“What the hell are we going to do?!”
A year into Funnel Gorgeous, we were stuck.
Except, no one knew that we were… except us. On the outside, everything looked grand.
It was summer of 2019. Cathy and I were on my porch and with a slightly dramatic slam on the laptop I said, “We have to get off ClickFunnels.”
“Wait. What?!” Cathy replied.
Let me back up a bit.
Our business launched in 2018 with one course called Funnel Gorgeous. The goal was to teach sales funnel page design. Over the next 11 months, we’d spent a painstakingly LONG time building monthly funnel drops inside ClickFunnels.
These beautiful funnels were built as share funnels and only ClickFunnels users could access them. These weren’t just simple little funnels. Every drop came with multiple funnels, brandboards, assets, the whole nine yards.
We had hundreds of customers. Thousands of dollars in labor to build these funnels.
Membership areas inside ClickFunnels.
The entire business was living on their platform.
Moving would be hard, time consuming, expensive, and risky.
Summer 2019, ClickFunnels was still in its popular heyday mode. There had been no formal announcement of 2.0 release, no big FHL reveal of new software… no one knew what I knew…
ClickFunnels wasn’t stable and I was uncomfortable building our entire business on it.
We spent the next several months trying to imagine what it would be like to build our own software. We talked to developers. We priced it out.
Millions of dollars.
Years of work.
Totally not sustainable.
Cathy’s first thought was “How are we going to stay in business if we leave the mothership of ClickFunnels?” and she did have a point.
Our entire customer base was built around that ecosystem.
But we both knew it was not a good idea to keep going. We saw the writing on the wall. The ClickFunnels ecosystem was more interested in marketing than software. It was going to degrade over time because the focus wasn’t on the integrity of the software.
Over the next months we brainstormed how to continue to grow our revenue with courses that weren’t dependent on ClickFunnels.
And at FHL 2020, we had a candid conversation with a few people using this new software called High Level.
It was a newer software, and we weren’t sure about it yet. But we didn’t have any other system yet we trusted as much, so we were open to exploring it.
Late that spring, we were finally introduced to Robin and Shaun (the owners). I’ll never forget our first conversation. They were eager to impress, and to show that they were ready to partner with us.
We asked them right off the bat for an SVG editor for our funnel templates.
Two weeks later, it was built and in BETA.
This is when we knew they were serious about being the best software in the industry. Their marketing was minimal. They were developers, not marketers.
And they were fast.
At first we thought, “Okay – we’ll use High Level and maybe that’ll be an interim solution until we can build our own.” We just were so burned by building on other peoples’ land, it felt safer to imagine our own.
But Robin and Shaun impressed us and it was time to give High Level a chance.
We saved our “actual software” name for our future theoretical software and just grabbed a name we could think of quickly. FG Funnels came to mind, and now in retrospect, we should have thought more permanently. But hindsight is 20/20.
There would be no new software that was our own. When we launched slowly and without any fanfare, we had no idea how much this was going to blow up.
FG Funnels launched in the fall of 2020 without a proper launch. We just showed our community and built a sales page that basically said, “Sign up at your own risk.”
Within six weeks, we had 1000 users.
Now it was time to move all our templates over.
I cannot tell you what a horrible nightmare this was. ClickFunnels code was junk. The funnels didn’t import properly. In the end, we had to rebuild everything TWICE in order to get it inside FG Funnels for our users. It ended up costing over $60k to move.
You can see all the free designs we offer to our users here.
(side note, we understand the pain of migration. We’ve gotchu. You can do it!)
With our head down working hard, we basically missed the announcements coming out of ClickFunnels. 2.0 was coming. And coming. And it was coming, they swore.
Head down, we just kept working.
Keep in mind when we launched our version of High Level, there was no such thing as SaaS mode. We had to program it ourselves.
We hired more and more people, spent more and more money to build an infrastructure of a true marketing automation software company. We built zaps with 175 steps to make sure our users would get the best experience possible.
We met with the High Level team as often as we could. Gave feedback. Listened to our users. We kept it simple with our plans.
One affordable price. An unlimited account.
We added office hours.
Built a university.
Fostered a community.
For the last three years we’ve been painstakingly building a software community focused on good design, efficient marketing, and a helpful community.
We have partnered with anyone who wants to, offering affiliate commission, custom funnels, co-branded checkouts, you name it…we’re doing it.
And with the slow demise of ClickFunnels, High Level is gained massive popularity for people who are looking for the next shiny object.
Competitors are at our heels.
Day after day we block IP addresses of people looking to hack our funnels, take our trainings, poach our people.
We watch as big time marketers launch their own SaaS, give up, and then just sell the opportunity.
Still… at Funnel Gorgeous, we persist with a dedicated focus on our users.
Our goal is simple.
We want to focus on you. Give people the best experience possible. Make it a warm, inviting, profitable place to grow your company.
Nurture the ecosystem so the community grows together.
Offer partnerships (and revenue) for people who want SaaS revenue without the SaaS headache.
We’ve had requests to jump ship and sell the opportunity of High Level white labeling vs. focusing on the end user.
We remain committed to our users and our original mission.
We are the #1 customer experience and education platform that uses High Level.
Every FG Funnels customer gets the following:
If you’ve heard the noise around High Level, we’re here to tell you that it is true… they are the market leader. They’ve got the money, resources, and developer team to outpace any other software.
But you want to find a provider to sign up with, and we are the #1 experience. We’ve spent years building our infrastructure and we have no plan to stop.
We have the best templates, design, education, and support.
Most importantly, we jumped in the waters before it was cool to do so. We knew what would be best and we did it, even at the risk of our reputation. We’re ready to be trusted with your business too!
If you need any more info before diving into FG Funnels, I wrote a blog post called The Case for FG Funnels. I hope you give it a read!
