Todd Dickerson

For 2 years, I've been rebuilding ClickFunnels this way. Funnels. Product systems. Marketing engines. Operations. This isn't an experiment. It's how we run the company. And @russellbrunson and I are teaching all of it. 5 days. Live. Free. Starts April 27. Here's the link: aisecretschallenge.com/?utm_source=X&…

"What if AI takes my job?" It's been months since I've written a line of code. And I don't miss it. Because building a business was never about the code. It's about knowing what to build, why, and how the pieces fit. AI didn't take my job. It made me better. Because the more I see, the better I direct. The better I direct, the more AI delivers.

The window for "early adopter advantage" in AI hasn't closed. But it's getting more expensive to close every month.

Two years of daily use built something I couldn't have shortcut. Not prompting tricks. Not the right tools. Just repetition — learning what to ask, how to verify, when to push back, when to trust it. At ClickFunnels we're watching the same curve play out across the team. The gap between who's compounding and who's plateaued is already visible.

Been building on AI since before ChatGPT existed — early GPT APIs, when nobody was paying attention. Anthropic just published data confirming what years of that feels like — the early-adopter gap is widening, not closing. High-tenure Claude users have a 10% higher success rate on tasks. That's not a coincidence. That's compounding. 🧵

We couldn't give ClickFunnels away for free. Not a single person would take the trial. Three months later, people were paying $997 for it. The product never changed, though. The framing did.

You can build a wildly successful business and completely fail at life at the same time. I've seen it happen. The revenue milestone hits and there's nobody at home to celebrate it with. That's what happens when you treat busyness like a badge of honor for too long. But the drive to build something great doesn't have to come at the cost of everything else.

I was making more money than my professors. 1,500+ websites. Millions of monthly visitors. I thought I had it figured out. (obviously) I didn't. Avoid these 5 mistakes before they cost you everything:

More traffic won't save your business 😬 Because the biggest revenue leaks happen after awareness: -> at interest, you're not nurturing. -> at consideration, you're not building trust. -> at decision, you're not removing friction. -> at purchase, you're leaving money on the table. -> at retention, you're ignoring the customers you already have. Every one of those is a lever you can pull - without spending a single extra dollar on ads. Stop chasing eyeballs. Start maximizing the ones you already have.

5/ Waiting for perfect instead of shipping and learning. The best funnels I've seen (including ours) were never perfect at launch. They were tested, iterated, and improved with real customers. At the end of the day, the product doesn't make the business. The iteration does.

4/ Selling the product instead of the outcome. ClickFunnels at $97 and nobody bought it (they wouldn't even take the free trial). The same software bundled into a $997 transformation program - 45% bought instantly. The product didn't change. The way we presented it, did.

3/ Optimizing for page views instead of relationships. I was obsessed with traffic metrics: visitor counts, page rankings. But I wasn't building anything that lasted. The real asset was the list - and the relationships I didn't even know I was missing.

2/ Driving traffic with no way to capture it. 1,500+ automated websites, millions of visitors and not a single email address collected. Every visitor left forever. And all that traffic, all that potential - it was gone.

1/ Chasing trends instead of your own strengths. Real estate was hot and everyone was doing it. So I went to the seminars, built the spreadsheets and saved for down payments. But deep down, I knew it wasn't me. The moment I stopped following the market and leaned into what I was actually good at - everything shifted.

I tried sales. Didn't feel right. I tried real estate. Didn't feel right. I kept chasing what was trending. And all of it led nowhere. Because success isn't in copying someone else's path. It's not in following the next big thing or in chasing money for money's sake. It's in finding where your skills + interests + talents naturally intersect. That's where the hours stop feeling like work, where you innovate in ways others can't and where you build something that actually lasts. For me, it was tech that helps entrepreneurs grow. Yours will be something completely different. Find it. Then go all in.