The Game with Alex Hormozi - Be Unforgettable: How to Create Content That Resonates (on The Matt Gray Show) | Ep 669

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

“The purpose of your brand is to help people solve a problem.” Today, join Alex (@AlexHormozi) as he guests on The Matt Gray Show to emphasize the power of simple content and strategic branding for business growth. He highlights the importance of solving customer problems, creating exceptional products, and producing content that remains valuable beyond the author's lifetime, with insights from successful brands.Welcome 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 on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Follow The Matt Gray Show on:➤ Instagram | Spotify | Apple | LinkedIn➤ Check out full episode on YouTube!Timestamps:(0:49) - Deep dive into branding philosophy(2:36) - The power of brand and its impact(3:31) - Content strategy and problem solving(4:09) - Personal branding and authenticity(6:31) - Crafting a content strategy that works(8:27) - The journey of writing a book that lasts(15:49) - Breaking down the perfect book launch(20:00) - Balancing perfectionism and execution in product launch(23:42) - Preparation and mindset for successful launchesFollow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

People mistake making things simpler as making them dumber. I think that's a massive mistake that a lot of content creators make. They try and make things sound complicated to make themselves sound smart, but all they do is confuse people and then no one listens. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer, and how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way.

I hope you enjoy and subscribe. There's a lot of people out there with misconceptions. They think like designing a fancy logo, just getting a good name, you know, it's the right color palette, this kind of stuff and they kind of are just slapping lipstick on a pig. I'm curious like, how do you view it? What's changed over the years that you're like, okay, now I kind of feel like,

you know, I've got the ability to create a brand that gets goodwill. They can get to the billion dollar plus, you know, that you're looking for. I'm going to use different language than the audience is probably used to when talking about branding. But branding is teaching behavior at scale. And so if you think about the origins of the word, branding was branding cattle. So you had a cow and you would see some sort of logo into it. And so then we have to ask, what was the objective of that action? Well, the idea would be that if someone saw the cow next to a cow that had no brand,

they would behave differently, right? And so for a cow that had no brand, they might take it, they might kill it, they might leave it alone, whatever they would do with an underbranded cow. But with a brand of cow, they might return it to a specific owner, or they might kill it because they hate the owner, right? So like, it's still a brand and you might hate the person who's the owner. But the key difference is that it would change your behavior. And so if we kind of extrapolate onto that, what we did was like by changing behavior, that's functionally teaching. And so when we teach things from, from, you know, babies all the way to adults, it's associating things that people know with things that they don't know.

And so you, the thing that they know should be the valuable thing. And the thing don't know is your brand. And so then you associate the thing that that audience deems valuable with this logo or this tagline or these colors. or these shapes or this person, and then they say, oh, these are similar. And then you do it enough times that eventually they become one and the same. And then you can drop the thing and have the person

and they will still behave the same way as though they were receiving this value. But that has now been disassociated or at least not paired in the same image. But then you can take that logo or brand and associate it with something new because now they do know this thing and put it onto a T-shirt.

And then they will behave in the same way. And so fundamentally, that is what we were trying to do when we create a brand is that we were trying to program behavior at scale, which is why brands are the most valuable thing that a company can have. If you look at Warren Buffett and the companies that he buys, he's begun, he's begun branding,

buying a lot of brands. Like Apple's not really even a technology company anymore. It's really just a brand. And brand, you can measure the power of brand based on the difference between what you can charge for a commodity and what you can charge for the branded version of the product. And so if you can continue to raise price, on a product based on the brand that is an indication of the power of the brand itself

and how much it has been trained and associated with value for that audience. And so that is what we try to build because, you know, it's one thing to have a salesperson. It's another thing to be able to literally just imprint something on it and immediately buy, you know, sell a shirt for $500 that cost you $10. And like there's a reason that LVMH just prints money, you know, as a conglomerate because they understand brand. 100%. Yeah, no, I talked to a lot of founders.

And they're confused around like, you know, I want to build this brand. I'm not trying to get my content out there. And, you know, what I often talk to people about is when you're having that much difficulty, just remember like the purpose of content, the purpose of your brand is to help people solve a problem and to drive value for them. And at the end of the day, your customers' problems can very much become your content strategy, helping solve those. I'm curious when you're going and like buying a company, investing in a company and, you know,

the brand's suffering and they're looking to kind of turn it around. What's your process then for, you know, developing that word cloud of things that you want to be associated with and then actually like establishing that brand through the messaging yeah it's inside out and I actually think it's the same thing for personal brands it's inside out it's you have to have the evidence you have to have the proof that you are who you say you are and then add two three years add a thousand reps and iterations and continuous and consistent association and then people will start to say it because like brand isn't what you say about you it's what your customers say about you and

it's more that branding happens and you do things and then branding occurs. So like you do things and then your reputation happens and you try your best to associate with the things that you think the widest percentage of people will associate with a positive thing for a specific audience. You know like what is it?

Black Rifle Coffee has a very specific audience that it puts out stuff that that audience will find valuable that other audiences would find despicable. Right. And so still also being okay with the idea that you're going to lose a percentage of an audience whenever you make any kind of polar stance you will lose some and you'll gain

some and the idea is that you just want to gain more than you lose like Bud Light made a gamble by doing the Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light thing right and they lost more than they gained from that move but they did gain

they gained some people who didn't drink Bud Light that were like good for Bud Light I'm going to drink that but they lost way more people who were like, no, I will never drink but light again. Now, look at what they've done now is they've made a massive partnership with UFC. So they were like, our bad, how do we do the opposite of Dylan Mulvaney? The UFC is probably, you know, the strongest brand in the opposite direction that they could associate with. And I'm sure Dana bent them over backwards for that, you know, endorsement to try and, you know, try and save them, you know, a very iconic brand otherwise. And so whenever you make any change to a brand, you always risk.

And you just want to make sure that you gain more than you lose. And so what are the words that you guys are trying to be associated with? Well, I would ask you, what things do you think? It's from the audience. So what do you think we're associated with? I think some of the things, I mean, 100 million seems to be a moniker that you're already using and we'll be using a lot more. I mean, the marketing side of things, I think generosity is a big thing.

seems like, you know, the whole slogan there for a while was like, I'm not trying to sell you anything. And so when you guys are then going and architecting like a YouTube content strategy off that, is it like how are your kind of like ideation sessions going on? Is it like the balance between kind of data, the brand, you know, stuff you want to be putting out there? You know, I think a lot of people get lost in the soup of like how do they develop a content strategy. And I'm curious, you guys are someone that's doing it right. And I don't think you're following like, you know, the path that everyone else is telling you to. So what's,

what's the path that you guys are carving? Yeah, we don't have like, like our five pillars of content and like we have oh we've only done four they like jesus like laughing at this like yeah we're not like oh we did four this week you have to make sure we get the fifth one in yeah um we just try and reverse engineer from the consumer or from the audience member and reverse where they're currently at to where they want to go and see how much bridge we can build for them and people have different problems some people are not in shape some people are not motivated some Some people are, you know, struggling to go from one million to 10 million. Some people are struggling with, you know, recruiting the right people.

Some people are struggling with co-founders. And, you know, fortunately or unfortunately, I've had experiences with all those things. And so I share the things that have worked for me. And if they work for other people, awesome. And if they don't, no sweat. And so I think that's really what we just try and focus on. To your point, like we try and solve problems. We try and provide value.

And using that, you know, using the value equation in the offers book is still kind of the predominant. the North Star for what we do. It's like, what's the dream outcome? How can we increase their perceived likelihood of achieving that outcome? How can we decrease the time that it's going to take someone to get there? And then how can we decrease the pain,

the effort and sacrifice associated with the actions of doing the thing to get the dream outcome? And so it's like if we can maximize the dream outcome, the perceived likelihood, minimize the time, and minimize the pain, we will have a valuable thing. So you just released $100 million leads,

read the book, went through the exercises, we listened to the audio book while reading the book. I feel like I've had you in my ear here for a couple weeks now. I'm sorry. No, it's great. It's great. You know, when you're going, I'm actually currently writing a book, and I'm curious from you,

because you've been a bit of the maestro of this over the last little bit. What were the goals of this book, and how do you kind of approach the book writing process? I want the book to be exceptional, and I want the book to continue to be spread after I die. And so that's the bar, is will people talk about this book? when I'm dead. And so that's the bar, which is a pretty high bar. It's very easy to just like ghost write, make a slogan, put a cover on it, do a marketing campaign, and sell a book, and then have no one ever buy it again. And that is what 99% of books, I mean, probably more than that, 99.99% of books are. And it really comes down to, I think, the intention of the author,

because most authors write books to make money in one form or another. I would say, writing is probably one of my true artistic expressions. Like if I happen, if I were, if I were a musician, I wouldn't make books. I would write albums that had like entrepreneurial motivation. It's just not me. So I write books about it. But like I was, you know, I was, I was the editor-in-chief of the literary magazine in high school. I was vice editor of the newspaper.

I got a full ride to Tufts for writing scholarship. I didn't go. I didn't know that. Yeah. I enjoy writing a lot and it's getting the books has actually given me a really nice thing to do that I haven't been doing in a long time

and I really love it a lot and so I think people can see the amount of time and effort that goes into the books they are really an inefficient monetization vehicle it has none of the things that I talk about but I do think that there's an element of brand which is what I give myself

as my excuse for why I write them Yeah. But in so doing and writing it from that perspective, um, technically, I'm like a point zero zero zero, zero one percent author, uh,

based on book volume and book sales. Like we're almost out a million copies sold between both of them. Nice. Congrats. There we go. Yeah. Without, without,

without any like paid ad campaigns to the book, you know, with the exception of the launch, right. Purposely was showing that to show that paid ads work for stuff. Nice. Um, but I think it's really like always thinking,

how can I make the simpler? How can I make the simpler? How can I make the shorter? how can make this easier? And I really do write to a fifth grader. Yeah. Because if you can write to a fifth grader, then everyone else will understand.

But people mistake making things simpler as making them dumber. Yeah. And I think that's a massive mistake that a lot of content creators make specifically within what I would consider highbrow industries, you know, in the investing world

or finance or even business, is that they try and make things sound complicated to make themselves sound smart, but all they do is confuse people and then no one listens. Yeah, well, I like that, a couple of things about you, you know, like unbelievably generous. I like the framing, too, of like, I'm going to write this book,

and it's got to live beyond when I die. You know, I was talking to Travis, actually, and he was saying, you know, when you're involved with the book, right? Trevor. Trevor, sorry, my bad. Trevor, slip my mind. Yeah, Trevor was talking about, yeah, that was one of your guys' goals when writing it, was just like simple language, don't know of a complicated things, no jargon.

You know, people should understand this stuff in 100 years. So you don't see a lot of talk around algorithms or platforms or fancy language unnecessarily. Most books written before the 1950s were written because people would end their career and that would be their contribution to the field. They would say like, this is my 30 years of work and I've put into a book to move the field forward. That then started to come with status. Then people were like, maybe I can just write a book and get status. And then they started shortcutting it. And then the barrier to entry to getting a book published got lower and lower.

And then once self-publishing started, anybody could publish a book. and so I think books overall have decreased in value tremendously since they were written the old way with the old intentions. But if you think about a book as a product, our goal has always been one that it lives on for a very long time. And the way to achieve that is that if one person reads the book, they refer it to more than one person. And by doing that, it will continue to live on proliferate.

And from a monetary perspective, if you work for two years to write a book and then it works, you know, it continues to get spread for 200 years. That's a high leverage activity. But you really, really have to index on the fact that it's good. And so that's where it's like, if I spend six months on a book and it's pretty good, it won't. Yeah, I might get two years of sales, right? But if I spent two years on the book, I'm going to get 200 years of sales. And so it's like the difference between, you know, a nine out of ten and a nine and a half out of ten is probably five times the work.

And there's between a nine and a half and a nine point seven is another, is ten times the work. You know what I mean? And so the orders of magnitude in terms of the effort that are required to get to squeeze out those distilled the, really distill the knowledge down into what does someone do at the most basic level, allows to be accessible to more people in more places, in more contexts. And that's where from a third frame that we use is validity and utility, which is how useful is this thing? And then how true is it?

Which would be how many context is this framework true? And so to give a really simplified example, if I were to say some things work and some things don't, that is valid. It is not useful, right? Now, if I say, here's my 21 step sales framework for gyms, that might be incredibly useful, but if I apply it to salons, it might not be valid. It might be something entirely different. And so trying to find the intersection of those things, which is what is true all the time

and what is still also useful in every one of those contexts. And that's the kind of the Venn diagram or the cross point. And then how do we communicate that in a way that a fifth grader can understand it with pictures and words below fifth grade? and how can we define terms that makes sense rather than just taking dictionary terms? Because at least my opinion, and Trevor shares this with me, is that most dictionary definitions are not useful. Like half the time, they use the actual word in the definition. And so we try to define words by behavior.

And that has helped me personally, and I think a lot of the audience. Real quick, guys, if you can think about how you found this podcast, somebody probably tweeted it, told you about it, shared it on Instagram or something like that. The only way this grows is the word of me. mouth. And so I don't run ads. I don't do sponsorships. I don't sell anything. My only ask is that you continue to pay it forward to whoever showed you or however you found out about this podcast that you do the exact same thing. So if it was a review, if it was a post, if you do that, it would mean the world to me and you'll throw some good karma out there for another entrepreneur.

And you're also someone that I think practices what you preach. Like, you know, it's almost like a almost like a religion. You know, with the, you know, webinar book launch that you had there, you know, it was a perfect example of, you know, $100 million offer and, you know, what you've And leads. Yeah, and leads, right? Wait for the next one. It'll be all three. Okay, there we go.

I can't wait. So break it down for me because, you know, for those that don't know, like, randomly, you know, about a year and a half ago, I just started doing workshops on about a monthly basis, just helping out, giving back to people, enjoying these. And it's actually become a great monetization source for founder OS. I'm providing value on a consistent basis of people. What a crazy idea. Yeah, exactly. But I was blown away by your execution of that book launch.

and I know your team and yourself. You know, kudos. Like, you guys put in a hell of a lot of work into that. Yeah. You know, what for you is like the perfect sort of like book launch slash like webinar? Like, can you break down maybe some of the principles that went into that? Well, well, let's talk. So let's let's go, let's go for components that are different, right?

So component number one is the product itself is the thing that we're launching, is it exceptional? And after we launch it, will continue to grow in sales on an ongoing basis. Well, people who buy it want to tell their friends about it, and then they buy it too. That is thing number one, by far most important. Because otherwise, in my opinion, it's just a transaction. Now you're just promoting something. It's basically a movie promo. Yep.

You promote for opening weekend and then you just, that's it. You know, and I mean, hey, there's a play there. But that's not the type of business. You really, you do a launch. You make a movie. You're not building a business. So number one is the product and the quality of it and will people who get it tell their friends. number two is the promotion itself.

And so with our stuff, we talk about, at least in the Leeds book, I talk about the eight different ways you can advertise. So there's four things you can do four things other people can do. I'll just say I'm really fast for the audience. But you can reach out to people you know one-on-one. You can reach out to strangers one-on-one. You can post content publicly, which is the stuff that we've talked up to this point. You can run ads publicly.

So that's one to many to strangers. You can use those four to then get you customers who then use those same four to get you other customers through referrals so a person can post or they can leave a review. or they can reach out to a friend or they can reach out to a stranger, all those things. They could even make a testimony that you use in an ad, right? All those things, the customer you can use to get more customers. You can have affiliates, which are other businesses who have your customers, and you can make deals with them to send you their customers in a way that benefits both of you.

And so that's where you can kind of tap into a network of people who've already done the advertising on your behalf, and then you can just get leverage, right? You put less in than you get out. So if I get 100 people who already have 100 person audience, then I have a 10,000 person audience that can show up to my thing, and I might not have an audience at all. So if you're starting out, making affiliate relationships is a great way to get going quickly. You can have agencies who can help you in, you know, I would say specifics around platform. So if you don't know how to execute, let's say TikTok ads and you don't have that skill set in the team and you have a shorter timeline, sometimes it helps to have an agency who has experience doing that, make, you know, make those promotions and ads with you or for you.

And then finally, you have employees who, you know, they knew they have to do the core four for you, which is they have to reach out to people. they have to post-contour, they have to run the ads on your behalf so that you don't have to do any of those things in order to get more people to find out about your stuff. And so, you know, part two of the perfect bunch launch would be you use as many or all of those promotional methods to get people to find out about it. The next one would be basically is there a bigger picture goal that it ladders up to? So that can either be a, um, a, a, a bigger picture goal that it ladders up to. So that can either be, um, a, um, a, um, a, a, a bigger picture goal. Um, um, um, a, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, um, brand play of some sort. It can be some sort of monetization play. But I think that I think it's worthwhile to have, because with just some thought, you can get even more leverage on the launch by having another reason for the book to exist. And so I think a lot of authors, especially very good authors, like real authors, not people who write books, but like authors who do this as their main profession. I think they miss out on this a lot. It's just having like, is there a goal beyond the goal? Is there something beyond the book? And so I think that's probably number three. in terms of the perfect quote book launch. And then the fourth one is, you know, my first book, the offer itself, which is, is there a way that I can enhance the book so that it's not just a book? It's a solution. And the more I can transform written words on pages into a better life for someone

and make that fast, easy, cheap, pain-free than the more people who will buy it and ultimately experience the benefit. And then hopefully that ladders up to 0.3, whatever the might. my next thing is. And so those are probably the four components that I would break down for the perfect, not just book launch,

but just launch of anything. Yeah, me and a friend we're actually just talking about, you know, $100 million leads, $100 million offers all your content the other day. Yeah. And it's interesting. Like one thing that doesn't get lost in all

is this is the importance of an exceptional product. You know, you hear a lot of like marketers or people out there kind of like breeze over that aspect, but really it's the foundation of it all. You know, there's a lot of people out there too,

that on the other side of it struggle with like perfectionism, you know, just like not launching, building some beautiful mouse trap, and never gets out to the, to the world. Now, how do you kind of find that balance between, you know, it's a 9.5 out of 10, it's a 9.7, 9.8, okay, it's 9.85. You know, okay, now we're going to launch this thing. You know, what's that point for you, like as an example, you're writing $100 million leads? You could give it another revision and another. Like, what's the point you're like, no, no, no, no, it's time to ship this thing? Really good question.

So I say there's three internal questions that every entrepreneur has no writing. answer to, maybe four. One is risk, which is how much risk are you willing to tolerate? That's 100% personal. Consumption versus investment. How much you're going to consume of your income today versus what you're going to invest for later? That's, again, completely personal. When do you push through and when do you pivot on a hard challenge? Because there are definitely times where it's right to pivot and it's right to push and you need to have some level of wisdom to discern between the two. And I think the fourth one is what your point is right now, which is, you know, when is something good enough? Because these all exist on continuums, and that's why they're so hard.

Like, neither, none of those are, they're false binaries. So people perceive them as binaries and they try to make decisions around them as binaries, but they are not, right? Like, take into the extreme, if you invest every dollar for the rest of your life, you never consume anything, you die with a big pile of money and what a great life. Right. If you, if you push through everything, you'll probably run into a wall at some point that you can't push through because of something outside of your control.

If you pivot all the time, you also never stick with anything long enough to see any attraction, right? So like, the extremes on here are hard. So it's really about the nuance of which of these, which, what, amount right now is best. And so for when is something good enough, I've done a decent amount of writing kind of in my life now that my litmus test for that is there's nothing else I can do this to make this better. And so, you know, for the first, I think for offers is probably five drafts. It was a shorter, narrower concept and it was easier to do. I mean, when I look at offers now,

there's a bunch of things I would tweak and cut out and reshape. Of course, that's the nature of that. But as of right now, there is really not a lot. I would change to leads. Now it's only been four months or five months or whatever it's been. But when I finished that book, I was like, one, I'm sick of this. And two, there's nothing else that I can do. Like anything I would do to this book would make it worse based on my current skill set. And so that is how I saw it.

Now, if you're developing a software product, then this probably doesn't necessarily apply to you. What you have to do is just narrow the scope of the problem. And so I think that you absolutely still want to ship a product that's exceptional. You just narrowly define the problem. And then over time, you will expand the scope of the problem. And so, like, if you ship a product or like it's done is better than perfect, right? And it doesn't solve the problem that you're going out for. You will fail.

Now, it's better to really narrowly define it and then solve it really well and let the narrow definition of the scope allow you to say, I have 100% solved this very narrow problem and then expand it rather than say I'm going to solve this big problem on my first go round and that's really unlikely. And then that is where you get into the problem of like I'm a quote perfectionist and whatnot. Now I've never had an issue shipping things

and so that's just not been a struggle for me. I just I have a pretty good feeling for when it is good enough. And you know I think my fifth draft I sent out to a bunch of people in there like oh this is awesome blah blah blah and I was like no I'm going to rewrite it again.

And it was way better. You know, it's just like, and that's where I think, to some degree, like, you have to trust you in terms of your, your bar for excellence. Like, the most successful people I know have the lowest tolerance for mediocrity. And I think that you just have to add that for you. So when you go about launching it, I'm curious, like what's going on your, like, your brain, your body. Like, is this something that you're excited to launch it?

You feel really good about it. And you're like, okay, I got this. Like, I put in the reps. This has been through the ringer. This thing's a banger. Or is it something that, you know, like a lot of people, you know, it's like, you're nervous to the last line, like hoping it's being received. You're also kind of following up and we all know how sequels go.

Yeah. You know, a lot of pressure. And so, you know, curious how you're feeling like going into launching something like that. Well, the sequel thing for sure in terms of I set a bar with the first book that was unexpectedly, um, well received. Yeah. Um, and so I worked, I worked probably five times, maybe seven times more hours on leads than I did on offers. I also made a massive mistake with leads, which is that I did not narrowly define the problem.

So I made it. It was such a hard book to write because the book was the, I mean, I literally just, I did lead generation. Like I literally made a book on advertising that I don't think left anything out, which is insane. The first book was on how to make an offer, which is literally just such a tiny, I mean, it's super important, very high leverage which is why such a valuable book.

You can read the book and immediately make 10 times the money, which is great. But other components of the business aren't, aren't, don't have necessarily that level of leverage. And so to help someone get leads, it's like, well, I had to cover different platforms, media types, consumption types. I'd cover lead magnets. I'd discover actually like doing this.

I'd make content, um, content across different, like audio versus video versus, yeah, like there's so many things. But I think that I think we did a pretty good job tackling those problems after, you know, thousand plus pages of actual writing to just distill everything down. Um, but to, to let her back to the point that you were asking earlier, um, I felt truthfully very confident about the product when it came to the launch. And so I just wanted to get it in people's hands. I felt truthfully, incredibly prepared for the launch. I had done that presentation three times a day for an entire month. Wow. And so every morning I would do the presentation

in my head, so I'd go through the slides saying it. And then I would do one live and record it. And then I would play the recording back to myself with the slides in front of me. And I would pause it and make edits or add slides or takeaway slides or smooth over language where I felt it needed help. And so when I got there that day, I had done this before. And I knew what I was going to say. And I could probably do the whole thing by heart without the slides. And so I tend to go into high stakes situations that way, which is the higher the stakes. the greater my preparation is.

Because I can eliminate my anxiety by preparing. And I know that if I have no anxiety on the day of, I will do well. And so I can control that to a great degree. So I do. Yeah, we're seeing that way. You know, just put in the reps, put in the practice. And then that anxiety has a way of just working itself out, kind of channeling the anxiety into just some action

and delivering the evidence to conquer the self-doubt. Well, I think a lot of people go into things underprepared. And so I think it's reasonable that they have anxiety. Like it is good, it is right that you have anxiety. You're not prepared. You know, because the flip side is if I went in and I, it's just like the book where I said, like, I could not have prepared more for this. And so if something goes wrong, I have done the level of effort that I am satisfied with.

You can look yourself in the mirror. Right. And I think that if you can actually do that, like for real, for real, not for the podcast, not for the Instagram post where you cry and say how grateful you are. But like if you can really, when no one's there, look at yourself in the mirror, and say, I did enough and I'm satisfied. I think if you do that, you become very bulletproof. And there's not much that can phase you

because you go into it having one already. And so now you're just exercising it.