A $100K Miss, 18 Months of Rebuilding, and the Comment That Made It All Worth It

The vision for this was born several years ago.

Our first attempt at bringing it into the world was a $100K investment that didn't quite get us there.

So it was back to the drawing board.

After 18 months of rebuilding the foundation of our platform from scratch, we were finally ready to tackle this last piece. Very cool. Very complicated. 🙂

It's the all-new Builder by HBA, and the full reveal we did at our event in Branson, Missouri is right below.

Within 48 hours of release, this comment showed up:

"I'm shaking, and crying at the same time. But happy tears. I can not believe what I've just built with our new builder. Everything I always wanted and was too overwhelmed to do, too worried to put into words, is now ready. Thank you Paul and Mike."

That's from Conny Young.

I felt a rush of gratitude when I read it, because I knew all of our work was paying off the way it was designed to pay off.

The whole point was to make it simple for people to get the vision in their mind and heart out onto the internet, without all the technical nonsense that no one ever wanted to learn in the first place.

Over the past year we rebuilt just about everything in HBA from scratch, so we could stop piecing it together from other people's tools. The funnel builder was the one piece left.

It was a white label product, which meant we couldn't change it. For six or seven years, members suggested improvements. We'd say, "Great idea, we'll pass it along to the developers."

How many of those did we actually get built? Zero.

That's what the $100K miss was about. A few years back we hired a programmer to rebuild it, and about a year and a half later we called it a loss. I won't pretend that didn't sting.

A lot of people want a business online and get stuck on the tech. Building pages and funnels. Writing good copy. Web design. I've seen plenty of pages that made me wince, and I get it. Nobody taught them.

AI can build a good-looking page now, but then you're on your own. What do you do with your domain? How do you connect it to your emailer? And it doesn't know your market, so the copy comes out generic.

So we built an AI that knows how to use the builder, and knows the home business world too. If you can chat, you can build.

At Freedom Fest, we typed one request into the builder's chat. We asked it to build a lead capture page, a thank-you page with a video from a YouTube channel, a button to an affiliate link, a new email list, and four autoresponder emails, and to connect it all to a domain.

About six minutes later, the funnel was live. We opted in on stage, watched the thank-you page load with the video, and checked the inbox for the first email.

It even read the video's transcript first, so the copy on the capture page matched what the video actually says.

The demo starts around the 10 minute mark of the video, if you want to jump straight to the builder.

• Import a page you love from any web address and edit it as your own
• Paste in HTML from ChatGPT or Claude and get a real page on your site
• Share a whole funnel with someone using one link
• Blogging, which is how this very post got published
• Membership sites and communities
• Evergreen and live webinars
• Edit on your phone, or design on desktop and let it adapt automatically

I don't believe there's anything quite like it, but more importantly, it's helping the people it was meant to help.

If you've had the sense that online marketing could really help your business, but you've been stuck because it's "too complicated" or "I'm not techy," this is totally worth a look.

Over the next week or so I'm posting some short videos introducing it, and I'm emailing the "Sneak Peek" tour. If you want the full tour with me, grab the free sneak peek here.

That's our job after all, right? Share things that have a chance of making other people's lives a little better. 🙂

Thanks for reading, and hope you have an awesome day!

Paul

P.S. The reveal runs long because we had a lot to cover. If you only have a few minutes, start at the builder demo and watch it go from one request to a live funnel.