The Simple Sales Funnel That Took Alex Becker From $0 to $110M

Most first-time founders build their website like they are Nike.

Every product on the homepage, a services page, an about page, a blog nobody reads.

Then they wonder why strangers never buy.

Brett Malinowski has a blunt answer in this 28 minute whiteboard session: Nike earned the right to a catalog over 50 years of trust. You have not. Nobody knows you exist yet, so the fix is one simple sales funnel that walks a stranger from "who is this" to paying customer.

It is the same skeleton Alex Becker used to grow Hyros from zero to a $110 million exit. The same one Oliver Brocato used to sell $11 million of chocolate from a one-page store before he turned 21.

I watched the whole thing and pulled out the system, the examples, and the exact lines that make it work.

What a simple sales funnel actually is

Four steps. That is the entire concept.

→ Captivate: get a stranger's attention
→ Curiosity: make them want to know more
→ Trust: prove you can actually help them
→ Convert: ask for the sale

Marketers dress this up as tofu, mofu and bofu (top, middle and bottom of funnel), but the mechanics are dead simple. A piece of content gets attention. A lead magnet earns the email. The email sells the product.

Brett drops one stat in passing that should change how you spend your week: in his view, 90% of sales happen in email. Not on the homepage. Not in the TikTok comments. In the inbox, after someone already raised their hand.

The best live example is Tabs Chocolate. Oliver Brocato started it with $30K in savings as a college student and did $11 million in about two years, over $280K of it in the first month. Go to the site and you will see one product. One. Every photo, every line of copy, every scroll reinforces why this one chocolate bar is worth buying. Click shop and the only decision left is quantity.

That is what a funnel looks like when someone commits to it. One path, and nothing on the page to wander off to.

The only three assets you need to build

Strip away the guru language and a funnel is three things:

1. One piece of content. A TikTok, a YouTube video, a Reddit post, a Facebook ad. Its only job is attention. If you are deciding where to post, I broke down how solo founders win this game in the attention playbook.

2. One lead magnet. Something free that a stranger actually wants: a Notion template, a free mini course, a 7 day trial, a free audit call. Brett calls it the magnet because it pulls people off the feed and onto your page. Free works because of reciprocity: give someone real value and they feel like they owe you one.

3. One landing page. A headline, a few lines about the lead magnet, an email field. Maybe testimonials. That is the whole site. The thank you page delivers the freebie, and the email sequence does the selling over the next month.

Notice what is missing: the 15 page website and the logo redesign. Neither one moves a stranger closer to paying you.

Messaging is 80% of the game

Here is where most funnels die, and Brett spends the best third of the video on it.

Before you write a word, you need an avatar: the one person this is for. Age, location, job, what they already tried, what they are sick of. Someone in Alabama does not respond to the same language as someone in San Francisco (his example, and he is right).

Then every message you put in front of that person has five jobs:

→ Spark curiosity
→ Call out exactly who it is for
→ Sell the outcome they get
→ Kill their biggest objection
→ Give one clear next step

His chiropractor example nails it. Weak version: "I sell AI services for business owners." Strong version: "Are you a chiropractor struggling with no-shows? My AI follow-up system nurtures your patients and fills your calendar without any of your time." Same service. One of them gets replies.

And this is the amateur mistake Brett keeps hammering: selling features instead of outcomes. His fake Nike ad makes the point. "Carbon fabric, nanotechnology, handmade, lightweight" sells nothing, because nobody wakes up wanting carbon fabric. The rewrite sells the outcome: these shoes help track athletes run faster with zero blisters, Usain Bolt wore them, only 100 pairs exist, shipping is free. Every word is doing persuasion work.

Hook, story, offer

The delivery framework comes straight from Russell Brunson's DotCom Secrets, and it is the simplest writing structure I know:

Hook: one flashy line that filters for your avatar. On short form that is your first 3 to 5 seconds.
Story: 15 to 25 seconds that name who this is for, the outcome, and the objection you are killing.
Offer: 5 seconds. The call to action, usually your lead magnet.

Longer content scales the same ratios. A 10 minute video gets roughly a 1 minute hook, 8 minutes of story, 1 minute of offer.

Once you see this structure you cannot unsee it. Which brings us to the psychology underneath.

The seven persuasion levers every guru uses

Brett points at Robert Cialdini's book Influence, and jokes that Hormozi, Becker and every make-money YouTuber "all read the same three books." He is not wrong. The seven levers:

→ Social proof: others got results (testimonials, logos, Michael Jordan in Nikes)
→ Empathy: you understand their problem and it is not their fault
→ Authority: you have done this before and can prove it
→ Reciprocity: give first, people feel compelled to give back
→ Scarcity: 100 pairs left beats one million in stock
→ Consistency: you have done one thing for years, not a new hustle every month
→ Liking: people buy from people they recognize and enjoy

You do not need all seven in one ad. Brett's bar is three or four per message. The rewritten shoe ad hits social proof (Usain Bolt), scarcity (100 pairs), reciprocity (free shipping) and outcome-focused messaging in two sentences.

How Alex Becker ran this exact funnel to $110 million

This is my favorite part of the video, because you can verify all of it yourself for free.

Every Facebook ad any company runs is public. Go to their Facebook page, open Page Transparency, click See All, then Ad Library. Brett does this live on Alex Becker's page and dissects the funnel that built Hyros, his ad tracking software.

Becker's video hook: "This simple line of code can increase your ad revenue by 50 to 100%." Outcome, stated in the first five seconds, and it instantly filters for people who run ads.

The first line of his ad copy: businesses like Tony Robbins, Grant Cardone and bodybuilding.com use this to scale ads. Pure social proof before a single feature gets mentioned.

The landing page: a headline, a subheadline, testimonials, and one button to book a free call. No feature tour, no pricing grid. The call closes you into a software subscription worth thousands a month.

Content, lead magnet (the free call), landing page, close. That funnel took Hyros from zero to a $110 million acquisition by Banzai in December 2022. Mostly stock, as it turned out, but the funnel did its job.

Mindvalley runs the identical skeleton for info products. Hook: "Diets don't work, but there is a better way" (empathy, aimed straight at people burned by diets). Lead magnet: a free masterclass for your email and phone number. Backend: a $400 course sold over the email sequence. Different niche, same machine.

Steal this funnel for your SaaS this week

Here is the whole playbook compressed into steps you can run in days, not months:

Step 1: Pick one customer and one painful problem. Chiropractors with no-shows, not "business owners."
Step 2: Build one lead magnet that solves a slice of it. A template, a calculator, a free email course. I wrote up how founders turn free courses into paying users in the free course funnel breakdown.
Step 3: Put it on a one page lander with an email field. Nothing else.
Step 4: Make content on one channel using hook, story, offer. Every piece points at the lead magnet.
Step 5: Write a 5 to 10 email sequence that stacks social proof, authority and empathy, then asks for the sale.

When I was scaling my last SaaS from $15K to $75K a month, the funnel behind it was embarrassingly basic: content, a free resource, an email list that did the selling. Nothing about it would impress a marketer, and it worked anyway.

The founders I interview keep proving the same point. A decent product with a working funnel beats a great product nobody hears about.

FAQ

What is a simple sales funnel?

A simple sales funnel is a four step path that takes a stranger from discovering you to paying you: content gets attention, a lead magnet earns their email, a landing page captures it, and an email sequence builds trust and closes the sale. You focus the whole thing on a single product and a single next step, and it works for SaaS, services, info products and physical goods alike.

Do I need funnel software like ClickFunnels to start?

No. A one page site built in Framer, Carrd or plain Webflow plus any email tool covers the whole stack. The funnel is a structure, not a software category. Becker's $110 million funnel was a headline, testimonials and a booking button. Spend your energy on the avatar and the messaging, not the tooling.

What is the best lead magnet for a SaaS?

A free trial is the obvious one, but it only attracts people already shopping. Earlier-stage buyers respond better to a template, a calculator, a free audit or a short email course that solves one slice of their problem. The test: would your exact avatar trade their email for it today? If not, make it more specific.

What do tofu, mofu and bofu mean?

Top, middle and bottom of funnel. Top of funnel is your content, built to get attention. Middle of funnel is your lead magnet and landing page, built to spark interest and capture the email. Bottom of funnel is the sales page and email sequence, built to convert. Each layer has one job, and mixing them up is why most founder websites sell nothing.

How many persuasion principles should one ad use?

Three or four, per Brett. Cialdini lists seven levers (social proof, empathy, authority, reciprocity, scarcity, consistency, liking), and cramming all of them into one message reads as desperate. Becker's ads stack social proof, authority and a hard outcome claim. The Nike rewrite example stacks social proof, scarcity and reciprocity. Pick the levers your proof actually supports.