The Game with Alex Hormozi - 21. Continuity Offer. Lifetime Upgrades. | $100M Lost Chapters Audiobook
Episode Date: November 14, 2025Welcome to The Game w/ Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make ...more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned and will learn on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Wanna scale your business? Click here.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Continuity offer, lifetime upgrades.
Get them to stick.
Lost chapter, author note.
This chapter delineates lifetime versus one-time bonuses.
I thought too many people would struggle to fit it into their business,
but if you have a continuity service, this model can be very effective.
June 2017.
After launching 30-ish gyms by hand and getting absolutely crippled by payment processing problems,
crazy story, by the way, you can read all about that in $100 million leads.
Layla and I had had enough.
We wanted to wind down gym launch and do a weight-lawful.
loss offer instead. But that meant I had lots of gyms to break the news to. And when I called up the
first gym to cancel his launch, he refused. After some back and forth, he asked if I would just teach him
instead of flying out to do the launch. I agreed. Jim lunch was saved and just like that, I stumbled
on Jim launch licensing offer, which we still used to this day. So instead of flying out,
I provided our already proven gym launching stuff. Think ads, scripts, sales training, follow-up tactics,
and so on. And I licensed it all for $16,000. The stuff worked.
Jim's using our materials made on average $30,000, almost twice what their investment was in the first 30 days.
For the average gym owner, that was life-changing, but I still had a looming problem.
Even though the product was expensive and worked, I could only sell each customer at once.
So after I sold it, that was it.
A problem if you want to reinvest in growth and pay yourself.
My preference, I like getting paid.
So to solve it, I had to sell something else.
A continuity product fit the bill.
Even if I used all the cash from the first purchase to get more customers, the continuity offer would keep money coming in.
but I didn't have a continuity product.
Boo.
Then I had a stroke of luck.
A gym reached out and gave me a perfect opportunity.
Hey man.
How are you?
I'm in.
Uh, what?
Seriously.
On your next thing.
I've already made 55K in the last six weeks.
It's a 340% return.
So if your next thing is half as good as this, let me just buy it yesterday.
Uh, so how is your semi-private training going?
Uh, we actually don't have any, he replied.
Uh, how much you make on supplements?
Zero.
We don't have those either.
feeling confident now. What about churn? Hiring. Internal plays. You got those sorted? Uh, not really. His confidence
dropping. When coming out of his sales. Time for the offer. I see. So do you want to get out of the
daily grind and actually scale a legit chain of gems? He puffed back. Dude, that sounds awesome.
Like I said, where have you got him in? Down selling the upsell. All right. It's way higher price and you
got to stay longer. Cool? I think so. He said getting a bit shaky. It's punching numbers into my calculator.
$42,000 a year for three years.
He sat there, silent.
Shoot.
Throwing the bonus.
On top of that, you'll get access
before you start pay.
Cool?
Ticking out his own calculator.
He looked shocked.
Then spurked.
Alex, there's $3,200 a month.
That's 20% cheaper than gym launch.
Yeah, you got a deal.
What do I get first?
Oh, boy.
Well, that depends on what's holding your gym back right now.
So we'll figure out that bottleneck,
and then I'll make that plate to solve it.
We'll repeat that process every two weeks
until you've got more money than know what to do it.
Sound good?
Buy week who plays specific for my gym?
Fantastic, let's do it.
Little did he know, I had nothing ready yet.
I left that up to future Alex.
But I did know one thing.
I had a continuity offer.
One where I provided a new money-making play every 14 days.
Yikes.
It was insane.
And so were the results.
I would keep this up for almost two years.
It exhausted me to my core.
But it meant I could plow all the extra cash
into getting more customers and get paid.
So I did.
And Jim Launcher's revenue went up by more.
than 13x, from 300,000 a month to 4 million a month as a result. So it worked. This turned into an
important lesson for me. Customers would start any offer if I made it tasty enough, but they'd only
stick if they had good reasons to, so I gave them one every 14 days. Our revenue kept scaling,
not because we sold more customers, but because I gave them good reasons to keep paying. So a good
offer got them to start, and good bonuses got them to stick. Now, so can yours. Description. With the
previous offers in this section, we got people to start our continuity program. Now we focus on
getting them to stick. So once they become customers, they stay customers. That said, we can get
people to stick to continuity offers longer with bonuses, more value on top of the continuity product
itself. So improving monthly stick means providing extra value in some way monthly. When I make a bonus,
I think of when and what. For the when part, I use delays or milestones. This means how long do they
have to wait, delays, or what do they have to do to achieve milestones to get the thing?
For the what? I give them a one-time bonus, a variable bonus, or a lifetime upgrade.
A one-time bonus, you give one-time. Think of one-thing, one-time access. A variable bonus,
you give on a schedule, but it changes each time. And a lifetime upgrade means a permanent high-value
change in continuity status. Think an entire feature or service. This means that you simply pair a when
with a what? Putting them together, the person has to wait a certain period of time or do certain
stuff to get the bonus once, get a variable bonus on a schedule like monthly, quarterly or yearly,
or get the same bonus forever. The time to the first bonus extends their stay one time,
and if you keep giving them bonuses, you can extend their stay more times. If you're not sure
what bonus to offer, think of it two ways. First, how can I give them more or better of something?
From a value equation perspective, think faster, easier, or risk-free. And finally, if you're
If you just want to list the different types of bonuses,
refer to bonuses chapter in $100 million offers
and feature downsells in $100 million money models.
Both will give you different perspectives on types of bonuses.
All in all, you can probably make a continuity offer on anything that provides continuous value.
You can get them to stick on that continuity offer longer by adding bonus value
well after their first payment and often.
Here's some examples.
Delayed one-time bonus for local service.
When?
Stay a recurring customer for four months in a row and you become an advanced.
member. What? As an advanced member, you get access to our annual customer appreciation
Paloosa. Delayed recurring bonus, local service, when. Stay a recurring customer for four months
in a row and on the fifth month, what? VIPs get first in line access to in-demand time slots.
Milestone bonus, digital product, when, for every friend you refer, what? We give you one more module.
Recurring bonus, consumable physical product. When? Stay.
a recurring dog food customer? What? A new dog treat, toy or book every month? When? Stay a recurring
butcher box meat customer? What? Lifetime free bacon with every order. If you cancel, you lose it.
Continuous physical use. Car lease. When, every 3,000 miles, a milestone, or every six months delay,
what? You can get the car service for free. Bonus. Important notes. Make sure customers know about your
bonuses. They can only get excited enough to stay longer to get it if they know it exists. So,
tell them. Whether they're just sounding up or a year in, always let them know what comes next.
And if you have recurring bonuses, right after you give it to them, let them know about the
next one. Always keep them wanting more. How to tell customers about upcoming bonuses? Let customers
know the type of bonuses they get, but keep the bonus itself a surprise. This gives you flexibility
and makes the bonus more valuable. In the gym launch example, customers knew they would get a new play
for me every month. But I kept the exact play a surprise. To be clear, the bonus was on top of
of licensing stuff they already got.
This made it both recurring and valuable,
which makes sense because we want them to pay
as much as possible continuously.
Variable bonuses or lifetime upgrades.
Unless your bonuses give a huge and permanent improvement,
keep it variable.
No matter how good you make your thing,
customers will get used to it.
So giving new stuff more often,
even if less valuable frequently,
keeps more customers interested in longer.
Making milestones for your milestone bonuses.
As always, I try to you.
try to make all my milestones either, things that make my customers more successful, think activation
points, or things that make me more successful, think advertising on my behalf. Ideally, things that do both.
For example, if publicly posting that they are starting a weight loss challenge will increase
their adherence and advertise my business, then why not give them a bonus when they do it?
Think of all the tips from the win your money back chapter in $100 million money models. All of those
apply. Combine bonuses when you can. You can combine both the whens and the ones.
what's from earlier. For the wins, you can have something that they get at a delay and another
bonus they only get if they achieve a milestone. For the what's, a one-time bonus will get them
to sign up and stay to that point. A recurring bonus, variable or lifetime upgrade, will keep
them staying after. So you might put one big bonus for getting them to stay for X period,
and then another permanent upgrade after they get the Y period, and then another one-time bonus
after they achieve a milestone. Use them all. With proper framing, you can make lots of stuff a variable
bonus. The bonuses can be new things, better things, or more of what they already like.
Giant streaming services do all three. They already have more stuff than any one person could
ever consume, ever. But they still come out with new shows, more seasons that people like,
and better ways to match content to viewers' preferences. Give customer status and bragging rights
when they unlock bonuses. Once customers unlock a big bonus, change their label. For instance,
after someone's day six months, you might go from calling them a customer to a
VIP. Smart cookies like us align the label with the traits of loyal customers. From a customer to
committed, lifer, advanced, invested, all in, elite, and so on. Bonus points if you make the label
something they can brag about and feel bad about losing. Kind of like airlines with their super-duper
diamond status. Celebrate status changes publicly. The more you compare status changes with
little ceremonies or graduations, the more value the status change has. The more status they gain and the more
status that gets them, the less they'll want to lose it. And by extension, getting them to
stick. You can do these monthly, quarterly, or when you have big achievements to celebrate.
Summary points. To get more people to stick for the long term, give them bonuses over the long term.
When making bonuses you want to know the when and the what. When you give a bonus is either
on a delay or from a milestone. Delayed bonuses you give after a specified number of payments
where time is passed. Milestone bonuses you give after the customer does something or achieves a result.
What type of bonuses give you a one-time variable or lifetime upgrade?
One-time bonuses happen once and extend the duration of customers' tenure once.
So you may need to give lots of one-time bonuses over time and keep them staying over time.
Variable bonuses give a different thing each time.
Lifetime upgrade bonuses give additional features or services.
You can combine bonuses.
The more incentives someone has to start and stick, the better.
When someone earns a big bonus, give them a new label to show their superior status.
Make the bonus a big deal to the customer and do it.
in the public if they feel okay with it.
