How to Build a Personal Brand That Makes Millions

In the last 12 months, my social media had a grand total of 3 billion impressions and brought in 4 and 1/2 million new subscribers. And with that, I managed to break the world record for the fastest-selling non-fiction book of all time, generating just over 105 million dollars in sales in a weekend. And here are my top lessons that I've learned when it comes to building a personal brand. Enjoy. You guys want to hear something absolutely insane?

I was able to take home more in a year than the CEOs of McDonald's IKEA Ford Motorola and Yahoo combined as a kid in his 20s. And I have continued to for over half a decade. Which resulted in a 200 million-dollar per year portfolio and a 100 million-dollar net worth by age 32. And no one is more surprised than me. Me expressing that fact will create envy in some, anger in others, skepticism in most, confusion in

old people, and inspire a select few. You are who I made this presentation for. But before I dive in, raise your hand if you'd like any of the following things to happen. To be able to charge two times, five times, 10 times more than your competition for the exact same thing, like Yeti. We have basically identical cups, and somehow they're able to charge $40 versus $10 simply because of what's on the cup. If you'd like to

be able to have customers buy from you over and over and over again without considering competition, like Harley. Once you're a Harley guy, you stay a Harley guy for life. And if you'd like to virtually guarantee sales in any new business or product that you launch, like Apple. A lot of people just wait in line. They say, "Just leave my credit card. Just bill me and send whatever you're going to come out with." And that's more

or less how a lot of Apple buyers are. Once they become an Apple person, they become an Apple person for life. So, if you like that stuff, great, cuz that's what this talk is about. And so, I couldn't figure out how these brands, these companies were able to do this, demand these prices, get people to stay loyal for a really long time. And I felt like for me, I always had to like beg, borrow, and steal,

and I just squeeze and push so hard just to get people to buy. Whereas these companies made it look effortless. And it's because I didn't understand this one thing, and that's the subject of the talk today. Brand. And the thing is, even people who claim to understand it often don't. And the few who do understand it do a terrible job teaching it. So, this definitely isn't going to be marketing 101 class on branding presentation colors and

logos. And this definitely isn't going to be about feelings, presence, intuition, or whatever. This is about making money. And this concept that I'm going to explain to you is how I built a 7.8 million person audience across all these platforms in the past 40 months or so. I sold over a million copies of my last two books. And your deals worth hundreds of million dollars in our holding company acquisition.com. That is why you build a brand.

At least, that's why I built mine. And so today I'm going to cover three things. Number one, what branding is. You don't know what it is, you certainly can't build one. Number two, why it makes money. Cuz once you have it built, you're like, okay, well, how do I trade this thing for doll hairs, which is what we want. And then third, how to start and grow yours. So, let's start with the first one. What branding

is. So, when I decided to build a brand, I looked at what many popular marketers said about it. Here are some popular definitions that I have removed the marketers from them. This is not throwing shade. So, I'm just saying them. A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or organization. A brand is not what you say it is, it's what they say it is. A brand is a set of expectations memories stories and

relations to that taken together account for a customer's decision to choose one product or service over another. A brand is emotional shorthand for accumulated and assumed information. A brand is present when the value of what the product, service, or personality means to its audience is greater than what it does for the audience. A brand is a product, service, or concept that is publicly distinguished from other products, services, or concepts so they can be easily communicated and

usually marketed. Branding is the process of creating and disseminating the brand name, its qualities, and personality. The promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design. If these sound vague and confusing, it's because they are. And I was just as confused as you when I was trying to figure this out. Because none of them told me what to do. And so after looking at all these marketers' words, I think I pieced

it together. At least enough that once I started thinking about this way, in a different way that I'm going to share with you, my brand grew and it grew fast. And the reason this is so important is that if you don't know what to do, nothing's going to change. Fundamentally, if you don't change your behavior, obviously nothing's going to change as a result. And so I wanted to define this one term before we get going. Learn

it. Who here came to learn? Raise your hands. Fantastic. All right, the other ones just be talking to the wall. So, learning means same condition, new behavior. And so if I wanted to teach someone a phone script, then after teaching you, the phone rings again, and you say the new script, you learned. Learning occurred. On the other hand, if I tried to teach you the script, and then the phone rings again, and then you change nothing,

no learning occurred. You learned nothing. And that's why none of this stuff that these guys said helped me, because I didn't know what I could do. I didn't know what behavior I had to change as a result of this. So I didn't know how to do that. And so here's how branding happens. Branding is a deliberate pairing of things through an outcome. So I'll say that again. Branding is a deliberate pairing of things through an outcome.

So, let's use Coca-Cola, drinking it, and liking it as our example. The yum, aka the outcome, that's what people get. They pair that with drinking, the action that they do to get it, with Coca-Cola, the product. So, the next time you want some yum, you're probably going to reach for a Coca-Cola, if that was paired for you successfully. And so, branding is delivering pairing of things through an outcome. That's it. But, sometimes businesses pair stuff, pair

their stuff with things that people don't like. That's bad branding. This leads to losses for the business. Now, some of you guys may have seen this. This is Dylan Mulvaney doing a collaboration with Bud Light. There's a lot of press around this advertisement. This advertisement was actually a great advertisement. And you might might think I'm crazy, but it was. Let me explain. It's just not the way you might think it was. This is a great advertisement

because it let a lot of people know about their stuff. It let a lot of people know about the product, about Bud Light. By the way, if you're curious, that is the definition of advertising, not branding. Advertising is letting people know about your stuff. Branding is the pairing that occurs as a result. So, it was good advertising, but bad branding. Many customers hated this pairing. Lots of people found out, but a lot of people hated it.

Good advertising, bad branding. And so, as a result of this bad branding, people not liking the pairing, fewer people bought the product, which netted a loss for the business. And so, to fix this, Bud Light paired their product with stuff the audience liked, like Shane Gillis, who is a man's man comedian, and the UFC, a man's man of sports, if you will. And sales began to recover. So, that's the 101 explanation of branding. Let's go into

201. So, we're going a little deeper because the better you get at this, the more money you will make. Like the more nuance you can understand how to brand and build a brand for yourself, the more money you will make. I promise you that. And so, to some people, the Dylan Mulvaney pairing was actually good. In general, both good advertising and good branding. Hear me out. For others, it was bad, obviously. All pairings have positive and

negative results, and that's because everyone's different. Everyone has different preferences. But for a business, you can objectively see if a pairing was good or bad whether it netted you more money. So, more people disliked the Dylan Mulvaney Mulch tough day Dylan Mulvaney pairing, so the sales suffered, making it a bad pairing. So, this isn't opinion. They objectively made less money, and so this pairing was a bad one for their ideal audience. Now, the 301 version of

this is is there a company or a product where the Dylan Mulvaney pairing could have been both good advertising and good branding so that the majority of people would have bought it. I think the answer is yes. It just doesn't necessarily mean it's Bud Light for conservative males as the primary audience. And on the other hand, some people love the new Gillis and UFC pairings, and some hated it. But more of the audience that is their

ideal customer liked it, saw it as good, and so the business netted sales a result, and they made more money. Good branding. And so, for Budweiser, and I just want to call this out, this is specifically for Budweiser and their customer base. It's not that Shin Gillis and the UFC is magic in some way, or Dylan Mulvaney is unmagic in some way, but for that specific audience, yes, the pairing mattered and how much of the base

liked it or disliked it. So, if you're anything like me, making money is the point. So, let's drive this home. If you made a pairing of your thing and your customer, and you got to choose which outcome you had happen, so you have your product and they drink it. There's an outcome that happens afterwards, right? That pairs with it. On one hand, 75% like it and 25 hate it. Or on the other hand, 25% like it

and 75% hate it, which would be the bottom example. Which would you choose? More money good, the big the big green one. Yes, of course. The top one. Because it would make you the most money. And so, to be clear for the 201 level of understanding, branding always happens. Branding always occurs. But our goal is good branding. And good branding is a deliberate pairing of our business with good outcomes for our ideal customers. And so, what

you pair your business with determines two key things. One, who pays attention to your business, and two, whether they go towards your business, like the UFC example, or away from your business, like the Dylan Mulvaney example. And so, at the beginning of this I said I was going to cover three things. The first thing I said is what is branding. But now that we have gone through that, I want to re-say what I walked us through,

which is what good branding is. Ideally, what we're shooting for. So, now that we covered that, let's talk about why it makes you money. Why good branding makes you money. Branding as I define it happens everywhere all the time. But businesses use it for profit. So, let's look at some of the earliest uses of branding to figure out how we can use it. So, these are the first entrepreneurs who used branding to make money. Real quick,

I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish I've now done multiple times, and so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages, as head count increases, that you need to get through. And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're

going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this, and it works. And it's my gift to you, it's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap, just enter your info and it'll spit it right back to you, all free. The earliest version of branding that we can think of, or at least that

I can think of, happened on livestock. It was literally a brand. They'd heat up metal, they'd sear it into the side of a cattle, and they would get a lovely little logo. Maybe we'll have a Nike swoosh cow someday. And so they literally burned these symbols into animals. And those symbols had a magical effect. So let's say you're walking around and you see a cow with no brand. You say, "Hello cow." The cow says moo back,

and it has nothing on it. This is just a cow. You might leave it alone, and that might be it. On the other hand, let's say the cow has a brand you recognize. Say it's your neighbor's. You might be like, "Hey, that's Bill's cow." Now, if you like Bill, you might grab the cow and pull him by the whatever you pull cows by, and probably return it to Bill. If you hate Bill, then the cow may

stay lost in the wilderness forever and become lunch for your family for the next month or two in the form of delicious burgers. Moo. But either way, for better or for worse, the brand affected what you did. It affected your behavior. And so to take this to the 201 level, what if you see a branded cow, but you don't recognize the brand? You might be like, "Who this? I see a logo, but I don't know anything

about it." Well, then you would treat it how you treat branded animals in general in that you just know that it belongs to someone. And so you would treat it the way that you would treat it as though it belonged to anybody else. And even if only a tiny bit, you would treat a wild cow different from a branded cow in general. So if you had one that was wild and you had one that you didn't

recognize but was branded, you would still probably treat them differently. So that just shows you the power of brand as a concept because it dictates a tie between that cow and a human being. Or some complex animal that can brand cows. And so these are all effects of brand in general. So that's how it affects what people do. And so now I want to get tactical on how to get how we translate that concept into getting

them to buy. So let's say we pair our brand. So this is where we get really tactical and this is like, okay, if you don't have a brand, this is the step-by-step right now. So you have a weak brand and we say it's a weak brand cuz it's starting out. You don't have really a lot of associations. Fantastic. So now you want to pair it with people, experiences other other stuff that your ideal customer likes. So

in this instance, I'm using little Nike pairing with LeBron and Tiger who are champions, world-class, goats, etc. And so people who like sports and competition would see that probably as a positive pairing. AKA good stuff. And so if we do that pairing or we make that pairing for the majority of people, branding will occur and so the brand grows. And so the question then follows, what's the benefit of a strong brand versus a weak brand? And

so the the the weak brand is before the pairing, the stronger brand is after the pairing. So a strong brand turns commoditized products like a $5 white t-shirt plus the strong brand into a premium product, a higher value brand name product. And premium products with a strong brand then get customers to want to pair themselves with the product so that they can associate the outcome themselves with the outcome the brand delivers. Which they do with their

money. So, how do they make that association? They give money, they get the shirt, the association happens based on what they've seen where that logo has been elsewhere. And so then they go from I want to be a winner to exchanging money and saying now I am a winner or I feel like a winner. That's how this works. And so this means that if the ideal customer likes sports, winning, and competition, etc. then they're more likely

to buy stuff from a brand paired with those things. So, let's lay it all out. Weak brand paired with stuff customers like creates a strong brand. Strong brand gets put onto a winning product, transforms a generic to winning product. Then the customers want to associate with that winning product, so they buy the product, and they put money into your bank account in order to do it. And so as long as you net a positive between what

it cost you to associate with Tiger and LeBron and how many t-shirts you can sell as a result, you make money. And so here are some steps in words for those of you who are more word people. You start with a brand that means nothing. You have a logo, just like the cow that the other person didn't recognize. People know that it is a brand, they just don't know what that brand means yet. So, it means

nothing right now. Then you pair that brand with something or someone that your customer is ideally like. Third, your brand starts to mean the thing customer likes to them. Then they want to associate themselves with that thing they like or get more of it. But they can't buy that thing. But they can buy a tiny sliver of that association. So, they buy the shirt with the logo that means that thing to them. And so they get

the shirt, you get the money, and it all happened because you deliberately paired it with something they like. And this happens everywhere. So, Dolce & Gabbana, classic example. They paired with Kim Kardashian. They made a line specifically for her. And so, for a lady who wants to associate with fame, beauty, wealth, that would be a pairing that makes sense. And so, that lady who wants other people to associate her with fame, high class, money, luxury, wealth,

will then buy Dolce & Gabbana and be like, "I'm just like Kim." Now, she might not say that directly because she might just associate with the values, but the transference still happens. And so, when someone looks at two products that on the surface are generically the same. You've got two t-shirts. One that has a weak brand or no brand, and the other that has the strong brand, the person that has the strong brand, they're going to

be more likely to buy and pay more for. And this happens because they actually buy the elements that we've deliberately paired with the brand which they identify with. And at this point of building a brand, you do this to change customer behavior. And that excuse me, that is the point of building a brand, to change customer behavior in your favor when they see it with a product. And so, this is a quote from Warren Buffett that

I like a lot, kind of signifying some of the elements of the benefits of brand. He said, "The single most important decision in evaluating business is pricing power. If you've got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you've got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10%, then you've got a terrible business." And so, if we have an unbranded t-shirt for $5,

and we say, "You know what? We think we have a strong enough brand that we can raise the price." And then, boom, we can raise the price and still not lose that many sales, but we in this case, 12x the price, good branding drives that premium pricing. Good branding also improves advertising. So, with the generic brand, if you're marketing this white t-shirt, you might get half a percent of people. There are many white t-shirts. There are

many like it. This one is mine. Just kidding. So, the point of those of you got the reference. Um so, if you have a 0.5% click-through rate on something that's generic, there's nothing special about it. On the flip side, if you have a Nike brand t-shirt, same identical t-shirt, and it has the swoosh, then you might get six times as many people click and buy at a higher price. See how these things stack together? That is

why these brands exist for such a long period of time and make so much money. So, they get cheaper customers, they get higher returns, and they have better response rates in advertising. And on top of that, if if as if that weren't enough, good branding also drives customer loyalty. AKA, they buy more stuff more times. And so, like the Apple example I gave earlier, once you buy one Apple product, you tend to buy more, and you

tend to keep buying them. And so, this also, a good brand, also protects your business from competitors stealing that customer for in the future. And so, as I promised at the beginning, we're seeing how this all this stuff allows you to one, be able to charge 10 times or more than your competition, two, get higher returns in advertising, so you can scale that much more, that much faster, and then three, get people to keep buying for

life, compounding your money-making skills for good. Okay. Which is why I'm building a brand will make you lots of money. It's also why brands outperform commodities in every single industry. And give a lasting competitive edge that to be fair is theirs to lose. So, here's another quote from Uncle Warren. It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently. And so, I said that

I was going to cover three things. One, what branding is, which we read into what good branding is. Second, why it makes you money, and we got that. So, now, let's go to how to start or grow your own brand. So, if is the deliberate pairing of things, your thing plus what your ideal customer has, through an outcome, and good branding is the deliberate pairing of your thing with something good, to start a brand, we have

to know what we want to pair it with to attract ideal customers. So, here we've got Bud Light, UFC, good outcome for the majority of the audience. And we want to understand that just as much as we should also understand what to avoid pairing our brand with to lose customers, like the Del Monte example. And so, here's how I like to think about assembling the pairings for a brand. So, if you're at ground zero, you have

you have no brand. You've got these elements that haven't been put together yet. So, I think about it like a tableful of flowers. So, if you want to put a bouquet together, you start by having lots of different flowers all over the place. On their own, those flowers are not a bouquet. Just as products, values, experiences, people, etc. on their own are not a brand. The flowers are like the brand elements that we pair with stuff

our audiences like. With enough pairing, over and over and over again, they form a bouquet. Now, replace the word bouquet with brand. And so, that assembly is the connection, it's the association between those things. Cuz a brand, fundamentally, doesn't actually exist. If I take the flowers out of the vase and scatter them across, was there ever a brand to begin with? It's simply the association we make between those things that creates the one-of-one brand. And if

we unravel it, the brand disappears. And so, the deliberate pairing of those things makes the brand. And if we want to get narrower on our brand, so let's say I talk about tacos, lifting, and philosophy, if I want to narrow my brand, I'll just talk a bunch about tacos, and then all of my flowers are just taco-related. If I'm only talking about tacos, but I want to expand the stuff I'm talking about to my audience and

maybe capture a wider audience, then I might talk about tacos quesadillas burritos things that are tangential. And then if I wanted to expand even broader, I might just talk about food in general. And then I might talk in alcohol, then I might talk in restaurants, and then things that go wider and wider from there. And so we get narrower as we niche down and we go double down on one type of topic and we go broader

when we branch out. But distant and random pairings hurt a brand because they're so hard to make the associations with. And this is what most brands are and do. Most people's brands happen by accident. It's just whatever they appear next to, whatever the people associate their stuff with. Good branding happens on purpose. Cuz like what are we looking at with a a bike, a single flower, some socks, and a burger? Not a lot. Not a lot

to hold together there. And so think about it like curating a garden. You want some flowers to grow and you want to pull out the weeds. You have to do both. You have to add the good and take away the bad in order to assemble the ideal brand for you. And in the beginning, our brand won't be strong, just like yours won't. If you're building it, then you might only have a couple flowers there. It's because

you haven't had that many instances to pair your brand for that customer. But the more good stuff we pair with our brand for the customer, the stronger it gets. You go from one flower to many red flowers or many red roses that become a bouquet of red roses. That's what you're about, and the more you're about it, the more the brand strengthens. Now, what if we make a branding mistake and pair with the wrong thing? Cuz

it's going to happen. One bad pairing can absolutely hurt a brand. So if I now give my this lovely red rose a bouquet to my wife and I say, "Hey, don't you love this bouquet?" And she sees this rotten flower sitting out in the front. She might be like, "Ew, this bouquet sucks." Or, "This brand sucks." Or, "Hey, that guy got a DUI and I thought he was this paragon of good ethics." Well, that would hurt

the brand. And so, just like one ugly flower messes up the whole bouquet, it changes how everyone sees the brand. This bouquet sucks. Now, to recover from something like that, you just have to overwhelm customers with the stuff they like until eventually the bad pairing shrinks into irrelevance. So, we don't try to eliminate the DUI, we don't try to eliminate the dead rose. It happened, there's nothing we can do about it. But, what we try to

do is just overwhelm it with way more of the stuff that the majority of our people actually like. And so, Kanye, for example, has said some things that people don't like. But, he also comes out with products that people love. He made a Super Bowl ad. He sold shoes. He just came out with an album that came out after having some cancel culture stuff around him, things he had said. And so, over time, people forgot the

bad stuff and associated the good stuff back with him and purchased. They still bought. And so, you need to decide what values people experience, etc., that you want to use to connect the audience to your product. And equally importantly, what things you want to avoid, remove, or ignore from the stuff they hate. And so, it goes without saying that even if you say you're premium, but people think your thing sucks, that suck will stick. And so,

up to this point, everything I've talked about has been the things external to the product. They've been the people you associate the product with. You know, almost all of that occurs prior to purchase. So, you can absolutely get someone to buy the thing. But, how many experiences are people going to have with the thing once they've purchased it? Probably far more than they have with your advertisement. And so the advertisement can let people know about it.

The branding makes a good association with the person. They make the purchase. And then afterwards, the product does a lot of the branding after that. Cuz if I buy that amazing Nike t-shirt, and there's a hole in the armpit when it comes in, I might say, if this is the first time I've ever bought a Nike product, this product sucks. Therefore, Nike sucks. And then I think the whole thing is a sham. And then I also

start to hate LeBron for even recommending it. Right? So it starts to transfer backwards. Now, on the flip side, brand can influence how people see the product. So if the product is what I would call good enough, so it's it doesn't have any holes in it. Now, is it the highest quality it possibly could be? Maybe not, but it's good enough that no one's going to find an immediate problem with the product. That's where brand can

carry you the extra distance to still make it a positive experience for the person. And so brand, in a very real way, can affect how people perceive value through products. Now, me personally, it's a pro tip here. If I'm going to charge a premium price, I absolutely want to make sure that the product is dialed, so that I only further reinforce how much they like my brand, rather than let my brand carry me, or at worst,

have it conflict with the impression that I gave them of the thing they were going to buy prior to them buying it. This is a quote from Warren. Your premium brand had better be delivering something special, or it's not going to get the business. And the only tweak I'd have on this is that it's not going to keep the business. You'll get the first purchase, you just won't get the ones after that. And so all these

things you're like, okay, got it. So brand is pairing. I get how the pairing makes me money. I have these big margins. I got more CTRs. More people buy. And as long as my thing doesn't suck, you know, ideally that it's good, people will keep buying. Awesome. But how do I measure that? So brand has three main metrics. One, which is influence, which is how likely it is to change someone's behavior. So, if I show someone

a brand and they react in any way, they recognize it and they they they do something about it, then we have influence. Second is direction. Are they changing the way we want it? Were they running away? And third, how many people it changes for. That's it. So, if I show it to 100 people and 100 people react versus two people react, the 100 person reacting at least recognition, that is the reach. How many people it changes

it for. So, taking to the hypothetical extreme, a small, weak, and neutral brand, very few people recognize, and the people that do don't care that much about it either way. And on the other polar extreme, you have a large, large, strong, positive brand. So, that would be lots of people recognize the brand, it changes the behavior when they see the brand, and the behavior is generally towards. So, they try to do in accordance with what that

brand is asking someone to do. And I want to make this point. A lot of people have this misnomer that any strong brand is polar. That because lots of people love it, lots of people also have to hate it. Now, I say this by percentage, not necessarily by absolute. If you have If the whole United States knows who you are, you're going to have a percentage of people that hate you just cuz there's crazy people. And

that's not what we're talking about. I'm saying, is there a brand that can't have that kind of status that isn't polar? So, I'll give a polar example first. So, I have the silhouette of Donald Trump here, and he has a very strong brand. He has a big reach, lots of people recognize him, even just a silhouette alone people recognize. He has strong influence as in the percentage of people that when they see this have a reaction

in either direction, positive or negative, but just that they react shows that he has strong influence. And the third is the direction. Now, for him, he is polar, meaning many people move towards him very strongly, and many people move away from him very strongly. And so, many assume that all brands are that way. And that's just because there are many examples of that, but it doesn't mean it has to be that way. And so, I'll give

you a different example. So, some brands manage to change many people's behavior towards them all at once. And so, like Taylor Swift, sure, I'm sure she's got some crazies, don't get me wrong. But the vast majority of people who see Taylor Swift recognize her, she changed their behavior and most of the time it's towards her. So, she is a large, positive, strong brand. This is also personally why I think the idea of like seeking out controversy

absolutely gets you recognized, but you don't have to make that trade. You can absolutely just build a strong positive brand. Mother Teresa has a strong positive brand. A lot of people know her, influence a lot of behavior, did a lot of good stuff. Most people aren't like, "I hate Mother Teresa." Some people do, but most people don't. And the same thing goes with Apple. A lot of people like their products. I'm sure there are some tech

geeks that are like, "Android's way better." Or they're like, "PCs are awesome." And that's great, that's good for them. But the vast majority of people who encounter the product like it, which is why they're one of the largest companies in the world. So, all those examples that I gave to you up to this point have assumed a large audience. And I do that because this is a presentation and it makes more sense for me to work

with you on stuff that you already know. But this concept carries independent of whether you have large reach, and this is why it applies to you. So, if you had a small audience with high influence, what would you have? Your mom and dad. They are high influence, as in most people when they see their parents, their behavior changes. They have low reach cuz for you, they're only your parents. They might not be any other people's They

might be some other people's parents, but not many very many people's parents. Also, you have low reach. Um and it will be your behavior will towards for some and away for others. Meaning, some people hate their parents and don't want to do anything they say, and some people like their parents to do whatever they say. And there's a lot of people in between. And so that's how we measure if what we're doing to grow our brand

is actually working. Are more people finding out about it? Are more people changing their behavior when they do it? And ideally, are they doing that towards the direction that we want them to go? So if I say, "Hey everybody, go click here, go download this thing, go attend this event, go buy this product, whatever it is." If a lot of people do that, then we know that the brand is growing. And so we want when we

want to build our brand, we want to pair ourselves with the things the highest percentage of our ideal audience like. And so whenever we pair anything with a brand, because especially if you're starting out, everything is new. And so every new pairing has risk. And so you risk losing a certain percentage of your audience who has a bad experience with the thing you pair. There's always that risk. There's always going to be some people who don't

like something you do. If anyone's seen a small town band go hit it big, some of the old towners are like, "Oh, they sold out. They did whatever." But what they did was they gambled the short-term loss of that local audience, potentially, for a much broader, bigger audience. So they made a bet. They did lose people. They did gain people. They just gained more than they lost. And so to the same degree, when you make that

bet as the local band, you risk gaining other people who have had a positive experience with this new thing. And ideally, we have more green than red. And so those new pairings, the new pairings you make with a brand, always lose audience, right? He sold out. I like the old stuff better. This also happens with content, by the way. And so this person is the red bucket. Fantastic. And the new stuff might also cause people to

say, "No, this new stuff rocks." And that person is in the green bucket. And so whenever you try to grow and you make any new pairing, meaning you make new content, you make a new genre, you don't make a new song, you make a new anything, you make a bet that more people from your ideal audience will like the pairing than people who don't. TLDR, that you'll net an increase in reach, influence, and positive direction. And

so, my ask for everyone here is don't let the five mean comments stop you from gaining the 500 new people who like the new thing. So, let me finish the real-life example to make this whole thing real for you. I want to associate myself with business value. So, I associate myself with making people money and growing their businesses. So, there's me, there's me making content, and then ideally money. And so, the best way I can do

this is make content for the small business owner kids to consume and books for them to read and use, so that they then profit. The good thing. And then they associate that growth and profit with me. And so, then they consume more of my stuff. They drink the next soda. They buy the next shirt. And so, the next time they wanted to happen again, they take the action or they have a higher likelihood of taking the

desired action. And equally important, people who don't like business stuff won't like my stuff or they'll just prefer to watch other things. So, you've got this married couple, they say, "We hate people who talk about money." They're probably not going to like my stuff. And that's okay. But, people who like business, have a business, or are trying to start one, might want more. And this grows the bread because people consume the stuff and they say, "Hey,

you got to check out Herazi's stuff." And then that person they tell to who says, "Right on." They check it out. They get that positive outcome. They make the pairing as well and the brand grows. And ideally, with my ideal audience. And so, to see this in action, if you use this information from today to make money, good branding has occurred. And so, I said I was going to cover three things: what branding is, ideally what

good branding is, why it makes you money, and how to start and grow yours. So, hopefully you feel like I've fulfilled those three things. And so, now we can test if the pairing, good breeding, actually occurred. So, if you are my ideal customer, so here's a business owner. Okay, awesome. Lottie, pay attention. We can see objectively if this provided value. Did we get a good positive outcome, a neutral outcome, or a negative one? You might be

like, I hate this guy talking about money, or you know what, I think this could make me a ton of money. Well, we'll see. So, I want you further to associate myself with value in making you money and growing your business. So, I'm going to give you guys two gifts for free. The first is for existing business owners who want to scale. So, most of you guys have raised your hands. I have two books, $100 Million

Offers, $100 Million Leads. People say they made them money. There's a lot of five-star reviews on them. Fantastic. And I mean video versions of these books that you can get absolutely free on my site at acquisition.com/training. This is me further associating. If you If you like this, you're going to love that. And they'll make you more money for free. That's what it looks like on the inside. These are legit courses. And you can get those video

versions on my site, again, absolutely free, acquisition.com/training. Now, if you're like, man, I don't like watching stuff, I like listening to stuff. I want to provide value for a different type of ideal audience, which is still business owners, but business owners who listen rather than business owners who watch, which is also fine. And so if you are somebody who's not a reader or not a watcher, I've got the books on my podcast absolutely free. It's called

The Game. They started episode 570 something. And so that's what I have for business owners. Who here is earlier on and they're like, I want to start a brand? Okay cool. So, this is for you. So, I did become an owner school.com, really awesome platform, helps people get started in the business. Um and so anybody here who watches this or listening to this and wants the tools, the training, and a community of other people starting brands

with a little friendly competition and some prizes, we made a step-by-step process on school to help you get started. And you can start for free. So hopefully I succeeded in providing value and a good pairing occurred, ideally good branding happened, otherwise I'm sorry. For everybody else, I hope good branding occurred. Um and for those of you who either start the school games for free or use my stuff to grow your business, I will see you guys

soon. So go to school games, school.com/games, acquisitions.com/training and I'll see you guys all there. Thank you guys so much for your time. So next I want to talk about how I got 7.8 million followers in just 3 months and the six key lessons you can use today. Let's rock. So you guys want to hear something absolutely insane? Well, in the last 40 months my YouTube grew from zero to 2.23 million subscribers. My Instagram grew from 7,000

to 2 and 1/2 million sub- subscribers, followers, you get the idea. My LinkedIn went from zero to 324,000 followers. My TikTok went from zero to 856,000 followers. My Twitter/X the artist formerly known as Twitter, uh went from zero to 617,000. My Facebook, which we just started, went from zero to 25,000. There we go. Going in big, Facebook. Um my podcast went from 3,000 downloads to 25 million downloads. And my email subscribers went from zero to 700,000

for a grand total of 2 billion impressions over that time period and 7.8 million new subscribers. And for a grand total of 8 million copies sold of my book. For those of you who are like, well, what does that mean? And I'll get to that in a second. So in 40-ish months, all of that happened. And I show all of this as proof to start this to show one thing is that this actually works. And you

can build a brand without babes, without stunts, or kittens. And I start this proof because lots of people talk about stuff that they haven't done and teach a lot of sucky fluff as a result. You can see the man there. He's saying the truth. This This fluff sucks. And I refuse to do that. And so, before we got the 2 billion impressions and the 7.8 million subscribers, it wasn't like this. Because 40 months ago, I started

with zero subscribers and a big quote fancy plan. And my fancy plan had three steps. Step one, make as much good stuff as I could. Step two, post it everywhere I could. And step three, learn as much as I could. And after 40-ish months, $4 million in team, equipment, vendors, studios, and software, a thousand hours of me on camera recording, and 35,000 pieces of content. Let me say that again. 35,000, as in count to a thousand

and then do that 35 times in a row. I learned a lot of what not to do. But I did learn six things that made money and grew my brand that you can use today. Now, what I'd like to do is for the remainder of the presentation, save you the three and a half years and $4 million, so you can just get the lessons without the scars. So, that little box is our box of six lessons.

Cool? All right. Let's rock. So, here are the six changes that we observed over the last four 40-ish months that actually worked. Number one, going from edutainment to education. Number two, for us to for you. Number three, wide to narrow. Number four, views to revenue. Number five, shorts to longs. Number six, assume more to assume nothing. Now, most of those I promise you I will explain. And if it looks like I think I know what that

means, believe me, there's a lot more underneath of it. So, let's start with the first one. Edutainment to education. So, I see content in three buckets. On one extreme, you've got entertainment, which is the entire point of entertainment, just to define the term, is to get people to watch. The only point of the entertainment is to just get people to consume it. That's it. If it accomplishes that, it has succeeded. On the other side, you have

education. Where the point of education is to get someone to change what they do. Right? If you try and teach someone how to answer a phone, and then in the same situation, the phone rings and they don't do something, and then after they watch you do something, they then change what they do in the phone rings the second time, they have learned. So, the point is to change their behavior. If If the video or the content

does that, then you've succeeded at educating them. And lastly, you have edutainment, which has the point of both trying to teach and entertaining at the same time. And to be clear, it's less that you make entertaining content, or that you make educational content. It's more that you make content and people are either entertained or educated as a result. And so, you can make one thing that entertains some people, and then that same thing educates other people.

And so, I just want to make this very clear that you don't control the audience. You make something and then education or entertainment occurs. But for our purposes, I'll define the content category as the most common outcome of your content. And so, if a lot of people are entertained, then you've made entertaining content for the purpose of this presentation, even if one or two people learn something. So, for example, some creators might learn stuff from Mr.

Beast's videos. Wow, I learned how to make videos. But, the vast majority of people are entertained. They watch just to watch. On the other hand, Walla, who's one of the number one educators on YouTube, you can even see the different look and feels, and don't worry, I'm going to get into that. He may entertain some enthusiasts around that subject. But, mostly, he educates students. And until recently, I've been trying to figure this out. I've spent a

lot of time really working through this. And so, I actually have videos in all three buckets. I have entertainment videos where the point is to get people to watch. I have edutainment videos where we try and teach and entertain at the same time. And then we have education videos where we just want to change people's behavior. We just want to teach them something. And so, the first change, number one, that we see, or lots of the

data I'll support in a second, is that I'm going all in on education. For three reasons. Number one is that when we looked at all of our data, all views are not created equal. I'll dive into that in a second. Number two is I like educational videos. And number three is I like people who like educational videos, too. And or people who educate themselves, people who want to learn. And so, let me explain these. So, all

views are not created equal. So, there's this theory, and this is going to This will be one that's going to rattle some cages. There's a theory that media works like a funnel. In fact, the vast majority of marketing infographics and things like that, almost all are funnels. And the theory goes like this. You make entertaining content, and then the theory states that people who watch that content then will go to more educational content. Okay? Sounds simple

enough. We've got something wide, we've got something narrow. Fantastic. But, in our experience, in my experience, and based on our book sales, based on our email opt-ins, and based on the applications we receive at acquisition.com to become portfolio companies, it works much more like this. Which is that entertainment people want more entertainment content. And education people want more, say it with me, education content. And so in other words, these people do not become these people. Not

in any appreciable rate that we would build a business around. And they certainly don't read the books, join the email list, or apply to become portfolio businesses. So if I want more of these people then they deserve the stuff that they value. And so that's the first reason that I'm doubling down on education. All views are not created equal. Number two. The next is that I simply like doing it. All right, so you know, I do

believe that you should try and do stuff that you like doing and if it happens to also be in line with your goals, awesome. It's much tougher when the thing you like doing isn't in line with your goals, but in this instance, when I got that first piece of data, I was like, thank god cuz this is stuff I like making most. All right? And so when I talk to ideal customers in my mind, they're business

owners and business interested people. Because if you know me and anybody who is who's close to me would probably attest to this is that like if you hang out with me for any amount of time, we will probably talk about business because it's what I love talking about. I I eat it, I sleep it, I drink it, I work 7 days on it and like I skip holidays for it because for me it is the holiday.

So, this is what I like doing and this is what the people that I like serving also like. And so they like it better, too. And this is where it got confusing for me leading up to this and why this is so important is that it got very confusing when you have so many people saying, "Man, I really like the entertaining content." And this is where it gets difficult. This is where you have to read between

the lines of the comments rather than just reading the comments themselves. All right? Because the thing is is for us, or at least for me, they weren't necessarily who I was trying to attract. Again, there's nothing wrong with that. I I hey, if I could serve the whole world, I will. But, I know that I tend to do better serving people who want to educate themselves than people who just want to watch or consume just for

the sake of it. And so, that's why I'm doubling down on going from edutainment some enter- edutainment some entertainment to education. So, that's number one. So, let's talk about change number two that we saw. Going from for us to for you. You're like, "Well, what does that mean?" Let me explain. So, recently a mutual friend came to the headquarters, and he said, "Hey, I've been consuming your stuff for years. But, recently I just haven't been watching

as much." And he said it offhandedly. He wasn't like trying to smash my ego into bits. Um and he failed at that. Uh >> [laughter] >> But, when he said it, I really took it to heart, right? It was very gut-wrenching. He said, "It just doesn't resonate as much." I was like, "Okay, got it." It felt like a gut punch since he's literally the person I could help most. He's a business owner doing 10 million plus

a year. I was like, "Man, well, that sucks." And that's when I realized that reading the comments actually led me a little bit astray. And for you, it might be leading you astray. And I'll give you some data to support that. And so, some people loved our different styles, but not the people that I ultimately wanted to help or am best suited to serve. And so, we realized that we were serving the wrong who. And that

had some very significant downstream impacts on what we made and how we made it. So, what is making for them or for business owners content really mean? Let me break this down into tactics. All right, so tactically I made five things. Number one, different packaging. Number two, different introductions. Number three, different meat. Number four, different visuals. And number five, different what I'll call pre-work. All right, so let's start with number one. So, the difference between these

two thumbnails is going from vague to clear. All right, so if I looked at all the stuff that we did in the past, if I said, "What is the video on the left about?" you probably be like, "I a rule of some sort that might have to do with money. Not sure." If I said, "What's the What's the video on the right, the yellow background video?" If I were to describe it, I'd probably say a map

or a blueprint or schematics of some sort that go from zero to a million. Okay. Well, guess what? The one on the right is is exactly that. The one on the left actually has nothing to do with what that thumbnail looks like. And what do you know? When people click on something that they don't know what it's about, they have a smaller percentage of getting something they actually want than if you say, "This is what this

is about." and then they get exactly what they think it's about. So, we're going from vague to clear in both what it looks like, the thumbnails, and what we say about it, the headlines. And so, that's number one from a packaging perspective that we'll be changing and/or going more all in on. And I want to take a pause here for a second about this. There was also kind of a pervasive narrative in in the kind of

marketing world is like, "You got to have curiosity. You got to like You don't want to tell them everything. You want them to to be able to get No. Like if they want that thing, they will click on that thing, and then you just give them that thing. And that has been a very hard lesson for me to learn. And so, I share it with you now. So, the second is different introductions. You guys feel on

this? Okay. Good. Okay. Different introductions. Now, this one is really big. So, going from confirming the thumbnail or confirming the headline to proof. And this is super important. I'll explain the difference. So, a lot of the things that I learned, like many of you, if you are trying to get into content creation of any sort or media, is that you look at the people who are who are the biggest, right? And so, often times the biggest

people in media are entertainers. Now, why is that? Because everyone gets value from entertainment. But there is no one thing from an education perspective that can provide value to everyone. Why? Because everyone already knows different stuff. So, if I educate a wide slice of people, there's still already people who know that thing and then do not get value. So, entertainment by definition will always be greater or larger the followings for those people than people who educate.

There is no no bones about it. Like it is that way. And so, a lot of the lessons that entertainment teaches, everyone listens to because they have the biggest followings. But, I don't think the actual tactics they subscribe or espouse are correct at a tactical level. At a principle level, yes. And so, let me just say a second about what that principle is. Is that the person who's going to consume the content, we want to increase

their perceived likelihood that they will get what they clicked. So, just like the headline and just like the thumbnails, now when they said in entertainment, you want to confirm it. Well, that's because most of the sensational entertainment is something crazy. And so, the likelihood that someone just got the click so that they could not do that crazy thing is pretty high. And so, if you want people to watch, you smash a Lamborghini, then you better have

the Lamborghini next to you or people aren't going to believe that you're actually going to smash it. Now, let's flip to entertainment for a second. Sorry, let's slip let's switch to education for a second. If I say I'm going to teach you a physics thing, I'm going to teach you about the law of I don't even know what the first law of physics is, but if you push it, it will move. Something like that. Anyways, if

I want to have proof or increase the perceived likelihood that they're going to be well taught, then what I actually have to do is edify the person. Why should I listen to you? If I'm the viewer, there's a zillion people that could write something on a board. But, if you're a PhD physicist, then the likelihood that I will listen to you and that I will get what I want is much higher. And so, in both of

these examples, we are actually doing the same thing, but we do it differently if you want to educate. And for me, when I looked at my videos, and I'll explain the data in a second, it became really clear. And so, in entertainment, it's say the title again, and then literally show them what was on the thumbnail. In education, it's show them that you can do what you promised them in the thumbnail, and that's the difference. And

to figure out what made intros for our videos work, I actually rewatched my top 35 educational videos. This actually took some time, and so let me just save you like a lot of hours and just give you the nugget. And so, I actually developed a new moniker around how to think about introductions for ourselves that I'm spreading throughout my whole team, and you can just steal it. Proof promise plan. So, I'll break down all three of

these. So, all of the introductions of the best education videos that we had had these three characteristics. And I want to make one point about the order of these is that you can have these three mixed in any order you want. I would emphasize the one that is the most important for that particular piece of content. So, if you have something that you're making that you think the proof is going to be really important, then lead

with that. If you have a promise that's incredibly important for the audience, then lead with that. If you have a plan that for some reason is going to be more emphasized, then lead with that. But, I would say that for our content for the most, because I'm a business educator about making money in general, most people have this big glaring sign above their head before they can even turn on the volume of their brain, which is

why should I listen to you? And so, I tend to lead with proof. And so, proof is that you prove that you know what you're talking about. You give people a reason to believe you. The promise is to tell them what they're going to get or learn from the video. And the plan sets the expectations of what will happen next. So, let me give you a real-world example of this. I started this presentation with data that

shows that I've done what I'm talking about. If I went up here and just skipped this part, you might be like, "Okay, all of this up to this point, why should I listen to you?" And you'd be right in thinking that because you have no idea who I am. I could just be some random dude that looks like a Birkenstock, slightly lumberjacky-ish, weirdly dressed man. Like, why would you listen? And you'd be reasonable to believe that,

right? But if you start with that, then you're like, "Okay, well, he knows something." The promise was what I said you would get at the beginning. I said I learned six things that made money and grew my brand that you can use today. And I'm going to save you $4 million in 3 and 1/2 years, and you'll just get all the lessons that I learned. That was the promise. Making sense? Okay. And then finally, we had

the plan. I said, "How are we going to get there? How am I going to complete that promise?" I said, "Well, there are six changes, and I'm going to walk through them." That's the plan. And so, leading with those things, we found got business owners, or the people that I'm interested in, to actually better frame and perceive and get educated on the content that we're talking about. And so, that's what we're changing in our introductions. Third,

now let's talk about how this strategy changes the meat of the content, what we're actually like the the real bones, the potatoes. All right? Is that going from be real {slash} vlog stuff, cuz we have made that, to list steps and stories. When we looked at the educational content that did the best, they had more of the right and less of the left. From razzle, I would I would love to say to dazzle, but it really

is it's just razzle on the left. And so, I actually wanted to show you different type of content. So, I don't want to make this seem like this is all YouTube-y. I just have like long-form video there has all of the elements, and some platforms don't have all of them. So, this You YouTube is a very easy platform to to base this off of, but this is from Instagram. And TikTok would function the same way, etc.

So, if you look at the squares here, I just pulled the last 30 days of content that we made. And I looked at our bottom performing over the last 30 days that we posted that were reals, and then I looked at the top. Now interestingly it was a almost a a perfect reversal. So, the bottom 12 videos that we made, eight out of 12, I would say had more razzle emphasized. It was more about effects, a

little bit higher production. And on the flip side, and this is what was crazy, and this is why I'm sharing this stuff with you because like I would I would literally never have guessed it, and that's why we look. Nine out of 12, 75% of the best videos we had emphasized language. Emphasized the actual message more than the production. And so, it was about emphasizing the language rather than the razzle. I find this very fascinating. Now,

to be really clear, you can have really bad language. You have like poor, vague, unclear language, and it won't do well. And you might have razzle that just absolutely crushes. I just look at the trends of 75% on this side were this style or this type, and 75% that weren't as good were this style. Well, then let's do more of this and less of that. And so, those are the main meat changes that we're doing in

the videos. We're emphasizing language. This also was true with longs as well. So, if I go and show you this real quick, language, that's on the screen, and that's one of our best videos ever, and that takes up 70 80% of the video is actually just words. Interesting, for me at least. I mean, I was a little offended cuz I thought I had a, you know, good face, but apparently no one cares. Uh So, that's what

we're changing about the meat. So, let's talk about visuals. This one's a big one. All right. So, going from overproduction, and I want to be clear, not overproduction overproduction for the objective. So, it's not like we did like my team did anything wrong or anything like that. It's just that if we want to educate, sometimes production distracts from the objective of education. If the point for entertainment is to get someone to watch, then adding lots of

things can be a good thing. But if you're trying to learn physics, and there's wiz bangs and pop-ups and changing backgrounds, it's really hard to learn. And if that's the throughput or that's the point of the video, then it actually detracts rather than adds. And so, the difference that I put in this example here is we have a background that changes colors while I'm teaching something. It does not help someone understand the subject matter better. Fundamentally,

changing background color will not help anyone learn more. On the flip side, clarifying what words on a screen are cuz maybe my handwriting's not that good, would help people understand. That's the difference. So, overproduction to effective production. From distracting to enhancing. From visual effects to visualizing data. So, instead of having flames behind me, it's What does this look like on a chart? So, we can give relative scale. So, we have scope, so we can show changes

over time. And so, that's how the visuals that did the best looked like. And then number five, let's talk about pre-work for a second. So, going from post-production to pre-search. So, instead of saying, "Hey, let's just record something and then fix it in post." Anybody's in the media side knows what I'm talking about. Four weeks of editing after, you know, almost no prep to get a video out. Well, what if we did four weeks of research

and then we have almost no editing because we thought of everything ahead of time. Well, guess what? The videos where we spent, I mean, we're like the the the hour-to-hour ratio is stupid and I'll get to that in a second. But, if we spent a quarter of the time that we used to spend on post in pre, we eliminate 90% 90, maybe 95% of our post edit work and man hours. And for the business owners in

the room, that's real cost. That's real savings. And for the also business owners in the room, that also means increased production. So, if I can take a in the quarter of the time and I can get almost zero time on the back end, that's four times the videos. But, not only is it four times the output, it's also higher quality for your goal and your audience. So, this is a big thing that we noticed. The videos

that we spent the most time on the front end, we spent less time on the back and they did better. And so, we want to spend more time before than after. And so, this is my little quote on if you want to write something down. Uh an ounce of pre-work is worth a pound of post. So, that was my little my little take on this. And so, by focusing more on what educates and what it means,

we do great and everything else distracts from that goal. And so, the those are the five things that we're changing tactically and that we're doubling down on to cater to business owners. This, at least for my audience, is what they cared about. And I happen to be in that audience and I feel that way, too. So, I'm happy about it. So, that's how we went from for us as media people to a degree cuz I've gotten

into this now. Uh to for you or for your audience. And for me, that means for business owners. So, now let's talk about why dinero. All right, and this will also ruffle some feathers and rattle some cages. So, instead of talking about relationships and college and food and lifestyle I'm going to be narrowing down or doubling down on, if you will business business models business leverage and selling in a business. Notice business being in all of

these videos. In all these topics. And so, that's how I'm going narrower. Very simple. Now that I'm going to go back a slide cuz I want to I went ahead on this for a second. Just like I said earlier that people who like entertainment also just want more entertainment, what we also found is that people who I'll go back real quick. People who watch relationship stuff want more relationship stuff. And as they should, that's what they

clicked on. That's what they want. That makes sense. And people who want to learn about college are people trying to make a decision about college. Guess what those people probably aren't? Business owners. And people who want to learn about food, they watch other food videos. And people want about lifestyle probably watch other lifestyle videos. But for me, those are not necessarily the people that vibe the most with my stuff. And that makes sense because to be

fair, this is a little bit more foreign to me. When I talk about business, I feel very comfortable. When I talk about these things, I just give what I would consider hot takes. This is my perspective. So, that is what we're doubling down on in terms of the topics that we're choosing for the content we make. So, that's number three. Let's go to number four in terms of the the things we're doubling down on. So, before

this, we used to track views. This is another big one. Man, all six of these are big. Man, I'm glad I made a presentation about it. So, before this, we used to track views as our primary metric. So, I'll take a second here. Who uses Be honest. Be honest. Everybody's like likes don't You can't trade likes for for paying rent. You can't pay payroll with views. Sure. Okay, got it. Who here actually tracks something besides views?

Let me say it again. Who makes views the most important metric you track? All right. Right. A lot of you. That's okay. Me, too. But I'm going to give you a good metric that you can track. And this is after pouring through Believe me, I'm I'm a big data guy. Um a metric that you might not expect. So, the main reason is that I had a 6-to-12-month deal cycle. So, I started by using views because I

really had no other metric. Because for those of you don't know what I do, well, I'll explain in a second. But we had no idea what what it would do besides driving awareness. And I didn't really have any other objective. Right? But in that time period of doing a deal in every 6 to 12 months, because we buy companies, that's more or less what we do, um we began seeing a much closer correlation with faster feedback

metrics. And ideally in any business, you want as little latency between the metrics you track and the behavior you want to change. And so, if you want to get people to change something and you want to look at something that takes a year to get feedback, really tough to change behavior. But if you can have a metric that you can see daily changes or hourly changes, then those are things that are going to much more quickly

change behavior so that you can have 100 feedback loops in terms of changing and getting better than one every year. And so, besides book sales, opt-ins, and applications, there was a metric that stood out as fastest and most measurable. It was ad revenue. And this is really surprising to me. So, and I this is the point I want to make real quick is that to be clear for those of you don't know who I am, ad

revenue is not how I make my money. All right, just very clearly. Um, for those of you don't know, my wife and I exited our first big company uh for $46.2 million in December of 2021. You can Google it. American Pacific Group was the private equity firm. Jim Launch proceeds option to through those companies. Um, and since then we invested and bought a number of companies that have grown a lot and do over $200 million a

year. So, I do media to feed a lot of different things, but I don't directly monetize the media and at like ad revenue is I'll explain why in a second is an important metric that we can use for everything else. Okay? So, these are companies that we own. Great. So, for me, I pretty much always ignored ad revenue and just saw it as something that could offset some of the cost of the immediate team. There was

really nothing else. But I was wrong. It's actually so much more. So, let's let's dive into a little bit for a second like, how does ad revenue come to be? So, it comes from two things. It's number of views times revenue per views. Now, the actual term is RPMs, which is revenue per mill, which is French for 1,000, but it's number of views times the revenue that you get. Okay, per view. Fantastic. So, it takes into

account, and this is why this is important because we thought views, and that was the only metric we had, but we had to have something to counter it cuz otherwise then you get views for views' sake, but we needed a quality metric with a quantity metric. Which by the way, paired metrics, if you're ever tracking something for a department, having like number of tickets resolved with rating against the the the resolution of how well those customer

service reps resolved, paired metrics allow you to get to the best or most effective throughput for any department. And I just didn't know enough about media to find out what our paired metric was. And this happens to be a single metric that pairs both. And so it takes account the quality of the audience, which for me was business owners who have amongst the highest spending power. And so RPMs are the highest. Now for So for me,

the RPMs go up, it means I'm getting more of the quality people that I want. And so this gave me and my team something that we could shoot for that balanced making videos for the right people who wanted to watch. So I mean, ideally, we absolutely want to crank views with the right people. And that's what that was able to track for us. And looking backwards, the month with the highest RPMs and ad revenue also created

the most book sales, the most opt-ins, and the most business applications. And this had nothing to do with how many views we got. In fact, we did it kind of an experiment lately where we did 90 days of almost no business stuff. We just did more more edutainment and entertainment-style content, and our views went through the roof, like way up. Two, three X what we're accustomed to. But even with the increase in views, our ad revenue

dropped by half. So we're actually getting the wrong people. And I share this with you so you don't have to. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through. And I broke each of these

down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this and it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap. Just enter your info and it'll

spit it right back to you all free. And so the nice thing about this from a team perspective for those of you do have larger teams and want to translate this over is that my team now has real-time access to this. So they can see every single piece of content and the ad revenue that it generates and they can quickly generate baselines in their mind of what's good and what's bad on an objective metric that really

is good and bad rather than just like, "Hey, this video cranked." Yeah, but it didn't it didn't bring any of the right people. We got this thing that had 10 million views. Okay, but it drove nothing. Versus we had this video that had whatever, 100,000 views and it made more ad revenue than the one that had 10 million. And we saw the corresponding increase in the metrics that matter to us. And so that's why we switched

from views being the metric that we're optimizing for to ad revenue because it's a leading performance indicator. It happens almost in real time rather than something that happens in a big in arrears to give you a fancy word, later. So that's number four in terms of the things that we're doubling down on. So let's talk about the fifth one. Shorts to longs. All right, this is yet and then another big one that's going to ruffle some

feathers. So for a long time the prevailing idea in content marketing was again a funnel. It's like everything's a funnel. All right. And it was believed that shorts viewers got more people to then watch longs and then those long viewers would then translate into becoming customers, right? So people watch shorts and then they watch longs and they give you money, right? That was kind of the prevailing thought. But again, when we looked at the data, it

looked more like this. Shorts viewers watch more shorts. And long viewers watch more longs. And customers buy more customers. >> [laughter] >> And so the point is that that these are different audiences, and I will make a note here that this can change my platform. So, I might be a long viewer on one platform and a shorts viewer on another. And where I do think the magic happens is where you can have shorts in one thing,

and so someone finds you on TikTok, but then they are a longs viewer on YouTube, and then they watch your longs there. So, I do think there's an element there, but not the way the narrative goes. And so for us, longs drive a lot more conversions than shorts. Conversions being book sales, opt-ins, and applications, all right? And business-related content, unsurprisingly, brings more business owners than not business-related content. And so we are going to double down on

more longs about that stuff. And change our short strategy to keep the volume the same, but focus more on business overall. And again, people watch differently on different platforms. So, making shorts in order for people to on a different platform watch longs still carries as far as we know. So, despite the mega obsession with shorts that has kind of prevailed for the last few years because it was a new, you know, format of content, we're putting

now more emphasis on longs overall. For now, as far as we have data. So, that's number five. Now, let's talk about the sixth one that I'm going all in on. Assume more to assume nothing. All right, so what does this mean? So, let's start with assume more and what what that what that really means broken down. So, assume more means I made content assuming people already knew me. Okay? So, here's an example. The Alex Hormozi guide

to haters. I might be like, if I don't know who Alex Hormozi is or I've never seen that face before, why do I care? If I see the day in the life of Alex Hormozi, yet again, I assume everyone knows me in this. I'm I'm sharing these mistakes with you as far as I'm concerned for getting new people into my world. It wasn't made, I assumed, like everybody's going to know me. The Alex Hormozi diet. Everyone

knows me. No, they're like, who is this guy? Right? And here's why this matters. If you want your content to bring people who don't know you, which is why many of you guys make content, then you can't assume they do. And so this is what this looks like tactically. From a headlines perspective, if I were to remake these today, I might try a first crack at business influencer crushes haters and shows how you can, too. Okay.

So now, if I'm clicking, I would understand at least that this guy is a business influencer of some sort, and he crushes haters. Okay, why I might want to see haters get crushed. Uh day in the life of $200 million per year CEO. Okay. Now, the jet tells this me that this Alex Hormozi from the the first one before Alex Hormozi's maybe rich, or maybe he can afford a private jet, but now I know he's a

CEO, cuz I could be a rapper. I could be, more realistically, when I walk around in the place that I live, all the people that in my community assume that I'm a football player. It's the number one thing they're like, "So you uh play football or you on the hockey team?" And uh I I say no. I can No, nothing wrong with that, but no, that's not what I do. Um and then, the third one there,

Alex Hormozi diet, 16-hour work day, six-pack diet for business owners, whatever. The point is is that we actually make it welcoming to everyone. And so here's how we do this tactically within the content itself. So, we go from they know me to introducing yourself every time. So earlier, I was like, "I'm Alex Hormozi, this is what I do, this is the the the the subscribers I've gotten, whatever." We introduce ourselves. Two, they know why they should

listen to me. Tell people why they should listen to you every time. Three, the inside jokes. You know how I get. No, I don't know how you get. Please fully explain the reference, because that references another piece of content that I haven't seen, cuz this is the first video I've seen from you. And if you tell an inside joke, and someone doesn't understand the inside joke, guess where they are? On the outside. And guess where people

don't want to be? On the outside. And guess where people spend money? On the inside. And number four, going from acting like you're already friends to pretending everything goes to people who have no idea who you are. And when you make content so people who don't know you can enjoy it, more do. And for those of you who are worried, cuz I can already hear the thoughts that are coming up. So, let me just address those

right now. I see you. I'm going to lose retention if I introduce myself. Okay, well, let's play the equal opposite. Would you rather fewer people know who you are or more people who have no clue? Because on one hand, we have some people who know you. And on the other hand, we have lots of people who also don't know you. So, you're in the exact same position you were before. Two. Well, aren't people going to get

sick of this? You're going to keep saying your name every time or keep introducing yourself? Well, from what I can tell, warm people like the reminders and cold people need the introduction. And as a total side note, this is a fun little experiment for everyone here. You can run this when you leave here. If Who here actually Who here actually has posted content in the last year? Okay, good. Okay. Good. For a second, I was like,

this would have been really bad if no one had raised their hand. Fantastic. Okay. I want you to look at last year, and I want you to look at your number one piece of content. And this is what I want you to do. Just post it again. And then let me know how it does. And I will bet you that it does just as well or better than the stuff that you're posting right now. And let

me tell you one reason why I believe that to be true. Because if you have been posting consistently, guess what's also happened? More people have entered your audience. And guess what they haven't seen? That amazing piece of content that everyone from last year said was the number one best thing you ever made. And you know what you said? New people, you don't get that. That was only for my old folks. My OG's, they only get that.

No, you got to reintroduce some of the stuff, your greatest hits. Got to bring that stuff in so that the new people also know what your greatest hits are. So that the lore continues to compound and grow. So, number three. And this one are sub point. And this is one for me personally. I follow a bunch of quote accounts. I you know, I I like comedy and philosophy and like fighting. Those are like kind of categories

that I follow and gym equipment. And so I get quotes a lot on my newsfeed. But you know what happens when I see a quote from Sophocles or Epictetus yet again that reminds me that I should just toughen up and keep going? I like the reminder. I'm not like Epictetus God, you lived 4,000 years ago like get over yourself. No, he's not making new content but guess what people still post it and people still read it

because we need to be reminded more than we need to be taught. At least I do. To give a little tactical one on this for mainstream cuz this is what might resonate for some of the older people in the crowd. There was this thing called television a while back used to be big. Anyways, instead of having it on your phone, it was like this big screen on a wall. You had a it's a whole thing. Anyways,

I won't get into it. It's like floppy disk. Regardless, floppy disk was okay. Anyway, so so there used to be this thing where at the beginning of every show there was a theme song, right? So they'd be like Cheers where everybody knows your name and there's always a little introduction. It says produced by and all that stuff. And if those shows that's been gazillions of dollars on testing chose to think that despite selling more advertising space,

it was worth having the same exact theme song and introduction for the show, don't you think it might be worth that for us too? And here's an interesting thing, the last thing. Positive associations and six. If you actually get sing-songy about how you introduce yourself or the things that you relate to you, it starts to become something that people expect and then they start associating it with all the positive other experiences they had with you. So

if I always introduce something a certain way and then I deliver value afterwards, they associate the introduction with the value. And guess who else do they associate that with? You. And so, for those of you who are concerned, you can add variety to this. And I want to show you a cool little real-world example of this. So, The Simpsons has the longest-standing show to my knowledge that has existed on television. And the introduction is the same

now. Bart would be like 70 by now or whatever his his actual age would be if it was actually humans. But it isn't, right? And every introduction has Bart at some point in detention writing something on the board. For those of you don't know The Simpsons, every one of the introductions actually changes. >> [snorts] >> Every one of them. And so, they still have the introduction that has all the positive associations with the funny times and

the humor and the laughs that you've had with the show. But, they introduce a tiny bit of variety into them to keep it interesting. And then what happens is people look forward to these introductions cuz they want to find the Easter egg. The real fans now get catered to and the new fans don't know about it yet, but they will. And so, now you actually serve both sides of the audience, the people who know you and

the people who first who are just coming cold. And so, that's it. Small variation, same introduction, you let the new people in, and you give something to the the people who already know you. So, title it like they don't know you, introduce yourself, say why they should listen, prioritize the content that makes sense for strangers, deprioritizing the vlogs, the hot takes, the opinions because if you can serve both audiences, serve both. Let the new people in

rather than have a wall they have to jump over. Let them in on the joke. Fully explain the references that that make, make all jokes inside jokes for everyone. And then finally, mentally act as though you're always talking to a stranger because if the content does well, you are. At least, that's what I'm going to be doing. And so that's the six big changes that we're doubling down on. And so now that we covered those changes

in my strategy, I just want to get real for a second. Everything has a cost. And it's not that other types of media or other topics or other formats don't work. Obviously, we had a smorgasbord. We had a huge variety, a cornucopia, myriad content types that we did over the last 40-ish months. And obviously, we had 7.8 million subscribers and 2 billion views during that time period in a niche audience of business owners. Pretty good. And

so it's not to say that other things don't work. I'd even say that my mess-ups also worked to a certain a small degree. It's just that they didn't work as well as something else might have. And so the game, at least as I see it in entrepreneur entrepreneurship, is figuring out what's my biggest bang for buck. Right? What's the content that gets me the most of everything? Because you only have limited resources. You have time, money,

energy, you put it into your team, and that goes onto the social media or the media that you that you market on, and then that has output. And so if you can become more efficient with the inputs you get, you get more output on the other side. And so the question becomes, with the resources I have, how can I maximize the number of the right people who find out about my stuff? And so this is something

that I live by. Anything works better than nothing. So raise your hand right now if you haven't made a piece of content in 90 days. Okay. Just do something. Because if you do something, you will do better than what you're currently doing. Two. Some things work better than others. And three, nothing works forever. And so the requirement of the entrepreneur is to start doing something, see what works better, and then do as much of that as

they possibly can for as long as they can until it slows down, and then figure out what the next thing to do is. And then do as much as they can of that. So, is that helpful in terms of understanding content and media? Yes. Awesome. Do you feel like you got at least one lesson without the scars saved at least a tiny percentage of the $4 million that I spent learning what didn't work so I could

show you these six things that do? Okay good. Would you like more stuff like this? Okay. Well, then I've got a bunch of free stuff that I can give you to help you grow your brand and make some money. That'd be all right? Okay. So, if you're just starting a business right now, raise your hand. Okay, this is for you. I'm the co-founder of the school games. Inside you'll find courses, full-day trainings, the easiest business model

they know how to use this this media stuff cuz it's one thing to just say like, "Oh, great. I just watched this whole thing on media. Now do I do?" Well, this gives you somewhere to actually practice it like a sandbox. You can learn it, and you learn by doing. This is one of the lowest stakes way to make money, get your first dollar across the finish line. And so, fun fact, something I'm very proud of

is that right now 30.44% of people who finish their first month make their first dollar online by starting an online community. I think that's pretty cool. And so, you can start that for free by going to school.com/games. All right? Tell them I sent you. So, that's for everybody. Raise your hand if you're starting a business right now. Okay, that's for you. Now, if you're a little further along in your business journey, I've got free stuff for

you, too. All right? Trying to feel like Santa Claus today. I wrote these two books right now which have 25,000 five-star reviews and they sold a million plus copies. And I made courses for each of those books that are free. On my site, you go to acquisition.com/training. So, if you like this stuff, you want to learn about offers, learn more about advertising, learn about getting leads, paid ads, content, all of that stuff so that you can

start making money within your business or scale it from wherever you are to where you want to go, I've made this stuff for you. These are real courses. It's not barred anywhere. You can click there, watch them all. All right? See, I put that for myself because this is how I roll. I get in the Get in the zone. So, otherwise, you guys are all amazing. You can go there for stuff that will help you practice

the stuff, actually do it in the real world. Because if you just walk away from here today and you do not execute anything, you learned nothing. And so, for the love of God, just do one of the things so that you can get a tiny percent of that $4 million and the 35,000 pieces of content and the 1,000 hours that I spent recording, just do one of them so that you can take that lesson for you.

Thank you, guys. >> [applause] >> Now, building your personal brand can sometimes be overwhelming. So, I want to help you cut through the noise and give you one more quick tactic that's helped me grow my audience. I'm about to teach you a rarely used method that I used to grow my audience by 5 million people [music] in under 24 months. And the crazy thing is is 24 months ago, I had less than 10,000 followers and I

knew nothing about YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, any of these other platforms. And the reason that I was able to catapult to, you know, a top 1% creator in that 24-month period is using this method that for some reason, no one really talks about. Whenever I enter a new space, whether it's trying to learn a new skill, a new platform, a new anything, I realize there's a massive amount of skill deficiency that I have to overcome as

fast as humanly possible. And so, I can either deploy time or I can deploy money to save myself time. So, within the world of organic content, I was like, who can I pay to shortcut my path to getting to where they are? So, on one hand, I could go to like celebrities and I did go to some of them and they would give me their strategies, but it was like very personalized and tailored to them and

I didn't think it would apply to like how I run acquisition.com in my daily life. On the other hand, there was like the coaches, gurus, etc. that I could go to and I didn't want to do that because they might be using something that worked like 5 years ago, which honestly, I I all the time. They're like, "Guys, you've got to do hashtags on YouTube videos." I'm like, "What are you talking about? Like this that's that's

not true." And the third option, which I ultimately went with, are advertising agencies. [music] And what an agency is is just a business that sells services of advertising on your behalf. I can pay someone to run ads for me. I can pay someone to cut, edit, and distribute content on my behalf. So, what I want to do is help you decide whether or not you should use an agency and avoid what I call the agency trap.

There's different tiers of agencies. There's the guys who just make [music] stuff, and then there's the people who are real pros. Contextually here, for one brand on one platform, a small one might cost three-ish, maybe 5,000 a month. The more advanced ones are usually in the 15 to 30,000 or so a month. So, it's significantly more money. So, here's how I use agencies now and how you can, too. Phase one is I get what I would

consider a basic agency. So, long before getting into YouTube, the first step I did was I hired a 3 to 5,000 or so a month agency, and they just got me to commit to doing three videos a week. They just trimmed it, which means you take out the oohs and ahs, put an intro, and a thumbnail. The main objective of that first phase was just to get the basics down, forcing me to create content on a

regular cadence. Once I have more context, because I've spent 3 6 months working with them, seeing what the audience likes, then I'm like, [music] "Okay, now I want to learn everything." So, I go from beginner of learning the basics and doing the fundamentals to how do the top creators create on this platform? No business owner should change their business for one client. And so, it makes sense for both me and the small agency, or for you

and a small agency, to part ways at some point when your demands for what you want exceed their capacity. So, then I work with the much better, more advanced agency who works with the top creators to learn all of the more nuanced pieces of the platform. So, rather than agree to their initial terms, which is basically pay us as long as humanly possible, and we hope you pay until you die. This is exactly what I say.

Gather around. I want to do what you do in my business, but I don't know how. I'd like to work with you for 6 months so I can learn how you do it. Plus, I'll pay extra for you to break down why you make the decisions you do and the steps you take to make them. Then, after I get a good idea of how it all works, I'll start training my team on it. And once they

can do it well enough, I'd like to change to a lower cost consulting agreement. This way, you can still help us if we run into problems. Are you opposed to this? When you start that way, I like it because you're starting with very clear intentions. And you're saying, "Hey, I'm going to commit to 6 months. This is what I want from you. And I'm also saying I'm going to continue to pay you after the engagement's over

for a much higher leverage, much more profitable consulting engagement." So, that's what a lot of agencies would ultimately want. And if I need to pay a little bit more than the agency fee upfront, then I'm willing to do that. I also understand that as I start to train my team on it internally, there will be a period of time where I'm paying both them and my team. So, you're paying twice. The thing is is that when

you do that, you're actually building the enterprise value of your business and you're building the asset that you own rather than being reliant on somebody else who eventually could, if you wanted to, cut you off and then you'd be dead in the water. Or, what more realistically happens is they gouge you and they continue to raise their price cuz they can see how much money you're making from the thing. With that new agency, we ran the

same play. "Hey, we want to learn from you. We want to understand why you're picking these things. We want to understand the decision-making process, etc." I start documenting what they're doing into our processes internally. We want to start co-creating. So, they're making stuff for us and we're making stuff for us. And eventually, our stuff for us starts to be as good and eventually better than the stuff that they make for us. And it should be because

I'm only one client of many to them and I'm basically renting them as fractional labor with expertise at a premium. Once your team has the same amount of expertise or more, they should be better because one, they have more time because they're going to fully allocate their time to you. And secondly, because they will always have more context on your brand than an agent will. By having more time and more context, all we have to fill

is the gap of expertise. And so, once we have the expertise gap, then the in-house team should be better than the advanced team. And then at that point, you decouple and you let them go. You want to make sure that you have a clear deadline for when you want to make that transition. And this is good for a couple reasons. One is cuz it sets expectations with them. They can also see the LTV and you can

talk in terms of that. Let's say it's $6,000 a month. I'm committing to $36,000. All right, so like you're going to get that from me as long as you're not an idiot. But the real real is that your team also knows that you're like, "Hey, we're one month down. We got to understand this stuff in five months. Hey, we're two months down. We got to understand this stuff in four months." And so it drives you towards

the outcome of getting your team up to speed faster. Now, you have that deadline, but what if your team's not as good as theirs by the time the deadline comes? Well, in my opinion, you either need to change the people or they're not teaching everything that needs to happen. Because if their low-skilled people are doing better than your team, someone who is a problem. Either them or you. Let's assume that the people are right and maybe

it's just a more complex platform, whatever. I keep going until our team matches theirs. Once our team matches theirs, then I drop it off. We downgrade it to a consulting agreement just for insurance. One or two months later, if we feel like we're not learning anything on the calls that we have from a consulting perspective, we cut it. And we do so amicably because we set that as the expectation. That's how I grew my YouTube. So

now let's approach the same concept but on different platform. I didn't understand Tik Tok at all. I didn't use it. I wasn't on it. I actually had an agency reach out to me. How about which is not common for me to accept that, but they said, "Listen, you do no work." So from a value perspective, the offer was we You already have enough content out there. I can repurpose it and make shorts out of it. And

I was like, "Okay, sure. If you want to do all the work and involve me at nothing and just make content for me, sounds good." And so that's what they did. And they started getting traction with the short videos and we're like, "Okay, this stuff works." And then for me, my director of brand actually had a super deep history on short form content. And so normally I would have had that second phase where I would go

for that premium agency, but that individual worked at a premium agency. And so I actually bought the SOPs automatically and we were able to massively scale our output on short content within six or so months of working with that original agency. And again, we're on good terms with the person in the agency. If you set the expectation up front, which is I want to learn from you, and I want to be transparent about my intentions, and

I want to eventually bring this in house because it's my belief that my team will be able to allocate more time to my thing and understand my brand better. And if they had your skills, they will be able to do more output at higher quality than you could ever do. You have to make a margin, I don't. I'm going to cover costs and get five times more output. This is what I believe has married the best

parts of agency and the best part of building an enterprise and making a valuable business and avoided the agency trap that so many people fall into, myself included. So, the first agency experience I ever had was actually really good. I then worked with like 10 more agencies, and all of them were terrible. And this is the exact process of what happened. So, reading directly from 100 million dollar leads, step one, they got me excited about all

the new leads they would bring. Step two, I'd go through an onboarding process that felt valuable and sometimes was. Step three, they assigned their best senior rep to my account. Step four, I saw some results. Step five, they moved my senior rep to the newest customer. Step six, a junior rep starts managing my account. My results suffer. Step seven, I complain. Step eight, the senior rep would come back once in a while to make me feel

better. Step nine, the results still never got back to where they were before, and I'd eventually cancel. Step 10, I'd search for another agency and repeat the cycle of insanity. Step 11, for the zillionth time, start wondering why I wasn't getting results like the first time. So, how do you decide if using an agency is right for you? First off, do you have more money or more time? If you don't have any money, then you got

to learn it, and it's going to take time. And you know what? That's part of life. Usually, you master one platform, you get some success, you get a little bit cash flow, and then you can more quickly pay to learn the other ones. You pay down your ignorance assets faster. If you have the money, then for me, it's always worth paying down that debt. And that process is how we approached LinkedIn, how we approached podcasts, how

we approached paid ads, all of them. I run the same playbook. But when it comes to building a strong personal brand, you need to build influence, not just have views. So, here's how to do that. We got 32.7 million views on YouTube this month. Here's how. So, I posted 35,000 pieces of content this year. We did a $100 million book launch for $100 million money models in 72 hours or 3 days. We did over $100 million

in sales. The issue that most people struggle with is that you're making not enough content, number one, and the types of content that you're making are not attracting the types of customers you want. The promise that I have for you today is that I will show you a framework that I have called SPCL, like special if you want, but it's how to build influence rather than how to get as many views as possible or anything like

that. All right? But it's a four-part framework, and I want to break down each of the four components for you so that you can think about how you want to approach making content, all right, and building a brand in general. SPCL, these are letters, and hopefully overhead cam works all right. So, S P C L. So, what do these actually stand for? All right? So, number one is status. And this is why you hear me talk

about proof so much. But how do you define status from an operational perspective? For those of you who are new to the channel, I like to operationalize things, meaning that like I like to look at objective reality and describe how you would see with your eyes rather than try and put a whole bunch of like emotional words around stuff because these are the like that type of language is what confused me for a very long time

when I was coming up, and it was only after I started defining things by what I could see, what I could observe, did reality feel like sharper, more crisp to me, and my ability to predict what was going to happen next increase by a lot. And so, this is why I I talk in this way. So, how do I find status? So, status is someone who controls reinforcers in a given environment. So, that's a little bit

fancy word, but fundamentally, if you control the good stuff that people want, then you will have status no matter what it is, right? And so, the simplest example I have is like if you go to a bar, and it's a busy bar, and there's a bartender, and you have to get the bartender's attention in order to get a drink or booze, that guy in that moment has status. He controls a scarce resource, right? But if that

guy walks out of the bar, no longer controlling that scarce resource, he does not have the same status or even close to it, right? Like outside of the bar, he's not getting tips every every single 5 seconds when he like moves his hands a little bit and like says something nice. People aren't waving money at him as he walks in the street. Of course not. It's because he has status in one condition and he doesn't have

another. Now, what's interesting about all four of these elements I'm going to break down, they all can work independently, but the idea is that you want all four to be stacked together. And this is what gives you the most influence, right? So, like any of these four on their own would give you influence. Like that bartender, if he just has that, he would have some level of influence. And I'll give you a different example of this.

If a kid inherits money, right? They're going to have uh status, right? Like if you just if you have money, even if you didn't earn it, even if you didn't anything, if you have money, you will have some degree of status because you control something other people want, period. That's how it works, all right? But, would that kid who has money have the same status as a kid who has money who also gave you, you know,

10 different crypto coin picks that all popped off, right? Well, if he gave you 10 different picks and you followed them and they all popped off, how much more influence would that person have over them saying, "Hey, you should put money in this." or "Hey, you should, you know, give me money for XYZ." or whatever it is. Obviously, I'm talking money cuz I'm I'm a business person first, but like think about how much more influence version

two would have with just two of those things versus version one. That's the difference. But, if you have all four, that's when you get you become super sad. So, status is number one, so you control scarce resources. Power is number two. I would say if I had to only pick one, I would pick power and I'll explain why. Power comes from something in the behavioral dynamics world called say-do correspondence. What that means is if I say

something and then you do it and then a good thing occurs, a reinforcing event happens afterwards, you are more likely to comply with a following request, right? So, said differently, I give you the example of the guy who says, "Hey, here's 10 stock picks, you buy them." and then a good thing happens. The thing goes up. Great. So, that person has status and power, which is why they are more influential than the trust fund kid who

just has money. And so, to the same degree, for many of you who are trying to make content, one is like, okay, status, I want to demonstrate that I control a scarce resource that some people might want, right? And so, what makes this a little bit more muddy is that sometimes one event can check multiple boxes. And so, I'll give you a simple example. When we launched the book, we did 100 million plus in sales. That

in and of itself, me having money from the event gives me status. Me saying, "Hey, you can launch stuff in this way." gives me credibility, right? Because I show that I have an event I've something that has happened as a result of me doing it that gives me third-party credibility. There's something that you can observe with your eyes, right? The reason that my ads do well when I have my, you know, $10 million building behind me

is like, "Oh, well, that's hard to fake, right?" And so, you have credibility there. And so, one event like selling a company can give you money, it can give you credibility, and then if I give people directions on how they can do things that are similar, and then good things happen, then all of a sudden you get power. And then the last is likeness. I know I'm skipping around, but hey, we're live. We're having a good

time. All right? And so, credibility is number three. And I'm going to go into more detail on all of these. All right? And then likeness. So, what's likeness? So, likeness is that you see some This is some people say relatability. This can be both psychological in terms of you share similar values with this person. You like you like their vibe, whatever you want to say, right? You like their behavior set and it and that behavior set

matches to people who have been positive in your life in the past or they literally just look like you, right? So, like Leila and I could talk about the exact same stuff, but she's a girl and so, she's going to have more chicks who follow her than me. And for the few ladies who do follow me, I appreciate you. I really do. But I have like an 89% male audience. And so, maybe it's it's because of

the topic, but I would think, you know, at my onset I think, "Oh, it's because I talk about money and I talk about business, that's why I have a more male audience." But Leila I think is like 54% female. And she talks about almost exclusively money and business. Obviously, she talks about some mindset stuff, too. But I I say this to say, "Okay, if we have these four things and these are the things that create influence."

And I I define influence as high likelihood of compliance with requests. So, what does that mean? So, if I say, "Hey, you know, grab my new book." Or I say, "Hey, come to this webinar." Or "Hey, I'm going live. Like, come check it out." Or "Hey, you should come to workshop." Whatever it is, right? You make some sort of solicitation. It could be like or subscribe. It doesn't matter. Like, there's levels of how cool big of

an ask something is. If anybody's played like a video game, it's like you have like a roll for like Dungeons and Dragons. And it like depends on how how charismatic, how much influence you have, how high of a roll or how low of a roll, rather, you'd need in order to be successful with the request, right? And so, if you want to stack that stat for you, then if you want to min-max your influence, if you

will, then you want to stack all four of these things. Okay, you're like, "Okay, I think I'm I'm following with this." So, how does this relate to content? So, first off, starting from the back, likeness, I think so much more of it is just like just be you. There's zero ROI in trying to be or act in a way that is different than who you are. It's It's a relatively trite message, but like most people are

NPCs. Most people say pre-recorded scripts. They look at like the four different outfit, you know, combinations that exist for different kind of mental stereotypes. It's like, "Oh, yeah, guy who loves barbecue and craft beers. Oh, yeah, that's that That's that archetype. I'm just going to be that archetype." Or you've got like hipster bro who likes hipster [ __ ] right? Or you've got you know, like just bro, right? You've got who just like stir bro. And people Some

will put me in that status, but I also like for a few years was wearing like sandals that looked like really weird. And I wore those, and that was not bro-y at all, but I like I wore them because they were super comfortable, and I didn't have to like wear socks, which is a big thing for me. Anyways. But point is just like I think what makes you unique if is if you actually lean into the

the nuances that make you you and actually have a way to defend why you do what you do. Because most people don't even think about why they do what they do. And if you do things and you don't know why, it's not It's because you're following someone else's directions for your life, rather than your own. Real. Like, real. And so, so much of us have been programmed by people earlier in our lives. And I say programmed

as though we were like machines, but what person do you think in your life has super high max status, power, credibility, and likeness? Maxed out earlier on in your life. It's your parents. Right? It's your parents. So, think about all four of these elements. Status. Do your parents control scarce resources, things you want? They've got money, and they've got toys that they can buy you, they've got food, they act like they control your shelter. Like they

have huge amounts of status in your life cuz they control all the scarcest resources, all the things you want. These are not binaries. So, don't think like, oh, I have status, I don't have status. It's to what degree do you have status? Right? Like if somebody's got more money than you, they might have some status. If you've got $1, and someone's got 10 grand, they got more status than you, right? But if someone's a billionaire, they

have way more status than the guy who's 10,000, right? So, again, think not in binaries, yes or no, but think in continuums. So, the next one is, think about your parents. Power. How many reinforcement cycles do you assume that your parents had from the time you were born? When I say reinforcement cycles, it means like they said, do this, you did that thing, and then a good thing happened. Now, you might be like, ah, I hate

my dad, I hate my mom, or whatever your thing is. I don't really care. That doesn't matter for this purpose. The idea is that they probably said, don't go in the street, or don't do that, and you avoided a bad thing, or do this, and then a good thing happened, right? You tied your shoes the first time, you put the two bunny ears together, you tied your shoes, a good thing happened, they you followed their directions.

Think about how many times a parent has given you directions, you followed them, and a bad thing was avoided, or a good thing happened. Many. And so, it makes sense that not only do they have a lot of status, they have a lot of power. What else do they have? Credibility. Now, this is one where I think parents sometimes might lack compared to the other things. If you have a parent who also has credibility in that

specific, you know, realm of whatever it is that they're talking about, then you would have even more influence on you. And then finally, for parent, are they like you? Yeah, they literally look like you, right? And oftentimes, they share similar values to you, to a degree. Obviously, some people just go polar opposite from their parents. That's fine, but I'm talking in sweeping generalities for most people. This should at least explain or break down like why do

parents have so much power over us? How much How do they have so much influence over our behaviors? You might not even want to listen to your parents. You might not even like your parents, but you can still feel that they you have to like resist their requests because you are so programmed based on these elements of behavior to comply with their requests, right? And so then the idea is how do we take these four elements,

and then how do we reverse engineer these into the content that we have so that we can build up true influence? Like and again, we're defining influence as the likelihood of a compliance with the request, right? And that likelihood will depend on the nature of the request and how much your SPCL is in relation to that thing, right? If I was giving out fashion tips, I probably don't have a lot of credibility >> [laughter] >> for

fashion tips, right? I don't know if I control any scarce resources around fashion. I have no I have no fashion hookups. Um I probably haven't given anyone specific fashion tips. I have no third-party anything for credibility for it, and you probably don't look like me. >> [laughter] >> And so like I probably would have very low influence. To some degree they can generalize as you go up and up and up, but um you have more influence

in domain specificity. If we know these are the four things, status, power, credibility, likeness, then for each of these things in our videos, right? We want to demonstrate that we control scarce resources. And so for me, like at the very beginning, if you think about what the intro was, right? So I said, "We did, you know, 32.7 million views, and we did over 100, you know, 5.something million dollars in sales for the book launch in 72

hours." And so that's me demonstrating status. I have these things, right? Then power. So what I'm going to do in this video is I'm going to break down four things you can follow, and if you follow these things, you're going to be more likely to get people who are going to comply with your future requests. And so that means that they're not just going to watch your video, but they're going to be more likely to one,

watch your next video, and if you have any kind of call to action in the video, whatever level of call to action that is for you, whether it's subscribe or like or share or or, you know, buy something that's small or, you know, set up a call or whatever it is that you sell, then this is going to be second, right? Like that you'll have included that in your content. So then, credibility is going to be

the third-party stuff. So the reason that I had at my launch, for example, I had Guinness, I had to pay those judges to be on site was because I wanted to validate that the the the books that we did and the revenue that we generated was legit, right? So I had a a third party that most people respect as like a legitimate corporation that their entire business is based on trust that they validate and verify proof

that these records were broken. And so that gives credibility. The likeness piece, like I said earlier, is just you being you, right? And so that's why I'm actually super pumped to do these live streams cuz this is like I honestly hate making YouTube videos. What I mean that is like staring at a camera and having like, you know, prompts to, you know, solicit me to say stuff. Like I will do it because I have a relatively

high pain tolerance and I'll do what is required to get what I want, but like I'm I'm going all in on this. So if you guys are like, "What's Alex's kind of like media strategy for the future?" I'm I'm I'm focusing on two words. You can write this down. Live interactive. [music] Those are the two things that's that is describing the ACQ 3.0 or Mosey Media 3.0 vision for what's going forward. Like that is what I'm

focusing on. And I'll tell you a story of why why I think this is so interesting. So I had a conversation with a a mega influencer. I don't think he would mind with Mr. Beast a few weeks ago, and we were talking about kind of like the future of media and content. One of the things that he was talking about was the soccer game that came up that they do like UK versus US. What ends up

happening is that they have all these different celebrities or influencers from different platforms, right? And so starting from the lowest, the lowest people on this little totem pole, they would walk out in the stadium and this became the kind of the de de facto like measuring stick for who had who had the most cool points, right? These are the A-listers. And so, this is your typical kind of celebs from like movies and like '90s and the

2000s or whatever, right? People like they recognize cuz they're celebs, but like they don't have like huge I guess they have some media presence, but it's more like traditional media. The level of applause for these guys was almost nothing. Barely anyone cared. >> [music] >> So, then the next level that came up was the shorts, the shorts creators. So, this is your like only TikTokers or people who only make Reels, but like only short videos. And

so, they had a little bit more applause on the applause-o-meter compared to the A-listers. >> [music] >> Then the long-form guys came out. And this is when the audience got way rowdier. All right, so this is your podcasters, your YouTubers, the people who make long-form pieces of content. And I'm going to pause here for a second to kind of like highlight why I think this is. I don't think there's anything wrong with shorts. We make tons

of shorts. But, I see the purpose of shorts as many times a way to get someone to watch a long, right? They watch a couple a couple shorts and then think, "Okay, this guy seems legit or this gal seems legit. I'm going to risk my time." cuz that's the risk, they're making an investment, right? You're making an investment today. "I will risk that we get a good return on this, right?" And so, shorts then lead to

longs. But, let me show you the difference from an influence perspective. How many reinforcing cycles do you think you can have in 30 seconds compared to 2 hours? It's like not even close. And so, if someone watched two 1-hour pieces of content for me, period, okay? Two 1-hour pieces, that's 120 minutes. For me to get that same level of exposure and kind of cycles of reinforcement with a prospect, and they were only consuming shorts, right? Let's

say my average short, let's say it's 15 seconds. So, that means it's four shorts per minute. So, if I have 120 minutes for longs, I have to do Someone would have to watch 480 shorts to have the same level of exposure as watching 2 hours with me. And think about how how important this is. What were the things that people said, like this was the quote podcast election. Trump went on and I don't care about the

politics behind it, but I do care about influence and persuasion. And so like why is it that the two podcasts that I think really nudged this election, my opinion, is the Trump three-hour plus podcast that he did with Rogan like a week or whatever it was. I think that was a huge influential event. I think Elon getting on uh Tucker Tucker Carlson and doing that interview. I think those two interviews were some of the interviews that

really nudged the election. And again, I don't care who you voted for, it doesn't matter to me. I think about this from marketing persuasion, okay? And so because of that audiences who were not sure got to spend three hours with a presidential candidate and as a result, it just nudged some of them in the direction to ultimately vote, okay? Now, back to our little story. A-listers have almost no applause, shorts have slight applause, longs have legit

applause. Then >> [music] >> the live streamers. When the live streamers came out, it was like the entire auditorium or stadium or arena erupted. And when I heard that, it was such a visual example of I mean we have this saying which is like butts and seats. If you just make a bunch of like meme content, right? You demonstrate almost none of these things. Some of you guys are chasing views when what I think you want

is you want to have prospects who are more likely to comply with a future request. And so we need to change our behavior to maximize the likelihood that occurs. And so in in looking at this thing, this is why I'm I'm telling you like showing my cards, I'm going to be doing more live streams. And I think it's also and this is me like outside of SPCL, but I think like meta themes overall, I think that

the internet will always move towards truth. And so I think the A-listers everything's super curated, everything's super polished, it's photoshopped, it's scripted. And as you move closer this way, it's raw-er. Like you have a three-hour podcast, like if they're not scripted, right? Or most of them aren't, right? Um streaming it's like, yeah, we're live, right? I can't do anything, like we're live. This idea of of how can we approximate the rawest reality of you us hanging

out, right? And actually going through this stuff, I think that is what will unlock the most influence as long as you are still including these SPCL elements into it. And I think that's the marriage. Do SPCL and do it as many times as I possibly can. That's the idea. And so live streaming provides that that opportunity. Let's also think about this from a context of volume. Whether you like him or not, Rogan, tremendous influence, right? To

the same degree, PBD, tremendous influence. Uh Dave Ramsey, tremendous influence. What is it that these guys have in common? They're putting out hours of content every single day. So, I said it earlier that we 35,000 pieces of content, right? I hear plenty of times there's tons of, you know, $1 million businesses, $2 million businesses, things like that. They put out one piece of content a day, right? And there's nothing wrong with that. That's 360 uh 65

pieces of content a year. And if you think about the size of acquisition.com in terms of our revenue, right? Compared to somebody who's doing one or two million dollars a year and they're doing 365 pieces of content, we're just quite literally doing a hundred times more. And as a result of that hundred times the volume, what do you think's happening? We get a hundred times the prospects. And so people want to try and like outsmart themselves

in thinking that they can like not do the work that's required, but it's actually far more linear than you would expect. So, like we just know that like one out of ten, you know, shorts is going to go, you know, is going to be a two or three X outlier. We just know what that math looks like. Same thing for longs. How do I just jam as much into that input-output machine as I possibly can? And

as long as I'm checking these boxes, like I'm making the right kind of content, then you're going to get the right kind of prospects. So, I'll give you one more nugget, like I said, which is that some of you guys may have heard this, and it's a concept of social media is now turning into interest media. [music] Okay? So, what does this mean? Let's unpack this for a second. If you make content and you judge it

by views, I think that's dumb and I'll explain why. If I have a grandma public come and just do a running slap and just slaps me across the face, that video will probably get views. But, does it get the grandma views? No. Does it get me any any more people who now believe more in my stuff? No. But, what it will do is it will show it to people who are interested in humor, which is a

lot of people, right? But, those might not be your customers and they probably aren't. So, assuming you're not an entertainer and you are somebody who's a business person. If you sell services to anyone, you're likely going to be an educator, not an entertainer. Meaning you're you're you're trying to provide value to people to change their behavior in some way and ideally change their behavior that gets them to walk closer to you and buy stuff. Okay? So,

what do I mean by social versus interest? If you want to attract the right avatar, make content for that avatar. That sounds so obvious and simple and the thing is that no one does it because here's the writer downer. The content is the targeting. The algorithm is so good now, it knows what you're talking about it. It knows it can it can literally judge your your background. It judges what you're wearing. It judges who you are

and will display it to the people that they know have a history of watching content that is similar to that, that people find valuable. And so, if you are making stuff about how to fix pianos because you're a piano repair guy, then you will find people who are trying to fix their pianos. But, if you're making that type of content, you might be like, "Man, I'm only getting, you know, a thousand views a video." It's like,

"Yeah, but the market of people who are buying pianos might be significantly smaller than the market of people who just want to be entertained or distracted." So, you it's not fair to to compare your views against Mr. Beast. It doesn't make any sense. If I were to think to myself like, "I have a room of a thousand people that are going to watch this and all of them are only interested in fixing pianos, that's a hell

of an opportunity." I care so much more about IRL responses. So, what I mean by that? If I make a video and then I get texts from business owners that I like and that I respect being like, "Yo, that was fire." Then, I'm like, "Okay, I'm on the right track." And so, some of you guys, let me know in the comments you guys have seen um a format that we talked about. We call it cash cows.

But basically, it's me, there's a business owner that presents a little bit about their business, and they come to this side, and we talk about how to like how to improve their business, right? So, let me know in the comments if you like that style. And if you do, let me know if you're a business owner or not. Okay? So, uh like I like that style, and I'm not a business owner. I like that style, and

I am a business owner. Or I don't like that style and I'm a business owner. Or I don't like that style and I'm not a business owner. If you are a business owner, when I have people who are here in person, IRL, in real life, in Vegas, right? Business owners who fly out. I ask, I say, "What is your favorite type of content?" Dollars to donuts, that's their favorite type of content. And so, I make more

of that. Even though, and it would make sense. Like, it would make sense that there's fewer of those people. Right? Just think about math. If you've got uh if you've got the whole population here, let me I'll I'll I'll I'll show you a little graph on this. So, let's say that 100% of people, like this represents 100% uh let's just use USA cuz I already know all the numbers for USA. Okay? So, let's say this is

100%. All right? You get 100% of people who are interested. Okay. Well, right now, only 9% of people even own a business. Like, 9%. So, right off the bat, I'm going to have a huge percentage of people that aren't my ideal audience. Now, of course, I do have people who are business interested, and that's why I'm a co-founder of School, and we give people, you know, a way to go uh start a business online in a

in in a low-cost way, right? Which you can do. It's nine bucks a month after a 14-day trial. You guys can check it out. And there's a bunch of like training and community and all that good stuff. All right? But, you can go school.com, I think {forward slash} Hormozi. I think it's below this video. Doesn't matter. Point being, 9% is what I'm competing for. Okay? Now, that means there's there's about 32 to 33 million uh business

owners in the US. Okay? 32 million. That's that's 100% of all business owners. Now, within that, 95% of that 9% is below $1 million in revenue. 95%. Then I've got 5% of that 9% that are over a million. Now, if you want to get If you want to get weird with it, what percent do you think is over 10 million? .4% 1 in 250. And then a hundred million, nine figures, is I think one in roughly

3,000, depending on like your data source. One in 3,000 businesses gets to 100 million a year. This big. And so it would make sense then that we're given these numbers, right? 9% is is 32 million. So I know 5% of that is going to be a million and a half people. There's only a million and a half people who are business owners doing over a million, based on the math that they that that This is Census

Bureau data. Maybe theirs isn't correct, but that's the math, right? And so if we're looking at that's the market, then it would make sense that I'm not going to get all 100% of them to watch my video, right? If I got 1 and 1/2 million views and 100% of them were business owners, I'd be insane, right? And so it would make sense that like if I get 100,000 views on a video that has that's really made

for that level business owner, then I'm crushing it, right? And it doesn't make sense to look at, you know, Mr. Beast's video with 100 million views and be like, "Oh man, I suck." It's like, "Dude, we're we're going after We have different We have different games, right?" And so I'd encourage you to create accurate expectations of the size of the market that you're going after and also think about the translation of these numbers into IRL. I

have two businesses that I looked at in the last year that were doing over a million dollars a year with less than 5,000 followers. You absolutely can make plenty of money with a very small following as long as you make content that's directly valuable for that following. All right. With that being said, uh we just went over SPCAL status power credibility and likeness, what you want to include in videos, why I'm going all in on live

streaming, and why the whole point is you want to get as much time with your uh prospects as humanly possible. You want to make the topics of your content based on the things that those people find interesting, not uh based on like being social, but being interesting. If you get If you make it interesting for them, they will keep watching it. And then, being realistic about your expectations on how many views you can get based on

your size of market. So, let's say you've built a personal brand, here's how I would monetize an audience to make more money. In my second company, Prestige Labs, I built up to over 5,000 affiliates that generated 20 plus million dollars a year in revenue, and that business continues to this day. In Allen, my software company, which is my third big company, we built up to over 1,000 affiliates that were agencies white labeling that software. For my

book launch for 100 million dollar leads, we got 30,000 affiliates who promoted the actual book launch. I've also invested in companies that I've personally endorsed, and so I bring all these things up because most people don't know how to quote monetize an audience. And after talking to a lot of creators or celebrities and influencers, and also business owners who want to do deals with those people, a lot of people don't share a construct in terms of

thinking through how to make those deals happen. And so, I wanted to make this video to outline the four ways that I see those deals happening and the combinations between them and what considerations you might have, whether you're on the doing the deal side of having an audience or being the person who wants to quote buy, license, rent the audience from an influencer or somebody who has those eyeballs. All right? So, four ways to monetize an

audience. Let's use a good marker that doesn't suck. Step one, have good markers. Four ways to monetize an audience. All right? Now, right off the bat, number one, we've got affiliates, which is what I was saying earlier. The second way that you can monetize an audience is through sponsorships. Some people call these endorsements. The third way that you can do this is through partnerships, which usually involve equity. And the fourth way that we can do this

is through starting your own, if you're the influencer in this instance. All right. So, we have affiliates, which is where you are getting paid after you make sales for a business, sponsorships where they pay you first to advertise on behalf of the business, and typically endorse it via your brand, partnerships where you go into a business that already has a product, already has an infrastructure, and you do one of these two things or a combination of

these two things for equity. And so, the behaviors between affiliates, sponsorships, and partnerships are more or less the same. The difference is simply how you get compensated. And then the fourth is where you just start your entirely own brand to then promote to your audience. All right? So, let's break down which of these and kind of where they sit on the continuum. And the reason I want to bring this up is because I'm having so many

conversations with people who are like, "I have this audience. I've built it for 4 years. I just don't know what to do." And so, I think of these four on a continuum. All right? And I can think of this continuum in terms of difficulty and risk and value. All right? And so, on this side, you've got the affiliates. This is the fastest way that you could immediately make money. Most businesses that have affiliate programs, you can

sign up automatically. They have predetermined terms that are associated with this agreement. And as unless you do something that's really, you know, nefarious or weird, they're happy to have you sell their stuff. So, one is this one's fastest. This is low risk for kind of both parties because if you're an affiliate and you're promoting it like they don't have to pay you until after you make a sale. Now for you, you also don't get capped. And

so if you can make a ton of sales and you feel like you're being under valued, then you just get to prove that you are actually good at promoting and that your audience is actually a good fit for whatever that product is. But from a value perspective, so I'll call it exit value affiliate revenue streams are not typically that valuable. So they will contribute to the sellability of a company, but the majority of that value would

come in the terms of a multiple of the cash flow that you're receiving as an affiliate multiplied or discounted by how reliable the business that you're doing business with is. And so if I'm an affiliate of the US government you know what I mean? And I recruit people for the military, then I probably can say that my business model is sound and the US government's not going to go away. I'm not getting not not withstanding, you

know, theories and whatnot. All right, but by and large it's going to be a trustworthy third party. On the flip side, if I have some you know, info thing that is going to disappear tomorrow because of some arbitrage opportunity that's your business opportunity, then this is going to be basically have no value because that business that underlines that cash flow has no value. All right, and so we're moving along here. So this is the lowest value,

probably middle work, lowish risk for you. All right, the next is you've got sponsorships. So sponsorships is where someone pays you first. All right, so you receive cash and then you make the endorsement. And so usually this is in two forms. You advertise to your audience and the reason I say advertise rather than here it sell, here you only get paid after people buy. With sponsorships, you get paid first. And so that means that you are

advertising. You are a traffic source for the business. And so you will get paid as a traffic source, typically based on CPMs, meaning cost per thousand impressions that you can have in terms of views to an audience. Now, these sponsorships come in the form of you posting stuff to your audience, which for them they see this as free traffic. They're technically paying for it, but you're monetizing the traffic that you have. The other way, which is

the more scalable way, is something called white-listing. Which is basically them taking whatever your posts are and then running them as ads. And so, let's say I have a million person audience, I make a post and only, you know, 200,000 people see it. And as most content creators would do, you wouldn't want to post over and over again about that thing cuz it would kind of be like, "Oh, this guy's just promoting this thing over and

over again." It wouldn't feel good, right? And so, you might make a post or two every so often to not interrupt the value that you're providing to your audience too much. And so, the way to solve this really for both parties is you make an advertisement saying, "Hey, I just partnered with so-and-so. Their thing is awesome. I've actually been using it for years. Finally came to an agreement. I think you guys might like it. Check it

out, right?" And so, that white-listing then allows them to blast it to people way outside of your audience. I like this a lot as a win-win because the business pays money to advertise your brand. So, they make you bigger and they're spending money to advertise you. But at the same time, they get higher conversion rate because you're probably better on camera, you're better spoken, and you already have a certain amount of warm audience that recognize you,

at least your face or your mannerisms. So, you convert at a higher percentage. So, the business makes money, you grow your brand. This is a really nice partnership. Now, these deals, sponsorships, are harder to come by than affiliate deals because most affiliate companies just have a program, an influencer program, an affiliate program, and you just sign up on the standard terms. Sponsorships tend to be more a la carte depending on the size of the influencer relative

to the size of the company. And so, for extreme examples, if you're a huge influencer and there's a tiny company, you'll be able to get an amazing sponsorship deal. If it's a huge company like Nike and you're a small influencer, you might not get any deal and you still wear their stuff. And so, it's really the balance between who has how much leverage in the negotiation. Which brings us to the fourth one. Or sorry, the third

one, which is partnerships. All right? Now, as we move along here, sponsorships also don't have kind of like affiliates huge exit value. The only place that sponsorships really become exitable valuable exitable value for a business is if you have a true media company. Now, if you're a personal brand, it's really tough to exit your personal brand. But if I have an army of influencers and I negotiate deals through my network and say, "Hey, uh you know,

Pabst Blue Ribbon or, you know, Budweiser, whatever, I have a thousand influencers that fit your ideal profile for customers and I'll negotiate an umbrella deal and then all of them are forced because they have with them to promote your stuff. Now, you have a media company, which is very similar to a talent agency, slightly different, but has a lot of similarities. And so, then then that sponsorship revenue is really the main revenue of your business, which

is that you sell traffic at a discount, right? But for the uh for the influencer individually, these two things very hard to sell. Not really sellable. Not much. Now, once we get into this side, these deals get harder and harder to do and you do fewer and fewer of them as you go down this line. So, a partnership can either be a minority deal or a majority deal. Again, if you're going to go partner with a

company and you're huge and they're tiny, then it might be a majority deal. If they're huge and you're tiny relative to them, then it might be a minority deal, meaning you're not going to get all of the company. And that can range from, you know, 0.01% of the business all the way to you getting, you know, 99% of the business in terms of the range. And so, anything that you can imagine in terms of economics here

is going to be negotiable. But, one of the thing or some of the things that I would consider here is performance, which is This is again for both parties. You can have equity as the form of compensation rather than necessarily cash. And you say, "Hey, if I bring you an extra thousand customers, I get, you know, 1% per thousand customers that I bring you to the platform or whatever." And then you put a cap on that

at some point where you say up to to, you know, 10%. Great. And so that way it's a little bit balanced for you and for the business. Now, one of the considerations that you have to have if you were the uh content creator or the influencer is that the the the association that you make with their brand is permanent. As soon as you make that public declaration, you transfer all of that goodwill, you transfer that association

to them. And so if you are going to do a deal like this, my recommendation is that you want to have at least something up front. So no matter what for doing this deal, you get some amount of this equity up front and then some percentage that's based on performance. Now, the one of the last components that I'll say, and there's obviously a lot of ways that you can do deals, but these are just the things

that I think through, is time. And so somebody who's on the business owner side is like, "Well, I don't want you to just make one association. I want you to keep doing this for a long period of time." And so they can take some of this equity that they want to give you and say, "All right, I'm going to give you, you know, 25% of your equity up front. I'm going to give you uh 25% based

on performance and I'm going to give you 50% over time. And so I want you to promote for the next four years. And if for some reason something happens, then you're not going to get that vesting because we had some sort of breakup, right? And so whenever I think through these terms, I just like to think of through all the W's, which is who, what, where, when, why, how, right? Which is, "Okay, I want you to

post." And if you're the content creator, you should be asking that same thing, which is "How much do you want me to post?" Right? And about what? And you have to take into consideration that you have to keep building your brand, right? And so, you don't want to just be like all of a sudden some shill. Like, that's not good. You want to tastefully be able to integrate that promotion into the content that you have. And

so, you'd have to say, "Okay, well, I think the best way for us to do this is for me to, you know, put uh your links in my bio, and I'll put it up for 1 week of the month, and I will make one long-form thing that it mentions it, and you know, five short-form things via posts or stories." And then when you define that reason this is so important is that you define that stuff up

front so that it's just very clear. Don't just say like, "I will promote the business and whatnot." cuz it just doesn't work as well. And you might say, "I will also, you know, record ads once a month that you can then use for whitelisting." And so, all of these things, and this is where this gets more nuanced in deal making, is you can be a partner and still have affiliate revenue. You can be a partner and

still get paid from a sponsorship perspective. And so, these things are not mutually exclusive. But, like, you might have a primarily sponsorship deal with some element of equity. But, I will say on a personal level, the more money you have right now, the more you want to lean this way because the equity the sponsorship cash that you choose to take, you do it at the expense of equity. And if you believe in the product and you

believe that the company is exitable in the future, then it in my opinion, it makes sense to delay it for the little bit longer run. But, this takes on more risk because here you get paid today no matter what. Here, you might not ever get paid if the company doesn't sell. And so, by taking on more risk, you want to make sure that you're getting a disproportionate reward in the in the form of stock shares, options,

equity, and things like that. All right? And so, as we're walking through this and you're thinking, "Okay, how can I monetize my brand?" It's like, "Okay, the first level, I can do affiliates and just promote other people's stuff and get paid for it." The next level, I can be a media source for them. I can be traffic for them via sponsorship, right? These are a little bit more nuanced deals. Taking another step, I can actually partner

with the brand and say, "Hey, I want to own 1%, 5%, 10%, 50% depending on how big you are and how big your audience is. And then finally, you can start your own brand. And when I say brand, I say that all-inclusive in terms of products and brand. And when you do this, you can either white label, which means you go to somebody who manufactures stuff already and say, "Can you slap my logo on it?" which

is an option. And the other option is that you do custom formulations. Custom I'll just say custom stuff. All right. And so, if I were selling supplements, for example, I might go to a a company that already has a product that's done and I just say, "Hey, I want to slap my label on it." On the custom version of this, it's like, "Hey, I want this gram of this. We're going to test out flavors together and

then we're going to put it together and make a custom product that no one else has." Same things works with merchandise. So, if you said, "Hey, I want to get a white t-shirt." and you just try six different white t-shirts that people have off the shelf that are manufacturers, they say, "Okay, just slap my logo on it and let's go." or you say, "Hey, what are the different fabrics? What are the different materials that I can

put together? These are the cuts that I want to look at. This is how I want it to fit." right? That becomes more custom. And so, white label is faster and easier from a speed perspective, but usually, me personally, I prefer to do custom stuff because I don't like anyone else being able to sell something that's identical to me and be able to have any kind of pricing power over what I have cuz it the moment

that people find out that you just have a generic product that you slapped a label on, it just does It's not a good look. Right? And so, again, I don't think there's anything to Like, I want to be clear. I don't think there's anything wrong with doing white label. I just think that if we were to put this on this sphere, like white label would be here and custom would be here. But, if you're going to

take the risk on of starting your own brand, I might as well get all the benefits of doing it. But, this costs more money. White label tends to cost less because you don't have to get custom templates, custom forms, and pay and incur all those costs cuz someone else their whole business is based around doing this for other people. All right? Now, the difference here is that for all of these situations, you're going to promote stuff

that already exists. Here, you're starting the thing from ground zero, which means that you're on the other side of the table now. You start with 100% equity, and then you start paying people this way down the line. And so, if you are an influencer, you have an audience, or you're a business owner and you're trying to make deals with influencers, this is how I think through this, and I try and see there are elements that you

can borrow from each of these kind of verticals to tweak the deal to make it right for everyone. And so, I think about it in terms of what's the exit value, what cash is going to be going in or out of the business, how much work is the person going to do, and then how much risk am I or are they exposed to. And by balancing those four things, you can usually navigate along this continuum to

find the right part the right deal that's right for you and the product. As a bonus, I want to take you behind scenes to what I just learned with my personal brand so you can make more money and grow your business. I made 35,000 posts over 40 months and grew a 7.8 million person audience, and 3 weeks ago, I made six big shifts in my content, and I want to show you behind the scenes what we

found from those six big shifts with screenshots of the data so that you can use this to make more money in your business and whatever you promote. And so, the first was we went from edutainment to education. So, instead of being kind of halfway through to all the way all in on education. Now, that had downstream impacts in terms of how we package, how we title things, even the number of special effects we have, and the

purpose of education as I see it is to change behavior. And so, my point is with this video, once I show you the data of what's happened since that change, since the we made these six shifts, that hopefully or hopefully not, we'll see what you decide to do, but it will change how you make content to make more money. So, number one is we educate edutainment to education. Number two is we went from for us to

for you. Now, when I say for us, what ended up happening with the mistakes I made was that I mean, unknowingly, was that I'd be like, "Team, what do you guys think about content?" And so, they'd be like, "Hey, we should make a video on this. Hey, we should make a video on this." And so, what ended up happening is I started making videos for my team, not my ideal customer, a business owner. And so, I

actually had a friend come into town and say, "Hey, you know, it's weird. I actually haven't been paying attention to your content." He does about 10 million bucks a year. And uh I was like, he's like, "Well, I guess I'm not really your avatar." And I was like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa." I was like, "You are 100% my avatar. What's going on?" And so, as soon as I realized that, I was like, "Oh, man." He's like, "It

just didn't feel as relevant to me." And so, I was making stuff for my team rather than my avatar. And so, if you are somebody who makes content, something to be mindful of is your team might not be the type of people you're trying to make content for. So, just something interesting for me. So, we went from for us, our team, to for you, viewer, for business owners. Number three was went from wide to narrow. So,

fitness, relationships, etc. These are wider topics. More people are in relationships, more people eat food, more people trying to lose weight, compared to only 9% of people are business owners. And so, we went much narrower on the topic of like, "I'm just talking about business cuz that's what I love talking about too." As a side note. And so, it turns out business owners like it more when I talk about business, and I like it more as

a business owner. So, everybody wins, at least for me. Number four is we went from views to revenue. Now, this is key. So, when you just have views as a metric, then you kind of do chase wider because it was the only real metric we were tracking. And we didn't really have anything better at the time and since we focused on. Since then, we transitioned to ad revenue, and here's why. Ad revenue takes into account views,

but it has a second metric that's paired with it, which is RPMs, which is revenue per uh thousand eyeballs. So, if you if YouTube pays lots of money for the eyeball, then it means they're more valuable. And if they're more valuable to advertiser, they're more valuable to me. And so, my idea here is that I want to make sure that we're showing our videos to the right people, or rather that the right people are watching. Now,

once we can control for that and we stay or keep our RPMs, or the amount that advertisers are willing to pay for these eyeballs, high, then we get as many views as we can. And as a total pro tip for business stuff in general, paired KPIs works exceptionally well. So, if you're in customer success, you want the speed of resolution, but you also want a quality metric. If you had a a company that did cleaning, it'd

be the same thing is you'd pair reviews from customers with the number of cleans per day. And so, you like to have both edges so that you can control for both sides. And you should do that with any department you can. Now, so I said number four was views to ad revenue as our primary metric that we were optimizing for. So, we no longer care to oh, this one had a lot of views. We don't care

about that. It's just do we have as many views with the right people? Number five is we went from emphasizing shorts to emphasizing longs. We saw that longs got the best people, and short the whole thesis around shorts creates longs viewers, we actually haven't seen any evidence that supports that. People watch shorts want more shorts, people want longs want to watch longs, which doesn't necessarily mean that people from a different platform don't watch you on shorts

on TikTok, and then they're a long-form YouTube watcher, and then watch your stuff on YouTube that long. But usually, people who watch long-form stuff on YouTube watch long-form stuff on YouTube. People who watch them on YouTube watch short-form. Some people watch both, but most of the time people are kind of have consumption preferences, and they're not going to change the preferences for you. They just might watch you in a different place where that consumption preference is

what you make. And so, we found that, and we found that the longs are the things that actually drove the most applications for acquisition.com, and the most book sales, and the most opt-ins. So, that's what we're making more of. And number six was assuming more versus assuming nothing. Meaning, I made videos like the Alex Hormozi diet, I made uh the the Alex Hormozi vlog, the Hormozis, things like that. Those assume that somebody who doesn't know me

will want to care what whoever the hell Alex Hormozi is, which I don't think is that reasonable. Like, I don't think they would want that, cuz who cares about this random dude? And so, it's assuming nothing. Now, that has um changes in terms of what we're making, so there's no assumptions. So, for example, like we're on acquisition.com, we have portfolio businesses, I introduce myself because if you don't know who I am, this might be the first

video you see of me. And so, if I stopped doing that for a while cuz I kind of wondered this mindset that every everyone knew. Now, obviously that's dumb. Way more people don't know me than know me. But, you kind of fall into this trap of assuming you're talking to your warm audience rather than what you're making the content for, which is people who've never met you before. And so, keeping that top of mind, which is

that we want to make sure that we welcome everyone and that we don't have inside jokes that only people who are on the inside feel it because then all it does is it excludes people that are new. And like what you want to do is bring more people into your world anyways, especially if they're business owners for me. And so, there are these six changes that we made in our content. And so, we've gone all in

on that concept. And so, we've done a lot of rapid iteration. But, let me tell you the data that's happened since. So, right off the bat, RPMs, meaning the revenue per thousand viewers, went up by 68%. So, like when you think, man, I don't feel like I can like what my content is about, like it doesn't change anything. Well, it sure as hell did for us. When I talk about deep business stuff, when I talk about

reducing churn, when I talk about increasing number of time like ways to get someone to buy more times, when I talk about how we scale a 40-person sales team and the all the steps that we did in order to do that in a real case study in a real business, when I talk about how you can deconstruct and reconstruct a brand, these are deeper business concepts. And guess what? Business owners watch them. And guess what? Those

eyeballs are more valuable. 68% and we're only going to get better at it. And so, for us, boom, that meant that us changing our topics got the right people to watch the videos. Check box one. And so, you can see by the video title when we had educational versus kind of wide or business education versus wider topics, the wider topics in general had way lower RPMs. You can see that with the the light blue. Whereas, the

purple is more money making, more business, more sales, more more, you know, retention, real business tactics that grow companies. And those, unsurprisingly, were way higher in average RPM. Some of them even higher than that. So, the next big change, and I see this as anecdotal, is that 25% more comments per view. And so, I see that as an engagement metric that we had way more people saying, "Wow, this is good." or "This is great." or "I

miss this style of content." And that's actually a really common thing. And I will say this, this is to my this is to my detriment. I should have seen that more business owners were telling us in the comments what they wanted. And honestly, I just wasn't listening. Um and that's on me. I I was like, "Well, you're going to lose some people as you make more, you know, high-production stuff. That's okay." But with the return to

hardcore business education in terms of the content that we're making, the response has been overwhelming. That so many people were like, "I'm coming back to all your content. This has been great. This is what I came here for." And so, I'm stoked about that. And so, we got 25% more people who are uh doing that. We have more shares, negligible, and slightly fewer likes, which again whatever. But for me, I would say comment I would rate

comments and shares as higher. And so, overall, we had higher engagement from these videos, even though they were narrower topics. Which to me is more good for fewer people than a little bit of good for a lot of people, which is where I want to be in terms of what I want to serve or who I want to serve. So, the next big change is that despite, and this is a key point, despite having fewer absolute

views per long-form video, we're actually getting more long-form views overall across the channel. So, we're up 30 almost 30% 29.56% um than our our 6-weeks average before that from these deeper educational videos. Now, realistically, that's a function of one main thing in my opinion. That's because the education stuff actually requires far less post-editing. And I can make more education stuff cuz this is what I do every day. And so, we can actually create more content, which

I'm stoked about, and I think I think I mean, hopefully business owners are too. Um and so, we actually get more overall views with the right people because we don't have nearly as much high-fi post-production wiz-bangs, which is what most of my audience who is trying to learn stuff rather than be entertained was happy about. All right, this next one is very surprising to me at least. So, our subscriber conversion increased by 24.6%. And so, that

means that we've actually like even though again we had slightly lower lower absolute views, more long-form views, that we actually increased the absolute number of subscribers per week since doing this. So, like I mean, I was very comfortable with all of these metrics tanking. Like that was I honestly expected that because I was like, all right, we're going to have way fewer views, but it's going to be the right people. But, because 25% more people who

watch subscribe even though we get fewer views, our actual subscriber growth has grown. Which is crazy in an absolute metric way. So, this was this was an unexpected outcome for me and has just reinforced that this was the right decision for the audience that I want, which is business owners. The next thing is like, okay, well, if you're getting fewer views, how's that going to translate to opt-ins cuz I'm a business owner. Like that's what I

care about. I care about people who are trying to to become portfolio companies, come to a workshop, whatever. And so, it turns out that we have 26% more opt-ins per week since making this change. And so, this is like both incredibly surprising and also incredibly duh. And I say this because like saying, "Hey, I'm going to make business owner stuff to get more business owners." Duh. But at the same time, I'll say this, just me kind

of commenting on a lot of the educators that are in the space, they tend to start moving more and more broad, more and more wide, more and more entertainment-y, more and more topics that they don't necessarily have expertise on because they seek the views. Whether they say it or not, they don't want to sit there like like saying cash, cuz they still kind of count their likes. And so, I think if you can just absolutely get

your logic head on, which is tough because sometimes you it's it's tough to to go away from those vanity metrics. But, I care about the bottom line and so, the right people were seeing it and the right people were taking action. And so we, in the in the business sense, saw growth from this in a big way, and this is just like 3 weeks in, 4 weeks into this kind of execution all in on the strategy,

and this will compound. And so for those who don't know, I have two best-selling books on Amazon. They're still like number one and number two on marketing and sales, and they've been there for like number one and number two for 2 years or 3 years or whatever how they've been out, so they're pretty strong. And so we sell books every month no matter what. But what was crazy to me was to see this jump in book

sales that happened as like think about this, we're getting fewer views, but more sales by a lot, like 2x the sales, twice, not like 20%, twice the sales of books that I have. And mind you, by the way, if you're like, "Hey, I'm poor." I get it. My books are free, too. They're by like you can go to akuz.com and you get the video course, all my stuff for free. You don't have to opt in. And

you can go on my podcast, and you can listen to the audiobook for free, all right? Like the stuff's free. This isn't how I make my money. But it's a really good leading indicator for me of the quality of traffic. Now, if you want to get a physical copy, yes, there's printing costs and there's shipping costs, so yeah, you pay some bucks. But if you're dead broke poor, you can use the free stuff. The point is

is that this attracted the right people, people who want cuz if I make a fitness meals video, guess what those people don't care about? Getting leads and making offers. Kind of sounds obvious when you think about it. When I make a, "Hey, this is how I work with Layla, my wife," maybe you get somebody who's like, "What about the married entrepreneurs?" It's like, "Well, only 9% of people are business owners, and then of that 9%, how

many of them are married to their partner?" Percentage of percentage. Versus just talking about business stuff, business people want to get more leads, make more offers, make more money. And so that's what my books are about. And so lo and behold, more of those people bought. Now, I want to be super clear. I want to show these two these two keynotes here. So there There some keynotes that will be both deep and wide. And as a

content creator / business owner / investor / husband / human being boy big um sometimes you hit it out of the park and you actually get both. So, my highest revenue revenue per view video also happens to be my most viewed video. And so, it doesn't necessarily mean that if you have a lot of views, the RPMs are low. No, not at all. You can get a video that applies to all business owners and it will

get a lot of views. And the CPMs or the RPMs will be high. The branding video is the same thing. That one's that's very recent. It's new and it continues to climb up. Um and they're both of these are very conceptual business concepts that all business owners can benefit from. And so, if I talk about leverage, almost all businesses need to understand strategy and leverage. It applies It's a huge amount of value to business owners. Understanding

brand, tremendous value to any business. Now, on the other hand, you can also make and we have we call these keynotes, but like longer form either whiteboard presentations or like a presentation that I put a lot of time into. Um some of them are going to be deeper and less wide and that's okay. Like, if I talk about scaling a 40-person sales team, if you have an e-commerce store, doesn't affect you. But, leverage and brand would

affect you whether you had the 40-person sales team or the e-commerce company or a software company or an app or whatever. And so, again, the scaling 40-person sales team still super valuable, but it's just going to be only you know, valuable to 1/3 of the business owner audience that I might be able to you know, who might want to watch this. Same thing with um same thing with the video I made about 10Xing your business overnight

by using mega influencers. Basically, showing how to get a Mr. Beast, a Logan Paul, a Rock to partner with a Conor McGregor, a Huda Beauty, a Taylor Swift to partner with to 10X your business. Now, if your business like a local business, the likelihood that they're going to partner with you is really low, right? And so, it doesn't really make sense for that particular business. Now, you could use that on a micro scale, but it might

just not have as much transference. If you have an e-commerce brand that's national, might make a ton of sense. But again, it's going to have a sub-segment of already a 9% slice of the population that it would be deeply valuable to though. And so, that's the thing is is that I have to think about like I'm okay with a video that gets 10,000 views instead of 400,000 views. If 10,000 of those people are $10 million plus

business owners, it's like here, here's how I packaged my company in order to sell it. I have a video on my channel that walks through 46 minutes of the decision-making process I used to determine to sell my business. Guess who that applies to? Basically no one, unless you're actually have a lot of money and you already have a business asset that is $5 million profit or more. And so, let's see, 9% of businesses it's like 0.1%

do $10 million a year of businesses. So, there's like no one who that actually applies to except for those people or like this thing was amazing and this changed my life. And I had a bunch of people after I posted that that I know that were big 20, 30, 40 million dollar a year business owners who watched it be like this is insane. I can't believe you gave this out. I'm like, believe it because guess what?

No one else is going to watch it. And so, I will say this, this is me giving you like a little hat tip for consuming. If you're a business owner I would not gauge views as whether the whether the video is good or not. It just shows how relevant it is to how many people. And so, if you're an e-commerce person, I have some videos in here about how to use offers for e-commerce. That's just already

going to be a slice of a slice, but it'd be super applicable for you. And so, I'm okay with very small views as long as the quality gives value and provides a result in a clear way for the viewer. And so, I define education as change of behavior. So, if I can help them change the behavior in a way that makes them more money, ideally they'll associate that money they made, that value they made with us

at acquisition.com. And so, that's the whole goal of this stuff. And for the creators out there, or those of you guys who are making content in order to promote your business, I'll give you this frame that I started out with that helped me a lot, which is you know, when I first posted my first like I started at zero on every platform, to be very clear here. Like it wasn't like I was Taylor Swift and I

came on TikTok. Yay, right? It wasn't like that. When I started on YouTube, I had no subscribers. And the first videos I posted got like 100 views, right? But I thought to myself, I was like, man, if I like I would probably go across town to speak to a 100-person audience for lunch, and I'd have no problem with that. And so, the idea that I had 100 people, I was like, that's not bad. Or even if

there's 10 people, I'm like, well, I would talk to a 10-person I mean, I used to do this for years. I would do a lunch and learn and uh see if I could sell some weight loss. You know what I mean? Like I was willing to do that anyways. And so, there's this it's it's literally just because of comparison that people feel bad about their social media content, not because inherently the numbers don't make sense. And

the crazy thing about this, and I'm going to re-emphasize, is it's free. It's free. The platforms distribute your content for free. These are people that would never found out about you and they find out about you for free. Like take that in for a second. So, the leverage on free distribution is infinite. And so, if you get 1,000 people over a month who see your thing, it's 1,000 people. It's not nothing. And so, I try to

make sure that I focus on that concept of like, oh man, my average for the channel is 400,000 and we got a 50,000 view video. 50,000? My god, I speak at conferences with 1,000 people. It's 50 times that. Not bad. And those people I got to have a really, really curated experience, increase the value per second, absolutely crush as much value as I possibly could in that in time period. And so, I'll make one last note

on uh on the deep versus wide content, is that I get so many DMs and like Slack messages even from our portfolio company founders who are like, dude, that last video was so sick." And I hadn't had that in a minute for probably the the 6 months we went a little bit wider with our content. And it became so reinforcing for me. Even though like what's the what's the number of people? I don't know. 50 people

maybe messaged me being like, "Dude, that new like your new content style or going back like the new old content of more whiteboard, more deep business tactics, like it's so great. My team's watching again." That like fills me up cuz that's why I made the stuff to begin with was the stuff that I didn't have when I was coming up that I wish someone would have taught me. And then I had to just find out through

trial and error. And so that's why we make this stuff. But the views weren't high. But for me like I'm here for business owners. And I already know there's only 9% of people are business owners. And that's okay. I'm for you I'm here for you guys. All right. So here's what we're doing next with this data. All right. So we had our hypothesis. We looked at the 35,000 posts. We made the six big shifts. And by

and large we have crushed the hypothesis. So I'm actually like I was telling my team yesterday I was like we're kind of lucky that this worked out the first time cuz like I'm not really used to things working out the first time. I'm more more like realistically be like, "Hey, we made this change and then like four of the six stats are bad and two of them are good." And so we're like, "All right. Well, these

ones are good. So let's try and keep this stuff the same and then we got to tweak all these other things." Our view to subscriber ratio is higher. Our absolute subscribers are higher. Our options are higher. Book sales are higher. Applications are higher. And it's about stuff I like making. So I'm like I'm thrilled to tears. I'm stoked. And I get to make this stuff about like we can do more content because I don't have to

put as much post into it for you guys. So like you guys said it's more distracting to have the whiz bangs and the effects. And we're like "Cool. I'm happy to just talk business." So this is what we're doing now. So one big belief we have is volume negates luck. That's in the sales team locker room. Same thing in the media team. They said, "We will we will create more. And we will just basically have constraints

on where like the direction of what we're creating, but we will keep we will keep making as much as we can in different ways to find out what works even better than our first whack at it. The second thing is don't get the same scar twice. We're super happy to make mistakes. I mean I I It's funny. I even I I I almost mean that. Like it's totally fine making mistakes cuz like they're not mistakes. They're

just lessons. What we don't want is get the same scar twice. And so if we find out or we know that I have to introduce myself then I better keep introducing myself. If we know that high high five production doesn't do as well with business owners then I better not do that. Right? Unless there's a conclusion that we find that's wrong about that. But for now like that's what we're not going to make the same mistake

twice. And so I'm happy to make all the mistakes there are in a very narrow field. That's what makes an expert. Um but I just don't want to make it twice. A third one, this is super tactical, is that uh slides versus just me heavily prepping for a presentation hasn't made as much of a difference. So I tried to approximate this by like my best videos that were most views and most business centric in terms of

CPMs was me presenting at a conference. So I have a stage in my headquarters. And so I was like, "All right, I'm going to present on my stage." But it was to it was not to an empty room. It was to my to my team. But like a lot of comments were like, "Is this guy pretending to be on stage?" And so if you did see that, that's why it was uh that's why the the the

room was kind of empty. Um but I was like I was trying to approximate as much of that style of video. So that gives you maybe a little bit insight. I was like, "Okay, well what can I control? I can do a stage. We can do the lighting. We can have the seats. I can have slides." These are all things that I'm used to doing. Now it worked to a degree, but we got the same performance

from me just talking to a camera like this and going over the slides without the stage or me just doing whiteboard of walking through the concepts or the tactics to grow or solve a problem. Number four. Show what only you can show and say what only you can say. And so I have I have a few marketingisms that I have never heard anywhere else that are like very real for me. One is state the facts and

tell the truth. It's always that way cuz then you never get in trouble, you don't have to worry about anything, you don't have to worry about claims, you just state the facts and tell the truth. Which also means that you have to go collect data so you can state the truth. Um and so a second one underneath of that is say what only we can say and show what only we can show. It's demonstration, right? And

so if obviously I have accomplishments that I can say, "Hey, I know what I'm talking about." But there's also labor. And so I can say, "Hey, I built uh 8 million person audience." Listen to this stuff for content, which by the way, you don't have to listen to any of it. This just worked for me. Um or I can say I made 35,000 posts independent of the outcome. And so what I want to do is do

more work than anyone else will do so that I can show what no one else can show and say what no one else can say. And so if you're starting out or you're you're you're a different part in your journey, considering like, "Okay, well, I can't out-outcome anyone yet cuz I'm early, but you can outwork people." And so I can't just say like, "I made 35,000 posts. What I learned." I'm going to compress a lot of

time for you. That's valuable, no matter who you are. And number five is still doing wide shorts. So this is interesting. So we thought about this and we decided that for shorts we're willing to go a little bit wider. And I'll tell you why. So I run ads and Leila runs ads using our face. And I actually see the main ROI from shorts as top of funnel brand awareness. And when I say brand awareness, I really

just mean like facial recognition. People will see my face and remember that they got some sort of value from it. And in a short it's more difficult to get into really deep business concepts, which is what I'm um not saying it's impossible and maybe I just need to up my skills, which is totally totally fine. Um but we're still maintaining a certain percentage of shorts that I would consider to be more like um a little bit

wider. Because I tend to like business philosophy, too, and I don't want to stop. Like, what are the things I like talking about? Like philosophy. I like wide business concepts. I like personal development [ __ ] and sort of in terms of like productivity, which is kind of kind of a wider topic. But I'm not going to stop doing that cuz I do like making that stuff. And so, I'll probably keep having shorts around that because the ROI

is actually not from shorts turning into book sales or shorts turning into opt-ins. It's actually the shorts getting retargeted later with an ad that does go to something, but they're going to be more likely to recognize me and then take the next step in whatever it whatever the funnel is. Whether we're saying, "Hey, if you're starting a business, go check out School." Which by the way, again, wide. If someone's trying to start a business, then it

makes sense for it to be a little bit wider for people who are trying to get into it. And so then the School ads can hit those people and it makes sense for them to use School, right? Uh if it's a business owner, I still think that from a business perspective, we have a lot of business content in terms of our shorts. But I want to just address this in case you see it, so you're not

confused about it. I still will have some wide content in short form um because of the reason I just said. And so, those are the kind of like the next steps. And if you guys find these kind of updates valuable with the metrics behind it, um the TLDR of this whole video is that what we said worked. And if you're an educator, toss out the views, focus on your customer, make stuff for them because likes ain't

cash, views ain't cash, cash is cash. And so if you're trying to grow your business, make sure you're making the stuff for the people you actually want to make, not your ego.