Some Interesting Observations During Our Hack-A-Thon

This hack-a-thon has been different than all the rest.

On this episode Russell talks about some things that he and his team are working on at the hack-a-thon, including building a foundation with the development team to get things moving forward faster, and the decision to rebuild Backpack.

Here are some cool things to listen for in today’s episode:

• How Russell’s tendency to over commit is making this week crazy.
• Why Russell’s team decided to work on Backpack rather than Actionetics.
• And why the Inner Circle mastermind group will no longer have to rent hotels to get together.

So listen below to hear how the hack-a-thon is going and to hear about the exciting new things happening.

---Transcript---

Hello, hello, hello everybody. This is Russell Brunson and welcome to Marketing In Your Car. Hey everyone, I hope you guys are doing awesome. I am heading into day number 3 of the hack-a-thon, well of the official hack-a-thon it’s day 6 or something of when everybody started coming. It’s been a little nuts. It’s been really, really good.

I don’t know if you guys ever do this, but sometimes I have tendency to over commit to a whole bunch of things at once. For example, right now we’ve got Anthony and Brandon at my home filming stuff about a product for Biohacking Secrets. We’ve got a cleaning lady in the house, cleaning. We’ve got people out fixing our pump, because the well broke again. We’ve got people working on the poolhouse. We’ve got my wife and two of her friends working out with a trainer. We’ve got our accountant, who’s related to Collette, my wife, who slept over last night, on top of Dave. Plus we took 30 people to this really amazing restaurant called Barbacoa last night. All the people, all the programmers in marketing are here. It’s been nuts trying to juggle and do everything, but it’s been really good.

It’s been interesting, normally when we do our hack-a-thon, we come in and talk for 15 minutes and everyone locks down, well I don’t code, I wish I did. But we code, and I write copy or do pit funnels or whatever, and we just go, go, go like crazy. And this has been a little different. Not different in a bad way, just different. And it’s funny because the person in me is like, I just want to go, go, go, go and this has been interesting, it’s been a lot about bringing in our developers from around the country, bringing in our marketing team and trying to build better relationships with everybody so that everybody can work faster. It’s one of those thing, take 2 steps back so you can take 3 steps forward type of thing. It’s funny, because me and Dave and a couple guys on the team are very, move things forward every second of every day focused, it kind of is driving us loony toons, and crazy, but I see the value in it as well, in fact, the first two days these guys, the programming team, they spent 2 days together and it wasn’t us coding and solving problems and fixing bugs and adding new features and stuff like I assumed and thought it would be, it was a lot more helping the entire dev team really understand why Clickfunnels matters. Why it’s important. Why our customers want what they want. So it was hours and hours and hours of discussion explaining to them this whole world and what internet marketing is, and affiliate marketing and why we want tracking ideas and why we want subID 1 and subID 2 and why we need our stats right. And why this part of the stats don’t make sense and helping them to understand it, which again isn’t moving things forward, but building a foundation so we can move forward a lot faster.

So It’s just been one of those things that’s been necessary but that drives people like me bonkers, who just want to move forward. But I think it’s been good and will be interesting to see what happens over the next three months. Because we’re spending this week to build this foundation and get a good understanding, set the goals and road marks and the game plan to move forward before they go home, they basically got a 3 month sprint to get these certain things done. And then month 4 we’ll meet again, so once a quarter we’ll get back together and kind of do this same thing. Hopefully the future ones will be less talking and more coding, just because everybody getting on a better foundation.

And then every 4 months everyone flies back in, set new goals, set new foundations, set new ground work, and then everyone goes back and boom kind of doing that in and out thing every quarter, which is kind of the game plan. We’ll know more over the next sprint of 3 or 4 months, what we get done. So one of the major things we’re working on for the Clickfunnels hyper users like me, we’re kind of rebuilding Backpack. Not rebuilding it but a lot of it was we were trying to figure out how to make Backpack the best shopping cart affiliate platform in the world. I think when we built it initially, we knew we needed it, so we built it and it was out there and it works, but it’s not the best. So we had 2 thoughts, one is we kill it or number two we make it the best. So we spent one day just basically going through every shopping cart and affiliate platform out there, we’ve got a lot of accounts and we went through all of them and categorized the pro’s and con’s. And this one’s awesome because it did this and this, and this one sucks because it doesn’t do this, and this one’s great……looking at all this stuff, which was really fun actually, seeing how everyone does different things. And then from there breaking it down to like, what do we want ours to do? How do we want ours to function? How do we want ours structured? So we took, I feel like we took the best pieces from a bunch of different spots.

And then another cool thing, this is new to me and our world, one of the guys in our team is UI, User Interface and User Experience guy and he does the design, the coding part of the user experience, but more so, he tries to really understand. So we went and found 10 or 15 hyper users of Backpack, so he called them on the phone and talked to all of them. Found out what they like and what they don’t like, and what they wish it did, and what they’re……and all these things. Then he did the same thing with me, which was kind of cool because we saw these really weird commonalities among the hyper users. We all want it to do certain things it doesn’t do. And they were all the same things and there’s this really cool crossover blend. That was really cool too.

Anyway, I don’t know if that helps any of you guys, but hopefully it does. Hopefully it makes you think through the process and things that you’re doing and give you some context or some ideas.  So yeah, that’s kind of what’s been happening. So I’m excited for the new Backpack. The plan initially with this hack-a-thon, is we were going to focus on Actionetics, that was going to be the big driving point, but when we had Todd, Dylan, Ryan and me, and Dave and the guys here, and we were looking at what we thought we needed to work on in the next 3 months it shifted from Actionetics to Backpack. So it’s been interesting. So Backpack will be our focus for the next, hopefully the next 3 to 4 months, and then at the end of summer, a little after summer, is when we do our next hack-a-thon, we’ll get back together and we’ll shift focus, hopefully as long as we finished our initiatives, to Actionetics.

One of the other interesting things we’ve done, it’s just funny how all these lessons apply in so many areas of your life. It’s like, right now the way our dev team has worked, everyone is spread across the platform working on different things. It’s like, okay this guy is integrations, this guy is doing bug fixes, this guys is bug fixes in Backpack, and this guy is bug fixes in Actionetics, and this guy is building a feature in the Marketplace. Everyone’s kind of all over the place and because of that it seems like nothing ever gets done, because everything’s incrementally inching forward. And I think that most of us entrepreneurs have the same problem. We’re doing 12 companies at once and because of that none of them are making any money. What our focus is for the next 3 months is for everyone to focus on Backpack, which is going to be a really interesting experiment where basically everyone is focusing on one thing. That way when we do our daily standing meetings and things like that, everyone’s dealing with the same problems and everything is inter-related and we’re hoping there’ll be a lot more value for everyone because of that.

Anyway, just a couple of things we’re learning through this process that hopefully will benefit you guys as well. Anyway, that’s about all I got for today. I have been up early this morning, we did some Wim Hof Method, which doesn’t make any sense to you yet, but when Biohacking Secrets comes out that’ll make more sense. It’s crazy, I actually did the process and held my breath for 3 minutes, which doesn’t make any logical sense to me outside of the fact that we did it. It’s crazy, the first time I did it, I think it was 1:30, the second was 2:45, and the last one I did was 3 minutes, crazy, cool, ninja things that are happening. Anyway, if you guys want to geek out on that, when Biohackingsecrets.com comes out you’ll be able to kind of dig deeper and see all these weird things we’re testing on ourselves and how that actually relates back to performance in anything. It can be sports, could be business as entrepreneurs, as a leader, as a speaker, whatever it is that you do and you want to do better.

Anyway, that’s what I got you guys. I’m almost to the hack-a-thon office. I don’t know if I told you, we rented an office for the hack-a-thon because we had too many people to fit in our other office. Which actually worked out really good, because in our other office the air conditioner broke. And this whole week it’s been like over 100 degrees here in Boise, which is really hot for this time of year. So my main office, it’s horrible. It’s insane right now. So I had to go back yesterday to do a webinar, we had a big webinar with Jason Fladlien. I get back there and it’s like 120 degrees in the office and I’ve got on long pants, so I go and we did the webinar, which I did my webinar, and then Jason goes and he’s one of the best webinar pitchmen in the world, so he gets excited and he want to plug in what he does. So my typical 2 hour long webinar totally ended up going for 3 ½ hours we were on that thing. So we got done and I was light headed and sweating, and my legs were soaked from my pants. It was pretty crazy, but we survived it. So I think the air con guy was supposed to have everything fixed today hopefully. So we’ll be able to be back into a normal office here in the next little bit.

And the other cool thing, so many cool things are happening, way too many things at once. Next week we have Inner Circle, so that made me think about this, our Inner Circle’s next week. One thing about the Inner Circle is that, usually we do them in hotels here in Boise, but we’re tired of renting hotels, so we’re like we should get our own. So basically we just bought a new office that we’re turning it into, it’s about an 8,000 square foot office, so half of it, we’re going to chop off and turn into a mastermind room where we can fit about, well we’re not going to have masterminds this big, but we can fit 80 to 100 people in our office, and the other half will be our new office, which would be amazing. So we’re building our own Inner Circle Mastermind room, which we’ll also use for our Certification event.

Speaking of certification, we are launching a new certification today. I bet you guys think I have the worst ADD ever, for juggling so many things, but they’re all coming out really, really good, which is exciting. So before I tell you anything else you guys think I’m having worse ADD, I’m going to get back to work and get these projects pushed out the door. I’m also going to jump off because I’m completely lost, I can’t find the new office, so I think if I turn off the Marketing In Your Car and start focusing I should be able to find it, in theory. We’ll see. Anyway, I appreciate you all, thanks for listening and we’ll talk to you soon.