Customer Success Story Ad Engine
- Difficulty
- Easy
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 6
- Confidence
- —
Brunson's two-tier model of advertising creative. Tier one is the founder telling their own story — I'm successful, come watch my webinar — which works but plateaus, and burns the founder as the only production input. Tier two, which he says most entrepreneurs never reach, is customers telling their stories. These outconvert founder ads, they scale without the founder's time, and crucially they reach segments who do not relate to the founder personally. The engine is systematic: every time a customer succeeds, capture them telling it, cut each capture into multiple ads, and elevate the winners publicly so the rest of the community becomes aspirational and works harder.
Origin
Extracted from Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal
How to run it
- 1
Recognise the tier-one ceiling
Founder-led ads — your story, your success, your invitation — are good and necessary early. But they cap out on volume and on relatability, and they require you personally for every new creative.
- 2
Instrument success detection
Notice when a customer wins. Brunson's team spotted people hitting awards thresholds and treated each as a capture trigger rather than a congratulations email.
Pro tip Award structures double as a success-detection system: the qualification event tells you who to film.
- 3
Go capture the story properly
Do not settle for a text testimonial. Brunson flew customers in, and a team member bought a camper trailer and drove around the country for four months filming customers at their homes.
Pro tip On-location footage produces documentary material as well as ad clips — one trip yields many asset types.
Watch out Low-effort captures produce a testimonial nobody watches. The story is the asset, not the quote.
- 4
Cut each story into multiple ads
One captured customer yields roughly three ads. Brunson's arithmetic for a 30-ads-a-month requirement: instead of the founder producing 30, capture 30 customers and get 90 days of creative.
Pro tip Also cut long-form documentaries and social assets from the same footage.
- 5
Match storytellers to the segments you cannot reach
Some people relate to you, some do not. When a different kind of customer tells the story, a different audience enters. Brunson credits a female entrepreneur's story with bringing female entrepreneurs into his world.
Pro tip Deliberately pick storytellers whose demographic or niche you under-index on.
- 6
Elevate winners so the community becomes aspirational
Put customers on your stage, on your YouTube channel, on awards walls. Others see it, want it, and work harder to earn it — which produces the next generation of stories.
Pro tip This closes the loop: recognition drives effort, effort produces results, results become next quarter's ads.
In the wild
As ClickFunnels customers started winning awards, Brunson's team stopped waiting for people to come to them. They flew some customers in, and a team member bought a camper trailer and spent four months driving around the country to customers' houses to capture their stories on location. The footage came back and was cut into documentaries, videos, ads and social assets. Brunson contrasts these with his own origin story — 'I sold a potato gun 25 years ago' — arguing a musician with awards on the wall for selling beats is far more fascinating to a cold audience.
→ A reusable library of higher-converting creative that also opened new audience segments the founder's own story could not reach.
Brunson audited ClickFunnels' active users and found each employed about 2.5 people on average — roughly 250,000 jobs across the ecosystem. Zooming into individuals, Kaelin Poland's Lady Boss had 1.5 million women on the email list and around 100,000 customers who bought and lost weight. Her story, told by her, also pulled female entrepreneurs into a community that had skewed toward people who related to Brunson personally.
→ Demonstrated both the ripple-effect motivation and the segment-expansion effect of customer-told stories.
Common mistakes
Making the founder the only ad creative
A 30-ads-a-month requirement met by the founder alone is a bottleneck and a relatability ceiling. Thirty captured customers at three ads each covers 90 days without the founder on camera.
Collecting testimonials instead of capturing stories
A quote is not an ad. Brunson's team invested in travel and filming because the narrative — who they were before, what changed — is what outconverts founder-led creative.
Only featuring customers who look like you
Storytellers act as doors into segments. Featuring only your demographic mirror keeps the audiences who never related to you permanently outside.
From the transcript
“first level of ads people have is like them telling this story like hey I'm ol I'm successful you want be successful go go watch…”
“like get 30 people success stories and those people each create three ads now you got ads for next 90 days”
“when I had somebody else tell the story like it brings different segments of the world in that that may not relate with me or…”
From the episode
A Sales & Marketing Coaching Session with Russell Brunson
Russell Brunson