Drove in the Gumball 3000 Car Rally in 2017, 2018 and 2019. Driving Accross 15+ Countries Around the World
Helped Russell Brunson & Todd Dickerson Launch ClickFunnels & Their Web Page Editor with Original Co-Founder Dylan Jones
Hand Crafted Over 75 Marketing Products & WP Plugins with Private Label Rights (PLR) from 2011 - 2015
From Desk of: Wynter Jones
Subject: How to Build Profitable Software
Build software people businesses want.
Sounds simple, eh?
Took me a few years to figure this out!
As a young 17 year old aspiring freelance web designer I would take on any job that I could find and work on them in class. Yes, I failed high school. I was distracted with something entirely different; putting food on our families plate.
See, it's one thing to "know" how to sell software and market online. It's an entirely different thing to actually practise it. The truth is... it's not easy.
On this page I am going to share with you my journey and strategies I used to build high profitable software.
Before I jump into the juicy details of how to build profitable software. I want to tell you a bit more about myself, since you have found yourself on my website anyways so I bet you're atleast a tiny bit curious.
Born 1988 with my twin brother Dylan Jones (one of the original co-founders of ClickFunnels). We grew up moving all around Northern Ontario, Canada. My childhood home, which is now torn down resided in Sprague, Ontario just 30km from Elliot Lake.
The majority of my childhood was spend either making my own board games, skateboarding and when I was 12 years old finally using a computer to build RPG games, PC recovery software and even built a MSN Messenger hack that resulted in my first girlfriend by asking her out 10,000 times in 5 seconds.
It was around this time when I first understood what "welfare" was.
See, when I was growing up none of my friends knew who my parents were, so when they asked what they did for work and I said nothing, they would ask are they on welfare? Later on as other people in my family started to collect this cheque from the government me and my brother made decision to go completely against and find our own way.
No hand outs. Just pure hard work.
June 1st, 2009 was the first time we left the small towns and moved to Ottawa. During this time we had already established ourselves doing small freelance gigs and expirementing with our own projects.
We worked our asses off. For months we had to use a friends internet and even go to the local internet cafe or walk for kilometres to a co-working space. The "overnight" success story is not easy. In fact, there were countless nights when we could not eat, but we still worked anyways.
One way to make profitable software is to grind your ass off building shit products until you make a profitable product. Unfortunately most miss a key point. Building products that last.
For me missing this element of long term revenue was lost on me. Working as a freelancer I had always equated time for money. For some years I would develop WordPress themes and sell the rights to only one owner for $250 only to find they were selling to unlimited users for $39.
Pretty short sighted, eh?
Here's what I did wrong...
MISTAKE #1
The trend for me continued as I open up MonetizeDesign a business I ran which sold PLR WordPress plugins.
The work I was doing was great, except instead of thinking longterm I wanted cash now.
Hence why I choose to sell with Private Label Rights so that I could cash out as fast as possible at a higher price point.
Sounds pretty cool... if you're only 20 & looking for beer money.
Not at so great if you're now 30 years with a family where time becomes more important.
However it is not all mistakes because each product I produced got me one step closer to mastering my craft of which I will share with you here. Keep reading. There's ALOT to cover!
It is important that you have a vision.
A masterplan that will see you through the trials and tribulations on entreprenuership. Trust me there will be plenty of hard times and many good times. You need to have lazer focus on the path you want to create for yourself... even if you make a few mistakes along the way.
I found my audience in the internet marketing space. After transitioning from working freelance. I knew I needed to the audience that would have the most impact on my life.
Yes, for some that may be easy, however for others that is quite challenging. Who am I offering this product too? Why should they care? When you do not know your audience those questions are overwhelming.
My audience was Internet Marketers. Not any marketers, Millionaire Marketers.
Yes, I was going for the top 100 people in the industry. Making products for the people who I looked up too and stil aspire to be emulate to this day.
Here's some marketers who've bought my products and supported my career...
Through the years seeing these names pop up insid my PayPal account was very exciting. Each time I knew the product I created was solving a need they saw the potential in. To me these are the top marketers so it was always a good litmas test to see which idea was going to be successful.
When you're selling PLR products you end up making alot of products because you're essentially giving away your profits. This lesson I feel is important in repeating.
Today if you look at most landing pages and funnels online you see they are most likely made with ClickFunnels. This is no accident. Russell Brunson, myself and the others involved with creating it were all focused on becoming they defacto software for building any type of marketing page.
Mass Control being a marketing course by Frank Kern in it he teaches how to use sales and phsycology to build a massive following. This is one key to building profitable software. It needs to in some way asset mass control over the market.
When my brother and I started we loved the Macromedia Flash, so we often tried to use it on our products. We developed FreeGraphicCreator which hosted a few graphic editors for building Buy Now Buttons, Money-Back Gauaranteee boxes and much more.
While being young we quickly flipped the website and sold the rights to the files. This was a major mistake on our part because we solved a big problem. Fast, high quality marketing graphics that can be customized.
These graphics are still used today and over 5 years ago these were seen on almost every sales page that has a 30-day money back gauranteee.
The lesson here is to build software that solves a problem every one has and every one hates doing. The same continued into the creation of ClickFunnels where the web page editor was built in order allow anyone to start making a website in seconds without code.
I am not a guru.
I am a web developer and entrepreneur.
You probably have seen my work but never heard my name. That is because I wanted to stay behind the scenes.
These problems excuses have made it hard for me in the past. I used too always hide behind my work and seek out parnterships with other marketers who can be the "face" of the product.
One step to building profitable software or just a business in general is you need to be at the top, regardless of whether you bring a skill or not. It is up to you to guide the direction of the software.
It is my intention to share with you my story and inspire you to take action and build massively successful business online serving your customers with software.
I bought my first car before I could even drive. I knew that driving was a key to independence. Just like working and making money was a key to financial independence.
Every digital product I created and sold got me one step closer to living a free live. While my friends were working at grocery stores, I was designing websites. Dreaming of one day being free to travel and drive anywhere I wanted.
For a few years my goal was to drive across Canada. No big deal for most, however for me every kilometre was a new place that I was discovering for myself for the first time.
Just like in business you travel with each new customer, conversation and building awareness around your message in the marketplace.
If you never have fun than why are you working so damn hard?
Personally it is important to express your freedom whenever possible in the life you live. Being apart of the Gumball family is an amazing opportunity to meet amazing and inspiring individuals from all around the world.
Work hard and reward yourself. To take part in the Gumball 3000 rally only took 13 years year of hard wor and dedication to being the best I can be in my field of work.
Here's more about my story starting with the best first! ClickFunnels.com
When you take the success of ClickFunnels you can see we solved the main problems for absolutely any business marketing online. Except with the help of Russell Brunson's vision it was taken to the next level with now over 70,000 members and over $2.5bn processed.
Incredible numbers and an incredible company.
Before you think that my brother and I were simply hired and created ClickFunnels, in fact just like Russell who has spent the last 10 years trying in various ways to build ClickFunnels we also have in many forms. We met almost 5 years before CF was a thought in anyones mind.
In 2013 I was commissioned to work on a WordPress project called WPUndies.com which was Russell's version of ClickFunnels in a WordPress theme where the user would select from premade section templates to build a lead generating WordPress blog with heavy focus on the marketing processes.
The ClickFunnels web page editor was originally called Pulse Editor was a secret project Dylan Jones was working on for 8 months straight without sleep!
During the first few months of the ClickFunnels launch the editor was merged into ClickFunnels and this is where I came in and maintained the editor and helped build the editor you see today.
The User Interface, Blog, WP Plugin and a few marketing websites were hand crafted alongside myself and the rest of the ClickFunnels team. This was back when the company had only 30 employees. Now they have over 250 team. Quite a huge amount of growth in 4 years.
Before the massive success of ClickFunnels which is a SaaS (Software as a Service) we did not try this new model where software is given as a service. We always created software as products.
No matter what you are selling: you are selling a service, not a product.
When most people look at large software companies they try to see what that company is doing that keeps their customer base growing.
The secret is... an amazing support team.
Supporting software is hard. Every customer needs help to save time or to solve problems.
You need a strong team behind your software that can take on the call at any time of day to help new customers and help power users. You will find that support for any software free or paid is the number one priority for success.
Everything you build as a software developer should be easy to use. However what you think is easy is not always the case. When you are launching new features it is important to provide contextual explainations. This will give your users the correct information quickly.
Nothing is worse than having someone think they know how your software works and is completely wrong. Their assumptions limited their success with the software. Again the job of the support is to educate and progress the user through the software to get the desired result.
Throughout my career I usually choose to work with PHP and WordPress only because it was what my dream 100 list of customers were already using. A new plugin or theme was not a hard sell, where as asking them to install software on a server and setup a database? Let's say few people wanted to do that.
Using WordPress took 30% of the support out of the equation because getting the software installed and to work was the same process for every other plugin. No new skills required. The only part they needed support on was the actual feature set it brought to the table.
Lesson: Find a team to support your users using your software.
Without a support team you are asking to be over worked and to become an employee in your own business.
Again, if you're just dropping in now. I sold PLR products. So the support I provided during my first 6 years on my products was around 0.99% - which meant in most cases the users can atleast one tiny issue to deal with that would ultimately go unresolved.
No one gave me a lesson in business early on.
The closest thing I knew to business was selling weed as my father in and out of jail selling cannabis my whole life. So I could tell you how much weight in grams could equate into money. I did not know and still hardly know what the minium wage even is.
Talk about lack of support. It was hardly believable when my brother got paid to design a graphic when we were 14 years old. I immediately had to it myself, which I began to do and design logos while in school and at home.
My clients taught me how to design and code because they would send it back saying it sucks and how to make it better. Paid education!!
Once you begin to work on projects to sell yourself than you open yourself up to a much greator financial future, i.e. you can make a lot more money.
After my short freelance career I moved into the marketing space and started creating my own products under the name MonetizeDesign. Below we will go into detail about all of the products created and the lessons and mistakes that you can learn from.
Almost every product developed under MonetizeDesign you will see are features available inside of ClickFunnels in some form. Almost all of the products are WordPress plugins. Some of these plugins are sold today by some of the top marketers as bonuses to other offers.
Impressive headline, eh?
This is not a get-rich-quick story.
The MonetizeDesign PLR story is about marketplace influence.
If you were to take the advice below than you will certainly not get rich quick.
First, incase you don't know what PLR means. It stands for Private Label Rights which means you can buy the full rights to the product and re-brand it any way you please and keep 100% of the profit.
You just read the sales pitch for every single product sold under MonetizeDesign.
You are going to see alot of screenshots for software below.
All software was released under MonetizeDesign and each was sold with Private Label Rights. Which meant I was building more software to get paid rather than growing any specific one larger.
All of the source files were included in each PLR product right down to the code and Photoshop files.
Everything about the product was sold into one package usually for $97 or $147 to get the full rights to the products. The product was usually created in less than a week, sometimes even in a weekend!
All hand coded, designed and delivered at an incredibly fast pace.
MISTAKE #2
Here's what I would do to complete a PLR WP Plugin:
As you can see this is quite the laborous process that ends up in more than 75 different products being produced.
At the time I was too focused on sending out the product and making the quick buck on the product and I did not focus on growing any of the products.
It was my customers who some of the best marketers in the industry with email lists of 100k+ who would sell the products.
A unique decision, if I do say so myself.
Moving from freelance designer to solo product creator is a hard move.
You can see in my case I made the mistake of giving away the rights the product from the start making it impossible for me to stand out when 10 other people with much bigger email lists (remember dream 100) would make all the profit.
Just like if you are working freelance and stop working you stop making money...
All of the 75 products below haven't made me a single penny in the last 5 years...
Pretty shocking, right?
Normally you'd hear about how much money an expert makes with their marketing work with income screenshots and money making claims.
We infilitrated the marketplace by leveraging the resellers we were selling too. Being in young 20's having time and dream to get our products in the hands of as many peoples as possible.
When my brother and I first thought selling PLR to our products we wanted to get our products in front of a large audience. We knew one day it would allow us to sell more producs to more people.
Years later with ClickFunnels having over 10 million web pages on the internet that dream came true.
It just took a 10 years of trial and error.
About MonetizeDesign: These products were created by Dylan Jones and Wynter Jones when they were only 18 years old, all the way up until their 26th birthday when they started on working on the ClickFunnels editor.
The first product we created was "VivaViralVideo" which was ironically a software as a service written in PHP with a custom Flash Video player which users would customize with affiliate links.
We also created multiple Flash graphic players which helped internet marketers sell their products online, especially inside of the WarriorForum Special Offers.
WordPress for creating QR code for local businesses.
Polished PDF checklists to complete your projects faster.
Email lead generation has always been the number way marketers generate traffic and sales, so they love any type of software that helps them get more leads. Combining that with WordPress made for an easy sale.
The majority of MonetizeDesign products were created to get businesses more leads, more sales and building websites. All of the products you see below have a similar concept and have a unique feature that the product is designed around collecting email leads.
Sell TeeSpring T-Shirts, Get Social Traffic and Collect Leads.
Create survey lead generation pages with WordPress.
Build a interactive survey using videos for WordPress.
Create optin landing pages with focus on charts & data.
Create a groupon style shortcode for WordPress blogs.
A shortcode to reveal coupons after email optins on blog posts.
WordPres theme geared towards local agencies marketing online.
Another email optin page with a Before / After revealing feature.
A custom YouTube video player with overlays for signups.
A WordPress plugin for build mobile take over pages.
Video background driven lead generating landing pages.
Social sharing feature to lock content with email optin.
A two steo optin widget that gives the download link right away.
Create interactive email landing pages inside of WordPress.
Create simple and quick lead generating widgets.
Increase email generation via powerful landing pages.
YouTube email landing pages using a custom video player.
Very large and animated landing pages for WordPress.
The perfect "coming soon" landing page for any website.
High Quality email optin pages designed by Dylan Jones.
Streamlined 2 step optin pages modelled after AppSumo.
Create scarcity by showing a countdown timer.
Grab email leads with powerful popups on your blog.
Ask multiple questions and separate your email leads.
Collect leads with your WordPress blog in a few easy steps.
Create highly sharable video landing pages.
Create simple and customizable landing pages in WordPress.
WordPress themes are great and offer more functionality than some plugins can provide. The only challenge when selling them is that customers usually shop for themes when they are starting a new blog, where as the plugins can be integrated into existing websites.
Over the years MonetizeDesign has created WP themes for partners and to sell with PLR. Here's a quick list of just some of the themes created.
WordPress for creating QR code for local businesses.
A theme tailored for agencies who work with restaurants.
Create custom holiday style social media pages.
Build pricing pages for local business using a custom editor.
WordPress theme geared towards reviewing popular movies.
Theme designed to look like similar to the popular site Pinterest.
Simple theme that was formatted to work in Facebook Pages.
WordPress theme specifically made for local mom-n-pop shops.
Not just another WordPress theme for digital marketers.
Highly targeted WordPress theme for promoting affiliate products.
Professional landing pages that are similar to Groupon.
A powerful system for building your marketing website.
WordPress theme focused on video affiliate blog posts.
Theme that is works with other membership plugins.
Create a product launch WordPress website and blog.
Every product we produced that included a landing page people wanted to customize themselves. Usually this meant they had to code it themselves or provide some custom CSS.
Naturally the idea for web page editors comes up and every since then it has been a constant iteration until the final ClickFunnels editor.
Below you can see some past products that in some featured live in browser web page editing.
A custom web page editor for marketing pages.
A custom web page builder focused on building sales pages.
A live in browser web page editor for WordPress.
A simple WordPress theme for building custom pages.
Full live in browser marketing page editor and hosting.
Live in browser builder for making embeddable email optin forms.
Create video presentation using just simple YouTube videos.
A in browser page editor with focus on building text pages.
We utilized Flash technology to create graphic editors for building buttons, headlines, banners, ads and much more. In high school we were building simple Flash animations and games, so the skills were readily available. Also saving the image a file format like .PNG was much easy and quick.
You might have seen some of these graphics over the last decade on internet marketing pages. The CTA buy-now buttona and Gaurantee editor were the most popular.
Create and highly customize the famous buy now button.
Create a simple button for highly clickable links.
Create the conversion boosting gaurantee box.
Create complex headline designs to grab attention.
Flash graphic editors for building banners, sidebar ads and more.
Flash graphic editor for making sales page elements.
Flash editor for making eCovers for your ebooks.
These solved a problem every had when they were selling online. A high converting button to sell the product and an "iron clad" risk-free gaurantee offer. The graphic editors solved these issues in less than a minute.
I love building tools that help people grow their business. In my workflow I have developed a variety of software to help me be more productive such as the WP Plugin Framework.
Here's some of the products and websites that were built around the idea of building and offering tools for businesses.
Build marketing WordPress plugins using a simple framework.
Track and optimize parts of your blog with simple controls.
Adds the ability to highlight and tweet any selected text.
Convert your entire WordPress blog into a desktop application.
Create presentations like keynote in your WordPress blog.
Remove and clean up all the inline CSS with ease.
An interactive audio / video player for bloggers.
A simple redirect WordPress plugin to redirect traffic.
Collects various SEO data to display in your WP admin area.
Create a scroll-based popup for sharing your blog posts.
Build a solid countdown timer for your WordPress blog.
Build email countdowns, evergreen countdowns and much more.
A blog containing tips and tricks for flipping websites.
Free code and tutorials for ClickFunnels plugins.
Manage your download area with JVZoo and WordPress.
Create viral blog posts with easy to use shortcodes.
Create mobile landing pages that only appear on phones.
When we weren't making software we were creating HTML templates. We would create them and give them away to our email list as a special thank you. In few cases we would compile them into a giant .ZIP file and sell those with Private Label Rights.
Most of these templates weren't editable by most of our customers since they did not like programming, so they usually stayed relatively the same when they were used. This was a problem that further pushed us towards building web page editors to solve this issue.
Little did I know at the time that these templates would still be relevant and useful almost 10 years later. If I knew I hope I would have created it into a service based product and created a million dollar business.
I am sharing with you all of the products created over the years not to brag. I am showing you because it is important to see the journey. You can only acquire the skills when you put in the time.
Not every product I sold did well. Some products only a 2 people bought at the time. It is important not to give up and to keep going. Focus on the bigger mission.
In my case it was about Marketplace Influence.
Mass Control.
Trying to my products into the hands of as many people as possible.
My strategy was to get the top marketers to be selling my products.
It worked.
If you are working without a larger vision than it's all for no reason. You can learn from my mistakes and create massive marketplace influence while making a lot of money.
If you are just starting it is important to own the rights to your work, unless you have a crazy master plan to one day taken over the marketplace.
I like to think all the 75+ product you've seen are all stepping stones into the creation of ClickFunnels, which powers more than 10 million marketing pages online and has processed over $2.5 billion in users sales. Created hundreds of millionaires and has inspired hundreds of thousands to build marketing funnels online.
The journey is never over.
Keep building, keep selling and servicing your customers.
In a blink of an eye, 13 years can pass so you better have a plan.
During the time building products my PLR venture I always thought I was doing very well. I only made $27,000-$48,000 a year for 4 years straight.
To me, I was already wealthy. Not with money but with valuable connections with amazing people.
People who believed in my work enough to sell my products to their audience.
Personally, success comes in the form of freedom.
Building products and services that I wanted to create and doing it my way. To me this might be where my rebel motivation comes from. Instead of talking about creating something I would just create it.
As you can see from the plethora of products developed it was about quantity and learning more each time. Improving each aspect of product creation. From Photoshop Design to PHP code and even the words used to sell the product.
It's like a maze and you have to find the exit but by only remembering what the maze looked like. If you get distracted it's harder to remember the right turns to make. If you take action fast it is much easier to change.
Just like racing; the faster you go the easier it is to make quick corrections in your path. The slower you go the longer each correction will take and increasing your risk of failure.
If you have an idea for a product or business you need to act on it. Build it, outsource someone, do whatever it takes to get out of your head and into reality.
I am lucky to have a twin brother.
A mentor, a business partner and best friend.
It is rare that you will find that within a family. It is important that you find a partner in your business and in any project you take on. Some of our best ideas came from just talking and playing skateboarding video games.
Now that you've read enough about my journey it is time I give you something information to leave with. This is everything I wish I knew when I was getting started. This could have changed my life had I known how to build and scale a profitable software business.
If you are on this page and still reading you are already 100 steps ahead of me when I first started. Keep reading to learn how to execute your dream software business.
If you've gotten this far than I am sure you might have some questions for me. I have tried my best to compile the most frequently asked questions I get when I am out and about at marketing conferences or lurking inside of Facebook groups.
30 years old.
I am a web developer and prefer to code myself.
Yes it is, however the memories are worth it.
Not from me, however you can from resellers online.
No.
No.
Most likely not.
I like to think so.
No, left the summer of 2017 to travel.
My mom is a hippy.
Coming soon.
Coming soon.
Me.
Thanks for learning more about me. If you have any questions, comments or feedback make sure to leave a message in the comments section down below.
Do you have a question about how to make your web software more profitable? If you've bought one of the many MonetizeDesign PLR products or if you're currently using ClickFunnels, let me know in the comments below!
Copyright 2006-2019 © Wynter Jones ~ MonetizeDesign
Not affiliated with Gumball 3000, ClickFunnels or any of the trademarks mentioned on this website.
I am a free agent and work as a contractor. Code is poetry.