the us. And, you know, it's something that like, as, as you know, these customers are, are signing up for grew funnels and groove pages. It's like a huge Testament to the fact that you're like you're shipping so much product. And like, the thing that ultimately sucks for a lot of the early adopters is like they, they buy in to the early programs and then just the layers of complexity and these all-in-one tools just clogged down the machine and then you're not able to ship new stuff. And I think that, uh, it's always been, you know, impressive, like anything that Mike promotes, like it's feature rich. And, um, I've always been impressed, you know, from afar in terms of the overall volume and quality of output that you guys have do on the dev and technical side, nothing to do with rich ads or poor ads, but I'm a fan of bar in terms of like the quality of the products that you've put out.

Speaker 2 (15:54):

Yeah. In this case, I'm sorry. Go ahead. No, what I was going mention is, I mean, I've seen multiple people kind of post about Shaw. Um, it was during that lifetime deal and I was like, what is this? So I started kind of following y'all around and man, it's been super cool on how rapid is growth spend, especially in a lot of the Facebook groups I'm into, it's just, I'm seeing the post after post. Who are you guys? Right.

Speaker 1 (16:16):

You're going to have to share some of the numbers. Mike, you got to give us an update.

Speaker 2 (16:20):

Well, so let me, let me say this before I say those numbers, right. Um, I'll definitely take on the role of Tony stark in this company, but this company is really, is really the Avengers, right? So in that sense that, you know, Tony was kind of the hero character, uh, you know, they made the big deal when he died and maybe not everybody else and stuff like that, you know, I'll, I'll take that role as the CEO, but, uh, you'll, you'll take a look at any iron man movie and you try to compare it to what, you know, the Avengers movies have done in there. There's nothing that could be compared. So what I did, what I did in this company was, was basically said, I need to, uh, uh, assemble the Avengers. And, uh, you know, I have four equal partners, you know, the way I did this in terms of control, uh, you know, and for all of us, in fact, uh, is we're all protected, but, you know, I own less than 25% of this company.

Speaker 2 (17:14):

I was very, very generous to go out and have four main partners. And then another, uh, four partners that we gave another, uh, part of the 10% of the company is divided, uh, in the other four partners that you see as the front of group digital. So I'm not a greedy man in any way. I certainly live by the I'd rather have, you know, 22.4, 8% of a watermelon than a hundred percent of a grape. And I knew that by getting Donna Fox wonder woman and getting, you know, the incredible Hulk and Spiderman and getting all these people onto our team, that when they buy in, there's no employee CCS, you know, the leaders there are putting in eight days a week in the 26 hours a day. Uh, and, and they, they, it really, you can really see how that made a difference. Having our two of our lead people being well, actually three partners in the company are developers, but, uh, but, but, uh, but so that made a difference.

Speaker 2 (18:11):

So what happened was, and quite frankly, it was a surprise here, you know, here are the numbers. So we, you know, we had the, the first set of numbers and then we started changing the offers, you know, okay, so it's not group pages for life. And then it's, and then it's the longer, this thing that we call groove apps, we were able to secure the domain, grow funnels. And then I said, okay, this is going, well, why not push it? Why not get people away from WordPress and create group blog and all these different things. And we started working on them. They started coming out phenomenal, and then that created much more buzz around the brand. And so we had this, this basic Kickstarter backer program has been running ever since. And so the price at this point is, you know, 1397, or, you know, up to 2000, if you take some of the payment plans and, uh, we've, we've put in some very viral things that happen when you sign up.

Speaker 2 (19:03):

There's a very, uh, uh, very generous affiliate program. That's getting us about 1500 on a slow day, new free sign up today. And 2,500, uh, free signups on a, on a good day or sometimes 4,000 when we have affiliates promoting. So on average, about 2000 a day, that's about 60,000 new users, uh, per month, we, we we've crossed the 200,000 Mark on Sunday labor day weekend. Uh, we, you know, the, the, the graph is going up and we're, you know, we, when you look at that model of Dropbox and Trello and Gmail for, for that sake, you know, there's G suite, you know, for people that want to wrap up their domain, it, it gives you so many people that, uh, you know, so many different people that are coming in and gives you exposure that it's making it nearly impossible for the competition to survive, because there's just active campaign. Well, we'll give you so many leads for free or there's click funnels or lead pages. We're giving, we're giving part of the, you know, pretty much their lead product. We're giving it away for free. And then what we're getting people to realize is that there's just something great and having a software that's made to work together. And so only about 5% of the people are, are upgrading, but when 5% of you take 5% of 2000

Speaker 1 (20:21):

And the lead to sell conversion rates great though, right? Like, well, yeah. And 5% of 200,000 on a sheer number of volume

Speaker 2 (20:28):

Yeah. Or 2000 people a day, uh, you know, it is, you know, let, let's just say it's a hundred people a day, you know, at an average price point of $1,300. You know, we, uh, we, we quickly went to, you know, a 45, $50 million a year company, you know, doing, you know, a hundred, 120 550. Oh, you know, we have, we have slow days, you know, quote unquote, slow days for we'll hit 40 or 50. And somebody will say, Hey, what happened? And, you know, and then we have days where we'll hit 250,000 or 260,000. So that, that, wow, that has obviously when we had 1500 new people coming in everyday, we had a, we had an act treat them like regular customers that gave us a credit card. So we, we have to scale and, you know, put in all the proper onboarding and things like that.

Speaker 2 (21:11):

But that was, that was fun and challenging. And it could have been a lot worse, to be honest. I, you know, I can't believe how smooth the growth has been. And we're just, we'll just redeveloping all the money back back into, I don't want to say that anymore. I can't say that anymore. Investing because as you know, you can't just throw money at development. Right. I can't say, well, let's just, let's just throw a million dollars at it and we'll finish it next week. It doesn't, it doesn't work that way. You're going to actually have too many chefs in the kitchen and you can overwhelm your project managers, but, but we're, we're, we're putting it at the proper throughput. And, uh, and now, yes, it's, it's my, I will tell you this, my partners and I are very happy that there's just a, there's only so much surplus money that could go around, you know, for nest eggs and rainy days and war, chest, and advertising, which I'd love to get into media buying stuff next. But finally, we're, we're, we've been able to take our distributions and, and put some smiles on our faces.

Speaker 1 (22:03):

That's awesome, man. Well, let's dive into it, man. I want to see what the, what this rich ad is all about, why it's working. And I want to know how much money you guys are really put behind this because it's become such a flywheel at this point, your, your whole campaign has got so many affiliates and people sharing it and pushing it. But guys, you know, see the thing with, with obviously you've got a great audience and an existing email list, uh, but also seeding it, you know, with the second wave of paid advertising and now it's become a life of its own. So let's dive into this rich ed, Mike, let's do it, break it down for us.

Speaker 2 (22:44):

All right. So the, the, the secret is, uh, in my opinion, is getting the signup right? And, and, and working on making the sale through a lot of different experiences, such as onboarding email, follow-up retargeting free education and a Facebook group. And we can unpack all of that. But at the beginning, what we have to, you know, we have to realize when we're doing these ads is, um, all we do need to do is get their name and their email address. So we're very, very curious, uh, careful when we're doing even our current landing page about putting that awesome video on the front end of the page. That's a great video for SAS. It's a great video for our brand, and it's a great video for normal conversions, but we're not trying to make a sale. We're trying to get you to create a free account.

Speaker 2 (23:37):

So we have to make sure, you know, trust me when I tell you, when you go to group pages, there's six, six sections on the page. You know, your headline section know, uh, the video section, your, your call to action section testimonial, and, uh, you know, maybe guarantee or not even a guarantee because it's free. Right? So our focus is the main thing that we want people to see is that we're giving you a better landing page and marketing funnel builder that happens to be free with no credit card required. And sometimes it's like, okay, I'm using, like you said, Ontraport lead pages, click funnels. I'm using that while I know that this free products out there, I don't use free in my business. Right. So we had to be very, very careful. Uh, I'll, I'll just pull that up, um, pull up, um, like my, my headline there.

Speaker 2 (24:30):

So our headline is the better way to build funnels, but then we put the word free in there highlighted free way to build funnels and sell digital products. And we have a lot more than just funnels and selling digital products that we, we leave out. We don't mention group video right now. We're not mentioning, you know, group mail or group webinars. We don't know necessarily if we, if we have to, because what we want to do is get people onto an ad. They could, they can consume something very, very quick. Then there's a video there, which we think in this case, um, you know, this is, this is very well thought out. We're not really selling the software here. We're selling the hype, which is normally something I don't want to do, and we're selling the growth. And, you know, so it's, it starts off with this, this question.

Speaker 2 (25:18):

We have a question for you. Why has 47,000 people in the last, you know, 75,000 people in the last 60 days made the switch to group funnels. We're about to tell you why, because that's what we want. We want to handle that objection, right from the beginning, like, like, okay, so this is free and you're saying it's better. And we need to address those things. And all we want to do is, is get you to say, Oh, you know, like, you know, like doc holiday, okay, I'll be your huckleberry. All right. You're not asking for a credit card here. Uh, and it says no credit card required ever. Let me give my, uh, my name and email address and get in there. And then once we get you there, that's our goal is then from there, if we can do our proper onboarding where we're going to, if you're any type of series business owner, we're going to get you.

Speaker 1 (26:04):

Right. Yeah. I mean, you can say this a little bit, but like free, but it's definitely a powerful offer, you know, on the front end, but it also has, you can lose a lot of credibility, right? Like if I were to say, like with, with ad card, right? Like we have this free benefit where we do unlimited ad copy and creative with ad card and P and then it's like, well, what's the catch? Like, why is it free? Is it, does it suck? And so I feel like you guys totally overcome that with just an overwhelming amount of, uh, of, of credibility, uh, in that video, like you said, and then,

Speaker 2 (26:44):

And

Speaker 1 (26:44):

The, and the funnel of a free, you know, a total free product then into, you know, this, this lifetime deal. And then into recurring revenue, like, is the, is the, the, the, the simple playbook for, you know, scaling a technology and a SAS business, like at, at, at the early stages.

Speaker 2 (27:08):

Yeah, we got, we got lucky with that. Uh, guys, um, you know, our thing was to do this, um, in the T w probably launch sooner, um, at $99 a month and one 99 and two 99, and we're going to, we're definitely going to get there, but we, um, we got hit with COVID, right? Like everybody else we were at at, at traffic and conversion summit. I had a, uh, a place that I rented in, in downtown San Diego, which was my former hometown. I lived there for five years and I was excited to get a place right there in the Gaslamp district. Um, and, um, I got a place for two months. I'm here for, for TNC a month early. I just signed a lease with, we work having troubles, you know, there's, this is the worst thing that could happen to them. So I, I got an office that we work.

Speaker 2 (28:00):

We had a $20,000 booth at TNC, and we just made a $50,000 contract with sidebar, and we were going to be hosting the TNC after-party. So w I was, you know, basically had all of my PowerPoints to be on every single, uh, every single television set at sidebar. And I was going to be standing up on the bar at seven o'clock and telling everybody, Hey, you know, DJ is going to be starting in about an hour and this free drinks for everybody until nine o'clock or whatever it does. Uh, but in the meantime, everybody, and, you know, I was going to be talk, nobody had heard about groove at this time, and that was going to be, our thing was going to be, you know, one day, you know, my staff starts saying, should we be coming? Should we book these Airbnbs? Cause COVID was happening.

Speaker 2 (28:47):

This was right in March. And then Tuesday traffic and conversion says, we're still going on Wednesday. They say, they're canceled. Uh, then it's declared a national emergency Thursday. Trump says, it's a pen. It's a, you know, it's a national emergency first. It was a pandemic. And then on Friday I was home. And just like that, I told Michelle, I was soon as I heard Trump say that, I said, I knew what was going to be happening to the flights. I said, I don't want to get trapped in this city. Uh, I said, book us a flight. And she says, we have dinner plans tonight. I said, book us a flight out of here. Right. And then, so by the time that we got home, you know, my partners were saying, so now what? Then, you know, you know what? It was like, everybody was right there, right?

Speaker 2 (29:27):

I mean, this was governor Cuomo saying, screaming, this is your future. Right. You know, this was, this was the scariest time in anybody's life. And I said, guys, I don't even know if we're going to have a company. You know, uh, the economy tanked everybody, we had a knee-jerk reaction cut everybody to 50%. And I said, I'm scared to announce a launch date. So what happened now? We're saving grace was there, there was, um, you know, my, my partner Matt was using, uh, this company, you know, appear in, um, which I, yeah. Right. And, uh, and I think, I mean, I think they had to rebrand their name by whereby and then, then there was zoom and then there was Skype calls and every day he had a new link for us. And so I said, Matt, can't we just use zoom. And he's like, well, here use this Uber conference link.

Speaker 2 (30:17):

And I was like, why? And he says, well, they're giving you a free premium account right now because of COVID. And I said, Oh, well, whatever. So we do the conference. Um, and the second I get off a pop-up comes on and it basically says a letter from the CEO. And it says, uh, because of COVID, um, we understand that entrepreneurs are having a tough time and we're doing our part by providing a free service with no credit card required. Is this self-serving? Well, we could be accused of that. He said, he said, but, uh, yes, all we hope is when things get back to normal, you'll remember us for being a good service. And I had one of those, like, you know, brain moments. Oh my goodness. I called my partners because this would, the freemium model was never, you know, I'm not going to take any credit for stroke of genius or anything.

Speaker 2 (31:04):

I saw another company do it when we were wondering what we were going to do to create any buzz. And I said, look, why don't, if it's free with no credit card, people are going to hate us. Right. If it's, if it's, you know, if it's a work in progress or a beta. So that's what we did. We went out there and we made it free. And that's what ended up taking off that, that turned out to be something that will be a date, you know, for this, this company we'll, we'll, we'll look. And we'll say there was a silver lining to COVID certainly for, for us, you know, I, you know, I dare use those words, but, but you know, it, it turned out to be a silver lining for us.

Speaker 1 (31:39):

That's awesome, man. So you get the funnel, right? So you decided to go down this, this free route, and you've got this, uh, you know, this, this, this picture of you, which is basically like a picture of your ad, and it's quite dashing Mike, on your Facebook ad, you're pointing at the camera and this is, uh, you know, this is your, this is your guys's control. I'm like how much, you know, if you're open to sharing, like how much you guys spend on ads, like see the launch in and, you know, push behind this, this winning ad right here.

Speaker 2 (32:12):

Well, uh, no, no problems at all. Uh, talking the, uh, the little joke about the swimming ad is, um, the, the video it's no longer up there, but, you know, so we wanted to go out with this, this video, and we're very careful about making sure at the time we didn't want to have any upsells or anything because we were coming out into the COVID bed. Right. And so we didn't, we didn't, we wanted people to come in. So the way we did it originally is we said, you're getting group cell. And then the upsell was no upsell. It was a page that actually said, this is not an upsell. And the video said, um, Hey, you probably thought this was where it was going to be the catch, but guess what? We're giving you group pages for free as well. So we, we wanted to completely subvert and juxtapose their expectations where they will be like, Oh, I knew, Oh, wow, just got better while these guys are, these guys are for real.

Speaker 2 (33:02):

Right. Cause we, we, we knew that that marketing under COVID could be considered predatory or really, really terrible. So, so what we had to do is that video started out with, hi, I'm John Cornetta and I'm Michael, same. And we're coming to you from inside my house and forgive us for the echo. So we deliberately didn't go into the studio, even though we could have. And we, you know, we said, Hey, we're, we're apart from each other because of social distancing. And so what happened when we left the studio? Um, I, you know, I was in my house with all this bad echo. I was right behind a window, which, which created real bad exposure. I didn't know how to use the manual, focus on the camera. And as always moving from the couch onto behind the window, the exposure completely shifted. And frankly, it was a horrible video.

Speaker 2 (33:47):

It was, it was just, you know, we, we didn't, we didn't have a videographer come in again. It was COVID. And so my team decided to take a screenshot from that video at a point when the, the back got completely whitewashed. And I was, I was drowned out in contrast and I was pointing with my mouth open and my teeth sticking out and my eyes closed. And you know, when, when you're, we all know what it's like, you know, if anybody's ever tried to send a selfie, you know, to your, to your wife or your girlfriend, we all know who's taking a picture 17 times. Like it's almost embarrassing. Right. You know? So when you see somebody else taking a screenshot of you, my very first thing to my team was, Hey, I don't like that ad, you know, here's some approved pictures of me.

Speaker 2 (34:36):

I gave them studio shots, some action shots, some better screenshots from the new video, all this stuff. And I gave him about 12 different pictures and the, the control, the ugly ad, the one we call the mouth breather to this day, we can't beat it. And I'm using all this and stuff like, like guys that's because, just because that ad is seasoned and it's a season, Rory, Rory is like, it could be Mike, but these other ads are not doing better. So what do you want to do? So I have to take my ego out of it and use this. This is very terrible. But having having said that, um, there are multiple, uh, you know, different versions of that ad with different texts. Um, but for the most part we're, we're spending, um, on average, about 11,000 a day on Facebook ads and about 17, uh, $17,000 a day on total media, all, all in. Wow. Wow. The breather, the catfish.

Speaker 1 (35:39):

Oh, dude. That is, uh, that is hilarious, you know, for, for a guy that used to, uh, what you used to be partner up with with Andy Jenkins and that there's the production value that Andy used to put in everything. You kind of just put all that here of just suck your ad. It's just like Andy, rest in peace, man. But like this, this would not meet up to Andy's production standards. Like by any means at all.

Speaker 2 (36:05):

Uh, let, let me, let me say this about, about Andy, right. Um, you know, uh, cause you know, as I alluded to, you know, the, the partnership didn't work out and you know, I said we were better friends than we were partners and nothing is more true, but I'll tell you one thing about Andy, Andy went to N Y U uh, film school. He got an Emmy and editing with ESPN. He was partners in a company, small little company. You might've heard of their work. Maybe not the company called hacks and film. And I think Haxton is like the German or Dutch word or something for which, and that is because their, their very first, uh, film was called the Blair witch project. And Andy Jenkins did all of the marketing behind that. Making people believe that that was actual found footage, they're credited for the term found footage, film, and started a whole new genre of film.

Speaker 1 (36:57):

I didn't know that Andy did the marketing for Blair, which I thought he just did the production of it.

Speaker 2 (37:02):

No, no. Yeah, no. And Waldo Sanchez was actually the production and the director and Andy was there, you know, as an investor and executive producer of the Blair witch project. And, and he was, uh, he was, uh, he was the person that created all of the myths of this found footage. And so everything that made you believe that it was real and all of the fights that they had to have with Hollywood. So, so in Hollywood you have to credit actors. Um, so, you know, if, if you look into this whole thing, like George Lucas, like having problems, he didn't want to, he didn't want to roll credits at the beginning of star Wars and how they, they lost all of this stuff with the film Guild and all this different stuff. So they were having a problem, getting, getting access to the film Guild or whatever it's called.

Speaker 2 (37:45):

I forget what it, what it is, right. Because you're supposed to roll credits. So what they actually did, what Andy did to get around this, as he checked with them, you're allowed to, to roll credits with just somebody's first name. You don't have to give them credit for last name, if the actor agrees. So they got all of the actors to agree. Uh, so they filmed it with all of the actors first names. So all the actors are actually used all of their first names and then they credit didn't credit them. You know, at the end, it is a very weird way by just listing their names. So, uh, their pictures, it was, it was very interesting how they, how they have, they did that. But anyway, so, uh, Andy had products like video boss and the way we, we got together as when we were in Turks and Caicos with Brendan Rashard, uh, speaking of Brendan's mastermind, uh, Andy said, Hey, come out to California.

Speaker 2 (38:33):

Let's, let's do a product. We ended up doing called video Genesis. And then everything that we did after that for, for the software products, Andy literally liked to write scripts and we would shoot. I learned so much about filmmaking with, you know, with different takes where we'd shoot over the colder with Mike over the shoulder with Andy. Now, now, now a wide. Now, now, now let me get better footage. In case you were blinking, all of a sudden you'd have to shoot a scene. 19 times it took a lot of the fun out of movie-making you're having to redo the lines, but then seeing the final product, you know, was, was a lot of fun. So I definitely learned a lot from the boss, Andy Jenkins, and I, you know, that, that I was able to, I love him.

Speaker 1 (39:13):

So you go from like, Oh, Emmy award-winning producer and like this crazy level of creative to the breather ad spending 17 K a day billion a month. And it's just like, it's just,

Speaker 2 (39:29):

Yeah. Great video that you see at the front of the site. Uh, and we, we, you know, we couldn't use any of the stills from that, but we did pre repurpose a lot of that ad that, that video that you see at the front of the group, photos.com, you know, with the jazz beat and we're walking in a Plaza at night, um, that, that video, uh, we cut into many different versions and, uh, is killing it for us.

Speaker 1 (39:53):

Yeah. And so what do you target, you know, your, your ROAS with this type of funnel, right? If you're spending 17 K a day, like, what is, I mean, you've got such grandiose visions, are you okay? Breaking even, are you okay, losing money? Are you guys profitable on day one? How do you looking at the key guys of your day?

Speaker 2 (40:12):

Yeah, so, um, so, you know, we were up to 25,000 a day. Um, and you know, we, we kind of had this, this, this thing in the company where, um, where Rory and I were were telling John that look at the, at the end of the day, we have to be willing to sacrifice ROI for scale. Right. Uh, you know, so in other words, what if, what if our ROI was horrible, but we were, when we're spending nine point, you know, uh, you know, uh, 9.7 million to make 10 million in the day, you know? Okay. Well, at that point, that's a horrible ROI, but we're making 300,000 a day. Right. Uh, and at the end of the day, making 300,000 a day is better than making a hundred thousand a day. Right. So, so that was kind of like what I was saying when we were at 25,000, what we felt was that we scaled too fast and we didn't optimize it. So we brought it back down and where we are right now, we, um, our cost per acquisition, um, is about, uh, $375 to $400 for every paid customer. Uh, and every paid customer is worth about $1,200.

Speaker 1 (41:27):

Wow. That's awesome. Yes. You don't even care about the free trials. Well, I mean, you do care about

Speaker 2 (41:34):

The free trials, but optimizing obviously for the paid customer, um, as that's the way to go. That's great.

Speaker 4 (41:42):

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Speaker 2 (42:44):

We'll get back to the show. Let's talk about that. You wanted, and you wish you would've worked it would've made you look so good. Yeah. Well, that's the thing is, you know, I, I ended up, uh, getting all of these great screen screenshots. Uh, I don't know what I, I can't tell you what it is. Maybe, uh, maybe, uh, um, it's, uh, me in action just as not what people want to see, or maybe, you know, uh, I think, I think these are good looking pictures of me and maybe they're just like, no, Mike you're ugly. And every version and the ones that test better are these. I am, I can't tell you what it is. Uh, but, uh, any, anything that I try to do, uh, to, to, to look more handsome in the ads is my team is telling me is not working the mountainous, my poor, my poor ads, or my better looking ads.

Speaker 2 (43:40):

I it's nothing that I could, that I could tell anybody, uh, that they can write anything down. Oh, I was on a podcast, you know, don't make yourself look like a mouth breather with your mouth open and your eyes closed, you know, the test that it's working for us, unfortunately. And I can't wait to get a new winner. Oh my gosh. Well, I love thank you for sharing this. This is embarrassing and awesome at the same time. Uh, but you know, this show Mike hangs kind of at the intersection of finance and marketing, and we're trying to educate more of the advertisers in the marketing community on how important, you know, finances are in the game of, of scale, right? Not just in knowing your KPIs, but how you think about funding and investing in the growth of your business. And, um, what are some of the, you know, principles and

Speaker 1 (44:32):

Frameworks that you would share for, for some of those listening? I mean, you've already given us a ton of interesting perspectives. It's just like, Hey, it's just as long as it's like net positive in terms of breaking, even on your ads, like you'll scale up, you'll, you'll, you'll focus on, um, kind of growing the overall audience. Like you also gave a great tip around like, Hey, you didn't want to go the route of venture capital. You wanted to do the fundraising. You want to do that lifetime deal to, to get, um, you know, that in terms of how you capitalize the business, but what are some other things that, that, um, you would share for, for those folks that are looking to, to, you know, ramp up and scale their ads

Speaker 2 (45:14):

Here? Here's what I would tell people. Um, there's more traffic in the world out there than, than, than you could possibly imagine. Nobody has a traffic problem. It, it, you know, Hey, we need more traffic it's out there. Um, you go by it and it doesn't work. What does that really tell you? What it tells you is you have an offer problem and you have a conversion problem because if you put the focus into the offer, die hard, make sure that you have everything down right in, um, you know, in, in everything, on a macro level to a micro level. So on a macro level, what does that mean? That means you've, you've got the right product, the right product framing, the hook, the offer, um, and the proper funnel, the proper, in our case, we need onboarding. Uh, we need the software to sell itself.

Speaker 2 (46:06):

When they're in, in there, the software needs to have a path to the sale. It needs to say you only have two domains left, one domain left and pop up the right way. So we need to have proper, um, uh, retargeting ads, onboarding emails, all, all of these different things have to be completely, completely thought out. And then on the micro level, you need, you need perfect video production. You need the proper headlines and proper site design and things like that. So I think what people want to do very often, and it's not a, it's not a sexy answer where people want to do very, very often is they want to get the offer up and check that box and then say, let's go to traffic. An optimized offer is something that if you spend a good three months on optimizing that offer completely well thought out, whiteboarded, and then, and then really putting attention to detail.

Speaker 2 (46:59):

And in the seventh email, like it's the first email that, you know, the, the, the, the PS in the, in the 10th email is as important as is the subject line of the first. If you have a campaign that is well thought out like that, well, then what you get is what I call a no fail offer. You can throw money at this thing and it won't fail. What I would definitely recommend is start with Facebook because Facebook lets you, uh, we all know Facebook is, is, is easy. You can, you can, you can figure it out very, very quickly. But once that goes, here's a couple other tips that I'm going to tell people. I got this from my friend, Glen Ledwell. He said, um, whether you have an in-house or an agency get two to three different agencies running on your ads, don't worry about them complaining, Hey, sorry, buddy.

Speaker 2 (47:46):

This is my company. And you're going to share the data. I don't know why you're worried about making me more money. I'm paying you. And this is how we get paid. And if you can get me to spend more money, go for it. These are the KPIs. So it's not. So trust me when I tell you this has nothing to do with lighting a fire under there. But what you realize is first of all, Facebook has different algorithms on different days. And sometimes one picks up on an algorithm because we got lucky that the other one wouldn't have, because it was a Thursday, not a Tuesday, but more importantly, you're going to find out that different advertising agencies think differently in their ad sets. We're working with, you know, our good buddy Travis Stevenson, uh, with ChatMatic and ch and he's doing a completely different campaign based on getting shy, yeses, comments and followups.

Speaker 2 (48:35):

And then we work with, you know, groove ads, which is, you know, RFS media, and they're doing traditional ads with retargeting and a couple of video ads here and there. And we're hiring a third company called chamber media, who, you know, these folks that cost a hundred, $120,000 just to come to the table with them because that entire money goes into a six 60 day process of, you know, a 17 page questionnaire. It took me about eight hours of total time to, to basically write out. I'll be happy to get that to you guys. Just, uh, take a look at it. Yeah. You'll, you'll be curious to see what they're asking and what, what we, the way we answered for our, for our company. And then they go out and they basically go to create like a viral video, you know, like these videos. And, you know, you look at some of their customers, it's kind of like P90X type customers that they've taken the $30, 50 million, a hundred million dollar.

Speaker 2 (49:27):

So, so we're, we're, we're not looking to say, Oh, we're only working with one agency. If people have a different approach, we're going to work with different agencies. And then my next thing is be very, very careful with all in one agencies. They will tell you that they're all in one, they're really heroes at Facebook or whatever. After you dial it in with one medium, medium, then bill find the legends in YouTube and the legends in LinkedIn and the legends in Instagram or whatever the different things are like that. And, um, and drill real down. I'd highly recommend not doing that at the beginning, because they're going to you. Don't every one of these people requires a different type of marketing. The videos are different for YouTube than they are for Facebook. And you're going to approve it to run your marketing team a little bit too thin, but once you figure out what works in Facebook, um, you get it on autopilot.

Speaker 2 (50:16):

Now you can put your resources more to maybe going after YouTube and scaling YouTube, or pay-per-click, don't try to do it all at once. It's a great dream to say, Hey, I want to do pay-per-click. I want to do Facebook, want to do YouTube. I want to do LinkedIn, social media, all these different things. And like I said, if you're doing that, that's what I call the, you know, the process map, the big mind map. It's it's it's if you do that, you're just, you're gonna, you're not even going to put the time into the offer that I sent at the beginning. So that's kinda my take on that.

Speaker 1 (50:44):

I mean, I agree. I like I'll do a native plug here for ad card. Again, the whole approach to, you know, working with several media buyers is the right one, right? Like the, uh, if you look at, uh, V shred, this guys are spending I think 500 grand a day on Facebook right now. And the way they run it is with several media buyers across several accounts, and they're all competing with each other. And this was pretty much like why we added this whole agency matching and monitoring was we are sitting on this, this data of a billion dollars ad spend and 5,000 agencies. It was the early start of funnel dash and we flipped it and we're like, Oh, the performance data on 5,000 agencies is the value for the advertiser to ultimately help them with getting them matched up with the different media buyers.

Speaker 1 (51:38):

Like you said, the legend of, of these different style of accounts that have scaled maybe free trial funnels or scaled lifetime deals or scaled webinar funnels, or, you know, who are those people are. And, um, and that, you know, we ultimately with ed Carter trying to help people scale what their ads and immediate buyer is like getting them to, to work with several, not going all in on one. And each of them having their strengths, like is, is the way to go, you know, at a level of scale, one question I have though is like, how do you go from like, you know, spending a couple hours or maybe five or 10 grand and building a funnel to dropping some serious coin on grew files, right? Like this, this has got to cost you like several hundreds of thousands of dollars to really like spending a month building out this, this funnel. Uh, how do you think about investing on that front end before you're even going live with the campaign?

Speaker 2 (52:37):

Um, I look, you know, I, I have, um, you know, what do you call it? Um, you know, my superpowers, right? You know, everybody has their superpowers. Right. Um, and I'm part of, you know, as I said, I'm the Tony stark of this company. We have a lot of people with a lot of superpowers and I have a great marketing department, but I've been doing this since 2002. I have a pretty good, uh, sense of, of, uh, of what works. I don't try to reinvent the wheel too much. I know that there are, you know, there are boilerplate templates that, that people have put out there, you know, from, you know, from myself and David who's in Russell with a perfect webinar, webinar control, all these webinars, present, domination, all these different things. When it comes to an automated webinar, there are people out there like digital marketer that have basically scripts and templates for your VSLs and, you know, uh, all of these different things.

Speaker 2 (53:36):

So, so we, you know, we purchased the, the $3,000, uh, up ups upgrade thing for digital marketer. We have no ego involved in our, in our company. Um, I, I know that I have forgotten more things than, you know, uh, th that I practice today. And I know that, um, you know, the best thing that I can do is go back to my previous words by previous studies and the previous mentors that I've learned from, and not try to reinvent the wheel. And when I'm handing this stuff off, you know, that there's an expression. Um, you know, there's, there's a difference between, um, a time teller and a clockmaker right. And if, you know, if, if I, if I'm a time Keller, that means I have a unique ability. Uh, but if I'm building a factory, I need a factory of clockmakers, right. Everybody needs to be able to make the clocks if I die, and I'm the time teller, and I have this unique gift, right?

Speaker 2 (54:26):

So, so that gift that I have is not going to translate all the years that I have in marketing, isn't going to translate into my marketing team. So we, we buy, you know, everything, uh, you know, the full, the full access to the course at, at, um, digital marketers, uh, DM labs. And we, they have all of these templates that say, when you're making a blog post, when you're making a social media post, when you're making a Facebook ad, and I look at this stuff and I, and I say, Jesus, this is brilliant. Oh my goodness, thank God for them. So they have standard operating procedures in place. So, you know, there's no secret sauce. I mean, as much as I can tell you, I'm a time teller. I can not take that gift and put it into my marketing team. So having these standard operating procedures and checklists and heartless and hot sheets from, uh, from Perry, Belcher, Ryan dice, and their incredible company of people that have done this, uh, thank God because otherwise we'd have to do it. And I don't know that, you know,

Speaker 1 (55:22):

Oh my gosh, Mike, you are an amazing guest today, man. Thank you so much for opening up the kimono and, uh, sharing with everybody, this journey of how you, you know, just completely rebuilt your empire from the ground up here with GRU funnels. I'm so excited for your success. And, uh, gosh, man, I was just blessed. Yeah. I mean, tell everybody a little bit about, you know, what, where to go from here, how they can, you know, get in touch, go sign up. I mean, it's a, it's a no brainer offer. It grew funnels. I mean, she was, it's like, what 388 bucks on your payment plan or something like that. It's, it's super.

Speaker 2 (56:01):

Yeah. So, so what is it it's, uh, right now, you know, uh, hopefully, you know, this is an evergreen podcast, so, so, um, you know, but, uh, at the time of the recording of this podcast, we have an offer, um, where you could get access, uh, for one time price of $1,397 when you join, um, it's, it's that price, or we give you a couple of payment plans, like, uh, pay nothing for 14 days and try it out. And then it's three payments of four 97. And I think it's six payments of two 88 and 12 payments of one 88. But let's, let's just say for $1,397, you can pay one time. Uh, and trust me, I'd rather you go try it. Uh, but w put our money where our mouth is by letting you try the software, when you see it, uh, you know, you're, you're going to realize you're spending close to 2000 to $2,500 a month on all these softwares combined plan or these other plans.

Speaker 2 (56:52):

You're, you're actually spending probably tens of thousands dollars a year if you're, if you have any traffic or audience. So yeah. Group funnels.com. Uh, and then after that, on the thank you page, they'll ask you to join the Facebook group, and then you can, uh, you'll see, I'm very, very active in the Facebook group. We have over a hundred thousand users in that Facebook group since April South. Uh, so in just five months, we put a hundred thousand people in it's growing, it's growing very, very fast. Uh, so we'll see you there. And I appreciate you guys having, so Dylan, Zach, I know we got to go. I just, I just want to say this, you know, we're using this awesome software, you know, squad cast, uh, to do this. And when we shut off our cameras, it basically shows my map. And then I see you guys are pretty much in the same place, but there's no map data.

Speaker 2 (57:37):

All I'm seeing is this, these little lakes that kind of looks like the Ozarks or something, but I don't, I have no idea. It could be Canada. Where are you guys? And you're both at the same place. It appears we're in Austin. That's Austin. Okay. Oh, and that little, little circle right around the, the, the circle around the city there that's dead set in Austin. All right. Well, there you go. So, uh, that's what lakes is, uh, a river is that it's splintering, uh, that is a red river all the way down to it's called Lake. They call it Lake Austin, but it's really kind of comes all the way down. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 4 (58:24):

Yeah, definitely. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the rich, add more at podcasts. If you're like me and listen to podcasts on the go, go ahead and subscribe on Apple podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and rich ed [inaudible] dot com slash podcasts. And if you absolutely love the show, go ahead and leave a review and a comment share with a friend. If you do take a copy screenshot of it, email me zach@funneldash.com. Show me you left a review. I'll give you a free copy of the rich add or ed book to learn more about the book. Go to rich ed for a.com to leave a review that a rich ed or ed.com/review. Thanks again.