How the funnel works, rung by rung

The mechanism: a staircase made of prices

A funnel is a staircase. The first step is free. Every step after that costs more.

You are never shown the whole staircase on day one. You are shown one step. Then the next one.

Here are the five rungs, in the order they reach you.

Rung 1: free content

Short videos, a podcast, a free Discord. It costs nothing and it is meant to cost nothing.

Its only job is to make you recognize a face and trust it a little.

Rung 2: the free training

Ninety minutes, registration required, called a training or a workshop or a masterclass.

The US Federal Trade Commission described this rung at Growth Cave plainly. YouTube ads brought people in. Emails then “reinforced the deceptive video messages” and pushed them to book a consultation.
FTC press release, 7 March 2025

Rung 3: the entry product

A course, a membership, an event ticket. This is the first real charge.

It is priced low enough that you don’t stop to think: from $99 a month to about $2,000 in the documented cases. It is also the qualifying step. Paying once proves you will pay.

Rung 4: the booked call

Now a person calls you. It is called a strategy call or a consultation.

There is no price on the page for what comes next. The price arrives in the call. The call: what happens in sixty minutes (in the kit) takes that hour apart.

Rung 5: the top

The mastermind, the accelerator, the done-for-you package. This is where the five-figure prices are.

This rung almost never prints a price.

What the evidence says

Every row below comes from a regulator, a court settlement, or a live page we read on 19 September 2026.

Slide sideways for the other columns.

Sources, in full:
FTC, March 2025
FTC, September 2024
NPR, 31 March 2017
jointherealworld.com
funnelhackinglive.com/fhl2026

One more, and it is an allegation only. A US class action against Rich Dad Education described the same ladder. It said free classes and $199 seminars led to upsells of “up to $64,899” per person. A claim in a lawsuit is not a finding by a court.
Courthouse News

What they say at each rung, in their own words

These are phrases regulators pulled out of real marketing. All of them are FTC allegations, quoted from FTC press releases.

• Growth Cave’s owner told buyers “It is literally IMPOSSIBLE to fail”. The entry program promised “$20,000 to $50,000 in passive income”.
• On the strategy call, Growth Cave staff said buyers would “begin making money within four to six weeks”. They also offered a “$10,000 profit guarantee”.
• Growth Cave’s Cashflow Consultant Academy, priced at up to $6,800, promised placement with “wealthy business owners” worth “tens of thousands of dollars in monthly income”. The FTC says buyers “often are never placed with any client at all”.
  FTC, 7 March 2025
• Ascend Ecom promised a “five-figure monthly income by the second year”.
  FTC, 25 September 2024
• Air AI told customers they would earn back “tens of thousands of dollars within 30 days”. The FTC says some consumers lost as much as $250,000.
  FTC, August 2025

The language gets more specific as the price goes up. The ads show a lavish lifestyle. The strategy call promises money “within four to six weeks”.

What happened to the people who climbed

Click Profit sold Amazon storefronts. The FTC’s complaint alleges consumers were charged a “management fee” of at least $45,000, plus thousands more for inventory.

The same complaint alleges Amazon “blocked, suspended, or terminated about 95% of Click Profit’s stores”, that “more than one-fifth of the company’s stores on the platform earn no money at all”, and that “another third earns less than $2,500 in gross lifetime sales”.
FTC, 18 March 2025

Those allegations were never tested at trial. The operators were permanently banned from the industry by court order in August 2025.
FTC, 25 August 2025

The tell: prices are printed at the bottom and hidden at the top

We read these pages on 19 September 2026.

• The bottom rungs print a price.
• The top rungs print a button. Funnel Hacking LIVE’s VIP Floor says “Application Only”, and Tony Robbins Business Mastery says “Apply now” where the tuition should be.

funnelhackinglive.com/fhl2026
tonyrobbins.com
Tony Robbins, program terms

Why hide it? A printed price can be screenshotted, compared and slept on. A price spoken to you at minute fifty cannot.

How to spot it

Run this list against anything you are looking at right now.

1. The free thing needs your email and your phone number.
2. The training ends with a sales pitch.
3. There is a “next level” mentioned but never priced.
4. The only way to get that price is to book a call.
5. The booking form asks what you earn, or what you have saved.
6. A person messages you personally before the call.
7. The top tier says “apply” where the price should be.

Three or more of these, and you’re in a funnel.

What to do instead

1. Write down what you think the top rung costs, before you climb. Then ask the seller, in writing, what the most expensive thing they sell costs.
2. Ask for the price by email, not on a call. An honest seller will put it in writing.
3. Take the page apart before you reply. Read a sales page in ten minutes (in the kit) has the ten-minute method.
4. Give yourself a delay. Wait five days before you reply. The call: what happens in sixty minutes (in the kit) says why.
5. Look the seller up before the call, not after. Check a seller in fifteen minutes (in the kit) has the free lookups.
6. Take the twenty questions in Twenty questions to ask before you pay anyone (in the kit) and send them as one email.

The download below is the staircase on one page. Print it, and mark the rung you are standing on today.