And after three beers, I’m finally gonna tell you what I found.
Pull up a chair.
Pour yourself something. I’ll wait.
I’ve been quiet for a minute. There’s a reason.
I went underground. Locked the door. Killed the calendar. And for the better part of four months I tore apart 112 funnels — coaches, consultants, info guys, course peddlers — every single one of them banking somewhere between $200K and $3 million a month. Not vanity revenue. Not “we ran a launch and high-fived ourselves.” Real money. Hitting real bank accounts. Every thirty days.
I read the copy. Watched the videos. Bought into the funnels with my own credit card. Mapped every step. Logged every email. Sat through the webinars sober.
And what I found made me want to throw my laptop in the pool.
Because everything — everything — the gurus on stage are still selling you?
It’s dead.
Not “evolving.” Not “shifting.” Dead.
The Lambo-in-the-driveway, hit-play-on-this-VSL, six-figure-in-six-days, stack-the-bonuses-til-the-customer-can’t-breathe playbook?
Buyers are sick of it. The market threw up. And the same parlor tricks that printed money in 2019 — fake countdowns, manufactured scarcity, “only 3 spots left” when there’s 3,000 — they’re not just under-converting. They’re actively repelling people with money.
I’ve been telling you this for two years. Friendships over funnels. Partnerships over pushing. Some of you nodded along and went right back to running the same crusty webinar deck from 2020. I get it. The old way was easier. Plug in the script. Push the button. Cash the check.
That door is closed.
The data finally caught up with the truth. And the truth is brutal:
Out of 112 funnels making serious money in 2026, almost every single one of them threw the old playbook in the trash and built something quieter, simpler, slower, and a hundred times more human.
That’s the news.
Now here’s what I’m gonna do for you. I’m gonna walk you through 14 lessons — every one of them yanked straight out of a funnel that is, right now, today, while you read this, moving real cash. Not theory. Not “what worked for my buddy.” Not some recycled Russell quote from 2017.
What’s actually working in 2026.
You’ll see why the dumbest, simplest funnels are eating the fancy ones for lunch. Why YouTube is the only platform that matters if you want to scale past seven figures. Why guarantees just turned into a scam signal. Why selling on Reels is killing your reach. And why your Instagram Stories — the ones you post like a teenager — are sitting on the most powerful selling tool you own.
I’ll hand you the seven-day Story rotation that’s printing money for the people who get it.
I’ll tell you why webinars came back from the grave and are right now the highest-converting funnel on planet earth.
And I’ll tell you the one thing — the one — that all 112 of these funnels do, that 95% of struggling marketers refuse to do.
Hint: it’s got nothing to do with copy.
Buckle up. This is the most important thing I’ll write all year.
Let’s go.
Lesson 1: Market Research Eats Strategy For Breakfast — and Lunch — and Dinner
You wanna know what every single one of these funnels has in common before they ever sold a damn thing?
The owner did the homework.
Not “I think my customer probably wants this.” Not a vibe. Not a hunch from a podcast they listened to in the car. Real research. Real conversations. Real notes on a real legal pad.
If you’ve got an audience, here’s the play. Run a poll on Stories. DM the people who react. Get on 30 to 50 chats. Get on 10 to 15 phone calls. Ask them what they want, what’s blocking them, what they’ve tried, what failed, where they think they’ll be a year from now if nothing changes.
Record everything. Look for the patterns. The same sentences will start showing up. The same fears. The same dream outcome. Word for word.
That’s gold. That’s the whole game.
If you don’t have an audience yet — fine. Read the comments under your competitors’ best-performing videos. The objections are sitting right there in plain English. People are screaming what they want into the void. You just have to listen.
Here’s where most people screw it up. They write down what they sell. The goal is to write down how they describe what they want — and then mirror it back so cleanly the prospect thinks you cracked open their skull and read their mail.
That’s how you become a category of one. Not better marketing. Not slicker copy. You sound like the only human on earth who actually understood the problem.
Skip this and nothing — nothing — else matters.
Lesson 2: The Simplest Funnels Are Eating Everybody’s Lunch
I’m about to piss off every “funnel expert” who sells you a $1,997 course on tripwires.
The funnels making real money in 2026 are boring.
YouTube video. Simple landing page. Book a call.
That’s it.
That’s the whole funnel.
The guys at the top — your William Browns, your Neuro Knowledge crew, the seven and eight-figure operators most of you have never heard of because they’re too busy making money to post about it — they’re not running 17-step automated tripwire monstrosities with order bumps stacked four deep and downsells nobody clicks.
They’re sending traffic from a video to a page that basically says, “Here’s how I might be able to help you. Click here to talk.”
End scene.
Why does it work? Because the content already did the heavy lifting. By the time somebody clicks that button, they’ve already cried, laughed, learned, and decided. The funnel doesn’t have to convince anybody of anything. It just has to get out of the way and not screw it up.
Stop spending your weekends “optimizing” headlines on a page two people see. Spend your weekends making content that builds trust before anybody ever lands on the page.
80% of the work is the content. 20% is the funnel.
Most of you have those numbers backwards. That’s why you’re broke.
Lesson 3: YouTube Is the Damn Printing Machine
If I were starting from zero tomorrow morning — broke, no list, no audience, nothing — I’d put 80% of my effort into one platform.
YouTube.
It’s the only platform on earth that pays you to nurture your buyers. Where the video you posted three years ago is still pulling leads while you sleep tonight. Where you can drop a two-hour deep dive and people actually watch the whole thing.
Two hours, brother. Two hours.
Try getting two hours of attention out of anybody anywhere else. You can’t. You won’t. It’s not happening.
The average buyer needs somewhere between 7 and 11 hours of content with you before they’re ready to spend real money. I call it the 7-11-4 Rule — seven hours of content, eleven touchpoints, four different mediums.
A single two-hour YouTube video knocks out 30% of that in one swing.
Compare that to Reels and TikToks. Thirty seconds. Sixty if they’re feeling generous. You’d need to make 400 of them — four hundred — to do what one good long-form YouTube video does.
And here’s the kicker. Once you’ve got the YouTube video, every other piece of content gets easy. Clip it for Instagram. Clip it for LinkedIn. Pull a quote for X. Drop the audio on Substack. Run it as a podcast.
One asset. Five platforms. Years of compounding.
YouTube is where money is being made. Everything else is just leverage on top.
If you’re not on YouTube in 2026, you’re not in business. You’re a hobby with a Stripe account.
🔒 PAYWALL — SUBSCRIBER CUTOFF
If you’re reading the free version, this is where I gotta cut you off.
Behind this line is the meat. Eleven more lessons, all yanked out of million-dollar funnels, written for people who actually have to make payroll on Friday and don’t have time for theory. This is the kind of breakdown I usually charge five-figure consulting rates to lay out.
Become a paid subscriber. Get this piece. Get every premium essay I write. Get the full archive.
Less than dinner at Applebee’s.
A lot more useful.
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Subscribers — let’s get into the good stuff.
Lesson 4: Followers Don’t Mean Squat. Useful Content Does.
Stop counting followers. Start counting calls booked.
The algorithm changed. Quietly. Nobody told you. They don’t care how many subscribers you have anymore. They care if your content matches what one specific human is searching for in this exact moment.
Which means a brand-new channel with 200 subs can absolutely smoke a million-sub channel — if the small channel is making content that hits the avatar harder.
This is the best time in 15 years to be a coach or consultant on YouTube. The big polished channels with their teams and their thumbnails and their LA editors are losing ground every day to raw, useful, hyper-specific content from people who actually do the work.
So stop trying to be Mr. Beast. You’re not Mr. Beast. You’re never gonna be Mr. Beast. And nobody hiring you to fix their business cares if you can outrun a giraffe.
Be the most useful voice in your niche, for one specific human, with one specific problem.
Make videos for that one human. Title them like they’d search for them. Solve their problem in the thumbnail.
That’s the whole game. That’s it. There’s no part two.
Lesson 5: Guarantees Are Dead. Receipts Are King.
Sorry to bury them. Somebody had to.
When every guru on Instagram is promising “double your revenue in 90 days or I’ll personally refund you and Venmo you a pizza” — the promise itself becomes a scam signal. The buyer reads the guarantee and immediately discounts everything you said before it.
You think you’re building trust. You’re actually setting off the bullshit detector.
What’s replacing guarantees?
Receipts.
Show me the wins. Show me the screenshots. Show me the client video where they’re crying because they hit their first $10K month after six years of grinding. Show me the Stripe dashboard. Show me the before-and-after. Show me the messy, unedited DM where the client just said “holy crap it actually worked.”
Receipts. Receipts. Receipts. Every day. Every channel. Until you’re sick of looking at them.
Story posts of client wins. Reels of client reactions. YouTube case study breakdowns. Highlight reels pinned to your profile. Receipts in your DMs. Receipts in your emails. Receipts on the bathroom mirror.
Saturate the market with proof and you don’t need a guarantee.
The proof is the promise.
Lesson 6: They Don’t Buy Your Information. They Buy You.
Information is free now. All of it.
I can ask AI any question I want and get a 95% answer in 90 seconds. So can your prospect. So can your competitor. So can your competitor’s intern.
If your only edge is what you know — you don’t have an edge. You have a Wikipedia article with a beard.
So what do they actually pay for?
You.
Your judgment. Your scars. The 2 a.m. panics. The deal you blew. The client you fired. The specific way you see the problem because you’ve been in the foxhole. The fact that when something goes sideways, you’ve already seen it twice and know what to do.
Your content can’t just be tactical. It has to show them who you are.
Post the rock bottom story. Post the belief you’d fight a stranger over. Post the boring Tuesday morning where you’re walking the dog and thinking through a client problem out loud. Post the wins, sure — but also post the swings that didn’t connect.
Know me. Like me. Trust me. In that order.
Skip any of those steps and you’re just another talking head in front of a bookshelf.
Lesson 7: For the Love of God, Stop Selling in Reels
This one’s gonna sting.
Stop pitching in your Reels.
The feed is the wrong place for it. Reels have one job — discovery. That’s it. Their entire purpose in your business is to introduce you to a stranger, get them to laugh or learn or feel something, and earn the follow.
When you sell in the feed, the algorithm slaps you. Reach craters. Comments dry up. Everything you built starts unraveling.
Three jobs for a Reel. Pick one per video.
Entertain. Educate. Inspire.
That’s the menu. There is no fourth option.
The selling happens later, in the warmer parts of your ecosystem.
Which brings me to the most criminally underused asset in the entire creator economy.
Lesson 8: Instagram Stories Are the Most Profitable Real Estate You Own — and You’re Wasting It
Listen up. This one’s worth the subscription by itself.
Your Story viewers are not a cold audience.
They already follow you. They already opened the app. They already tapped your face on purpose.
In marketing terms? They’re about as warm as it gets without a credit card already on the table.
And most of you pour them into a desert.
Here’s the seven-day rotation that’s working right now. Steal it. Print it out. Tape it to your monitor.
Monday — Hard CTA tied to a client result. Lead with the win. End with the link. Boom.
Tuesday — Pure value. Break a limiting belief your audience holds. Teach something useful in 5 frames or less.
Wednesday — Personal story. Something inspiring. Something vulnerable. Something true from your actual life.
Thursday — Wins and proof. Yours and your clients’. Stack the receipts.
Friday — Soft CTA. Point people toward a free resource. YouTube video. PDF. Podcast. No pitch. Just value.
Saturday — Lifestyle. Cool the selling off. Be a person. Show me the dog. Show me the kid’s soccer game. Show me you eating a cheeseburger.
Sunday — Q&A or behind-the-scenes. Open up. Let them in.
Two hard CTAs a week. Maximum. The minute you start hard-selling every single day, your audience trains itself to skip your stories on autopilot. And once they skip, they don’t come back.
Get this rotation right and Stories will out-earn every other channel you have. Including email.
I said what I said.
Lesson 9: Give Away the Damn Crown Jewels
This one hurts the most people. So I’m gonna say it loud.
You think your information is your moat. It isn’t. Your information is your advertising.
The Neuro Knowledge crew is doing $300K to $400K a month — selling $25,000 offers — by giving away 60-minute weekly YouTube videos packed with tactics most “gurus” lock behind a $2,000 paywall.
The pattern is everywhere now. Three-hour free courses. Ten-hour free playlists. Entire frameworks given away for nothing. No opt-in. No download. Just here, take it.
Why?
Because reciprocity is real. Because nobody gates information that’s already on Google. Because the buyer who needs your hand-holding wasn’t going to DIY it from your free content anyway — and the DIY-er was never your customer to begin with. Stop being scared of him. He was never gonna pay you.
Give away the what. Give away the why. Give away every individual piece.
Sell the system. Sell the plug-and-play. Sell the I’ll-do-it-with-you.
The transformation is what gets paid for. The information just brings the buyer to the door.
If you’re worried you’re giving away too much?
You’re not giving away nearly enough.
Lesson 10: Webinars Came Back From the Dead. Here’s Why.
Three years ago I would’ve told you webinars were finished. Buried. Last rites read.
I would’ve been dead wrong.
The right webinar, run today, is the highest-converting funnel on the planet. I just watched a buddy pull $5 million in a single month off one webinar. Simple landing page. Headline. Photo. “Save your spot” button.
That’s the whole opt-in.
Why are they working again?
Because everybody bailed on them.
The space cleared out. Buyers — especially the Instagram audiences who never sat through one in 2018 — actually find them refreshing now.
The webinar isn’t a webinar to them. It’s a free training. A live event. A reason to block 90 minutes on Wednesday night and learn from a smart human.
But the mechanics matter. Pre-webinar value emails. Confirmation page that handles objections. VSL fallback for the no-shows (and there will be no-shows). A real offer at the end that solves the exact problem the webinar set up.
Done right, it prints money.
Done lazy, you’re just another guy on Zoom asking strangers for $1,997.
Don’t be that guy.
Lesson 11: Build a Show, Not “Content”
Hormozi did Shark-Tank-style segments. Neuro guys built a giant Vboard whiteboard and shoot every video against it. Some folks are doing 1-versus-10 confrontation formats with a panel of strangers in matching shirts.
The pattern?
They didn’t make content. They built a show.
A format you can spot in three seconds. A visual signature. A repeatable structure your audience comes back for like a sitcom.
If you’re brand new — don’t get fancy yet. Stick to proven formats. Get the reps. Get good at the basics. Don’t try to invent the wheel before you can ride a bike.
If you’re a year or two deep and your content all looks the same as everybody else’s?
Steal a format from a totally different niche and bring it to yours.
The fitness coach who borrows the cooking show format. The financial advisor who borrows the news anchor format. The business consultant who borrows the late-night talk show format with the desk and the band.
That’s how you become un-ignorable.
Lesson 12: Every Strategy Works. Pick One That Fits Who You Actually Are.
You’ll watch one guy do $10 million a year on call funnels. Another guy do $10 million on webinars. A third guy do $10 million dropping daily videos with no funnel at all.
They’re all right.
There is no single right way. There’s just the way that fits you — your strengths, your energy, your audience, your offer, your tolerance for showing up on camera.
The shiny-object trap has killed more businesses than bad strategy ever did. You see somebody else’s launch pop on Instagram, you blow up your perfectly fine working system to chase it, and six months later you’ve got nothing but a bunch of half-built funnels and a hangover.
Pick a lane. Run it for a year. Then evaluate.
Every successful operator I know has been running the same boring play for two, three, sometimes five years. They didn’t get bored. They got rich.
The boring play is the play. Stop trying to outsmart it.
Lesson 13: The Sale Closes Before the Call Ever Starts
Here’s a thing nobody talks about because it’s not sexy.
By the time a prospect lands on your sales call, they’ve already decided.
Or at minimum, they’re 80% there.
If your only “selling” happens on the call, you’re starting from zero and trying to convince a stranger in 45 minutes.
That is a brutal way to make a living. I know because I did it for years.
Pre-sell instead.
Confirmation page video that knocks out the top three objections.
Email sequence between booking and call that’s pure value — not “here’s a calendar reminder for your appointment, looking forward to chatting!”
Personal voice note from you. Yes, you. Open the app. Hit record. Send it.
A short asset relevant to their specific situation.
Move them from skeptical to hyped before you ever say hello.
When you do that, the call isn’t a sales call anymore. It’s a “let’s figure out the details” conversation. And those close at two and three times the rate of cold ones.
This single shift will double your business in a year.
Lesson 14: If They Relate, You Win. Period.
I saved this for last because it’s the foundation everything else sits on. Without this, none of the other 13 lessons matter. With it, you can break half the rules and still win.
You don’t sell with logic. You sell with recognition.
The moment a stranger reads your story and thinks “oh my god, that’s me” — you’re done. You’ve won 60% of the battle right there. Everything else is paperwork.
Which means your stories better not be about how perfect you are. Nobody relates to perfect. Perfect makes people feel small.
Your stories better be about the failures. The doubt. The 2 a.m. panics. The day you almost quit. The fight with your spouse about whether to keep going. The credit card you maxed out. The dumb thing you said in a meeting that you’re still embarrassed about.
That’s where the recognition lives.
In the mess. Not the highlight reel.
The best marketers in the world aren’t the slickest writers. Half of them can barely write. They’re the ones who’ll tell you something true that the slick writers are too embarrassed to say out loud.
If they relate, you win.
Everything else is just plumbing.
Bringing It Home
Don’t try to do all 14 of these tomorrow. You’ll burn out and execute on zero.
Pick three.
Pick the three that scared you a little while you were reading them. The ones where you went “yeah… I should be doing that, but…”
That little but? That’s the resistance. Resistance is the signal. Resistance is the X on the treasure map.
For most of you, my guess is it’s some version of:
Give the good stuff away free.
Build the YouTube engine.
Tell the real story — including the embarrassing parts.
Do those three for 12 straight months. Don’t change them. Don’t second-guess them halfway through. Don’t blow them up the second a launch goes sideways or to chase the next shiny thing.
I promise you — promise you — by this time next year, you’ll have a business that doesn’t need tricks to sell. It’ll just sell.
Because you built the trust the slow way. The hard way. The boring way.
The only way that’s working in 2026.
Friendships over funnels.
Partnerships over pushing.
Receipts over promises.
That’s the whole game now. That’s everything.
I’ll see you in the next one.
— Perry
P.S. If this hit, hit the heart button. Forward it to a friend who’s still running 2019’s playbook — they need this more than they know. And if you want the next one in your inbox before everybody else, you know what to do.
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