Russell Brunson at Side Hustle Summit 2026

Who Russell Brunson is

Russell Brunson co-founded ClickFunnels, the software that made “sales funnel” a word ordinary business owners use. The company grew into one of the largest bootstrapped SaaS businesses in the world without venture money, which is a rarer thing than it sounds.

Outside the software he is best known for three books - DotCom Secrets, Expert Secrets and Traffic Secrets - that are close to standard reading in the online business world, and for Funnel Hacking Live, an annual event that fills arenas.

Put simply, he has spent about twenty years studying why people buy things online, and has run that experiment at a scale almost nobody else has.

What he is teaching at the Summit

Russell has the Day 4 session on September 9, titled “The Billion-Dollar Mentor,” and returns alongside Iman for the Day 5 live build on September 13.

Expect his hour to sit on four things:

• Offer structure. Not the product itself, but the packaging, the price and the positioning around it. Beginners tend to skip this layer entirely and then blame the product.
• Funnels a single person can run. The version of a funnel that works when you are one person with a laptop, not a team with a media budget.
• Story as a sales mechanism. His entire body of work argues that the story around an offer does more conversion work than the offer itself.
• The second sale. Turning a first-time buyer into a repeat one, which is where nearly all the profit in a small online business actually lives.

Why him and Iman together is the unusual part

Russell and Iman have almost no audience overlap. Russell’s world is funnel operators, info-product sellers and small business owners, skewing older and more established. Iman speaks to a much younger crowd, most of whom have never made a sale.

That split is the point. Iman’s three opening sessions are about getting from zero to the first thing that exists. Russell’s session is about what you do once it does. Put together it is a fuller arc than either of them teaches alone, which is a real reason to sit through the whole week rather than cherry-picking one session.

What to expect from his style

Russell teaches through stories and frameworks rather than software walkthroughs. You will get named concepts, drawn diagrams, and a lot of examples from companies he has worked with. It is engaging and it is memorable, and it is also unapologetically a sales presentation in the second half - that is how launch events work, and the FAQ covers what gets sold and when.

His stories carry the hour, but the named structures underneath them are the reusable part. Capture those and let the stories go.