I Stole Greg Isenberg's Sales Funnel

I stole Greg Isenberg’s sales funnel.

You’ve seen Greg going viral with his startup ideas and spicy takes. But what you don’t realize is that last December, Greg and I had lunch in Miami and I secretly went into his wallet and stole the diagram for his sales funnel like Plankton stealing the krabby patty secret formula.

I must now share the secret formula with the world.

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Ok onto the secret formula.

Sorry Greg (not sorry).

How Greg Isenberg’s Sales Funnel works:

Most people start businesses by building a product.

But then they run into a few problems: How do you get your product in front of people? And more importantly, do people even want the product you built?

Greg’s “ACP Funnel” solves this.

ACP: Audience → Community → Product

Instead of building a product first, you build an Audience first, then a private Community to have 1-to-1 conversations, THEN based on the problems you see your community facing, you build Products to solve them.

Peter Thiel explains why the ACP Funnel is smart

The ACP Funnel solves this problem.

You’ve got built-in distribution!

How I’ve used the ACP Funnel:

When I first met Greg in 2021, I had zero ACP funnel.

But after 3 years of writing online and many thousands of cups of coffee, my ACP funnel is looking pretty, pretty good.

AUDIENCE: 50,000+ nerds across X, LinkedIn, and newsletter.

COMMUNITY: I run a private community called The Strategists for startup marketing nerds. Just as Greg said, during our weekly community calls, I learn about new problems I can solve in the marketing space. The key to finding problems you can solve is to stop yapping and shut up and listen.

PRODUCTS: I’ve built a suite of products and offerings in the social media space at all different price levels ranging from my book Memes Make Millions ($18) to my meme course ($69) to my ghostwriting services ($5k/mo+) and more. Most recently, I launched Meme Alerts, a $6.9/month daily newsletter with new viral meme templates so you can go viral by capitalizing on trending topics. This idea came to me because of my community; we were using our Slack to send viral meme templates and I realized that should be a product!

Because I followed the ACP Funnel and built an audience and community of marketing nerds BEFORE launching the product, the launch was a hit. Here, my co-founder Charlie explains our revenue projections. He’s basically Charlie Munger and I guess I’m Jimmy Buffet? 😂

We’ve since 4xed this in 3 weeks all organic from our audience and community. Not bad for dank memes in your inbox. Everyone knows MRR stands for Memelord Recurring Revenue!

Compare this to me in college.

Dropshipping from Alibaba was all the rage, so I tried starting a jewelry brand with my girlfriend at the time. We had no audience, no community, and honestly quite terrible products. We managed to grow on Instagram a bit and sold a few hundred bracelets but it felt like swimming upstream.

Meanwhile, selling a product after you have an audience and community feels like riding a lazy river. You let the current take you. You just add in your product to whatever audience/community building stuff you were already doing! I’ve been posting dank memes for years way before I was making money on it. Now I just plug Meme Alerts underneath my viral memes and get signups. That’s the benefit of building a product in a community and niche you actually love.

Nothing pisses me off more than seeing someone start a company in a community they have literally no connection with. I’m not joking—the number of tech guys I’ve met who have talked about building SaaS for farmers without ever meeting a farmer or stepping on a farm is insane. Bro, go build in something you love and understand. This is how you never burn out.

Build an audience and community around something you love—then build products to help your homies solve problems. That’s how you make your community stronger and hopefully make a few bucks along the way.

P.S. If you wanna see Greg and I chop it up about building audiences and communities, check out the pod I recorded with him. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube, got a very special pod coming out next week 😉 

My adventures this week

🧠 I wrote about my favorite Product Hunt growth hack EVER

📘 I wrote about a reading habit that changed my life

👗 My wifey went viral again! This time for a post on J.Lo

✈️ Booked a flight to Vail, CO for August using only United miles

Tech Memes of the Week

Not gonna lie, I had some memes ABSOLUTELY POP OFF this week

Thanks for reading nerds.

Create some cool shit this week.

Jason “The Memelord” Levin

Head of Growth @ Product Hunt, Author of Memes Make Millions