Last updated on April 23rd, 2026 at 03:13 pm
Andrew Culver walked into another Fortune 500 office building on another Monday morning, and something hit him.
It was the same broken project he’d seen at the last company. And the one before that. Different industry, team, and budget, but the same dysfunction playing out on loop.
He was working as a consultant at the time, helping massive corporations fix their software problems. The pay was good, the work was steady, but he kept watching companies throw money at issues that never got solved. They’d patch one symptom, then another would pop up. Nobody was fixing the root cause.
That’s when he started to realize something. He wasn’t interested in being the guy who showed up every month to apply the same band-aid. He wanted to build the fix once and move on.
That mindset ended up shaping his entire career, and it’s the reason he’s now president of ClickFunnels.
From Corporate to Consulting
Andrew started his career the safe way. He married his wife Carly (after spending years in the friend zone, but that’s a whole other story), and she had one request: get a stable job.
So he did. He worked at a Fortune 1000 company in Norfolk, Virginia. He started as a software developer, worked his way up to team lead, then manager. The classic corporate climb was underway.
But entrepreneurship kept pulling at him.
When an opportunity came up to join a consulting company, he talked it over with Carly. It wasn’t a full leap into the unknown. He’d still have a job with benefits and a paycheck, just slightly riskier than the corporate gig. And the CEO of his current company even gave him a safety net: if the consulting thing didn’t work out, there’d be a spot waiting for him when he came back.
So Andrew made the jump.
When Consulting Fell Apart
The consulting company was a mixed bag. Some people on the team were crushing it, others were coasting. Revenue was good for a while, then it wasn’t.
One Monday morning, Andrew walked into the office and noticed people looking stressed. Someone asked him, “Did you get paid on Friday?”
He checked. Nope.
Turns out the owner couldn’t make payroll. He’d paid some people and bounced checks on others. Andrew had two kids at that point and couldn’t afford to stick around hoping things would turn around.
He went to the owner and said, “I’m out.”
But Andrew didn’t just walk away empty-handed. He negotiated. He had an incredible relationship with one of the consulting clients, a two-sided wedding marketplace called Borrowed and Blue. He was building their platform, and it was working. They had traction, revenue, and customers.
So he struck a deal. He’d take that client relationship with him and keep building for them independently.
The Problem That Kept Showing Up
While working with Borrowed and Blue, Andrew ran into a problem that would shape his entire career.
They were a recurring revenue business. Customers paid monthly for advertising on the platform. Easy money, right?
Wrong.
Ten percent of their credit cards failed every single month. Not because customers wanted to cancel, but because cards expired, got reissued for fraud, or hit processing errors.
Do the math. At that churn rate, you lose your entire customer base in 10 months.
Andrew started solving it manually, charging them by the hour. He’d send emails, follow up, call customers to update their payment info. The more effort he put in, the better their retention got.
Then he had a thought: If they’re dealing with this, everyone with a subscription business is dealing with this.
He proposed a deal to the CEO. Instead of billing hourly, he’d charge them $500 a month and spend unlimited time solving the problem. In exchange, he’d build it as a standalone product he could sell to other companies.
The CEO agreed and that’s when Andrew built Churn Buster.
Building the Fix Once
Churn Buster wasn’t a home run overnight, but it worked. Andrew had friends in the industry who didn’t even realize they had the problem until he made them log into their Stripe accounts and see how much revenue they were losing.
One friend insisted he didn’t have the issue but Andrew told him to check. Thousands of dollars in failed charges sitting right there.
That’s when Andrew knew he had something.
He wasn’t solving one company’s problem anymore. He was solving the same problem for hundreds of companies, and he only had to build the solution once.
Eventually, he sold Churn Buster. It was a good exit, and he even invested back into the business as part of the deal. That gave him something valuable: investor reports. He got to see how the new team operated the business, what worked, what didn’t.
But the bigger lesson stuck with him. When you see the same problem showing up in different places, you’re not looking at isolated issues. You’re looking at a pattern. And patterns are product opportunities.
From Churn Buster to Bullet Train
After selling Churn Buster, Andrew and Carly took a sabbatical. They went to Japan, did some work with their church, and gave themselves space to figure out what was next.
When Andrew came back, he didn’t go back to consulting. He built Bullet Train.
Bullet Train was a framework for Ruby on Rails developers. If you’re not a developer, that probably sounds like gibberish, but here’s what it did: it gave developers a head start on building SaaS products.
Andrew had noticed the same thing happening over and over. Every developer building a SaaS product needed the same features: user authentication, billing, team management, onboarding flows. They’d spend weeks rebuilding the same scaffolding every single time.
So Andrew built it once. Developers could use Bullet Train to skip the repetitive setup and get straight to building the unique parts of their product.
He open-sourced it, shared it with the Ruby community, and it got traction. Not massive, world-changing traction, but solid traction in a niche market.
And that’s exactly what caught ClickFunnels’ attention.
How ClickFunnels Found Him
ClickFunnels was built on Ruby on Rails. Todd Dickerson, the co-founder and CTO, knew the Ruby community well.
When ClickFunnels started working on a major rebuild, they needed someone who understood Ruby at a deep level. They found Bullet Train, saw what Andrew had built, and reached out.
They brought him on as a consultant first. Then as an employee. Then, eventually, as president.
Andrew saw something in ClickFunnels that went beyond just software. It wasn’t just a tool. It was a platform with teaching, events, community, and scale. It had all the pieces that make a business more than a commodity.
He’d spent years watching companies try to differentiate on product alone, and it never worked. Whoever sold it cheapest won. But ClickFunnels had authority, education, and a proven process. That’s what made it different.
And Andrew’s pattern recognition kicked in again. He saw where ClickFunnels could go, and he wanted to be part of building it.
Still Doing the Same Thing
These days, Andrew’s role at ClickFunnels is all about spotting what’s next and capitalizing on it.
When he saw that ClickFunnels Radio was good but could be 10 times better, he flew to Utah, looked at podcast studios, and helped set up a professional production setup.
When AI started getting good, he didn’t wait. He brought the whole development team together at the beginning of 2025 and set a goal: by the end of the year, 95% of their code would be written with AI assistance. They hit that target by the end of January.
These days, Andrew’s back in the code himself. He’s writing, he’s building, and he’s still looking for the patterns that everyone else is missing.
What This Means for You
Andrew’s career didn’t follow a master plan. He didn’t map out every step from corporate job to president of a software company.
He just kept solving problems in front of him, and he paid attention when the same problem showed up twice.
Churn Buster happened because he was manually fixing credit card failures every month and realized it wasn’t just one company’s issue.
Bullet Train happened because he kept rebuilding the same features for every SaaS product and decided to build it once.
ClickFunnels found him because he’d already built the solution they needed.
The pattern is simple: Do good work on what’s in front of you, notice when you’re solving the same problem multiple times, and build the fix once instead of repeating yourself forever.
That’s how you go from consultant to product builder. That’s how you build a career that compounds.
And that’s how you end up running a company that’s helping thousands of entrepreneurs build their businesses online.
Just as Andrew spotted patterns and built solutions that scaled, your funnel should work the same way.
Build it once, and use it for every product, launch, and offer.
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