SFR 119: Preparing For FHL18...

WHY I get so excited for Funnel Hacking Live...

Hey, what's going on everyone? This is Steve Larsen and you're listening to Sales Funnel Radio. Oh yeah.

I've spent the last four years learning from the most brilliant marketers today. And now I've left my nine-to-five to take the plunge and build my million dollar business. The real question is, "How will I do it without VC funding or debt? Completely from scratch?" This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me and follow along as I learn, apply, and share marketing strategies to grow my online business using only today's best internet sales funnels.
My name is Steve Larsen, and welcome to Sales Funnel Radio.

What's up guys? I am so freaking excited for Funnel Hacking LIVE. It is coming up. Just to be clear, I've had a lot of people reach out and say, "Oh, Steve, now that you're leaving ClickFunnels, are you gonna keep podcasting and publishing and doing their podcast?" Please understand that this is my own show and it's not affiliated at all with ClickFunnels. I just happen to be a ridiculous fanboy of everyone over there, what they do. They're changing the world, and so that's why I talk about it so much.

Also, besides the fact that I've worked there. It's just a lot of part of my history, and I have massive, ridiculous respect and love for Russell and what he does. And, frankly, when you've made the kind of money he has, he obviously very easily could kind of drift off into the night, and he doesn't choose to do that. He decides to continue to go out and change stuff.

So, anyways, I'm excited for Funnel Hacking LIVE. If you are not going, please find a way to get there, okay? I'm not being paid to say that. I am trying to help you understand and get to the spot that changed my life. It changed my life for me when I got there, and it was amazing. It changed everything. To be around the right people, to be around the right information, to be around the most cutting-edge stuff ...

Anyways, there's my pitch for you.

Hey, I have for the last several episodes been teasing you guys with this idea that I've got something special for you who are coming, and I do. I'm sure we're gonna meet anyways, but I really want to meet you guys if you're listening to this, okay? And so, I've got something special for you. I went out and I grabbed these sweet little flash drives and these flash drives ... What I'm gonna put on them is pretty incredible. I have been going out ... And if you haven't been noticing, I've been building a bunch of funnels live lately. It's been a lot of fun. I've built, maybe, nine of them and each one of them is about five hours long. I build them from scratch and I record myself doing it, and I do it in front of a live audience.

And I've been doing that for the last, I don't know, four months, five months, something like that. And it's been fun. I've really, really enjoyed going through and doing that. It's a ton of work, oh my gosh. But I teach for the first fourth, the first third, something like that, and then I build from the ground up and everyone asks questions while I go. So it's extremely in-depth. Every single thing I place on there is on purpose. Everything has a purpose, and it's all part of the strategy.

Anyways, I hope if you've been able to watch those, it's been kind of awesome...

Well, when ... It's probably, like, what, three years ago? I built this funnel. It was probably the fourth or fifth funnel I'd ever built. The first funnel I'd ever built was, I told you guys, it was a smartphone insurance funnel. It went well. It was kind of a break-even business. If I had known more at that time, I would've kept it going and sold something more expensive on the back end because we were getting customers. Break even, which is awesome. That was our first funnel, first attempt, which is pretty cool when you think about it. It's awesome.

But, shortly after I started building all these funnels for all these other companies. I was ... A lot of you guys know, I am actually just barely leaving the Army right now. Paperwork in the government takes a long time to do what it's supposed to, I guess, and get the final signature. I don't know what it does. It must just sit somewhere and have a four or five month timer on it, and then someone walks up, signs the last thing, and hands it back. I don't know, but everything's out of my hands. I'm in the middle of leaving the Army right now. As soon as the last signature happens, I am completely out of the military.

Anyways, so I enlisted first, and I went through basic training and I loved it. It was hard. It wasn't impossible, though. I was actually hoping it'd be a little bit harder, but there were some challenging moments. There was some challenging aspects to it. I didn't eat that much. I still actually slept pretty well for the most part. We didn't really eat, though, that much, which was ... I lost 15 pounds, and I went in weighing, like, 170. I was really skinny when I came out of basic. It was crazy.

So that part was challenging, and there were some challenging aspects along the way. So I get out, and I was officially in the military at that time, and when I get in college and start building these funnels, build the smartphone insurance funnel, build all these other things. And what ends up happening is ... I was in a program called ROTC, and I became an officer when I graduated.

However, we wanted to put on a fundraiser. We wanted to put on a mud run. So what we did, was we put together this track. It was a 5K mud run, you know what I mean? Like, there was mud everywhere, obstacle courses all over the place. We had cool fire pits you had to jump over. We had spots where ... We made it military style, you know what I mean? You ran with M16s through all the stuff while we had simulated explosions going on around them. It was really, really cool.

And we put this awesome course together and they're like, "Hey, how are we gonna get people?" I was like, "I've got it. I've been learning about this thing called ClickFunnels. I know none of you know what it is. I'm gonna go build it, I'll be right back." And I spent probably 40 hours. I didn't totally know what I was doing at the time. I was just kind of figuring it out as I went, and I was talking to Support pretty much every single day. A couple times, actually. I became "that guy," you know what I mean, to Support, probably. Which is fine. I was learning.
And I went through and I was building all this stuff and I put together this event funnel. And it was the first time I ever did anything like that.

Well, from that event funnel, I went out and we started promoting it, and we got it on the news. We got it in newspapers. We got it on our school ... And we went, basically, the equivalent of what a Dream 100 would be. We ended up getting 650 people to my first time ever building a live event funnel. 650 people to a live event. We ended up raising ... We collected $7,000. We raffled off an AR-15. If you don't know what that is, it's like an M16, but the civilian version.

And we went out and we raised all this money and donated it to the Fisher House Foundation. Which, the Fisher House Foundation is the ... It's pretty awesome. When a soldier gets...