Alex Hormozi just did a big ‘controversial’ launch for his new book “100M Leads” and everyone’s asking for my opinion on it. So here’s my thoughts after our history together, including my take on the launch, our messages behind the scenes, and our differences in launch & content styles. Plus the strategies you need to choose, specifically how we’re staying ahead of the AI revolution using the ONE thing that’ll set you apart, including how the Hormozi’s are capitalizing on this over the long-term.
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He's like, "So the value's not in the course and information, the value is in the community. AI can't build a community." He's like, "That's the thing." So he's doubling and tripling in a hundred X-ing down on community. I think this is similar to what ... For those who are freaking about Hormozi's thing, it's like yes, info may be devalued or may ... Whatever you want to call it, but the value is in the community.

What's up everybody? This is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Seekers podcast. I'm pumped and excited to be hanging out with you guys. I've not recorded new episode in a couple weeks. In fact, the last six weeks of my life have been insane. We've been to Kenya and then to Jerusalem, and then back home for a couple days. We did a linchpin event and then from there flew to Pirate Cove for a family trip, and then two mastermind meetings with my Category Kings and my Atlas group. And now I'm back in Boise catching up, getting ready for Funnel Hacking Live, which we are like five weeks away from, which is crazy.

So, if you haven't buy your tickets yet, you should hurry. We are almost sold out, and this year's Funnel Hacking Live is going to be insane. I'm so excited. In fact, I'm going to be doing a million videos and Facebook Lives, talking about Funnel Hacking Live.The only problem is I got a huge black eye at Pirates Cove. I was wrestling this kid he's, I think, a junior in high school this year. Really good wrestler, and we were wrestling. And anyway, I'm a little taller than him, so my head was up higher than his. He popped his head up and gave me a nice little shiner, which is great, but it's hard when you're trying to do videos and courses and trainings, all these things I need to do.

So, I had to cancel an event and move things around, but alas, it's all good because it's part of the process, part of the fun. Okay, so I have a specific thing I want to talk about during this episode, mostly because I've had probably two million people message me about it, people I haven't heard from in years, people all over the place.

And then recently, I moved all my social apps off of my main phone and I got a second phone, a social phone. So, all my apps and things are there, and I leave the social phone away from me. That way, the only thing I can do on my main phone is I can listen to podcasts and I can text and box and record podcasts. That's about it. If I want to be social, I have to get to the other phone. So, I keep the other phone far away from me in a different building, or a different office, or whatever. And then if I do have something I want to share on social, I make videos of it here, and then I text it to that other phone and then I get to that phone and I go and I text it.

So, I hadn't seen social for a while and I pulled up that social phone last night, and I'm surprised, there's all this controversy around Hormozi launch and everyone's asking, again people messaging me, but everyone online's freaking out, positive, negative, all sorts of stuff, which confused me. So because so many of you guys have asked my opinion, and because you guys know I've been hanging out with Alex for a long, long time, I'm going to tell you guys my version of the Hormozi launch and hopefully, you guys get some ideas and value out of it. And yeah, I think it'd be a lot of fun.

So, there is the topic episode of today. So, the first question I get a lot is, how do you know Alex Hormozi? So I met Alex actually, man, I think it was year two of ClickFunnels. It would've been year one of ClickFunnels. We did the first year of ClickFunnels, we launched in September, and then that January was traffic and conversion event. That's back when TNC was the biggest event ever, before we had Funnel Hacking Live. So, this is a decade ago, and I remember I got asked to speak in a breakout room, but they told me I couldn't sell, which is the worst thing ever.

So, I took my webinar presentation, I burned it on these DVDs. We had a whole bunch of them at our booth, And the story's going to ... Man, it's a long story, but it's really fun. So anyway, so we get to TNC and I'm not allowed to sell. I have an hour on stage, but I still ... I want to teach my Funnel Hacker presentation. So we did everything in the manual that goes out to the entire attendees with a big ad for them to go register for the webinar. In fact, I remember people taking pictures like, "This is the best. This is the only direct response ad in the entire Trafficking Conversion newsletter." Or whatever. I was like, "Yeah, I'm the only one who still does direct response." So we had a big ad in there. Then we had a booth, and I remember the day I was supposed to be speaking. I was like, "Man, we have three breakout rooms. I'm competing against two other people in the breakout room. No one knows who I am or what funnel hacking is yet."

And I remember Dave Woodward, who at the time was not working for ClickFunnels, he was just a friend and he was there. I was like, "Man, I wish we had some booth babes who we could get to push people into my session." And Dave looks at me, "How many do you need?" I'm like, "I'm speaking like three hours, there's no way." He's like, "How many do you need?" I'm like, "I don't know. As many as you can get." So he gets on the phone, he's calling ... I don't know who he's calling or I don't even know. I didn't ever ask questions, but next thing I know, within an hour, he's like, "All right, I got four girls coming." And so, we had these four beautiful models show up and we put them in Funnel Hacker T-shirts, and they stood outside my door to try to get everybody to come into our session.

So luckily, between the booth babes and my marketing and whatever else, I think funnels were the hot topic at the time as well. My breakout room had 80% of the people, and we had people standing room only. In fact, I think fire marshal got mad at us because it was ... Anyway, it was awesome. So people come in there. I did my presentation and I only spoke for 60 minutes, which meant I taught the whole Funnel Hacks presentation except for the pitch. So, I left people wanting more, and then I was like, "I'm not allowed to pitch anything, so if you want to watch the rest of this presentation, go to our booth and get a DVD where you can watch the rest of it." And that was it. And I didn't know who was in the audience or anything, and that was it.

And then a year later I get a phone call, not me, but our sales guys get a phone call from this gym owner named Alex Hormozi. And Alex was like, "Hey, last year I heard Russell speak at this event and I want to do the thing he was doing. I'm sick of my gyms, I'm do what he was doing." And the guy sold him on Inner Circle and a week later, he's on a decade in the day call with me, and he jumps on and we start talking. And you know when you start talking to someone really quick, you know when someone's just sharp and bright. So, I'm talking to her and within a few minutes I was like ... And again, I had not met him yet. Funnel Hacking Live number two was coming up. So, we had the San Diego Funnel Hacking Live was about to happen. And he was a gym owner and he was doing all these cool things. And I was like, "Man, I want someone to teach funnels to gym owners." And so, during my first conversation with him, I was like, "Hey, do you want to speak at Funnel Hacking Live?" Which again, that normally never happens, but I just felt something about him. I was like, "Oh, there's something here." And so, he was like, "Sure."

And I told my team and they're like, "Wait, who is this?" I'm like, "I don't know, just some guy. He runs a gym. He seems really cool. He should speak a Funnel Hacking Live." And everyone on my team's freaking out like, "You've never met him before, what if he ... " "I don't know, he just seems really cool." So yeah, so he came to Funnel Hacking Live, and I think that was the first time I met him was at Funnel Hacking Live. And he got up and spoke and showed what he was doing, the funnels and the sales stuff he was doing to fill his gyms.

And at Funnel Hacking Live, I think from there somebody saw what he was doing, then hired him like, "Hey, can you teach me how to do this for my gyms?" And that was the beginning of him doing Gym Launch. And it's a long story. I'm not going to tell you all the details. I'm sure you've heard the details from him, but he went and first off was flying out to gyms and filling, and then from there he's created an info product course and then licensed it and blew it up and became Gym Launch. And so, I had the opportunity to hang out with Alex a lot over the years and just someone who I'm grateful that I had a chance to be a part of ... as he was learning and growing, a part of that. But man, just someone who I love and respect and grateful for.

So, that's number one. That's how Alex and I know each other, is through that time. And we were, back when he was in the Inner Circle, we were hanging out three, four times a year here in Boise or other places. I remember the very first TEDx event I ever went to was Dave, Alex, and Layla came to the event and Grant Cardone wouldn't back then give us a sales table. He didn't think that that was necessary. Anyway, I did my sales pitch and there was nowhere for people to run. So, Dave had a box of order forms and pens. Alex had one and Layla had one. So, people running to them and they're selling each other, selling everybody into it. And it was chaos and fun. I just have so many good memories with Alex and ... anyway.

Anyway, so regardless, so Alex two years ago, sells Gym Launch and decides to go all in on organic. And he's insane, he's great. If you've ever talked to Alex short form, he's really good. He's giving you an idea or principle or something and doing it short form. So, for whatever reason, he started doing social and just went really, really hardcore on it and blew it up to the point where he's getting ... All his videos, get half a million views or more. My videos get 50,000 views or more, so he's 10X-ing me on his organic reach, which drives me crazy as a friend, but also as a fan, I'm pumped for him.

So anyway, but he's the best at short form. You watch him, he's just so good at picking a topic, riffing on it and just, he's so natural, so good. And so, the last two years he's built this huge social following. Launched his first book and he crushed it there. And so, he was launching his second book and I knew he was writing it, and I think everyone's anxiously waiting to see what he was going to do and how he was going to launch it. And so, he decided to do a free book launch event.

And again, I'm working on book number four right now, so I'm looking and watching, and I have a goal with this next book, is to sell a million copies within the first year and 10 million copies within the first five years. And so, I'm looking hard, what are people doing to launch books and stuff like that? And I've seen recently a lot of people doing book launches. Jenna Kutcher did a really good book launch recently. Jamie Kern Lima did a really good one and she did hers with a big event.

So, I was curious how Alex was going to do this, but I didn't know the details. I've texted him back two or three times during the process, but he didn't ask for my opinion or didn't ask for any help when he was doing it. And I was just more watching him to see what his creative mind would do and create. And so, I'm sure a lot of you guys did as well. I don't know the exact numbers, but he was around 500,000 people subscribed to this free event, I think mostly organic. I'm sure he paid some ads, but I think the majority is organic and getting affiliates to promote and all sorts of stuff. And what was crazy is you opt in, he opts you in with a text message from he's got a 500,000 person text message list. Which if it was me, I would be spamming every single day with offers. Just kidding. Well, kind of. But they haven't yet. I'm hoping he sells me something through text, but text and emails. He built half a million person list from this exercise, which is crazy.

And then the event he was doing was the Eric Worre Studio and Eric Worre's got a big studio in Vegas. And I happened to be in Vegas during the book launch and Eric Worre came and actually spoke at the Category Kings Mastermind event and he's like, "Yeah, we're getting ready for Hormozi's big event this weekend." And so, he actually invited me and the Atlas Group actually went over to his event center the night before Alex's thing. So, we got there and they had all signage for Alex and all this stuff, but we got to go the night before just to go see the studio, which was really cool, knowing that tomorrow Alex is going to be doing the thing there.

And so, that was the last day of our mastermind. The next day I was with Bart Miller, shopping for my Funnel Hacking Live wardrobe. I was downtown, or in Vegas, running around store by store trying to find some clothes for me to wear so I don't look like I'm rustling T-shirt and jeans at Funnel Hacking Live, right when the event's happening.
So, I'm trying to watch it while I'm shopping and all sorts of stuff. And I don't know all the details. And so, I haven't talked to Alex post events, so I don't know all this. So, this is from Russell's recollection of what he's able to see. So number one, is I tried to start the event initially and it didn't work and I went to a dead page and then I re-opted in and it spun, didn't give me a page, and then I never got a text message link. I went to email. Email's like, "Tomorrow you get a link." So, I didn't get the email or text message and I was like, "Oh no, everything's crashed." So I think it crashed for a while.

Again, I didn't get an email or a text with a link to register. And then when I went directly there, the page was down. So, I was stressing out for him anyway, because I don't know if you guys have ever done a huge launch, but whenever you have a big launch and it crashes, there's nothing more stressful than that. And then, I don't know, 10, 15 minutes into the event I got a text saying, "Go watch it on YouTube." So I'm like, "Okay, I think Zoom must be down, but the YouTube link's working." So, I went to YouTube and boom, he's live in the studio. So, I'm pumped that I'm able to watch it.

I missed the first part, so I don't know if he started on time or what happened, but I finally got away to watch it. So, I was literally at the food court. I sent Alex a video, I'm in the food court and I've got a big black eye from wrestling. I got a big black eye, I'm sitting in the food court, I'm watching him, listening to him pitch and trying see what he's doing.

So, he goes into it. And it was interesting because I watched Jamie Kern Lima when she did her virtual event book launch. She had 10 speakers and they all came and they added value and they taught stuff in between. She would do little mini pushes back to her book. And I feel like that's the way I would've structured an event.

Alex wasn't that way, he was the only speaker. And it was structured more like a webinar. I think it only went for two hours, then it was done. And I was, for me, I was sick to my stomach. If you got 500,000 people registered for an event, I would talk for forever. I would never stop. I would just keep talking until everyone disappeared. You know what I mean? It's like, ah, don't miss that opportunity. But he went for I think two hours and then it was over.

Anyway, so for me, I would've elongated that and tried to serve those people as long as I could while I had their tension. Same thing. It's funny, day four Funnel Hacking Live. When I'm on stage saying goodbye to everyone, I'm looking out and there's 5,000 people still there. I'm like, "It takes us so much work to get these people in the room. I don't want to leave. Let's go all night long. Let's go five more sessions because they're all here. Let's keep having fun." And that's how I felt about that. I was like, "Oh, I wish Alex would've kept going, or had more speakers, or had more people talking about the topic, or whatever." So that was one thing I thought was interesting. How he structured the event was different than I definitely would've. But he's structured like a webinar.

And so, then he started going through the webinar. I was like, "He's doing the perfect webinar, which was cool." And it was funny, I was watching the comments and as he's doing the perfect webinar, he's leading up to a cell, because I'm like, "Oh ..." In fact, I texted Alex the night before. I'm like, "What are you selling? Please tell me you're selling something. Don't deprive these people giving you money."

And he's like, "Well ... " He's like, "Just watch." He's like, "I'm doing something that you'll notice," but he's going to making some twists on it. So, I'm watching him do the perfect webinar and as he starts getting into the stack, the comments, people are upset, they're freaking out like, "Oh, he's just all the other ones and he's trying to sell," and stuff like that.
I'll talk about what he did here a second, but a couple of things I noticed from the webinar, which were interesting to me, interesting because when you watch Alex on short form reels, he's just the best I've ever seen at just riffing and talking. Whereas the webinar, I've never seen Alex do a long form, two hour ... I've seen him do presentations, but a structured sales presentation for that long. And it was interesting because I think he had written the whole thing out because it felt like he was reading it. And I was like, "How interesting."

For me, I'm the other way around, when I do ... The reason why I suck at ... Not that I suck, but I'm not as good as I'm going to be soon in the future, but I'm not as great on short form as Alex because I'm the opposite way. I have to structure it and I write it almost and then it sounds like I'm reading it. And so, I'm trying to get better at that. And it's interesting to me because the long form, when I have a 90-minute webinar, I just flow. That is my arena, that's where I feel the most comfortable. I can talk, I can share a story. I don't write a single word out and I can go for 90 minutes and kill a webinar, but on a 60-second reel, I'm the one that's got structured out and I sound like I'm reading and it's horrible.

And it's just funny, like me and Alex had flip-flopped, where he was long form teaching slash selling, like he was more reading. Whereas he's just so natural short form and I'm the exact opposite. So, I thought that was an interesting thing as I was listening. I'm like, "How interesting how he's so good in this one," and then where I'm so bad and then vice versa. So, I thought it was fun.

All right, so then he did his pitch and he built the whole value and the value dropped and dropped and dropped and eventually he's dropped all the way down to it's just free. Like, "You all get it for free." And so, it was funny Watching the tides turn the comments from, "We hate you, you're trying to sell something." To, "We love you, you're the greatest ever." And he pitched at $0 and was basically you just go to his site and the whole course is there. You can just watch it. No paywall, no opt-in, it's just there.

That was cool. I think I've seen some other people do open-sourcing their content. So it's just like it's there. It's for you to learn and grow from. And so, he did that. And this is where a lot of the controversy I saw online come, is people were like, "Oh no, Alex gave away a $2,000 course for free. It's destroying the market. He's moving the free line where now everyone's going to have to give away their courses for free," and all sorts of stuff. And that's where a lot of the controversy came from.

And I don't actually agree with that. I thought it was interesting that people were so nervous about that, but I don't think it's a legitimate fear. Alex's business model is different. He's not selling info products. He's trying to serve people and then get the right businesses, businesses doing three to five million a year to come, give him equity and then he helps consult. That's his business model. And so, he's just serving the lower audience, to get the cream to rise to the top so he can do equity deals with the best businesses, which is pretty cool.

And so, for him, he's not trying to sell a course. Yeah, he could have made a couple million bucks selling the course, but instead he gives away for free because for him, the long game is different than us. And so, everyone's like, "I'm going to have to get my stuff away for free."
First off, you don't have to. Second off, it's not even the right model unless you're modeling Hormozi's model. So, it's understanding what business model you're in. Don't think that because he did it, that should become your business model. I think that's a misconception some people were having watching their reactions to it afterwards, which was interesting.

But one thing that I do want to stress. At Pirates Cove, we had the Category Kings Mastermind. I had a guy come speak, some of you guys know him, his name's Pace Morby. And Pace, he got into the real estate coaching business two years ago and this year I think they did over a hundred million or something crazy like that. And what's interesting about Pace is I had him come speak about but wasn't about their coaching business, I had him come speak about the community he's built.

He is the best I've ever seen at building a community. In fact, I thought I was the best. I'm not going to lie, Expert Secrets is about how I built the Funnel Hacker community. But Pace has done a better job, just flat out. He's done a better job. And so, it's been fun because actually, he spoke for over an hour and I've modeled out a lot of changes. You guys are going to see some really cool funnel hacking community stuff happening over between now and the end of the year, primarily from Pace and stuff. But somebody asked Pace that about community, "Why is it so important?" And what Pace said was interesting. He's like, "I don't think courses are going to matter in the future." He's like, "You can go to AI and write me a course on how to do underwater basket weaving and it'll create a course better than any of us could create."

He's like, "So the value's not in the course and information, the value is in the community. AI can't build a community." He's like, "That's the thing." So he's doubling and tripling in a hundred X-ing down on community. I think this is similar to what ... For those who are freaking about Hormozi's thing, it's like yes, info may be devalued or may ... Whatever you want to call it, but the value is in the community. And I think that's hopefully lesson for everybody here is understanding that, between AI making content easier, Alex giving away for free, or whatever the fear may be. Don't fear that. The community is the secret, that is the key. It's like, how do you double down and triple down on building your community? So, that's something, a big takeaway, I really had from the whole process.

So, then after he pitched his pitch for $0, then he's like, "Hey, and by the way, those who do want the book and you want to pass it on, you can go buy one book if you want, but if you buy three books, one for you and then give away two to people, you think would benefit from it, I'll give you a free Hormozi hat." So, it was like buy three books, get a hat. And then he had a 10 book option as well on the site. So, that was the pitch, which just go buy one book, or go buy three to give away two copies and you get a free hat. And number three was buy 10 copies, I think was the other option.

So, one cool thing I got from there is, I've only done this on one book funnel ever on my Network Marketing Secrets, the networkmarketingsecrets.com, I got a book funnel there. And because network marketers will a lot of times buy something for their team. So I have on the order form option, there's that you can buy one book, three book, five books, or 10 books, and most people buy multiple books of Network Marketing Secrets, but I've never offered that on any of my other books. I was like, "Dang it, I should have done that for all these." And just make it like, "Hey, get one for you," or, "Buy one book for you, or buy three to give two to friends or business partners, or buy three." And so, I think I'm going to update my funnels to have an option, like a one, three, five option above the credit card form, where you can order multiple copies because I just thought that was cool, to see how he did that.

Now, I don't know exactly how many copies he sold. He told me before he had printed over 150,000 copies of the book before the launch and then most of them sold out within the first hour or so. So, I think he sold, who knows, 100,000 plus copies of the book, which is awesome. And so, that was the book launched and it ended and the webinar ended. I was like, "Why would you end this? Sell me something or talk some more," or whatever. But he ended and that was the end of it. So, that was interesting.

Now a couple other things. So, number one big thing I wanted to talk about was just the fact that information is a commodity. And so, thinking about different business models, Hormozi's is give away information for free, give away the commodity, and then I get equity in the back. With Pace, it's like information's there, but you're building community. Just thinking about that with your business. I think for me it's wrapping information more in community than I've ever done before to increase the value and make it valuable.

Number two thing was interesting is that, and this is ... Anyway, this hurt my heart as a marketer, but Hormozi didn't send people through a funnel and his tech stack was interesting. He sent people, I think, to a Shopify page and from there took them to a HubSpot CRM. So, it was Shopify for the product, HubSpot for the CRM. And I know Alex grew up on ClickFunnels, but he always says, "Oh, we need more using enterprise software." But the reality is number one is ClickFunnels is enterprise software, especially 2.0, if you guys have been using it lately. It's getting really, really good to do all the things. In fact, Funnel Hacking Live, we're launching the CRM features and a bunch of other really cool things that are insane.

But the other thing is HubSpot can't even do a basic funnel, which drives me crazy. And so, you use Shopify, which also doesn't do a funnel. So it's just like, he had no funnel, no order form bump, no upsell, no downsell, no nothing. It was just buy the three books, was there. And again, I understand Alex isn't trying to monetize the thing, so I forgive him for that. But for any of you guys who are watching that, if he sold 150,000 copies of the book, his average cart value should have been, I don't know on a book launch like that, average cart value, you're probably looking 70 to 80 bucks. So done correctly, 100,000 copies of the book times 70 books. What's the math on that?

Okay, do the math. Let's see. Just a 100,000 thousand copies of the book times, let's say $70 cart value, which I think is low. I think he got a lot higher. That's $7 million. Instead of using Shopify and HubSpot to glue together something, if you just would've put that funnel inside of ClickFunnels, that'd been $7 million net in your pocket, day number one. I don't know, so I feel like that was a $7 million mistake in this book launch. I think he could have made a lot more off the other stuff, but again, his model's not to make money on the info. So, I understand that, but it hurt my heart seeing no upsells, no downsells, no order form bumps, no two-step order forms, no ... all the things we know that drive a book and sell a crapton copies of the book, were implemented. So again, that hurt my heart a little bit, but other than that, as a whole, the Hormozi launch was awesome.

So, I love him. I'm grateful for him, love watching him. I think there's a lot of really cool, innovative things he was doing in the whole process and just gave me some more ideas for our book launch.

So my book launch, well, my big ... We launched a book recently. You guys probably saw Linchpin book. Which is just selling like crazy. It's one of our highest converting funnels right now, which is exciting. But I have my next big, big book launch in about a year from now. So, I'm taking close notes to all these kind of things and I'm excited. You guys will see what my version looks like here in about a year from now, a little over a year from now for our big book launch. I think it's going to be a lot of fun.

So, thank you Alex, for doing the launch. Thank you for showing us some new innovative ideas. Thank you guys for listening. Hopefully you got some ideas from it. And just biggest thing is make sure you use ClickFunnels. Don't miss out on $7 million in pure, unadulterated free profit that is yours just for the taking, just by just structuring things correctly. So, that's all I say. That's my only hope for you guys if you've got nothing else from it.
Also, focusing on community over info and all the other things. So, hope it helps. I appreciate y'all. Thanks for listening. And with that said, I will talk to you guys on another episode very, very soon here, on the Marketing Secrets podcast. Thanks everybody.