Why My Books Go Viral (David Perrell Interview) | Ep 885

Summary

Summary of "Why My Books Go Viral (David Perrell Interview) | Ep 885"

Podcast: The Game with Alex Hormozi
Host: Alex Hormozi
Guest: David Perel
Release Date: May 14, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 885 of "The Game with Alex Hormozi," entrepreneur and author Alex Hormozi engages in a deep dive conversation with David Perel about the intricacies of his writing process. This episode explores how Alex crafts his bestselling books, the strategies behind making them go viral, and the lessons learned from his journey in building a substantial online presence.

Alex's Writing Journey and Passion

Alex begins by sharing his lifelong passion for writing, emphasizing that writing is one of the few activities he deeply enjoys. Despite not being traditionally labeled as a writer, Alex recounts, “[00:00] I weirdly am not considered a writer, but it's the thing that I probably enjoy most in the world.” He highlights his dedication to writing from a young age, mentioning his involvement with school publications and his decision to pursue writing over a full scholarship: “[00:54] I actually got a full scholarship to college for writing. I decided not to take the scholarship and go to Vanderbilt instead.”

Structured Writing Process

When discussing his disciplined approach to writing, Alex outlines his daily routine which ensures maximum productivity. He states, “[01:24] I write on days that I know have at least, like, six hours or more uninterrupted.” Alex emphasizes the importance of creating a distraction-free environment by using earplugs and headphones, and reserving writing for days without scheduled commitments to fully immerse himself in the process.

Outlining and Content Structuring

Alex elaborates on his method of outlining books, starting with the table of contents as the foundational game plan. “[02:27] I outline a book with what the table of contents is first. That’s the hardest part.” He maintains a consistent structure for each chapter, integrating narratives and examples to elucidate non-fiction concepts. This approach ensures clarity and engagement, allowing readers to easily grasp complex ideas.

Balancing Planning and Discovery

Alex discusses the balance between having a structured plan and allowing room for discovery during the writing process. “[06:46] I'd say two-thirds discovery, one-third getting the stuff that I already have out.” This flexibility enables him to refine ideas and develop nuanced frameworks as new insights emerge, enhancing the depth and validity of his content.

Editing and Iterative Refinement

The editing phase is rigorous, with Alex often going through multiple drafts to perfect his work. He shares, “[26:45] I have to delete if I can,” illustrating his willingness to remove entire sections if they don't resonate with readers. This iterative process ensures that only the most valuable and coherent ideas make it into the final manuscript.

Marketing Strategies for Virality

A significant portion of the conversation focuses on the strategic marketing efforts that make Alex’s books go viral. He explains the meticulous process of AB testing book titles and subtitles: “[15:39] I AB tested probably like 3 or 4 of the image of different... different back variations.” By experimenting with different titles like "$100 Million Leads" versus "$100 Million Marketing," Alex identifies the most compelling options that resonate with his target audience.

Creating Evergreen Content

Alex emphasizes the importance of writing content that remains relevant over time. He avoids referencing specific platforms or fleeting trends, ensuring his books have a lasting impact: “[38:48] Think about writing a book on advertising without talking about any single platform.” This strategy not only extends the shelf life of his books but also ensures they continue to provide value to readers years after publication.

Writing vs. Video Content

Differentiating between writing and video content, Alex notes that while writing allows for deep, structured exploration of ideas, video content requires a more streamlined and engaging approach. “[21:48] The biggest leverage on performance for a video is the hook, packaging, title, thumbnail, first 30, 60 seconds.” This distinction highlights his ability to adapt his communication style to different mediums effectively.

Building an Audience vs. Creating Products

Alex advises against the common mistake of prioritizing product creation over audience building. He believes that focusing on expanding his audience creates a stronger foundation for long-term success: “[54:54] It's a business mistake... It's creating your reputation through valuable content rather than diversifying into multiple products that dilute your focus.”

Notable Quotes

• “[00:00] I weirdly am not considered a writer, but it's the thing that I probably enjoy most in the world.”
• “[01:24] I write on days that I know have at least, like, six hours or more uninterrupted.”
• “[02:27] I outline a book with what the table of contents is first. That’s the hardest part.”
• “[06:46] I'd say two-thirds discovery, one-third getting the stuff that I already have out.”
• “[15:39] I AB tested probably like 3 or 4 of the image of different... different back variations.”
• “[26:45] I have to delete if I can.”
• “[38:48] Think about writing a book on advertising without talking about any single platform.”
• “[21:48] The biggest leverage on performance for a video is the hook, packaging, title, thumbnail, first 30, 60 seconds.”

Practical Advice for Aspiring Writers

Alex concludes with actionable advice for those looking to write impactful books:

1. Define Clear Objectives: Understand why you are writing and how it serves your purpose.
2. Maintain Discipline: Dedicate uninterrupted time to writing regularly.
3. Iterative Editing: Be prepared to revise extensively to ensure clarity and value.
4. Strategic Marketing: Invest time in testing and optimizing your book’s presentation to maximize reach.
5. Create Evergreen Content: Focus on timeless topics to ensure lasting relevance.

Conclusion

Episode 885 offers valuable insights into Alex Hormozi’s writing process, highlighting the dedication, strategic planning, and continual refinement required to produce viral, impactful books. His approach underscores the importance of balancing structure with creativity, rigorous editing, and strategic marketing to achieve sustained success in the literary world.

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This comprehensive summary captures the essence of Alex Hormozi's discussion on his writing strategies, providing valuable takeaways for aspiring authors and entrepreneurs alike.

Transcript

[Alex Hormozi]

Welcome back to the game. Today is a guest spot on David Perel's podcast, How I Write. And so this is a super deep dive on writing, and I would say probably about 30 to 40% of it's on copywriting. And so the book and the books that I've written, the process, how I think through it. If you write for a living in any way, so you write emails, you write blogs, you write books, you write webinars, you write video sales letters, you write slack messages. If you write words, then you might get value from this. I weirdly am not considered a writer, but it's the thing that I probably enjoy most in the world. And I actually got a full scholarship to college for writing. I decided not to take the scholarship and go to Vanderbilt instead. But writing has been a part of my life for as long as I've had a brain and hands. I don't get to talk about it often, and I think you might find some value from it. Enjoy it.

[David Perel]

Alex Hormozi has written two killer business books that together have sold more than 1 million copies. And all that obsessive writing has gotten him to 9 million followers across social media platforms. And this is the first interview he's ever done. That's all about the writing process. One of the things that super distinguishes you is you just, like, go into Hermosi Cave every morning and you just write, write, write. So tell me about how you do that.

[Alex Hormozi]

I wake up and then I caffeinate, and then I put earplugs and headphones on. I close all the windows, and I really only write on days that I know have at least, like, six hours or more uninterrupted, sometimes eight. Like, I definitely suffer from, like, Zigarnik effect, which is open loop, right? The idea of, like, if you have something later on in the day, like, messes with me a little bit, because I feel like I want to be able to lose myself in the writing and then, like, come up for air whenever I want to come up for air, rather than think, like, I have to be done by this time so that I can prep for this meeting or take this call or do this thing. And so I almost exclusively write on days where I have nothing on my whole calendar. And so I optimize a lot of my calendar around when I'm in a heavy writing season, around not having anything at all on my on.

[David Perel]

And then when you sit down to write and say, it's 6:00am Are you like, I want to write for six hours. These are the things I Want to get done, I'm going to get to do list. How do you think about that?

[Alex Hormozi]

Man, I feel like I'm incredibly unstructured with the writing besides just, like, violent effort, but that's about it. Like, I. I write what I write. I never had writer's block in my life. I usually have a game plan of what I'm going to write. So, like, I would say from a writing process perspective, I outline a book with what the table of contents is first. I think we were talking about that before this started. Like, the table content's the hardest thing that I spend my time on. Once I have that, that's, like, basically the game plan. And so each of the chapters, I tend to have the same structure because I write the way I would like to read. And so I like to have some sort of narrative or story that kind of puts context to what I'm talking about. I also write, obviously, nonfiction, and so this just gives color to that. I give a very short description of what this thing is that I'm going to be talking about. And then usually plentiful examples. And then I will basically put all of my Alex notes, basically, as the end. And I pretty much stuck with that setup for all of the books that I've written. And I think that that setup has just gotten cleaner and clearer between the books because they fundamentally are like my notes brought to life in a book format. But the hardest part for me is usually picking what story I want to tell in each chapter that best embodies whatever the principle is or whatever the core message of the chapter is and what visual framework I can tie to that that melts everything together or, like, ties it all together in a really clear way. That's what I spend, like. And I usually do words first. And I'll then put these highlighted caps marks where I'll say, like, a picture that looks like this. And then I'll move on. So I basically do words first. Then I'll go back through. I'll keep cleaning words, and then I'll put rough doodles in. And then only at the very end will I come in and put the final doodles. Because sometimes, like, my orders change, and I'll put numbers in a doodle that I'll find, move the paragraph around, and, like, I have to redo it. But that's been my. My overall process for writing. But I just. I just write, and I write as much as I can until I can't write anymore. Where I feel like my words per unit of time starts to, like, Drop pretty precipitously.

[David Perel]

Tell me about those notes. Where do they come from? Is that like a note on your phone? Is that stuff that you've written in emails?

[Alex Hormozi]

I have so many books to write. Like, right now, I have, like, 20 more books that I have outlined. My books are limited by my ability to promote and launch them more than they are limited by my ability to write them, because I have what I know what my other books would be like. I already know what my next two books are going to be. And I write a lot of stuff down because I don't want to forget it. Like, I have this Excel sheet that has, like, 600 stories of my life, and when I go back through them, I'm like, oh, yeah, I forgot that happened. And it's like, it's. It's. In some ways, it's kind of scary because I'm like, man, this was my life, and I barely remember, and I have to, like, retrace the synapses to, like, go back into the experience. And I think that a great. A great fear of mine is forgetting. And so I write to crystallize the memory, but also whatever the finding was, because I feel like if you can't remember the lesson, you might as well not have lived it and learned it. And so I spend a lot of time trying to crystallize the knowledge into, like, artifacts that. And I refer to my own stuff. Like, I. I use my own books for reference. I think there's an Indiana Jones quote that I like a lot. It's a. It's Sean Connery who says, I think It's Indiana Jones 3. And he says. He says, I wrote it down so I wouldn't have to remember it. And because he was like, you don't remember it? He's like, that's why I wrote it down. But it's funny because people write things to remember things, but they also write them because they think they'll forget them. So it's just kind of this really interesting dichotomy, like how. How writing serves people in different ways.

[David Perel]

Yeah. So then when you're writing your books, it seems like you're really good at crystallizing ideas in your head. So when you sit down to write leads or offers, how much fidelity do you feel like you had before you started the writing project versus how much of writing is a process of discovery for you?

[Alex Hormozi]

I'd say two thirds discovery, one third getting the stuff that I already have out. Oh, okay. Yeah. Like, as I'm writing it, I'm like, ooh, I didn't think about that. I'm gonna have to clarify that. And that's kind of like. I feel like the most exciting part, that's the fun part, is when I, like, encounter some apparent conflict between two ideas that I know are both true but seem to be conflicting.

[David Perel]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

That's where, like, all right, where's the nuance here? Under what context? Where. Where's the through line for this that can create some framework that actually applies to everything. And so the two modes that I use for the frameworks or even the writing that I have in general and is utility and validity. So is this true, and in how many situations is it true and is it useful? And so, for example, if I say, sometimes things happen and sometimes things don't, incredibly valid, not very useful. Now, on the flip side, a lot of, like, at least in the nonfiction world, a lot of, like, sales and marketing lore. Very useful, not valid. So I can prove a time when there's some sort of tip or trick that works maybe in this scenario, but not that scenario. And so trying to distill out, like, what's the fundamental principle that applies to all scenarios is what makes that interesting for me. Like, I have tons of anecdote, and that's what creates some of the stories that are, like, in the books that I have. But I call it, like, how do I break this? So I'm like, how do I break this model? How do I break this truism? And if I can't break it and I can't think of a way that I'm like, it's done. Like, it's good.

[David Perel]

Yeah. My challenge when I do that is I kind of fall in love with my ideas, especially after I've just written them. So, like, if I'm 2pm I did a morning writing session. I mean, it's like. I mean, it's like my mom. Like, you can't say anything bad about her, you know, but, like, it kind of takes time. And so I'm pretty dependent on other people to help break ideas. It doesn't sound like you have that same challenge, though.

[Alex Hormozi]

I definitely rely on my editor, but I feel pretty strongly in saying that, like, I have very little loyalty to my ideas. Like, I'm very willing to be like, oh, yeah, this was probably not right. I'm absolutely married to the truth zero about how we get there. Right. And I think that's. That's. That's at least how I approach this.

[David Perel]

So what do you do? You enter these intense writing seasons, and is that, like, a Season of no type thing where it's like an official thing.

[Alex Hormozi]

So let everybody know I'm going to be writing. And I do say it's a season of no. So rea team knows that basically, like, I'll probably cut my calendar down significantly and maximize for full free days. And typically during that season, I'll only have two days where I'll take meetings. And so I'll have five days a week that are completely empty. And one of those days will probably get hijacked. But I would say I'm pretty good about keeping that schedule. I also really like writing. Writing has definitely been a. A guilty pleasure. I love writing and it doesn't. It doesn't make the most monetary sense for me, but I really enjoy it. Like, I was the VP of the school paper. I was the editor in chief of the literary magazine when I was in high school. I got a full scholarship to Tufts for writing when I was in high school. I never go to Vanderbilt, but like, that's so like, I. I really love writing and I think that a big part of it is I love learning. And I feel like if I really want to understand something, I write a book about it. Yeah. And that's been the process. And so I love business, and so I love the components of business. And I come in with like my preconceived ideas. These are these anecdotal frameworks that I, when I have 4, 5, 6, 8, 10 frameworks that all of a sudden start. Have like a through line that I see, I'm like, oh, there's a book here. But then when I dive in it sometimes, sometimes it goes great. And I'm like, wow, I was right. And then sometimes I'm like, oh my God, I was wrong. That's when it's like really going through the muck sometimes. Not as fun, but I want to, like, get to the other side. I don't know the value of getting to the other side because that's where I feel like you get the most fulfillment, where you're like, this is true. Like, you either talk to people one on one, or you talk to people one to many. They're either people who know you, they're people or they're not. Fight me. You know what I mean? It is valid and it's useful.

[David Perel]

I love the idea when you're writing and you feel like you've just gotten X ray vision on how reality works. It's like, I've looked at a hundred sales letters and I just saw like the core component that Just went in all those that. For me, the line that people say sometimes is, I don't like writing. I love having written. That's how I feel about the craft. It sounds like you enjoy the process a lot more though.

[Alex Hormozi]

I like both. I really do think I like both. I really enjoy writing. I do enjoy writing and I enjoy having written those moments where you have those like little mini breakthroughs, whatever we call them, at least my editor and I would call them like fight me, fight me statements where it's like we say this thing, it's like, like that is true. Like there's nothing you can say about that, you know, and when it's also useful, that's when it's like we create these, at least these little monikers to live by.

[David Perel]

Tell me about usefulness. You've mentioned this a lot. Usefulness utility. How do you think through that when.

[Alex Hormozi]

Someone uses this thing? Because I write nonfiction. Right. And so when someone uses this framework, this tool, this tactic, do they get to the desire? Do they get the desired outcome? And so if it is valid, then it is true. But if it's not useful to anyone, there's no context under which they would actually use it. And it would materially change the decision making process or their behaviors in a way that would ameliorate or make their lives better. And so I like the best framework, like the value equation was, is probably the core framework of the offers book, right? That's the, like, that was the meat that actually took like multiple years before I actually, you know, crystallized that. But that framework is useful all the time, everywhere. Like, it's useful for ads, it's useful for sales letters, it's used for making offers because fundamentally it's what do people want, right? They want things that are fast, they want, they want things that are easy, and they want things that are risk free. And if you try to find another component that's not one of those variables, it's like, it probably is one of those variables I have yet to see and maybe we'll see it later. But I've seen many people republish the value equation either as their own or they change the icons. But no one has changed the four. They are the four. And so I see that as like, it is valid now. Now when I see like, I think bad frameworks, because you can make a framework with anything. You put a triangle, you put three things on. It's a framework, right? Yeah, but that's not a good framework because I can break it pretty easily if I see lots of people starting to morph things around, then it means that it's not correct. Right. Whereas the, like, the value equation has like stood the test of time, at least for now. I mean, it's only a few years.

[David Perel]

But do you know the concept of mece? So this is. They use this a lot at McKinsey and different companies like that. So it's mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. So an example would be, ah, we're struggling with our content strategy for the business. All right, well, we got three options. We can do more, we can do better, or we can do different. But actually there's no kind of content improvement plan that isn't part of those things. And every single thing would slot into one of those buckets. So when they teach people to. To break down problems and, and stuff, they'll use the word mece. And then that's how they think about it. So it can hit all the options, but also all the options are different from each other.

[Alex Hormozi]

Wholeheartedly agree. And that's the. That's 100% how I think about it. I can't think of something that's where I say breaking the model. Like, if I can think of an example that doesn't fit in this, the model's wrong. And I just keep doing it until I get those. I mean, more better news or more better different whatever is a great moniker that I use a lot just in business too. But it's like, are there other of those in different sub segments or subcategories that don't exist or that people aren't using? And that's what I enjoy trying to discover.

[David Perel]

Let's do this. Take a hundred million dollar leads. And I want to walk through how you think about book marketing. So let's just focus on the COVID Okay. And then just show it to the camera. And what I want to hear is, as you talk through it, how did you think about leads, the icon, the subtitle? And then we'll talk about the back of the book after.

[Alex Hormozi]

Okay. So the COVID I basically had to make the decision. So this is the first book. I was like, am I going to do something totally different or am I going to just basically make this into a series?

[David Perel]

So immediately what we see is $100 million. The same that you took out the testimonial. That's what I see.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah. And so I just went with another color. There was really no rhyme or reason for blue. I was like, blue sounds fine.

[David Perel]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

In terms of the icon, I'm pretty sure I wanted to do a Magnet. I just kind of was like, you want to attract leads. And I couldn't think of it was either going to be fishing or a magnet.

[David Perel]

I think I saw somewhere that you a B Tested the heck out of those.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yes. So I a B Tested the heck out of this. I ab tested probably like 3 or 4 of the image of different, basically different. Different back variations. But the word leads I tested the hell out of. And so I had a Hundred million promotion, $100 million advertising, $100 million leads, $100 marketing. And leads was the one that won. And so I was like okay, if leads. And kind of interesting though because leads is the output of advertising. And so no one wants to advertise. People want leads. I mean that's Alex's conclusion. I could be wrong. I haven't tested it. But like, but if I, if someone said why do you think that? That would have been my. That would have been my answer. And so I tested it. Because what's really interesting, I mean and to be fair, it's like kind of the contents of the book is people do judge a book by its cover, of course. And if you're going to go through all the, all the work of writing the book which is significantly harder than testing the COVID and the title, like do that. Right. You know what I mean? And I think the first time I heard about this was I think Tim Ferriss tested four hour, a four hour work week for his book and he hated the title but it crushed all the other titles. And so he. Because he's like, I don't even really believe in like just only working four hours a week. But it just, it murdered. And so that's what the book became and obviously became bestseller. And I read this. There was this like white paper that was released by this publishing company or that helps self publishers and they talk about this dating help book that sold like no copies and this okay, yeah. And then all they did was they changed the COVID and they changed the headline or the title of the book and they became like an international bestseller. And when I saw that I was like, all right, this is important. I should take the time to actually like make sure. Now the big picture. That was basically how I picked the headline and then the image and then the subhead. I also tested a ton of too which is how to get strangers to want to buy your stuff.

[David Perel]

And how do you test that when you say this? What I would assume is I go to Google and Facebook and I see what drives the most traffic. But how do you test the Subtitle.

[Alex Hormozi]

I can tell you I have the actual tests here. So it's like, okay, I had the realistic versus the cartoon version. So I tested that out. And so the real one did better. It also was aligned with the real image ad, the first one. So I was like, okay, that's good advertising. Crushed promotion. So I was like, okay, advertising is the winner. And then I did advertising versus leads. Then leads was the winner. Then I did leads versus marketing. Now that one was really close, but leads still won. So that's why I ended up doing leads. In terms of subheads, I only showed two of the tests here, but I ended up doing like, probably five or six. How to get more people to want to buy your stuff. How to get strangers to want to buy your stuff. So strangers narrowly beat out more people. Now this is the one that I thought was the most interesting test of the whole thing. So how to get more strangers to want to buy your stuff? How to get strangers to want to buy your stuff. 71% to 29%. Like, just one word. And so when I saw it's like, it's so sensitive and I just, I just come in with like, no ego about what I think it's going to be. And even because some people are also like, hey, you should do a shorter version. So just get strangers to want to buy your stuff versus how to get strangers to want to buy your stuff. 70 to 30 with how to in front.

[David Perel]

Right?

[Alex Hormozi]

And so even word concision wasn't necessarily the thing that people kind of like optimize for. And so anyways, yeah, I tested the how to, the title, the image, and the subhead. Because fundamentally, anybody who's in my audience who has read the first book, they have a high likelihood of buying the second book if they got value from the first one. I'm not making that for them. I could just call this book two and they probably would have been willing to at least take a shot on it. I have to make this for all the people who don't know who I am. And I have to optimize for that one split second decision where they're like, it's like, you know, actually it sounds pretty good. Like, and it's clear, like, what does this book do? Get strangers to want to buy your stuff. Okay, what's the output of that? Leads. Okay, this makes sense. I need leads. So I'll buy this book on how to get strangers want to buy my stuff back cover.

[David Perel]

Talk to me about that.

[Alex Hormozi]

So this is like my little mini sales letter. So I Just wrote this as like kind of like blind bullets of the stuff inside of the book. And so I basically just took the chapters and tried to translated into a bullet that doesn't say what it is, but gives kind of like the benefit of it.

[David Perel]

But hold on, when you say this is my mini sales letter, that is like uber hermosi brain. Go and do that. So what matters in a sales letter?

[Alex Hormozi]

So you can get 2x10x or 100x more leads than you currently are without changing anything about what you sell. That I think is fair. Like it's a fairly compelling promise. And so then it's like, okay, I want to learn more about that now the next kind of like bigger font is. I wrote this book to solve your leads problem. And if you talk to small business owners, the largest reason that people will say, if you look at like the small business surveys, why they go out of business, they say lack of lack of leaf, lack of marketing, lack of new business, whatever. Second is of running out of money. But I see that as lack of leads. Right? Chicken, you know, chicken egg. And so then I put a little bit of proof. So it's like today our companies generate 20,000 new leads per day across 16 different companies or start 16 different industries. And they do it using eight never go hungry playbooks inside. Once you see them, you can't unsee them. They're so powerful. They work without your permission. Right? So like once you, once you use it, like you don't, you don't have to believe it's going to work, it just works better, period. And so you know the easiest way to get another five customers tomorrow. So that's warm outreach. That's the first, the first of the Core 4. So what's the benefit of the Core 4? That's warm outreach. It's the how you get first five customers, the hook retain reward system. So that's content. So it's the second chapter. And so I just talk about the media part of it for that, you know, six part ad framework that gets more people, especially strangers, to want what you sell. That's gonna be the paid ads chapter. And so I just took the chapters and turned them into the benefits of the chapter.

[David Perel]

Those are super specific.

[Alex Hormozi]

That's what strikes the bullets.

[David Perel]

Yeah, right. Because if I look at these bullets, right? The six part ad framework that gets more people, especially strangers, to want what you sell. How to get people to want what you sell would be like, ah, but you're like, there's actually a lot of things going on. So six Part ad framework. The specificity leads to credibility. There more people, especially strangers. To me, that nuance is like, yo, I've thought about this. I know how you think well, and these are just very concrete.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah. So that's how I thought about the front and the back cover of the book.

[David Perel]

I like it. How is your writing different for when you're writing for books like that versus video? And what comes first? The books lead to the videos, the videos lead to the books. How do you think about that?

[Alex Hormozi]

Totally different process. Yeah. So namely because of the volume that has to go out. If I'm on camera, I'm not very scripted. It's more like these are bullets that, you know, we'll probably make sure that we nail the introduction, because that's very important. So nailing the introduction, nailing what the roadmap is for the, for the, say, the movie, for the video. And then, like, it's almost like I'd say this. The YouTube videos are far closer to what my writing outlines look like than my final product. Because if I were to write the YouTube videos as though I were writing the book, it would take me probably a week of. Sure, of five days, five full days to. To write just the video, to make it to air, you know, airtight air, seal all the words. But we can do, you know, a writing outline in like 30 minutes or an hour, you know, for. For a video. And that's much more manageable given, like, I actually do other stuff for a living.

[David Perel]

How do you think about those hooks real quick?

[Alex Hormozi]

Guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you got customer success, you've got it. You've got recruiting, hr, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30ish pages for each of the stages. Once you enter the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to aqua position.com forward/roadmap R O A D map roadmap. So we will look at other industries that have higher performing videos typically and look at packaging that seems to have performed well. And we say is there a business version of this that we could do?

[David Perel]

So what's an example of that?

[Alex Hormozi]

There's this one where this girl said like my, my memory, like my system so that you can out learn anyone or something like that. And I think we made a version of that. It was like how you can outwork anyone. And I think that's what we ended up doing for the video.

[David Perel]

So then as you think about the interactions, the hooks, the fraying for the videos, what matters because it's interesting. You basically said I'm pretty unscripted except for the very beginning, which a lot.

[Alex Hormozi]

Of work goes into kind of like the book. Well, except the book is very scripted all the way through. But like, but like the amount like 80, 20 on the effort of like where's the biggest, the biggest bang for the buck is always going to be it's you know, hook, packaging, title, thumbnail, first, you know, 30, 60 seconds is going to be where you have probably the biggest leverage on performance for a video. And this is just something we learned. Obviously average view duration long term is going to be something that lifts a video. But right out the gate it's hard, not impossible to overcome a video that's just tanky. Yeah, we want to make stuff that people want to consume. And so I think that like solving for making sure they want to consume it is the title and the packaging and the introduction and we have to just solve for congruence. Like is the thing they clicked on, the thing that they're going to get and making sure that they feel like they're going to get it like that that promise is going to get delivered on.

[David Perel]

And how do you think about when you're delivering a story, how that is different in video versus writing?

[Alex Hormozi]

I actually feel like my stories in video are pretty, are pretty comparable to my stories in writing. Yeah. Cause I think I have a pretty colloquial kind of tone that I use in the stories and writing. I. My writing more mirrors how I talk or it comes to stories, right? Yeah. So here I am in the middle of nowhere, right. Like you know, like and a guy pulls a gun like Stephen King. Like if you're not sure what to do with the story, just bring in a guy with a gun. Same, same kind of idea. But I just, I tell it like I would be telling it to a friend. There's probably different styles of writing. I assume you would know this better than I do, But I tend to try and get everything out as fast as I can. Yeah. And then I kind of look at it as like, coats of paint. And that's the description I like. It's just like I let it breathe, then I come back to it, and then I do another coat, then another coat, do another coat. And for me, most of the kind of coats of paint, I'd say the. The vast majority of my editing that's not socialized is me crunching. It's crunching things down. Crunching things down, crunching things down. How can I use fewer words? How can I use simpler words? How can you use fewer words? How can you. Simpler words. And I keep doing that until I feel like anything else that I would remove would materially detract from the substance of the book. Once I do that and the. That process right there is usually like 10 drafts. So I do a lot, a lot of drafts.

[David Perel]

You did 19 for leads?

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, Needs leads was unbelievably hard. And I basically started from scratch at about halfway through those. So, like, at like, I think it was. I think it was draft 12. If, like, I remember it, it was like, draft 12 was like. I was like, I'm done. Like, this is it. This book's awesome. And then that's when I socialized with like, 10 or so readers and was like, okay, let me know what you guys think. And the feedback that I got, I was like, I have to rewrite the book. And so I rewrote the book. But most of the time, the editing from the socialized post is I actually use Stephen King's kind of, like, method there, which is if people have, like, little tidbits, I'll usually clarify those pieces, add those in. That's easy. If I have many people who have different comments about one section, their comments usually don't matter. It's more that there's something wrong with the section. And so in the third book that's coming out, there were like two chapters that were short that I put at the beginning, which is prime territory in terms of people falling off. What? It's super front end feedback. And there was just like, every reader had something to say about this chapter. And I just cut the chapter entirely and then just edited the book to not reference the material in that chapter. And I thought of the chapter as a pretty core chapter to the book. And so then I was like, okay, how can this book exist without this chapter. And I ended up being able to do it by literally just doing control. R. Control. F, for a word that I basically hardcore defined as. This is one of the core concepts. And it was like, I just will fully explain it every time I have it throughout the book. And as soon as I cut, it was. It was actually. I think it was three chapters, one section. It was like. The book was just. It's like reading downhill. Yeah. I mean, it's just like you just. You just keep rolling. Totally. And that's kind of how I see it. So little things. I'll just. If I agree with them, I'll quick fix. If I don't agree, I'll just ignore. But if many people come in one section, I'll strongly consider deleting it entirely. Or I have to just delete. Well, delete the whole thing and then rewrite it. Or I'll just delete it entirely. Most times, I'll just delete it if I can.

[David Perel]

And then when you say the pain is the pitch, I mean, I understand what that means conceptually, but tactically, when you're sitting down to write copy, you're working with a business and you're trying to get more leads or something like that, what do you do with that sentence?

[Alex Hormozi]

So you fundamentally have two. Two. Two methods of persuasion. Right. You could go forward. I can go into that. But, like, you have more good stuff, less bad stuff, fundamentally. So you got promise, you got pain. These are your two weapons. Right? And so my goal is to highlight both of those. Now, from a selling perspective, you make an offer at the point of greatest deprivation, not at the point of greatest satisfaction. And so, for example, let's say you're. You're incredibly hungry, and you come to my steakhouse, and I say, do you want a steak? And you say, yeah, so you have a steak. And after you have the steak, I'm like, how was it? You're like, oh, my God, it was amazing. Thank you so much. And I say, awesome, do you want another steak? And you'd be like, no, I'm good. And I'm like, what? You didn't like the steak? And you're like, no, I'd like the steak. I'm. I'm. I'm good. Right? And that's because I'm trying to sell at the point of greatest satisfaction, not at the greatest point of point of greatest pain. Whereas if you walk in the second time a week later, and you're starving and you walk in, I say, hey, you're really hungry, and you're like, yeah. And you're like, want two steaks? You might be like, yeah, two steaks. Hungry, right? And then you bought. You buy more. And so we sell the point of greatest pain, not the point of greatest satisfaction. Now the caveat to this is people are like, wait, you should sell when you provide value, only when the value that you deliver creates a new problem that you can then solve. And so, for example, if you are a marketing agency, whatever, and you help a customer get a whole bunch of leads, all right, you, once you solve their leads problem, if you say, hey, do you want even more leads? They're like, no, I can't even handle them. So at that point you solve the first problem. But now they need somebody to help them work the leads. They're now hungry for dessert or whatever, so they have a new deprivation that we can then sell the next thing. And so I see that as a big mistake from a copywriting perspective is actually the timing of when the copy is being delivered in the, in the larger context rather than the subcontext of the, of the, of the prospect. And so when I'm thinking about the pain is the pitch to bring this full circle is I want to think about as many very concrete examples that someone would experience pain. And so I remember when I was so when Layla were really poor and I just lost everything and we decided that we weren't going to actually do the gym business anymore. So there's this like, you know, 30 day period where we decided we're not going to do the gym fit. And so I said, okay. She had lost £100 and done a fitness competition and all that stuff. And I was like, all right, I'm going to write a sales page of your story because my story isn't compelling. I've had a six pack my whole life. No one cares. And so but her, she had all this weight loss, whatever. And so I wrote her life story and she was like, this is more compelling. And I'm the one who lived it. And I didn't live any of it. But I just thought about like, how she would wear a coverall when she would go to the beach and she would get chafing between her thighs when she was walking all day. She was overweight.

[David Perel]

Back to that specificity.

[Alex Hormozi]

And not wanting to be in pictures and just be always in the second row or to the side because she didn't like having a picture taken. And I'm like, how many of these moments, right? And so like pain happens in moments. And so I want to capture the moment. Because anyone who's had that pain is like, I never want to live that. I would never, never want to have that happen again. I think that if you can accurately describe a prospect's pain in their own language, in their own experiences, you can persuade them to buy whatever your product is based on how well and how knowledgeable they believe you to be as a function of how specific you were about the pain they're experiencing. And so if I. If I'm talking to a business owner that's doing $10 million a year, and I'm like, this is what's going wrong in it, right? And this is what's going wrong in sales, and this is what's going on in your marketing. And this is what's going on. And they're like, okay, I get it. I get it. You. You know where I'm at. I'm like, right, do you want my help? I don't have to make a promise if I can describe the pain so acutely. And they're like, he can't know that pain this well and not be able to deliver.

[David Perel]

Sure.

[Alex Hormozi]

And so that's where the pain is. The pitch comes from. And so oftentimes when people are trying to write sales pages or even they're trying to do a sales pitch, they. I think many people will overemphasize promise. And there's nothing wrong with having promise, you know, provide it's compliant, all that stuff. But the thing is, pain is what motivates a lot of people to take action.

[David Perel]

It's cool to hear you speak, because what really stands out is how much of an engineer you are. And you have this almost mathematical, not formulaic way of speaking, but you are in search of formulas in the way that engineers are in basically trying to break down reality into formulas, to basically say, yo, I'm trying to figure out how things work, simplify it, get it to a place where it's super clear, concrete stories, examples, and then I'm going to share it for you so that any problem that you have, here's an answer. I feel like that's a lot of what you're going for in your writing.

[Alex Hormozi]

It's 100%. What I'm going for is actually very well described. When I get, like, in my deep emotional places, I'm like, I just feel like I want to understand the world better. And a lot of times I feel like I don't understand it well at all. And so a lot of my writing is an attempt to just understand one tiny quarter of it. And that just happens to be the core that I spend a lot of my time in. And so I spent a lot of time thinking about business. And so a lot of my frameworks, a lot of my writing, a lot of my content is in search of simplified formulas of seeing the world accurately. And so fundamentally, if you can predict, you can control.

[David Perel]

What do you mean?

[Alex Hormozi]

If you know all the variables that you can influence to create an outcome. Right. Which means that if you have a perfect predictive model. So this would be like from a science perspective, like, if you have all the variables that predict an outcome, then if you reverse that, it means you can also control the outcome.

[David Perel]

Okay.

[Alex Hormozi]

If you can mit both the variables, if the weather is one of the variables, fine, if I can't control the weather. But if I can put someone indoors and mimic the weather, then I can in a very way, in a real way control the outcome.

[David Perel]

So what you're saying is that businesses have these similar equations and you can say, I'm struggling with this, I can pull the lever on leads and then I know what's going to happen here or there.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, we don't have enough demand. Okay, well, demand is straightforward. Are we going to talk to people one on one? Are we going to talk to them one to many? Well, what. How many customers are we going after? Fortune 100? So it's probably going to be a one to one approach. Are we going after mass market weight loss? It's probably one to many. Okay, cool. If we're doing one to many, like, are we gonna do paid ads or are we gonna be making content? Okay, well, we could use one on one to get affiliates who then are doing paid ads or doing content on our behalf. Well, then we can use that strategy. But fundamentally, the only four things that you can do as the entrepreneur or whatever is cold outreach, warm outreach, paid ads, content. That's it. It's the only thing you can do. But what about affiliates? Well, you do one of those four to get the affiliate, you reach out to them, you make content saying, hey, I'm looking for affiliates. Or you run ads saying, hey, I've got an influencer program. You're going to still have to do that first. Core four to get other people to come do the other stuff on your behalf.

[David Perel]

Here's the other. Alex, dude, there's two lines that I feel like I've really, that I think you really nailed. The first is, we'll talk about this one first. That if you put in 10 times more work into a book because the quality is Better you end up with a hundred or a thousand. X the word of mouth.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah.

[David Perel]

Talk to me about that.

[Alex Hormozi]

It's kind of the difference between, you know, gold medal and fourth place. The real difference is small. The practical difference is enormous. So what's the difference in terms of someone's life when they're the gold medalist of something? They get endorsement deals, they're forever the gold champion, like all that stuff. Fourth, it's like you get nothing. Right. And so I think a lot of people don't even get fourth to be real. You know, like they're like number 100 and they. But the thing is, they still try pretty hard.

[David Perel]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

It's just that all of the best returns come at the end of work. It's like those. It's the. It's the 16th coat of paint that really just makes it that little bit better. And I think in an increasingly connected world, more things are winner take all.

[David Perel]

Well, the way that I put it is that the curse of the Internet is global competition. The gift of the Internet is global reach.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah.

[David Perel]

And because of that, your stuff has to be way better in order to stand out. But then the rewards on the other side are way bigger.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah. I think naval has a good quote on this. He says technology democratizes consumption and consolidates production. And so it means that if you're the best in the world, you get to do it for everyone. Y and so then it's like, if you get to do it for everyone, then it's like, then trying to become the best in the world. And the best in the world definitely not going to do it on 40 hours a week. It's higher leverage to work more. Which sounds ironic or counterintuitive. Right. Because then that's kind of the point of what, Like, I think why you like that statement. It's like, how are you telling me that this unscalable effort where I'm putting in N equals whatever. Many more repetitions. Like, I'm getting diminishing returns here. Right. How can that be more efficient than doing half the work or having a ghostwriter? It's like, well, if I have a ghostwriter, no one's going to talk about my book. Right. Like, I'm just going to have a marketing campaign. I'm going to sell whatever it is before people read the book, and that's it. But the long tail on time is huge. And so the fact that, like, rich dad, poor dad still sells a hundred thousand copies a month, 40 years, I don't even know, 50 years later than when he originally wrote it, I'm like, I want to build assets, not magazines with hardcovers. And that's also why I spent a long time on all the books, to try and make them. To make them evergreen. Like, think about writing a book on advertising without talking about any single platform. Facebook is not in there. Instagram is not in there.

[David Perel]

So as you were thinking about these, you were like, in 2080, I want this book to be as useful as it was when I wrote this.

[Alex Hormozi]

And the easiest way I do it is I back test it.

[David Perel]

What does that mean?

[Alex Hormozi]

Does this make sense 2000 years ago? People still want things to be risk free. They still want them to be fast. They still want them to be easy. You can reach out to people one on one that you know that you don't know. Reach out one to many that you know that you don't know. Like, reaching out one to many is standing on the corner, corner of a street and shouting, right? That's what it is.

[David Perel]

Right?

[Alex Hormozi]

Right. You could put a billboard up. You can have a sign like, this works 2,000 years ago. And so that's. So rather than trying to predict the future, I just look at the past and say, does this still work?

[David Perel]

This one's good too. It's from Michelangelo. If people saw how much work I put into my art, they wouldn't think it's as exceptional as it is.

[Alex Hormozi]

I love this, this visual, which is that if you look at a marathon, right? If you've ever gone with somebody to some marathon that they're running and you wanted to support them, 95% of people are in two places at the beginning, at the end. But the marathon's everything in between. And so we as a society, the highlight reel is only these two places. And so what happens is, most people in their mind assume that that is the race starting and then finishing, but the 26.2 miles, that happens in between, the mundane middle, right, Master. The middle is the part where the champion's made. And so I think that to the same degree, like, if people saw that I wrote 19 drafts of this book, they wouldn't think it was that special.

[David Perel]

Can we do this? Can we open up to that table of contents? And once again, I just want to remind you, take as much time as you need to find. So it's the second sticky note here. So if you go right here, should be opened up right to it. But take as much time as you need to go through the table of contents. And I think it'd be really cool to walk us through how some of these ideas changed. And also, I just want to emphasize before you start here, this table of contents, it's not like, oh, Alex made a table of contents.

[Alex Hormozi]

No, no, no.

[David Perel]

This. The table of contents is the outline for your book.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah.

[David Perel]

And so it does a lot more than a standard table of contents.

[Alex Hormozi]

And I feel like that's how Alex's opinion. I feel like that's how books should write. Like, if you want to write. If you want to figure out if you want to read a book, I feel like you should read the table of contents and be able to make a good decision.

[David Perel]

Sure.

[Alex Hormozi]

And that's kind of. And I try to make my. My titles and chapter headings, like, pretty descriptive. Like, this is about. Or my reach.

[David Perel]

So what's going on here? So when you start, what am I looking at?

[Alex Hormozi]

So believe it or not, this book was. Was the original through line was going to be about leverage. And I ended up cutting all of the leverage concepts from the book for the most part, except for one chapter right before Lead Getters, because I just. It was so difficult to try and weave it in that I. It felt forced. I still believe it to be, like, the actual essence of that, but because it's like, how can I, as one man, get 20,000, 30,000 leads a day? Like, how? Well, I can't do it. I do it through leverage.

[David Perel]

Sure.

[Alex Hormozi]

And so that was kind of like the. The catalyst for wanting to even, like, begin writing about this.

[David Perel]

Yeah.

[Alex Hormozi]

But anyways, so this was kind of like my rough idea. It's like, okay, you know, I have to define some terms. Right. I have to define media, legion leads, content promotion, the three contact types, which is not even a thing. I thought it was going to be a thing, and it wasn't a thing. Promotions. I ended up just cutting entirely from the book and using somewhere else. I'll just leave that there, you know? And, you know, I was going to take this very, like. Like everything we used to talk about marketing is wrong. Right. And I do believe that to a great degree that that is somewhat true. But it's like, okay, now you got to define the target. So there's like, the market, you know, deeper up down adjacent, different market types. I ended up cutting that from the book. So.

[David Perel]

But what I see you doing here is you're kind of trying to do a full pass, give yourself enough fidelity to see where you're going, but you're not married to this. I mean, we did 19 drafts here, and we completely rewrote it after number 12. But you're not married to this, but it's crucial that you're actually putting enough on that you're like, I can at least start walking.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah. And so I would say that one of the biggest filters that I use for utility is whether it can be operationalized. And so the fact that it's unsurprising to me now because this was, however many years ago that I wrote that the activity box is what I call this. I don't even have the name of the core four yet. But the idea that, like, what can I tell someone to do if I can't change their behavior? They cannot learn. Which means that there's no point in writing about it unless it changes their. What they do. Right. And so that has pretty much been the. The biggest lens that I use from a cutting perspective when I'm making the book. And so I think the reason a lot of people are like, man, the books are, from what I understand, people say that it's. They're. They're really digestible. They're really easy to use, really easy to understand. It's because I talk almost zero about theory. Yes. I only talk about what you do. Yeah. And by talking that way, it demystifies a lot of it. I will eventually write a book on branding, but I looked up all the. All the definitions of branding on the Internet from different marketers, and I was like, I don't know what any of this means.

[David Perel]

They're all fluffy.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah. It's all, like, the feelings, impressions, experiences that a prospect has and associates. And I was like, I don't know what any of this is. Right. I was like, well, if I want a brand, I have to figure out what I do, what I do to brand. Right. And answering that question has pretty much been how I try to answer everything within businesses, which is like, okay, what is sales? Sales is just having a conversation that increases, like, that someone purchases. Right. It's like, okay, cool. So then everything that increases, likely that someone purchases within the context of conversation is sales. Right. And so then, like, okay, now I can start working through this. Right? Okay, so this is the first version. And what I will say that often happens is, like, I'll write all these ideas that I want to have in the book, and I'll probably end up being able to make the book, like, 10% of it. So, like, if I look at all of this, I cut out, like, I cut out so many. Like, I have this. The hoop. Just this one line was the second half of the book. Just this one line, like, operational drag Reliability, method, platform, all of that was cut more, new, better. I actually put at the end of section one, around the activities, like, anyways, I moved.

[David Perel]

So actually this is really interesting that you don't actually have a very good sense of what ideas are going to be the best ones. Like, you love more new better. You absolutely love that idea. But look where it is. It's section six. Bottom line almost looks like an afterthought. So that this idea right here, that's like an embryo that then really grew through the process of writing this book.

[Alex Hormozi]

Oh, yeah. So, like, once I get tired enough of something, I'm like, all right, I'm going to rewrite it from the top again. And so this is me rewriting it, the sections, right? And so I'm like, okay, now it's actually just to find the target where when give, ask, evaluate, scale. So I thought it was going to be this like incremental process that I'm leading someone because again, leverage was like this through line that I wanted to have through the book. And so then I got to like, okay, maybe I can try and visualize this a little bit better. And so, you know, marketing, like, where do people actually come from? Right? Because people exist. How to get them to find me, like I would have forced them to find. Which fundamentally is what I think advertising is. You force people to find out.

[David Perel]

It's also just striking that you're doing a lot of drawings to basically work out the high level thing. This isn't you're writing and then you're drawing. It's like you're drawing and that's how you kind of get the conceptual map of where you're going to go.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, I do almost all doodles in the beginning. Yeah. So doodles are at the beginning, at the end.

[David Perel]

And this is an iPad thing.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, yeah, just like just, you know, just notes or whatever. I mean, this is a huge amount of time that I was thinking. I was like, you know, media different. You know, this is a book on advertising. So I'm like, okay, well, media is a huge thing. Platform's a huge thing. Audience selection's a huge thing. And so the whole time I'm thinking like, okay, maybe that's media section one, platform section two, audience section three. And I'm like, that's not. That's gonna be so boring. Like, it's gonna be a terrible book. And then I was like, okay, what about the process? Like, how do people buy now real.

[David Perel]

Quick when you get there, you're like, oh, it' be so boring. It's going to be a terrible book. Are you down on yourself or are you at this point, like, you know what? I'm going to work through this.

[Alex Hormozi]

I need to find another way. So right here, this, right here, these four little lines end up being the second half of the book. Wow. Right. So like, it, it totally, like, it just keeps. And a lot of times it's like this cutting away process. Right. This is actually just continued from the, the, the one before because I went, this is all leverage. All this stuff was leverage. So I'm like, okay, this is the first time. I'm like, really? I've got this. Attract attention. Interrupt attention. So I was like, maybe that's going to be like an angle. Yeah. Because I didn't, I didn't, I didn't.

[David Perel]

But see, this is the Moy method, which is like, you're always trying to find either mutually exclusive, collective, collectively exhaustive, or these contrasts where you're either on this side or you're this side, which.

[Alex Hormozi]

I think is how you can make the mises. Yeah. Like, if you draw, like if you draw one line, it's going to be valid. If you draw two lines, it's much harder. Might not be valid because are they all true? Mutually exclusive, Right. Yeah. So this is me trying to put sentences in place of all the different ways you can get customers.

[David Perel]

Okay.

[Alex Hormozi]

Um. God, this is so like. And then I tried to make it this like, leverage equation of like, you times promotion times offer times the medium times the platform. Like that's all the variables that exist. This whole thing ended up being one paragraph. Wow. In, in the second half of the book.

[David Perel]

That's absolutely striking to me is how you just don't actually have a very good intuition for which one of the ideas are going to be good. And that's not. I think that that's all writers. We just kind of have to wait and see.

[Alex Hormozi]

And I was like, I'm supposedly good at marketing, so that was a little humiliating. This has been my big filter is like, what, what do I do? What do I. Yeah, what does someone do as result? And if I, if I can't clearly define that, then I probably either just need to break it down more or I just need to cut it. It's just not a thing. Yeah. That's been probably my number one filter for everything. Like, what does it change about someone's behavior? And that's why defining learning was so important for me. Like, if I want this book to educate, educate, it's about changing behavior fundamentally. If you don't change your behavior. You learn just like in the simplest. Like that is how you define learning. And the speed of, the speed of, the rate of, of learning is intelligence. So if I have to show you the same streamline multiple times before you change your behavior, then you are dumber than somebody. You can change it immediately. Sure. Right. So growing, you got do more pay more new platforms, more frequency, more uniques, more impressive. Like I, I kept like working through this and so this was actually just continued there from that same page. And I'm like, okay, scrap all of that. Let's start with just like, what about the basic questions of like, okay, maybe it's just who, what, where, when, how, how much, how long.

[David Perel]

And what's crucial is you don't get here unless you have all these pages.

[Alex Hormozi]

And so that I, for a minute I thought this was going to become the table of contents. And then what it really became is this became the action at the end of every chapter for. Yeah, go for it. Yeah. So that's the final result of me being like, oh, this isn't the table of contents. This is what I need to show for every way of advertising. So when you're posting content and you make your action checklist, you just have to say, okay, who's my customer? You know what, what am I, like, what am I going to do? Where am I going to do? What medium or platform? What am I going to make this post? So this is basically how you make your list of this is what I'm going to do. Nice.

[David Perel]

I love how messy all this stuff is. I don't know. I find that to be so gratifying, you know, because it's so clean in the output and it's just that this is a train wreck.

[Alex Hormozi]

Thanks. Yeah. Three ways. I mean, I could keep going on this, but do this.

[David Perel]

Go to the very last one for the table of contents in here.

[Alex Hormozi]

Finals. Yeah.

[David Perel]

Let's go to the final.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah. And so I got to here and then I thought, and this, this is what was so painful. I thought this was going to be a thing forever. Like, I thought that I had this like friction framework thing, like filters, because I thought it was like, maybe it's like a distillation process. Like you distill like raw attention is the input and then leads is the distilled output of that. And so I kept doing that lead distillery. I'm like, lead distillation process. And so then I was like, maybe I can make an acronym around this. And then I'm coming back to this method Medium thing that took forever to try and work through. And then I was like, can I do P's? Like, I don't know if I can find an acronym. I'll use it. I kept going. I don't even know where the end of this thing is. Right.

[David Perel]

So right here I see. Start here. Get understanding, get leads. Get lead getters, get started.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah. And then this became the final. So this was like a couple versions before the final. And then that was the final. Nice. That very messy process got me to here. Wow.

[David Perel]

I mean, this is the work, man. It's all. It's draft after draft after draft.

[Alex Hormozi]

So we look at how much stuff is here. Right. The amount that actually made it to here is like this, this line. This became one chapter and that's it. Everything else I more or less threw up. So that's how I came up with the table of contents. And then I was like, all I gotta do now is just write the book.

[David Perel]

Right. So then once you did that, then it was basically game time.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah. Then it was easy.

[David Perel]

Tell me about this. How do you think about who you're writing for? Because one of the things I learned from you is there's this difference between being known and being respected. And it's really easy to look at the analytics and say, number go up, therefore good. But no, you're trying to reach a specific kind of person. So how do you think about that?

[Alex Hormozi]

I think it's the validity utility piece. Like, is this useful? And I think that people will consume things that are useful for them. Like, does it make their life easier? Does it make things happen faster? Does it make things less risky depending on who you talk to? If I talk about food, then that applies to everyone. If I talk about leads, it's only applied to people who are advertising, which is usually business owners. And so I think about this in context of deep and wide, deep versus wide and so wide I define as something that is only useful for a beginner. And deep I define as something that is useful for anyone, like in a vertical. And so how to get your first five clients is useful, really only for a beginner, because anybody who already has customers is like, I know how to get my first five clients, but if I talk about strategy, that's useful for somebody who's starting out and somebody who's got a billion dollar company, because I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I can have something that's deep and wide. And that's kind of our sweet spot for what we try to do now. We don't always succeed. But like that is the intention is I'd like to have something that a beginner can get value from and somebody who's super advanced can also get value from independent of their context.

[David Perel]

And how do you think about the general strategy of what you're doing? Like, what was the genesis moment of we're going to make rock and business content and then that'll be the first domino that then makes all these other ones fall.

[Alex Hormozi]

Tim Ferriss has his concept of like the big domino. So you kind of like, I don't know if you're purposely referencing it, but basically like, is there one thing that is so important that I can do that if I do that, it makes the rest of my to do list irrelevant. And so it's like if you have a hundred things on the to do list, it's like there's probably not one that's important enough because if it were important enough, it would make the other ones disappear either shrink into irrelevance or accomplish by consequence. Right? And so we're investors, right? And we have capital. And so what does every investor want? They want proprietary deal flow. And you want to shift the supply demand in your favor. And so if I can have unlimited people coming towards me who have good businesses that want to do deals only with me, then I can decrease the likelihood that basically I can decrease my skill at picking and pro and negotiating and still probably do well. I saw the ultimate way of maximizing my luck surface area as building, you know, our hope is the most valuable business brand out there to business owners. And if we can build that, then I don't need to worry about all the negotiation tactics. I don't need to worry about having the most capital. I don't need to worry about having the best term sheets. I don't need to worry about any of these things. If I just have more people who want to do business with me than I can possibly do business with. And then after, after you, you, you match the supply demand of like, okay, there's more people who want to do business with me, then it's how, what quality of person? Like, basically then you can just consistently continue. And that's kind of an unlimited, I think, continue to raise the bar of the quality of company and entrepreneur that you work with. And so like the companies that we, that we invest in now don't even look close to the companies that I invested in four years ago.

[David Perel]

Talking about this, the number one creator mistake is building new products for their audience rather than building more audience for Their product.

[Alex Hormozi]

Okay, I'm going to tell you this little side story and then I'll ask the question. So I'm really a pretty big stickler with written word. And so it's been very difficult for me to have anyone write for me at all. And so as a result, basically the only thing that's very game that my team can use to put captions on stuff is stuff that I have said in a video and they can just transcribe it or tweets. That's it. Anything else that you've seen that's written is me.

[David Perel]

Okay?

[Alex Hormozi]

And so like just put context on, like if all the words that are out there, like I have written all of them or I've said them, that's it. And so to your question, it's, it's more of a business mistake than I think. It's just creators fall in the same traps. And so let's say they, they spend this time growing their audience and they get to call it, you know, 100,000 followers, whatever, and then they come out with a product and then they sell the product and they make money. And then they're like, huh, I should come out with another product to make more money. But what it did was it reinforced the wrong activity because it was latent. So the activity that made the money was building the audience, not coming with the product. And so what happens is you find these creators who have like six businesses essentially, which is really just like six different products, that each of the businesses in and of themselves could be $100 million plus businesses, but they don't have enough audience. And so they do the short term fix, which is come up with another thing. But long term, you end up drowning in the fact that you have six businesses in your attention split. And so there's two components to this. So one is that if you just launch a product on its own and there's no repurchase rate, or it's not consumable and there's nothing recurring about it, then you're going to have to keep coming with products, which means that's kind of a strategic mistake. Right? We should have just thought of something that, like, if we launched it, people were going to buy it quickly, but then keep buying it. Now you have a regular stream of income, and you can take that income and keep doubling down on the audience to grow it, or pay for other people's audiences or pay for ads or all the other strategies that are in the book of expanding your reach. But fundamentally that's the trap is that rather Than saying. Because you just think of it a long enough time. Rosen, do you just keep starting new products and then in 20 years you have 30 products that you're doing? Or when I say products, a lot of times it's businesses because the products are actually not. They are too differentiated to be like a second product in the same line. I guess someone has two different T shirts. I don't see that as different product. If someone goes from T shirts to selling consulting, that's a different product. Right. Versus the alternative, which is like I just make T shirts and I keep advertising and all I do is I keep getting more and more people to find out about my T shirts and my brand and that's how I grow my sales. And it's going to be more steady, less pops. But that's how you can build a really big company. Whereas if you have seven businesses which like the most common thing that I see, your end up just going to be split thin and all the products are going to be crap. Yeah. And I see it all the time.

[David Perel]

So when you say, hey, I'm a real stickler about words, how does that show up?

[Alex Hormozi]

We have by and large solved this problem by me having lots of video content and the team being able to take any snippet from anywhere if it's appropriate to use it as a caption or something like that. LinkedIn is the only thing that I don't write. Right. So captions in LinkedIn are the basically things that I don't manually write, but they are taken from either tweets or they are taken from videos. And so that's. But emails I write books I write copy I write. Not ad copy. That's one that I don't write as much. But that's a problem. So I'm fixing it.

[David Perel]

So tell me, what is the business model of these books? Break it down for me because it's. You sell them for cheap. They're you spend a bunch of time on. I mean the. This sort of naive person could be like, what are you doing?

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, it makes no sense. So that's part of it is that it does make no sense. But the other part is that long term, like I think that I'll die and my hope is that these will still be around. But.

[David Perel]

But I don't think that's true. Isn't this the thing that sort of initiates everything else, kind of gets you the domain expertise?

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, I'll. Yeah. So from the asset perspective, I write these because I really want them to be assets. I want them to help a lot of people. And that it, like, I think that anybody who reads my books can feel my intention behind what I'm trying to do. Like, if it were just a lead magnet, which is why I think it would cheapen it to describe it that way, they wouldn't be best selling books, right? I think they would just be lead magnets and suck. And so I think the ultimate lead magnet should be timeless assets. And I think that's where a lot of people mess up when they do what, like 99% of people will never buy anything from you, but 99% of people are what create your reputation. And so I would want them to consume something that is still exceptionally valuable because they are ultimately the ones who will create the reputation you have. Now, of course, you're like, well, you don't know them or you've never done business with them. It's like, yeah, but the Internet doesn't really deal in nuance. And so yes, this is the gateway drug, but really before this, the gateway drug is the content. And so the content's really the first thing that Samuel consumes. And we want to make that really, really good. And then if they got enough value from the content, they're like, maybe I'll give one of his books a shot. And if they read the book, then they get way more value. Then maybe they come into my world and they show up at our headquarters, come to, come to one of our advisory events.

[David Perel]

And when you speak to people who come to the advisory events and whatnot, what kinds of people, what kinds of businesses do you recommend that the founders be writing like you do? And then if, if they do that, what do you tell them so that they can be successful?

[Alex Hormozi]

And honestly, the I, I basically try to dissuade most people from writing a book. And I think that's because it's people who aren't writers who don't love writing, see my book and think, oh, I'll do that. And it just like it's the Michelangelo quote. You don't understand how much work it is. And you, I could already tell you, if you've never written before, you aren't willing to do it. Like, I've been writing for a long time. I haven't been writing as publicly from a books perspective, but I have four books. Like, it's not like I'm. And before that I, I loved writing, you know, in my, I've loved writing since I was a kid. And so it's something that I, I can do and can immerse Myself in and really lose myself to the. To the craft. And a lot of people can't do that. The amount of people who are entrepreneurs, who I know who are like, hey, man, I. I wrote my. I wrote my book in. In 12 weeks. And I'm like, that's amazing. But it's probably not that good. And I try to not say that in a mean way, but it's like, yeah, I'm like, first draft. They're like, yup, just knocked it out. I'm like, that's okay, you know, sure. Good luck. How you launch a book determines how good you are at marketing. How well the book is selling. Two years later determines how good the book is.

[David Perel]

Is there a tactical way that you get more Amazon reviews, or is that just one of those things? Or, you know, if the book is good, people are going to review it, but you really can't influence it that much.

[Alex Hormozi]

I'm always scared to make a review ask because my own insecurity is like, well, what if it sucks? And they remember to leave a bad review? Right. But I think that in some ways, it's almost a litmus test of how confident you are about the quality of the product. Like, if you're willing to ask everyone to leave a review, then you're really confident that people will like it. And so I have a review ask in the middle of both of the books, and I figured I put it in the middle. So it's like, if someone got to the middle, then they probably like the book enough to get to the middle. Right?

[David Perel]

Not on page five.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, exactly. Not exactly. By the way, I haven't given you any value yet, so. No, I've put it after. They hopefully got a significant amount of value. I do think that making an ask increases the likelihood that they leave review, but I think if you have a crap book, then people are like, no, or they'll give you a bad one, which is, you know, arguably worse.

[David Perel]

Okay, I don't know anything about your love for writing as a kid, and I want to hear about that.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, I wrote short stories. I wrote poems, and I enjoyed that. I enjoyed that stuff. The Free. That's why that. The literary magazine is probably where I spent. Like, that's where I wrote more of my stuff. So it was all the student submissions for short stories, poems, and so I managed them. And art. And art, too. Like kids who put art. So, like the COVID art, you know, we'd get a bunch of paintings and we'd be like, okay, which of these cover? And then between stories and between poems, we'd put other art from, you know, the art department, from the kids who are, you know, making, painting or whatever they're doing, you know, pictures of sculptures and things like that. And so we, you know, we do a review every week. And so that. That helped me get better at writing, just being able to, like, look at other people's writing. And so I just. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed that writing significantly more than everything that was assigned to me. I didn't enjoy that writing. And that was actually a really interesting breakthrough for me is that, like, I didn't like reading that much. And that's not common. Usually writers like reading. I think I didn't even know that non fiction was really a genre until like. Like after I graduated high school. Because everything you read, just about everything you read in high school is fiction or a textbook.

[David Perel]

Right?

[Alex Hormozi]

Textbooks suck. And fiction, I felt, was useless. And so I enjoyed making my own fiction. But, like, think about, like, from a learning perspective, what does this change about my life? Nothing. I'm like, okay, some person, some random land just did something, and whatever, it doesn't affect me. And so I never really understood the point. As soon as I became an adult or whatever, I got introduced to nonfiction, and I was like, oh, my God, this is useful. And so then I got more into reading for specific purposes, but I'd still almost separate that as, like, I was trying to learn a specific thing, not analyze the writing. Right. And so, yeah, I just. I really liked writing. And so I just. It was one of the few things I feel like I can get the flow really easily with writing, like, writing and drawing, which is why all my books have lots of drawing, lots of writing. And I like doing my brainstorming with a pen because, I don't know, it feels more tactile. I. I lose myself in it more easily. That. That was pretty much my experience. And I did take a bit of a break from writing when I got into the business world, and it was only like, gosh, it was probably was.

[David Perel]

This, like, the gym launch days.

[Alex Hormozi]

Yeah, well, I wrote the gym launch book, but getting. I think I wrote that book in 2018. So writing the gym launch book was the first, like, real writing that I had done that wasn't like, copy or things like, you know, like, writing. Writing that I'd done. And I think as soon as that happened, I was like, oh, I missed this. It was like, I've forgotten how much I liked it. And so then I. I pretty much haven't stopped writing since last question, so.

[David Perel]

You get a call from unlv, they're like, hey, Alex, we want you to teach a writing class. How you structure the curriculum? What are the core things that you want to teach people?

[Alex Hormozi]

I'll bet you the first day I would probably define terms, or first week. I mean, that would be. I could break this into sections rather than the sessions. But, like, the first section would be the definition of terms. The next one would be clarifying the objective of why. Why are we writing? What are we writing for? How does writing service? Why is it even. Why is there? Why does it matter? And then I would probably transition from there to the rules of writing.

[David Perel]

What are the rules of writing?

[Alex Hormozi]

So there's at least as. As I see it. And I would probably be parroting a lot of Stephen King's on writing if I were to say it. But, like, I think that's one of the best books on writing out there. As few words as possible. Like, if you can use a simpler word, use that word, you know, very sentence structure. So there's a rhythm to it, you know, short, short, long, you know. And then from a stylistic perspective, I purposely try to use lower grade language because I want more people to understand it. I don't think there's. I don't have any ego to people thinking that I'm smart. I also have no. Nothing against people who use bigger words. It is like ultimate word concision, uses more complex words. Right. But I want maximum comprehension rather than maximum word concision. So I use concision only as a tool to increase comprehension at large. Yep. So short words, short sentences, big promises. This is.

[David Perel]

So you have rules of writing.

[Alex Hormozi]

Anything else that would be. Yeah, that'd probably be the next section. And I would probably practice super constrained writing for people if I was trying to. So if the objective of the course was to teach people to write. Yeah. Then it would be like, I want you to write an entire paper on this thing in one page and really force people. Because I think like Twitter, I think is. Or X, I think is a wonderful platform for learning how to write because it just. You have. You have to force the I. You have to keep crunching them down. And I think that's. Honestly, I think X is one of the best tools for learning to write because you get fast feedback. The other one is I would probably use like Hemingway app as. Because that also gives you real time feedback. Yeah. And so typing into there is so helpful because, you know, Stephen King pretty much says this. It's like, just don't use adverbs by and large, just don't use them like there's a better verb that you're not using. X And Hemingway would probably be the vast majority of the remainder of the time that I add. It would be repetition of them getting fast feedback on the writing that they're doing under specific constraints. And I would probably have a lot more free, like, freedom in terms of topic and far less in terms of rules. Like, you have to obey these rules, but you can write whatever you want. You have to do it in page, or you have to in half a page. And you can write whatever topic you want, but you have to obey these 27 rules. Now write. Because fundamentally, when I'm writing, for the most part now, they're like, a lot more or less ingrained in how I write. But if, like, a section still doesn't seem good, I'll paste it into Hemingway and be like, oh, that's why, like. And like, I. You know, long sentences. Like, there's just. There's things that you just learn that you're like, oh, this might have sounded good in my head, but no one can read this. And so not to get super writing tactical, but that's.

[David Perel]

That's why we do this.

[Alex Hormozi]

How I write, mate. Yeah, it's called how I write. Yeah, that's probably how I laid out. So definition of terms, why this matters and how. How it's useful for you. And I basically sell them on why they should even do this. Rules of the game, and then practice. And that'll probably be everything. The rest would just be practice.

[David Perel]

Rock on. Well, I just want to thank you because I've read a lot of your stuff, consumed many, many, many of your videos, had a lot of questions and feel like you answered them well. But also, you've been a big inspiration, so thank you.

[Alex Hormozi]

Oh, I appreciate it. I'm glad they. Hopefully they were.