Everything Went Wrong at Our First Launch in Japan

We took our company international for the first time and picked the hardest market we could find. Then everything went wrong in the first four hours. This is the full story of our Japan launch.

For years people in Italy, Brazil and Japan were signing up for ClickFunnels even though we weren't set up to support them. We could never crack the hard part — translating the whole platform, the payment methods, the training, all of it. When we rebuilt ClickFunnels we finally built it to handle that, and this year we decided international was happening no matter what.

So we picked the hardest market we could think of. Not the easy English-speaking one. We chose Japan – figuring that if we could make it work here, we could make it work anywhere.

None of it happens without one man: Jun Suzuki. For years Jun has shown up to almost every ClickFunnels event we've ever thrown, flying in from Japan, and he doesn't speak a word of English. He built his own audience back home teaching the funnel hacker mantra, and he became the partner on the ground we'd been waiting for.

Then the event started, and the first few hours were rough. The room wasn't set up. No clicker for my slides. The confidence monitors died. We were fifteen minutes late with a room full of people waiting on us. Amateur stuff we honestly haven't dealt with in over a decade. I tried to smile through it. It was chaos.

And then it flipped. The MC got up there — basically the Japanese Tony Robbins — and reset the entire room. Jun took the stage breaking down funnels and value ladders. Everything after that ran like clockwork. Around 400 funnel hackers, and one of the best events we've run in a long time.

Here's the part that stuck with me: funnels aren't only for launching your own thing. If you know a business that needs a funnel, you can get paid to build it for them. It's a real skill and a real opportunity, and the systems work the same way over and over. That's how you actually scale.

If you want more raw, behind-the-scenes videos like this one, tell me in the comments and I'll bring the camera everywhere we go.

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CHAPTERS:
0:00 First, What We're Looking For
0:16 What We Did Right — and Everything That Went Wrong
0:40 Why We Finally Went International
1:40 The Problem We Couldn't Solve for Years
2:35 The Superfan Who Never Missed an Event
3:45 Landing in Tokyo
4:40 Why We Picked the Hardest Market on Purpose
5:30 Nothing Was Ready
7:15 The Reset That Saved the Day
8:05 Jun Takes the Stage
8:55 Getting Paid to Build Funnels for Other People
10:15 400 Funnel Hackers and a Standing Ovation
11:10 We're Looking for Partners
12:10 Old School: Behind the Scenes

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WHO IS RUSSELL BRUNSON?
Over 20+ years, Russell Brunson has built a following of over a million entrepreneurs, sold hundreds of thousands of copies of his books: Dotcom Secrets, Expert secrets, & Traffic Secrets — earning him New York Times Bestselling Author status—and popularized the concept of sales funnels. He is the co-founder of ClickFunnels, a software company that assists tens of thousands of entrepreneurs in rapidly delivering their messages to the marketplace.

As of 2026, Russell’s training, teaching, and software have helped over 2,894 individuals achieve entry into the prestigious “Two Comma Club,” signifying they’ve grossed over seven figures within a single sales funnel.

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