Last updated on September 3rd, 2026 at 11:06 am
Jaime Smith spent years trying to build something of his own, and none of it worked. Then, almost by accident, something did.
Here’s how that turned into a business, a job at ClickFunnels, and a very unusual arrangement the company has fully embraced.
Years of Chasing the Wrong Strategy
Jaime Smith had been building websites since 2000, working with everything from big companies down to small local shops. But he wanted his own thing too, and for years he couldn’t figure out what that was going to be.
He followed the big names in online marketing, Russell Brunson, Frank Kern, Ryan Deiss, Perry Belcher, and figured that was the path. So he kept trying new strategies. Every time one stopped working, he’d drop it and move to the next one.
But one of those tries did pay off, for about a week. Google was just rolling out AdSense, and people were running ads straight to affiliate products and keeping the difference. Jaime tried it, and one day he opened his laptop and saw he’d made $800. It was the first money he’d ever made online.
But a week later, Google changed how the ads worked, and the whole thing stopped paying out.
So he went looking for the next strategy, then the one after that. He had small wins along the way, but nothing that lasted.
The Conversation With His Wife
Jaime kept spending money on new programs, hoping one of them would finally work. But the wins stayed small, and the money kept going out faster than it came in.
His wife noticed the charges on the credit card and asked him about it. He explained what it was for and told her he was going to make it work. But she wasn’t convinced, and she said so. They either needed to make it work, or he needed to stop.
Jaime knew she was right. He wasn’t ready to quit, but he was ready to commit instead of jumping to the next thing.
So he made a decision. Instead of building a brand new product from scratch, he’d build an audience first, and figure out what to sell them later.
The Ebook That Never Launched
Jaime had just lost close to 50 pounds and gotten into good shape, so he decided that was the story he’d build an audience around. He’d write an ebook about how he did it, then find a way to get it in front of people.
But he needed somewhere to host and sell the thing. Around that time, Russell Brunson was running a webinar about something he called funnel hacking. Jaime signed up and watched it. Russell’s pitch was simple: you need a funnel. Jaime agreed, bought in, and started using ClickFunnels for the first time.
The ebook itself never really went anywhere. But ClickFunnels did.
Giving Away the Answers
Once Jaime started using ClickFunnels, he did what he’d always done. He found the community and started helping where he could.
He joined the ClickFunnels Facebook group, and because he’d been a web developer for years, he could answer the technical questions other people were stuck on. Someone wanted a way to force people to check a box before submitting a form, so Jaime built a small piece of code for it and shared it. Someone else wanted a badge that highlighted a bestselling product on the page, so he built that too.
And he didn’t just answer people in private. He posted the solutions publicly, with a quick video showing how to install them, so anyone in the group could use them. There was no pitch behind any of it and he wasn’t trying to sell anything. He just wanted to help and get known in the community.
Over a few months, he built up close to 20 of these small tools and put them all in one place, a free members area anyone could join. About 700 people signed up.
That’s when people started reaching out asking how they could pay him.
When People Started Asking to Pay Him
At first, Jaime turned the offers down. People kept asking to send him money through PayPal, and he kept telling them no, that he was just giving back to the community.
But enough people asked the same question that he started asking himself a different one. If he were going to charge for something, it needed to make someone more money than it cost them.
At the time, ClickFunnels only let you sell one item at a time, plus an order bump. There was no way to sell two or three or five of the same product in a single order. Jaime built a fix for that, a quantity selector, and it was the first tool he’d made that could pay for itself.
He launched it officially on August 1, 2016, priced at $37 a month. In the first week, it brought in five figures, more money than he’d ever made online before, from a list that wasn’t even that big yet.
That launch became CF Pro Tools.
Getting on Russell’s Radar
Jaime met Russell in person for the first time at his first Funnel Hacking Live, later that year, in San Diego. He’d had a few shirts printed for CF Pro Tools, found Russell standing near the back of the event, and handed him one.
Not long after, Steve Larson, who’d seen what Jaime was building in the Facebook group, started reaching out whenever Russell needed something ClickFunnels couldn’t do out of the box. More often than not, Jaime already had a fix built, or could put one together fast.
One of those fixes ended up mattering more than Jaime expected. At an unrelated mastermind in Greece, he met a couple running an e-commerce store selling winter hats. They recognized his name and told him they’d installed his bestseller highlight script on their product page. It had taken their average order value from $24 to $48.
His tools kept showing up in bigger places after that. Dean Graziosi’s team started using them. So did a launch built around Tony Robbins and Matthew McConaughey that reached millions of people.
Joining ClickFunnels for Real
In April 2017, Dylan Jones, one of ClickFunnels’ original founders, reached out to Jaime with an idea. He’d seen what Jaime had been building without even having access to the ClickFunnels software itself, and wanted to see what he could do once he had it. So he asked Jaime to fly out to Boise for a week and help improve the page editor.
Jaime spent that week in a room with Dylan, Russell, and the rest of the team, working through the editor together. On the last day, Russell and Dylan pulled him aside. They told him he wasn’t allowed to leave until they figured out a way to keep him on for good.
Jaime officially joined ClickFunnels in May 2017, all while still running CF Pro Tools on the side.
Running Two Businesses Without a Conflict
Working inside ClickFunnels while still running CF Pro Tools raised an obvious question. Was that a conflict of interest?
Jaime had that exact conversation with the team more than once. They agreed it technically was a conflict of interest, but ultimately, they didn’t care.
Jaime’s own way of thinking about it was simple. ClickFunnels had to build for everyone, which meant focusing on the problems affecting the majority of its users. CF Pro Tools could move faster and solve the smaller, stranger problems that only affected a fraction of people, the ones that weren’t worth ClickFunnels’ time to build internally, but still mattered to the people who needed them.
One of the clearest examples was PayPal. ClickFunnels Classic didn’t have a way to accept it. Jaime built the integration himself for CF Pro Tools, then brought it directly to Todd. Todd’s reaction was immediate: this should just be part of ClickFunnels. So Jaime handed over the code, and it became a ClickFunnels feature instead of staying exclusive to his own product.
What His Story Teaches
Jaime spent years jumping from one money-making strategy to the next, and none of them turned into a business. But funny enough, the one thing that finally did was giving away free help, with no plan to sell anything at all.
Looking back, that’s exactly what he wishes he’d figured out sooner. He kept switching ideas the moment one got hard instead of staying with something long enough to see if it would work. His advice for anyone starting out is simple: pick one thing, and follow it until it works.
It took one free members area, built in ClickFunnels, for people to start asking Jaime to take their money.
Ready to give away something free and see where it leads, the same way Jaime did?