Around October 2019, I was taking the One Funnel Away Challenge (OFAC) (affiliate link) for the second time. One of the ideas Russell Brunson, one of the mentors in the OFAC, talked about was funnel hacking. In my words, funnel hacking is the act of looking through your competitors’ websites and products and then modeling your own website and products after your competitors.
Although I was hearing the funnel hacking concept for the third time, I finally realized its true power. You can take the fundamental idea of funnel hacking and apply it to all areas of your business and life.
Table of Contents
What Is Ethical Business Hacking?
At first, you may have looked at the term “hacking” and immediately thought of a person or group of people typing rapidly trying to hack the password to your bank account.
This is not happening. Nobody is hacking into your business or any important accounts. You can relax.
Ethical business hacking is a term I coined for the act of researching and spying on successful competitors and then modeling your own business after them to try and reach similar success.
This works for many parts of your business. You can ethically business hack your website design, ads, marketing, products, and even operations by investigating your competitors.
How To Use Ethical Business Hacking To Become Successful
Ethical business hacking is incredibly powerful for start-ups in large markets where there are already successful businesses. Ethical business hacking is all about finding a profitable path fast. Once you’re making a profit, then you can experiment and test more extensively.
The main idea is to not necessarily be matching your competitors in sales, but be at a comfortable level to expand. If your competitor is making $1 million every month in profit, making 10% of that ($100,000 per month) would still provide many opportunities for you to expand.
There are three steps in the execution of ethical business hacking:
- Find successful players in your market.
- Investigate and research those businesses.
- Implement what you learned.
Suppose you’re selling cookbooks for the Keto diet. The first thing you would want to do is look for the top brands in your market. Think about the Keto brands that have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers on social media. Usually, I would start by searching for something like “Keto diet cookbook” on Google and see what comes up. Then I would go through each option on the first page and see what websites are listed. Then I would repeat on social media such as Facebook and Instagram and look at pages and profiles instead. As I’m searching, I would write down the businesses that really catch my eye.
The next step is to investigate and research the successful businesses you found. Go look at their websites and use tools like similarweb.com to see if you can discover how much traffic they’re getting. I also highly recommend you buy their products, subscribe to their email lists, and thoroughly examine the marketing and selling process. Refer to the Ethical Business Hacking Tools And Resources section of this article for ethical business hacking strategies you can use.
Finally, you must implement what you learned. If I was ethically hacking someone’s Keto business, I would implement many things I found on their site. For example, if they offered their cookbook as an e-book, that’s what I’ll do. If they use Pinterest as their primary marketing channel, I’ll use that too. If they sold their cookbook at $47, that’s what I’ll do. I will also look to create a similar website in terms of layout and even color scheme.
Do note that while you can model your competitors, you cannot directly copy them. KAZSMoney and I are not responsible for any legal trouble you may run into. There is a very fine line between modeling and copying that you cannot cross. Here’s a general list of things you can copy and things you cannot copy:
I just want to talk about products a little bit. In certain industries, you can copy products, and in others, you can’t. If you’re in the retail sector, you have the green light to copy products as long as no retailer holds exclusive rights. Best Buy and Amazon almost always sell the same tech products along with a plethora of other stores. However, it is still a good idea to talk to the brand that you want to sell. For example, if you’re going to sell Apple computers, it’s a good idea to directly contact Apple for selling rights. I am no legal advisor or attorney, so make sure you do your due diligence beforehand.
On the other hand, in almost every other industry (noticeable exception is farming), you cannot sell the exact same product. You can sell the same kind of product, but it must be different in some way. For example, Pepsi does not sell Coca-Cola; it sells Pepsi. They’re the same kind of product but are different in branding and how they make it. Again, I’m not a legal advisor or attorney, so double-check with a professional before investing your life-savings.
Back on the topic of Keto cookbooks, the idea is that if you’re modeling after a successful company, you’re implementing tactics that are working for them and, thus, have a high chance of working for you. You’ve basically skipped all the monetary losses from trying to make something work and created a profitable business foundation you can work off of.
Of course, ethical business hacking will not get you the exact same results as a competitor most of the time. If your competitor is making $1 million per month, expect to make only one to ten percent of that. Additionally, sometimes ethical business hacking will not work. In that case, analyze what’s wrong, learn, and try again.
Innovation Concerning Ethical Business Hacking
Ethical business hacking is a growth tool. It’s a strategy you use to become profitable quicker than the traditional face-diving method where you experiment with no information.
However, you cannot use ethical business hacking to become more prominent than your competitors. You cannot win by copying what your competitor is doing because you will always be one step behind. To become number one, you must do something new and different from what everybody else is doing.
In other words, you must innovate.
One thing I’ve come to understand over time is that new ideas are just a complex combination of old ideas. Humanity has always been about taking old ideas, combining them, and creating new things. Take math, for example. You start with basic arithmetic, then build into algebra, then calculus, and who knows what’s next.
It’s the same thing in business. There are always a plethora of “optimal” business strategies around us. The mentality a business owner must have is that there’s never the best way to do things. There are only better or worse ways.
In advertising, people might tell you that Facebook ads are the best way to get traffic, and other people will tell you that email lists convert the best. By combining these two ideas, you might run Facebook ads to collect emails and then sell directly to your email list rather than selling to cold traffic from Facebook.
When you combine ethical business hacking and innovation, magic happens. As you ethically hack many different businesses, you’ll see patterns and anomalies. When you stack all these ideas together, you start coming up with new strategies and operating ways to succeed. The next step would be testing these new strategies.
For example, suppose I were to sell courses on making money online. In that case, I might look through other internet business gurus and look at their strategies. Someone might offer a bonus blueprint on succeeding, and someone else might offer a bonus software. What if I took the two, combined them, and offered a bonus blueprint and software along with my course?
Sometimes, the strategies will flop, but when they succeed, you have a business that can overtake the competition that you initially modeled after.
Ethical Business Hacking Tools And Resources
In this section, I want to list some of the research tools and strategies for investigating into your competitors and ethically hack them.
Finding your competitors best-selling products:
If your competitor sells multiple products on a website, you can often find their best selling products and figure out what products you should sell. Add this to the end of an e-commerce store URL: “/collections/all?sort_by=best-selling” to find what’s selling well. This works best for stores using the Shopify platform.
You can also click on sort by best-selling if your competitors have the feature on their stores.
Find your competitor’s traffic sources:
Head over to similarweb.com and type in your competitor’s website URL to get estimates of the number of visitors a website receives and where they come from.
Facebook ad hacking:
If your competitor has a Facebook page, scroll down, and you will see “Page Transparency” (Facebook design often changes, so this might not be in the same place when you’re reading this article). Click “See All” to look at what ads your competitor is running. You can get a lot of great information about what’s working and not working.
Generally, the longer an ad has been up, the more successful it is. You can look to replicate the same type of ads.
Additionally, it’s also good to start noticing the ads people throw your way. Think about why they are or aren’t successful and look to incorporate those elements into your advertising.
Scrolling down to the end of the page:
Many websites have something at the bottom of their page, such as “Powered By WordPress.” You can learn a lot about what tools and platforms people are using to create their website.
Take notice of everything successful businesses are doing:
Take notice of absolutely everything. Look at product descriptions, ad copy, sales copy, product images, website layout, fonts, colors, pricing, upsells, downsells, cross-sells, email marketing tactics, etc. You’ll learn a lot, and that knowledge will help you become more successful.
Buy your competitor’s products:
When you take notice of everything, buying your competitor’s products becomes so much more valuable. You’re not only getting whatever they’re selling to you, but you’re getting their sales tactics, product design strategies, marketing strategies, and more. So if you have the money, I highly recommend you buy your competitor’s products to see what works and doesn’t work.
The strategies I listed above are strategies I personally use when executing the ethical business hacking tactic. There are also various software programs out there that can do these things for you. Personally, I have never used one before, so I cannot vouch for any of them.
The main takeaway I want you to get out of this aren’t ways to execute ethical business hacking, but learning to be super aware and conscious of things around you. Awareness is the key to successful ethical business hacking.
Ethical Business Hacking And Modelling For Success
To build a profitable business fast, you may want to use ethical business hacking. This strategy allows you to model after successful companies and avoid much of the potential losses from experimenting. Once you create a profitable base, then experimenting more and growing your company bigger is pretty straightforward.
Additionally, if you want to learn more about this concept, I highly recommend looking at the One Funnel Away Challenge from Russell Brunson (affiliate link).
If you have any questions or comments about ethical business hacking, leave them down below, and I will be happy to respond!
Affiliate disclosure: All links marked with (affiliate link) are affiliate links where I will earn a commission if you buy through the link. Please read our affiliate disclosure for more detail.
Kevin, thank you for your post about “Ethical Business Hacking”. The content was both interesting and informative. It has given me some new thoughts for how to grow my online business. I especially enjoyed the advice contained in your section on “How to use ethical business hacking to become successful. Do you think it is possible for anyone to become successful by following your advice?
Hi Jenni, thank you for the comment. Yes, I believe anyone can become successful using ethical business hacking strategies. Information is so widely available now that there is no excuse for not knowing enough. The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is that successful people act on their knowledge.
I think that if you want to succeed in the business you do have to watch your competitors. Have to see what is happening in the market. And most important what is trending in that particular time as fashion and trends seem to change quickly. And following trends gives you a chance to earn more. Thanks for the advice on how to actually hack more competitors.
Absolutely. Thanks for the comment!
Hello there! This has been an interesting read. I definitely have not heard of “ethical business hacking” before but I think it may be a concept that is subconsciously used by people (perhaps in a less detailed way). Whenever we have mental blocks, we might be stuck there for a while so what better way than to look at others’ examples for new ideas? Of course there are some limitations when doing that but that is something that we can all use from time to time. Thanks for explaining it more through his article.
Hello. Ethical business hacking is something very few people do. Success is all around us and yet, a ton of people never look at other successful people’s strategies and attempt to copy. It’s definitely something everyone should use more often to grow their career and businesses.
Thanks for sharing this useful information.
This is all very sensible information. If you want to compete with the competition then you have to know as much about them as you possibly can. Knowing how they tick is essential for you to know where and how they are succeeding.
You are certainly right that we cannot be better than the big market leaders, but if we shadow them closely, then there is a good chance that you might get a slice of it.
Keep up the good work.
No problem!
This is totally new concept for building a successful online business which I now understand, all thanks to your article. It makes sense to borrow some inspiration from established businesses to use similar strategies with your website to get success faster. Using your tips on investigating the competitors and taking the One Funnel Away Challenge, I’ll surely start making some real changes to improve my chances of growing my website using ethical business hacking and ultimately generate more revenue while also helping my audience solve their problems.
Good luck!
Really Interesting and out of the ordinary perspective you have given the word “hacking”. As soon as I read that word, as you said, I immediately thought about someone trying to get into another person’s account regardless of what the account is about. Personally, I like to stick to my own path and work my way towards what I want my website to be, but I have never thought about this business model from that point of view. I have taken so many good ideas from this post and I can’t wait to put them into action.
All the best to you!
This is an interesting approach to business. As newbies, most of the time we spend a lengthy period figuring out things. I would label this period “reinventing the wheel”. We could save all that time if we just go to our competitors and see what’s working for them. Sounds simple but it’s powerfu! Thank you!
Yep, absolutely!
Thank you for this very informative article, I have really enjoyed reading it. In order to compete with others out there, you need to them and what their business is about. We can’t beat the big names out there, but following their example and how they maintain their success can serve as a blueprint to guide you and keep you on track to maintaining your own success.
Absolutely.
Hi, I’ve certainly never heard of “ethical business hacking”. I was curious about your post and of course I read it all. Reading also makes sense, in today’s competitive environment, to win against competitors, the more we have to understand them more to be able to have coping strategies. Please continue to uphold.
Thanks for the articl
No problem.
Thank you for this informative article! I really liked this, and sometimes I think the name would scare people, but really, you are doing what successful business people do, which is finding what works and building upon that! I don’t think it would be wise to try and build a business without any kind of reference. It’s okay to learn from other businesses so long as you are not copying them, like you said!
Absolutely. Thank you for the comment!
Hi, thanks for this great article on ethical business hacking, the heading was a bit confusing I thought I was going to learn about online scams LOL! I believe the best way to grow in anything including business is to learn from those who have been successful in the the same path and do as they do. I really did not know that buying from your competitor can help you grow your business! this is something new to me, will definitely use it!
Good luck!
Excellent level article. I have wanted to read such an article a long time ago. I liked how you approached things very professionally and explained how I could search for myself and learn from others how to sell my products better. I never paid attention to what information the bottom bar contains, and I discovered a new thing for myself. Thank you very, very professional article
Thank you for commenting!
I am impressed! Loved the read and I am going to adopt this tool and implement it in my business ideas. To be honest, at first, I was like, how in the world any hacking can be ethical?! But then of course you explained the ethical business hacking in depth. I love this innovation (well it’s the innovation for me) 🙂
Btw, I loved the social networks at the bottom. What’s the plugin you are using? Lol, I am implementing the ethical business hacking right away 😀 On a serious note, I still haven’t found the right one. Please share
Thanks!
Sunny
Hi Sunny, glad you liked the post! The plugin I’m using is the Sassy Social Share plugin by Team Heateor. Definitely give it a try.
When I first saw the term ‘ethical hacking’ I thought it was the term for attempting to hack into an organization’s computer system. Your article has corrected this off-base perception by providing a very clear understanding of the usefulness that ethical hacking can provide as a business strategy, particularly for a less-resourced SME. As you suggest mimicking the approaches of top firms in a sector across the website and social media can provide very good intelligence to assess what is useful and what is not. I can see how a composite can be developed from various firms to determine where the gaps lie and how I could provide innovative solutions that would win market share. If there are any templates that you have and can share I would be grateful for the same. Thank you for this very useful approach.
Thanks for the comment. I recommend checking out the One Funnel Away Challenge. It will help you get going with the strategies I talked about.
Very interesting article. There is always lot of discussion what is ethical and what’s not in business and in Internet this boarder is even more blur. There is nothing wrong to observe our competitors, learn from them and copy their approach. I guess line is with their intellectual property, as long as we are looking on their behavior and strategy all is fine, but its unethical to copy their site, text and all what they created.
Absolutely. Don’t copy, model instead!
Hello!
Thank you forward the insights you provide. The legitimacy you lend to the word “hacking” is priceless!
Your content also provides the answer to a question I have had in regards to an aspect of the training I’m involved in.
That would be an application that you are able to “spy” on your competitors sites. Maybe spy is a little strong. Maybe I should use comparison. So that is a good tool for finding tactics and systems of designs that are working and (not copy) but “model” after if you do choose?
Have I got the gist of ethical hacking?
How long have you employed these tactics and how many sites do you own?
Would you recommend someone whom has just entered the “ field” to have multiple sites?
Thank you for the opportunity to review your site and I wore my hackers hat the whole time! Best of luck to you.
Larry
Hi Larry, you got the general gist of ethical hacking. I have employed these tactics for a few years now and own quite a few sites. I have nearly ten websites in various industries including affiliate marketing, e-commerce, as well as local marketing websites. For the “field” I’m assuming you mean internet business world. If someone new enters the internet business world, most people will recommend starting with one website to fast-track your way to making money, but you can definitely start multiple sites if you love working on internet businesses and you’re mostly interested in learning a lot. Hope that helps!
I actually received a connection request on a business social media platform and this guy listed his occupation as “ethical hacker” and I thought, “Ethical? Yeah, right.” and rejected his request. Haha!!
While modeling a business after another more successful business is a great plan (and has been done many, many times by many, many companies), I’m glad that you brought up the difference between modeling after and copying them. It’s an important topic and the more successful a company becomes, the more likely they are to get busted for cloning.
Yep. Thanks for commenting!
I really don’t like the idea of modeling someone else’s website for my benefit. I have been on the other end of this. I know a gal who has completely revamped her site to be formatted just like mine. When I first saw it, I had to take a double take and was really in disbelief that she couldn’t come up with her own ideas. So being on the other end, it is not really a good thing to do.
Sure, you don’t have to model after success. You can also try reinventing the wheel and look for your own. Generally, “your own ideas” are just a mixture of other people’s ideas anyway.
Hi, & ntmu. First I have to admit I have no experience relating to your topic.
I have been looking and reading throughout your article and because I have no experience I want to learn and assimilate as much as I can. I really like your topic regarding “Ethical Business Hacking”.
I have no idea what that’s mean and I really love when you said that you have to be innovative in order to become number one, unique in what you are doing. I deeply agree with you when to be unique through everything is what’s makes us different from the rest of the world. I am really curious and I will try to implement what you’ve saying-although FB delete my account- to combine the advert running through Fb and get traffic in this way with email lists. To be honest I haven’t get there yet. But thank you for sharing this and get me the opportunity to learn through you about business hacking.
My question is, how do I become successful if I am an absolute null on FB, advertising on social media and I do not know how to do this?
Thanks for the comment. My best advice is to keep learning and trying again. For Facebook specifically, I recommend looking for successful people’s brand pages and looking at their ads. If they have been successfully running ads on Facebook for a long time, you can model after them and lower your chances of getting banned on Facebook.
Thanks for posting about ethical business hacking.
I haven’t read about it yet and now it has intrigued me.
The post is great and full of useful information. I will try to use your ideas in my online business as well.
It may be a good strategy and successful. I like the post as you explained everything in detail.
Good luck!
Greetings, I’ve just gone through your article about ethical business hacking. I find it very educative and informative. In businesses, we all want to become successful and make a profitable business. I think ethical business hacking is important because it is incredibly powerful for start-ups in large markets where there are already successful businesses as you have clearly stated. Thank you so much for sharing this amazing article with us, I will be visiting your site more often to learn more.
No problem!
I’ve been doing this unconsciously for a long time. At first it was just networking, finding like minded people and spreading the word about Dashboard Destinations. After a while I was taking what I like about their business and applying it to my own. I’m glad I got to learn this was a real thing, and it even has it’s own term.
Well, it’s a term I coined based on Russell Brunson’s funnel hacking term, but yes, it’s a real thing.
Great post, by the way. The same techniques are great for looking for a career. When I was in high school eons ago, if there was a career we were interested in, we were advised to find a mentor in the field. It’s important to check out and learn from the people who are already doing what you want to do. Businesses do ethical business hacking all the time. It not about copying what the business is doing. It is about seeing what works and make it better.
There was a jean company called the Gap that only had a location in San Francisco, CA. The Gap researched what the leading Jean company Levi was doing well. The Gap made a drastically different type of jeans from Levi but started offering delivery to their customer homes. The Gap became very popular because a customer could call the gap and tell them what they were looking for, and the Gap would deliver it. If the customer didn’t like it, they could return it at any local Gap store. This was way before Amazon that eventually conquered internet shopping. Keep up the great work! 🙂
Yep, thank you!
Hi Kevin, Ethical business hacking and modeling successful people or businesses is the fastest way to become successful in your business.
If you want to succeed in your online business you need to watch established businesses. Ethical business hacking will help you master advanced analysis and techniques to grow your online business.
Ethical business hacking will also help you review your business if you are still on track and still solving your target market problem.
If you want to succeed in your business pay attention to the little things, as it is the little things that make the biggest difference, find someone getting the results you want to get and study what they do and apply it to your own business.
Absolutely.
“There is a very fine line between modeling and copying that you cannot cross.”
So true, from the little I have managed to gather about this topic. I mean it stands to reason that you would want to do as much as possible that is the same, without actually copying everything. Getting as close to that line as possible would mean that if it doesn’t work, there are a lot fewer variables to trace and eliminate to figure out why it didn’t work.
Very insiteful article, thanks.
No problem.
This is a very informative post on Ethical Business Hacking and has given me great inspiration on how I can grow my audience. It is indeed very important to know what our competition is doing. And if they are making money, it means they are doing something right and we would want to copy that. You have provided me with lots of tips on how to search for what my competition is doing.
Absolutely. Good luck with your ventures!
WOW! So informative! I have a lot of research to do. I had no Idea that this was even feasible. This will help me a lot in my online business and specifically because there are a lot of people that do what I do. It will help me differentiate between what is important and what isn’t. I couldn’t be more grateful. Thank you!
No problem.
Thank you for a very interesting article. I agree with your own definition of “Ethical Business Hacking” as being “the act of researching and spying on successful competitors and then modeling your own business after them to try and reach similar success.”
As you say, this works for many parts of your business: “You can ethically business hack your website design, ads, marketing, products, and even operations by investigating your competitors.” What a great idea! Find a successful “model”, even if it’s from one of your competitors, and then copy that model!
I agree with you that ethical business hacking can be used to become successful. It is unbelievably powerful for start-ups in large markets where there are already successful businesses.
Therefore, looking for the top “brands” in your niche sounds to me like the path to success! As you state, “Investigate and research the successful businesses you found. Examine their websites and use tools like similarweb to see if you can discover how much traffic they’re getting.” (Similarweb is the “official measure of the Digital World”. It is the fastest and easiest way to discover what’s really happening online.) The goal of attracting traffic to one’s website should always be tops in any online business.
As you say, “find a profitable path fast. Once you’re making a profit, then you can experiment and test more extensively.” Excellent advice!
Thanks again for a very informative article.
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your Ethical Business Hacking Tools And Resources’ section.
Next, I would like to hear more about your funnel hacking concept.
No problem. Once I write an article about funnel hacking, I’ll link it here!