The Game with Alex Hormozi - How to Survive Creator Burnout and Still Scale (Karat Reshare) | Ep 859

Episode Date: May 19, 2025

In this reshare from his interview on Karat with Eric Wei, Alex (@AlexHormozi) breaks down what it takes to build media that lasts and how creators can go from content grinders to long-term brand builders without burning out or selling out.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 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 | AcquisitionMentioned in this episode:Get access to the free $100M Scaling Roadmap at www.acquisition.com/roadmap

Welcome back to the game. This is a guest spot on Eric Ways podcast. He's the founder of Carrot, which is a very large company that helps creators get credit cards, kind of interesting business model. But this is a super, super business podcast. So I would say this is probably on the more advanced side. But we talk about obviously a little bit on the creator side of how they can build big businesses, what I look at when I invest in companies and my philosophy around content as our competitive advantage in the private equity space, enjoy. If I had that size audience, I'd already be played. Put up or shut up. When I met you three years ago, you had just started on your career journey.

Since then, millions of followers. The reason people followed me was because the systems were good. And so because the systems were good, they didn't need me for the systems to work. When I look at creation in space who successfully actually actually very minimal. I actually think creators are horrendously bad at picking product. Your constraint is not that you're a 97 out of 100 on content. It's that you're a zero out of 100 on monetization. That's a powerful concept right there.

that when people promote anything, they get backlash because anything that you give me that is not free, you die. You're saying that people had followers with an end of influence. The point of short form is one thing, which is to drive them to learn. Would you invest in content creators? Alex Formose might be the first creator billionaire, and he's built his business really differently from other YouTubers of my follow like Mr. Beast. Today, Alex shares why most creators are in a broken business model, the five ways to make money from content, and how to turn your social media into a real business.

If you're a creator wanting to grow, listen to this pod for 21 secrets from Hormozzi on how he did it. When I met you three years ago, you had just started on your career journey. Since then, millions of followers over 250 million are revenue for portfolio companies. Is this where you wanted to be?

I don't consider myself a traditional creator. Like, I had businesses and had businesses outside of this that aren't my face and anything. But I saw where just the monster amount of impressions that social media is getting and giving away for free. And I was like,

this is the most insane thing I've ever seen. And to this day, I still think it's crazy that like we can get a hundred million, a billion impressions, a quarter for free.

I think about creators in two buckets. Yeah. I think there are the words guys and then there are the video guys and then the crossover's audio

that I'm a little bit above. I started making YouTube videos and I wrote a book basically about the same time. Yeah. And then the book kind of took on its own you know,

growth path. Yeah. And then the video also did too. The nature of how I've done things is that I'm all about business process and system. Yeah. The reason people followed me was because the systems were good. And so because the systems were good, they didn't need me for the systems to work, whereas many businesses don't have that, and a lot of people follow the creator for other reasons that are not that, that are less duplicable. It's fascinating, too, because what you've built, it's a private equity firm in a way. But most private equity firms add value by cutting the slash

operations. In a way, you're adding value because, one, here's the business processes to run. The influence you've now built about talking about faceless systems, now you've been able to bring in your face to increase it. So yeah. And I think what you said at the very beginning, which is that like entrepreneurs are realizing just the amount of attention that's here and this is just a way to advertise your business. I mean, that was the, that was the entire thesis, fund acquisition.com was I'm a big fan of something old and something new. So like something old, private equity with something new social media. And like, how do we bridge that? How do we, how do we merge that? Now, because there's been old school, I mean, Warren Buffett's an influencer.

For sure, he's just legacy media. Ray Dalio is an influencer. Now, he's starting, you know, he's making his TikToks and things like that. Naval's an influencer. Of course, these guys get deal flow because they're out there. You know, they're talking about business. And so they get it. I just took what they were doing and just like did a lot more.

Right. What type of companies we look for, the process overall. Those things have changed a lot from when we probably spoke three years ago. Because three years ago, I was looking at basically running the gym launch playbook that we did, taking a company that has basically digital media driven that is vertically integrated education around a specific sector. Yeah. And then wrap in business services and then be able to package that because you have revenue retention and then sell it. Right.

And transition it from a face driven business to a kind of consulting business that's in one niche, right? It's a difficult operational challenge for face-driven businesses to remove the face. And I think that makes sense. Like, Taylor Swift isn't looking for somebody to, like, step in and sing for her. There's a tension in what you said. You became the face for faceless systems. Your premise was, I have these processes that work, 100 million offers, 100 million leads. You don't need Alex Formosie to literally be doing this.

And get value from it. Exactly. It's to empower you to do it. As you said, the business model of the creator is very different. Collins, you're talking about how there's an inverted pyramid where the crater is almost the chokehold, the gate point for everything because you need Taylor Swift to be there. Now you are an influencer. And so it's funny because you're like, well, I'm going to help you do a system where you don't need me. But now people follow you for that.

I think once upon a time, there's a conception of a creator as like the KC. United St. Altur. Like, oh, hey, I make money to make content where I've started. is on YouTube. And the advertising, the brand deals is what supports me. I think now you're seeing creators becoming entrepreneurs and Con is just becoming how they market themselves. In some ways, like the reputation of the creator was branded, if you will, like in a figurative sense, like branded by the early creators, which is not reflective of how you advertise a business today. Yes. For creators who want to fall on your footsteps, do you you think you'd advise them to double down on the creative distribution side of what they do

or to try and get better at the building business piece of what you do. Really interesting question. I think it depends on your goal. So if your goal is to make money, then learn the money game. If your goal is to make content, then get, you know, just keep making content. I had a conversation with other Uber creators not that long ago, and we operate at at Echoision.com off the theory of constraints. And so the positive of the theory of constraints is that any system will grow until it's

constrained and then we'll grow enough further. And so, you know, these gentlemen had like subrived to that. And they said, hey, Alex, I think we understand what our constraint is. You know, we have our media and our content creation machine. The constraint of it is like, we need better editors for whatever so we can get even more leverage on our time. And I said, what's the goal? And they said, we want to make money. And I remember kind of like smiling about this. And I was like, your constraint is not that you're a 97 out of 100 on content. It's that you're a zero out of 100 on monetization. If you don't care really about making money and your passion is making videos about whatever it is that you make videos about, then like, you won. Congratulations.

You're making videos about stuff. Yeah, yeah, like, you were like, if I could just quit my job and make videos about Dungeons and Dragons, then like, I would do it. And it's like, awesome. You're one. Like, so now, where are two from here? But there are creators that I've talked to who I'm like, hey, so what do you want? They're like, dude, I just want to make money. And if that's the case, then you got to learn the game. In 2004, you started working with school. Yeah. And so I think it's an interesting question using yourself as a case study. Number one, the product that you're associating with, it's not one that you like built it all nuts and bolts yourself. No. It was very much, here's an existing company, but I can grow it. And so it kind of comes down

for creators to question of, hey, like, do you really want to lean into being an entrepreneur and do it yourself? Or do you just want to do a brand deal? This is going to be really interesting. So, because I've given a huge amount of thought to this. So I'll see if I can get the number right, but the creator paths exist on a spectrum, basically five paths of monetization for a creator. So, and they exist on an axis of control. And so at the lowest amount of control, you have sponsorships, right? Like people just pay you money.

You give, basically you're an advertiser. And so you promote their stuff, you read an ad, whatever. That's that. One degree next to that, you have being an affiliate, which is just like, you know, getting sponsors except your pay on performance. Because what we do, when you do an affiliate deal or a performance-based deal, you're saying, I would like a larger percentage of the upside if I can prove that I can generate it. And so what you're essentially doing is shifting the risk from them to you. And the more risk you're willing to take on, the greater percentage of the upside.

And so winners always work on performance. No one should be able to as accurately estimate how much you can drive as you. No one does better than you do. Right. You're the seller. So like in M&A terms, the seller of a business, the person who knows the business is selling to somebody else. always has an information advantage because they always know more about the business than the person buying. Right. And so you are the seller of attention. So you should always know the value of your attention

better than someone else. Now, if you know that your attention is shit and doesn't actually convert at all, then maybe you should just do the sponsorship. Yeah, it's the brand value. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, we're just, it's overall the impression. Now you've got me on board. Yeah, right. Yeah, it's going to change everything. So, yeah, I know, so you've got you've got sponsorships here. You've got kind of affiliates and performance deals here. Then you've got kind of the next path, which is what I, what I did with school, which is you promote and you, so I put capital in the deal too. So it wasn't just, so you also invest in financial. Oh, I wrote sex too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it was a big deal. Yeah. And so we invested capital in the company and we invested resources and we invested brand.

So we did all. So I think about them in terms of like what are the buckets that create an investment. So there's work. And for me, me there's brands. Some people don't have that, but like there's work, there's brand, and then there's capital. And so we put all three into the business. I think there's a really nice sweet spot there because what you can do is rather than try and go through all the iterations, I say, hey, let's do a deal. I think there's a really nice sweet spot there because what you can do is rather than try and go through all the iterations, I say, hey, let's do a deal. It has to be significant enough for me to make it worth using what I would consider a brand bullet on. And let's let's, let's, let's, let's

get carried into every business in the U.S., not just creators. And then if that's compelling, then you get to just do what you're good at as a creator. This is me talking to creators and let the business do what they've already proven. And this is the key point that they've already proven they're good at. And so this is where a little bit of business acumen comes into play. This is where like understanding what revenue retention is, looking at churn, looking at user acquisition, looking at engagement rates, look at activation points, whatever, that you want to look at a business to understand, okay, is this actually, is the product good?

Because what you want as a creator, like the perfect Nirvana situation is, unbelievable product, compounding on its own from word of mouth for 12 to 24 months in a market that's like very similar to your audience and that you know that you can 10x in a year. That's where the magic happens for both parties. They have an amazing product that could grow without you, but with you it just grows that much faster. And so fundamentally all you're doing is pulling the future forward by like four years. years. You're cutting the compounding curve and just basically step, stepwise, increasing in a straight

line up and then saying, okay, we're just going to pull year four forward. And now we're going to compound starting next month at year four to five rather than year two to three, right? And that's fundamentally what I was doing with school. And I mean, think about the amount of deals that we look at. School was the only deal that I've done since that time period. It was because it hit all of those things. Now next on, so that's like third stop on our creator world here. The next is that you can white label. So you can drop ship stuff. which is pretty common that I see. The simplest way of this is like you don't manufacture t-shirts.

You find a t-shirt manufacturer, you slap your logo on it and you ship it. Pretty straightforward. And then the final version, final boss of this is that you create a product from scratch or service from scratch and you market and sell it. And those are degrees of control that exist on that spectrum. There is a right path for everyone. And you just have to have some level of awareness to know which path is yours. Now, which of these can create the most enterprise value? The further on the right you are, the more enterprise value you have.

If you are doing sponsorships or affiliate deals, which is the first two categories that I talked about, those two can create enterprise value in it of themselves if you consider yourself a media business, which is so funny, I was talking to a Mondo creator, so like 20 million plus subscribers. And it's so funny, he was like, do what we're doing. Like, no one's ever done this before. or like have a business around like making videos. And I was like, so you know media has existed for a long time, right? And when I told it was like, dude, like you should just look at existing media businesses. And it was like this big light ball. It's like all we're doing is taking an old business model and just doing it in a new media.

Like that's all it is. Right. The difference though is if you look at like a great media business of the new age, it's like Barstall sports. Right. Right. And Dave Portnoy is sort of now a creator. I would say he is a creator now. But it wasn't started that way.

He just saw the arbitrage that existed for all these cheap impressions. Built some of your properties. Yeah, exactly. And he built a network and so that he could sell impressions across a specific demo to advertisers. And if that's the business, I just have yet to see. I think YMH, your mom's house for comedy, I think they have a handful of production. So they're kind of becoming a media. Zach Justice is trying to do this too.

Yeah, yeah. You have to talk to Zach. It's tough, though, especially if you were the primary, like, breadwinner kind of for the media business. I would say it's almost simpler to be like, hey, I know a ton of advertisers. Right. Let me sell your ad space. And I think you could far more easily acquire a big network from that perspective, which is basically a port and way did. Interesting.

So for your POV, if you've successfully built the media side of your business, like that's a win. But the upside, according to your degrees of control, it's very limited. And as you mentioned, I was trying to think of people who I think have built these successful media empires. So there have been many who failed, like BuzzFeed. It's a great example. Many, many, many have failed. We're going to reinvent the game. It's like, well, you're just doing newspapers to it.

I'll be on a new medium. There are some creators who have succeeded in building. Or tabloids. Yeah, exactly. Tabloids, right? Yeah, to Daily Mail. And there are some creators who've gone, they've taken steps in this direction where they've almost scaled their content. So one that comes to mind, Linus Tech Tips is a very good example.

Where Linus Tech Tips strive with just Linus, and over the time, he's brought in other creators to be on his channel instead of himself. And then you also have creators like, I think MKBHD is a great example, too. MKBHD, I still think of his primary. merely as a media business. He doesn't do that much with products. And, well, he actually tried one, a wallpaper app that got a lot of backlash, which, you know, if I were MKBHE, I feel like I would be like, yeah, I know, you know what?

I'll just stay and do content over here because whenever I sort of go over there, people get mad at me. Now, it sounds like you're saying, though, from your POV, this is... Also, can we hit on this real quick before we switch? So I want to say this mostly to the creators of people who have started from organic and, like, built an audience and whatnot. There are, there's two types of angry. So there are,

there's angry because you have done something that you said you wouldn't do or that is against your brand or purported values. Right. Then there is people who think that everything in the world should be free. And I find that YouTube or really across all platforms, these people exist. And you can buy in large, ignore them.

And so I think that when people promote anything, they get backlash because anything that you give me that is not free, fuck you die. I think on some level you just got to be like, okay, anything worth doing is going to get lash back. And there's like, show me one ultra-famous person because this is all, we're talking about creators and influence and audiences

who doesn't have haters. Right. And so if you're going to get hate regardless, you might as well also accomplish your objectives. So that's just my two cents on it. Now, betraying the brand that you have, no, I think that's dumb. So like if you have, for example, a naturopathic brand of weight loss, don't push his M-PIC.

That's probably a bad idea. At the same time, if you said, hey, I've got these supplements that help you do that, or I have this, you know, nutrition program that I'm, you know, you do a retreat with me three times a year. Seems you know, whatever. Of course, I'm thinking of liver king because the whole premise was his gains came from his diet, not from other things. 100%.

You've been honest. I think it would have been fine. I think, yeah. It would have been interesting for sure. Yeah, fine. Maybe not fine. It would have been interesting. Oh, yeah.

I eat, you know, goat nuts. but I also inject Trent. Like, people were like, so is it the goat nuts or is it Trent? Well, it's actually both. It's an interaction between the two. That's what the magic happens, right? Like, yeah, so that's, yeah. But actually, I think he's, it's a worthwhile example to pull that up because, so obviously

there was a moment we're in time where he went super viral and then it peaked and then Derek, as a callback to earlier, ended up being the one who out at him. He exposed him. I remember. Yeah, he exposed it. Here's the thing. liver king still makes content. And I would imagine that he probably still makes good money.

Yep. And so I would see what happened to Liver King as close to a quote, brand suicide moment as you can get. And yet he keeps going. And so here's the real real. I don't think you can get canceled. And so a lot of people have this fear of making a mistake that's going to end their career. And no mistake ends your career unless you choose to end it.

And so you can always get back up. and keep going. The only way that you can actually get canceled is if you get prevented from distribution. Right. So if all platforms, de-platform you, if every platform did that, then yeah, you are canceled, right? Like, R. Kelly is in jail and he cannot make content. So, like, he has been, he has been effectively canceled. Right. On the flip side, how many times has Chappelle been canceled? I'll put that in quotes here. Right. He's not canceled. He just keeps going, right? And so in the same light, to further, hopefully put it at stake through this thing, your assumption that you have, have killed your career assumes that everyone in the world knows who you are.

And the vast majority of the world doesn't even know you exist. Nor did they really care. Subtext. And so, like, let's say you have a million person audience. Okay. You mess up. Just go get another million. You're not dead.

And if anything, you start having learned a lesson and you just keep going. It's interesting because, like, I think the poster childs for this in some ways are, like, Jake and Logan Paul. Dude, the suicide forest thing? Yeah. Like, here he is on WWE or whatever, whatever they're doing now. I don't follow as tightly as I probably should to be, you know, in this world. But he's still around.

Yep. And he's, quote, bigger than ever now. Yeah. And so like there's. He also, Jake Paul also is a VC fund now. Yeah, well, there you go. Yeah. There are so many examples of, quote, career ending moves that didn't actually end the career.

What you have to be able to deal with, and this is the real hard part, is that you have to be, you have to be able to handle hate for a week. Mm. Because the news cycle is about a week. And so you have to be able to just be hated. And it's very against our human wiring to receive that much hatred and continue onwards. Especially online. It's amplified. It's impossible to fathom a million people telling you that you suck. Have you gone through that yourself?

I mean, I've had my moments of people hating on stuff that I put out. Usually it's just stuff that I put out that just triggers people in general. And I would say that part of it is intended to do that. Because I have relatively extreme views on life and death and things like that. And I make those because those are the views that help me free myself and made life a lot more palatable for me. I've always been like, and if it helps you use it. And if it doesn't, don't worry about it.

Use whatever you're doing. This is not me trying to proselytize. This is me sharing what's worked for me. But of course, people see it and they're triggered because this conflicts with their worldview. My content is a documentary, not a sermon. When you think about the different axes of control, the different models you've said,

what's interesting is I've seen a lot of creators stand the media emperor side, I've seen a good number of creators make money via their own products. Like obviously there's festivals. The middle area, what you've done, it's actually very, very rare. That's the advantage of if you understand the business scheme, you can do nasty things. Because I remember, so there's, I can't wait for this to get the call back. But one of my very first podcasts I ever did was on Ice Coffee Hour with Graham Steffen. And on the show, I said, if I had your size audience, I'd already be a billion. I'm excited for when we cross that because I think it'll be pretty close.

You have the audience now, Alex. Does he say put up or shut up? Yeah. I mean, we've grown a ton. I'll just leave it at that. I'll say this for anybody who's listening to this. So the problem with me claiming something, I would like to have a third-party substantiate. And so, like, I could say, well, if you know what our revenue is, right, and you put any

kind of EBITA on that, that would be reasonable, especially in a business that has low-cac, you would probably imagine that it would be decent. And you put any kind of multiple on that, it would be a pretty large number. And so we have things that are going for us. And we've had conversations with companies that said we would value in this range. But those are things that I wouldn't. If I claim it, I want to be rock solid. Absolutely.

Right. And so that's why I have it. But that being said, obviously we've grown a lot in that period of time. And I'm excited for whenever that callback comes because he still has more YouTube people. So I'm using that as mine. You're saying we haven't quite reached your audience. Yeah, on YouTube. Yeah, I'm still behind his audience on YouTube.

It's actually another good point, though. You said multiple, right? The multiple that you would get on what you've built is going to be higher than, say, a peer YouTuber. Yeah. Here's your question. When you look at, say, like, what Jimmy, Mr. Beast has built. Yeah, perfect. I was going to come back to that.

Yes. Okay. Is that a business you'd want to invest in yourself? So I think I'd probably take Chimath's angle, which is like you're just, you're basically betting on Jimmy. And I think, yeah, I would take that bet. Right. Because I think Jimmy will just die or home win. And that's kind of...

He's obsessed. And you just want to find people like that. When your distribution base is the world, it's hard to lose. Yeah, I'll just... I'll leave it at that. But what you brought up, though, like Prime, for example. Yeah. So Prime is actually the identical to a school deal.

Because he didn't build the product. Great. It was Congo Brands is another company that previously worked with other creators to do other drinks as well. Yeah. And so they promoted it. Right. Right?

But they put... I don't know if they put cash in. I don't know what they did. But I'm assuming they put some money because they have the capital. Why not? To get more leverage on the ultimate deal or joint venture. Was Logan going to learn the drink business and get the and get brick and mortar distributed like maybe but it's also the

question is how much is your time worth and i don't mean like dollars per hour or anything like that you absolutely can't do it and when i say time is like how much is the next five years worth to you right because if you can pull five years of knowledge forward and then grow for five years rather than learn for five years then begin growing because you're if you have an audience of their size your constraint is going to be delivery it's not distribute like yeah it's not it's not media distribution. There's a shortage at one point. Of prime. Yeah, it's going to be product distribution. And so to build out the kind of infrastructure

and knowledge base to satisfy the demand internationally, not just nationally, internet, because they're in the UK too. You need deep expertise and large existing infrastructure. And so Kong already had that. And so it made sense. And so I

would probably lean more towards that type of model. I'm curious, like, there's me, there's Sirhan. Jimmy, I think, with Feastables is the only person who is building things truly from scratch. He's hired his own team and everything. Yeah. And I don't know if you were to ask Jimmy again today, uh, if he could go back in time, if he would have just if he would have done it the same line. He's talked about how stressful it is. Yeah. Well, and we can, and we can already say, uh, he launched lunchly, right? And well, what did he do with

lunchly that he didn't do with feastables? He didn't build it from scratch. Right. And so I think part of that is there's a desire that I totally understand as a creator slash entrepreneur to, control everything. And if you look at the people who are the wealthiest in the world, almost none of them own 100% of the companies that they have made their wealth on. So you look at Jensen Huang from Navidia owns 4%. You look at Elon. He owns whatever it is, whatever small percentage of Tesla that he owns. And with SpaceX, he's not the majority owner. Now he might have voting rights, whatever. That's a different question. Base Baseball owns 9% of Amazon. Like, I go down the list. Warren Buffett, I think, doesn't own more than 40% of Berkshire Hathaway, and we could keep

going. And so the idea is to build something really, really big, in my opinion, need multiple lifetimes. And you can either live all of those lifetimes in sequence chronologically yourself, and then take a lifetime to finally learn how to do everything. Or you can get three people's lifetimes. You all start together. You divvy up the pie. And then you can build something way bigger, way faster. The longer I've been doing business, the more I value time. and speed because also we have the assumption that these things will not change in 10 years. So maybe it does take you 10 years to learn everything. Is the moment still there? So that makes me think of two things. The first thing is for yourself, what are the elements

of business that you're most willing? Like, sure, I could learn this, but do I want to spend time with this? Yeah. So I approach all new things with the same perspective, which you can, you probably share with me, which is kind of the consultant's perspective. And so I started as a management consultant, which we share as background. And the way that I was taught is if you want to rapidly learn something in a space. And to give context on this, imagine this back in time. I'm 22 years old.

I go through my security clearance. No beard, by the way. Yeah, no beard. I have, so I have to get a top secret security clearance. So I pass that. Thank God. You know, I'm sweating bullets. Like, what did I do in my frat days?

You know, like, I'm thinking this is like a huge deal to national security. So I passed that. And then I can't say which armed forces, but we go and do work for the Defense Department. And I was focused on space cyber and intelligence. And, you know, some of the projects I can say this, that we worked on was like basically mix of assets to kill the most bad guys,

the most efficiently. Right? And the thing is that there's overlap between different armed forces for similar style of, let's just say, killing people or gathering intel on, you know, bad guys. How do you at 20 years, 22 years old, go and say something that's impressive and worth $4 million for a project that you're on in four months? Right. So it's like you start now, four months from now, you have to give a presentation to two, two stars and a four star general who have been doing this for their entire careers.

And then somehow managed to say something intelligent. So the way that they approach that problem is, so the person who does a record, you know, puts the records out for the project. We say, who are the smartest people you know in around this problem? Yeah. And they give you five people. So you go to those five people and you interview all of them. And then you say, who do you know five people who are the smartest people around this? And you do that for over and over and over again until eventually the same names keep popping up.

And then you're like, already talk to John, already talked to Steve. And basically you have, you kind of like mapped the neural network of expertise. And then you consolidate those notes into those buckets. So you like recode them. And then you distill them down. And then you make a pretty slide job. That's like the very TLDR. That is what consulting is.

Yeah. And if you were the 22 year old, you were the one doing all of the notes and all of the consulting. You're doing the calls. You're consolidating. Yep, 100%. And so. So I learned a very valuable skill set there.

And so I've approached every new endeavor using the same thing. To answer the question, what are the things that I would say I will learn more about this or I won't? I think it depends on my first pass. Yeah. So if I get into, because there's some industries where I look at it and I'm like, this isn't that hard. Like some businesses, I'm like, this isn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. Other ones, I'm like, this is way worse than I thought it was going to be. And it's also like what problems come up and how equipped am I to solve them?

So like I'll use an in business like insurance for example. Right. I think insurance is really interesting. Largely because one of the biggest problems with insurance is cost of acquisition. It's like it's a demand constrained business. Insurance is not hard to get capital for it. Like there's tons of insurance companies that will always all that to say it's there. But that was like, oh, that's more interesting.

And so when I have that like of the not now or later, like I put insurance in one of those buckets as something that like is also regulated. But I would say less than banks. And there's pretty amazing tax advantage. that exists within insurance. You're picking these products that have, to your earlier point, extremely high retention. People need it. It's just people don't historically like it.

And acquisition's really hard. And you're coming in and saying, well, I could help with the acquisition side. Oh, but people still don't really like it. And there's like limitations in my ability to prove that right now because some of these things are regulated. Where the magical will happen is I'll find some nugget in there. And this will just take time that I'm like, we can win on this. Three ways to build a business.

You can just look at what's already one. working and just do that for yourself. And I think that's totally fine. I think it's a wildly underestimated path. Like, you know, what business do I start? I'm like, look around, pick one. Like, you can just start and then you'll learn and then you'll, you know, learn from there. The second is you have a strong advantage in one of either that you can acquire customers cheaper or you can deliver in a better way, right? You've got some advantage in one of those two. And if you have an advantage in one of those two, you don't really need much of an advantage in the other. The third is that you need such a strong advantage that you can overcome a deficit.

in the other. So like if you have what I would consider a true product-driven business, you could not be really ever good at acquiring customers. And by solving products so well, it becomes viral. And then you do solve your acquisition problem vis-a-vis a better product. Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast. Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling a roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages

and across all eight functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, HR, you've got finance. We show the problems that emerge at every level of scale and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you,

so it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you enter the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, But it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap.

R-O-A-D map, roadmap. Now, on the flip side, it's like, can you do the same thing by just having unbelievable distribution? I don't think the answer is yes. You mentioned that as something like 20, 30% of the businesses coming to you. They make content in some way. Yeah. Do you think that those businesses, a lot of people talk about creator, creator economy, Are they better than those that don't grow and have Khan as part of their workflow?

Really interesting question. I think it's a double-edged sword. So what makes them great also makes them risky. So they will typically have very low cost to acquire customers because it's organic. And so it's just some, yeah, it's some star or whatever. I'll call it a star, right? It's good on camera or good in whatever format they advertise in. So they acquire customers cheaply.

The other pro is that typically if someone starts with an organic audience, they really care about product because being a creator, like your media is a product in a way. And so they have the right perspective on like, this has to be really good or I'm going to lose my reputation because the whole,

an organic brand is built on reputation. And so I think they're more obsessive about product, which I think that's a huge plus. The downsides for the business, obviously, is that they have massive key men risk. So now I think where you get really smart about it is if you can gain enough influence where you can develop an affiliate network,

a business is like somebody who's done really well is Derek from Derek more plates more dates uh the fitness guy um he has i think an affiliate base of four or five thousand affiliates that promote his fitness products and so he's become such an authority that people are willing to say well i don't want to remake what he's made i'll just promote his stuff and i think he has a good you know a good program there and so he's he's paying down his keyman risk by getting larger and larger percentage of the business and so i think that the way to really scale an organic creator business is you launch it with the personal brand. And then over time, you backfill with other

faces that you have to approve, and that's the key part, you have to approve that are on brand with your values and your message and are authentic to the product that you have and are attracting the audiences that you want to go after. And then they, over time, become bigger than you. And you kind of like Homer Simpson into the bushes. Oh, yeah, you receive. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. And you recede into the bushes until eventually people associate you with the brand. But the brand, outgrows you. It's fascinating because, well, two questions immediately come to mind. The first is on keyman risk, this is what you and Layla have. Are you thinking about bringing a roster of folks just slowly took for the faces of even the connoisseed of your business? So, two answers. First,

we're not planning on selling acquisition on any time price and that's useful. And so I like, I see Elon as keyman to SpaceX and Tesla. Yeah. And so what? If you have the desired to exit of business, then Kim Min risk becomes a problem. If you want to go public or you want to hold, it's really, who cares? And so it's kind of a who cares issue. That being said, the second answer is yes, because I do like having fewer single points of failure in general. So despite the fact that I don't think we necessarily would need it, I still like to build businesses that way in general. And we have plans for what we're going to do over the next, probably 24 months and beyond, to build out ACQ's brand.

Makes sense. Yeah, the second question I had related to that was when I look at creation of space who successfully executed on this, it's actually very minimal. Yeah. I can tell you one, who I look at. Who? Dave Ramsey. So, that's right. He's brought in George. He's brought on other people under him.

He's got Rachel. Who's his daughter? But like, he's got Rachel. He's got John. He's got George Cameron. Yeah. He's got nine, I think, channels, for example, just on YouTube that are associated with the primary.

And what's interesting is that they basically run the same playbook. It's daily call-in show and clips and full episodes basically are the channel. And so they clip each. episode into like four or five ten minute clips and they put each of those out so that's like that gives them tons of good like mid-length clips they get the one full episodes and then short clips get taken and become shorts I study Ramsey a lot um one because I like Dave but secondly because the amount of creators that get quote creator burnout is really high yeah um or we're talking like Shelby Church right she just kind of shifted to I would say a

sustainable content model, right? But it's, it doesn't really acquire new viewership anymore. Like, you only care about a vlog if you care about the person. Yeah, it's your maintaining or some careers, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's because it's a quote, easier format, but it doesn't really grow the audience. It just kind of like maintains the audience that you have. And again, to be clear, nothing wrong with that. Totally. But I look at somebody like Dave, and I think he's been making content for 40 years. Like, there's something to be learned from that. And I think the nature of why his content has been so interesting is because you have,

he has two types of variety, or three really, and that I think have to be present. So what are the types of shows that have, and I already say shows, that have existed for a long time. You look at the daily show, right? You look at the nightly host shows. Like those can go for 20 years.

Evergreen. Right? What makes that unique? In my opinion, you have three variables. You have the people who are on the show. You have the subject matter, and you have actually it's just that. Two.

Yeah, I was thinking because you also have the interviewer. Right. Format as well. Yeah, so I'll still say the third, which is the interviewer, comma, ers. So like there are some shows where they will rotate 10 people through three seats who are doing the interviewing of other people about dynamic topics. And so you need some level of novelty, I think, to consistently, one, engage your existing audience, but also to bring in new people.

And I think that a lot of creator content on a long enough time rising becomes the news. Like they say all the things they wanted to say about personal finance or how to build a house. And then at some point they're like, I don't know what else to talk about. And then they're like, the news. And I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.

It's just like, it's just a pattern that I've seen over and over again. Because if you have single person, they only have topic as their variety. And so once you've exhausted many of the, the, I would call it standard direct-to-camera topics, then the novelty comes from news, which is literally novelty, right? What is new? And so that's where they allow the environment to create their content or other topics. Going back to Ramsey, he has guests on. He has the call-ins, which create endless variety. And so those are kind of like the two formats.

And he doesn't have to prepare really ahead of time. And so if he does three hours of content a day, he's generating three hours of content, whereas I would say many creators will spend 20 hours on generating one hour of content. And so he has pretty decent leverage on his time in terms of output per unit of time spent on content itself. And if you want to grow a business around it, you can't just do content because then you have like when do you, when do you grow the business? It's a really interesting point because you mentioned that a lot of creators start

with one thing and then they eventually burn out and how he built a scalability. Like Graham Stefan's a good mutual friend of us. And Graham has openly talked about how he is getting really tired on his main channel. like three years ago. Yeah, I've noticed Graham every year talks about. And even when I met him, he was doing like three videos a week. And you just run out of topics. And to your point, you just become a news reactor.

And that's not something he enjoys as much as doing. And in a way, he's found a lot of success now with his podcast channel. But for a while, like, he's spent up a coffee business. Yeah. And he's also talked about how the coffee business didn't work. Yeah. And so I think it's interesting because on the one hand, everybody's like, well, acquisitions one of the most important things to a business.

If you're a creator, you're going to succeed. On the other hand, hey, Graham did the coffee business, didn't necessarily work. Emma Chamberlain's talked about how Chamberlain coffee line also doesn't apparently make money. There are many creators who go to the business path, and it seems like, well, maybe that was not the right play. So two really interesting things about this. Well, Graham specifically and then also in general. So I think we need to be very careful about what audience we want to gather. And so Graham's audience has been predominantly people who don't want to spend money.

Yes, frugal. And so he gathered everybody together who don't want to spend money and then was like, hey, spend some money. And so I think in some ways it's hard, it's almost harder for him to sell something that almost anybody else. Right. Because of the nature of his brand specifically. That's why I think like for him, it's like doing media stuff in some ways is probably an easier. He can sell to advertisers and they can have the good luck, you know. But I think for him, like something that would have been on brand would have been like honey, right?

Before the, the Lord. Yeah, before the scandal. Right. Pre-scandal honey, I think would have been very on brand for him to offer. Sears you money. Yeah, and he could have made a lot of money on that. And so I think all discount-related things or discount-related financial services probably would have been good angles for him. So that's thing one. So I guess that I was getting into thing too, which is picking the right product.

Right. So you have right audience, right product. And so I think that having the saving money audience, you can make money from it, but getting them to buy something that would be considered frivolous, which is just like coffee. Now you can try and position it as like, okay, it's not Starbucks, fine. But now you're literally dealing with a commodity. Like it's trade, like coffee beans are traded as a commodity. Like very hard to be.

to have alpha from a brand perspective when the whole brand has been built on don't buy. Like this stuff comes off the same factory floor as this stuff and they just put a markup on it, right? And so from a product perspective, I actually think creators are horrendously bad at picking products. Like the amount of conversations I've had

with creators who are like, hey, I'm thinking about launching an X. And I'm like, what? So on one hand, like these are real conversations I've had where they're like, yeah, you know, I read Peter Thiel zero to one and I think I have to create like a totally new category. Yeah, monopolize.

Yeah, and I'm like, dude, you already, your monopoly is the attention. You can sell a commodity. And as long as it's on brand, you know, like with you, with you'll probably be able to do really well. The follow of question is, will you do as well as you could have otherwise done if you picked a better product? Which then goes into kind of like circling all the way back to acquisition.com in terms of what we do is we, I only really solve for revenue retention. It's like really the only thing I care about because on a long enough time horizon, anything that retains customers becomes huge. If you know how to advertise at all, which if you're a creator, you do. And if you can keep the customers, then on a long enough time horizon, you build a massive company.

Right. It's probably what you should retention instead of growth, actually. Well, at baseline, like, level one, like keep customers. Level two, grow those customers too and get them to bring more. But yes. And so from a product perspective, though, I don't think enough of them are thinking about reoccurring and recurring revenue. And my two cents for anybody who's a creator who's listening to this, do not try and solve. churn, try and find products that people already don't churn out of and then make it your own.

I spent a huge amount of my career banging my head against the wall, trying to figure out how to make something that people inherently leave, like a gym membership, something that's sticky. And I've learned a ton. And so there's lots of what I would consider like blocking and tackling tactics that I have learned that will improve churn. But to conquer churn, like how many of you have turned out of your internet lately? How many of you have turned out of your cell phone bill? How many of you have turned out of your insurance?

You can count for that matter. Yeah. You hate them and you're still with them. Of course. And so you think about these products. And so I would rather find products that people already don't leave and have no affinity for and then try and just shift them over. And you're like, wait, how can, well, aren't they technically turning out of them?

Yeah, but I'm being laser targeted and how, like, yes, that's the point. That's the advantage that you have, the creators that you can bring those people over from what is otherwise a commoditized product that they don't care much about but still pay for. Rather than trying getting things. people to care about your product in order to buy it. You might remember 2021, everyone is really excited about the creator economy. Everyone that was going to be the biggest thing in the world. One, because COVID.

Everyone's at home. They're watching online videos. And two, because TikTok, short forms growing on the scene. Everyone's getting millions of followers. And then 2022, 2023, there actually was a bust where a lot of people were like, oh, creator economy is not going to be a thing. And it's because people weren't able to monetize. They have all these short form followers.

They didn't really see what to do. I have really strong views on this. Oh. Yeah. What are you thinking? So I think it's because the people who are allocating money didn't understand media at this level. Like I would I would wager that you and I probably understand the creator world and media better than most. And I think that fortunately,

unfortunately, I think short form content does not build tremendous influence. Right. I think you bring awareness. But if we think about influence in terms of like what percentage of likelihood can we get the audience of this person to purchase something? You just need Okay, so four elements for influence. So you've got likeness. So does this person look the way that I look? So because of that, I will trust them more and be more likely to follow their directions. The second is credibility, which is say-do correspondence, which is basically, does this person have evidence or proof that what they say is true?

third is you have power and power comes from someone doing some directive that you have stated and then yielding a positive consequence from it and so I'll give an example of this so Huberman made short about if you have the hiccups how to stop having hiccups

and I remember watching it and being like well I don't have the hiccups right now but I'll try to remember this when I have hiccups and about a month later I had the hiccum You followed it there's power what you said and then I did the thing and the hiccups stopped. And so in that moment,

Huberman gained influence over me. I am more likely to follow a directive in the future. And so status is the fourth thing that gives you influence, which is relative control over reinforcers, meaning if I am a bartender and I control a scarce resource, which is alcohol, I have status in this setting because I control the things that reinforce. Does it matter how rich or powerful you are?

I'm the bartender. In this setting, I control what scarce, right? And so if you were a billionaire, you control money. And so you gain status just from that. Presidents and politicians also have status because they control resources of the government, right? But they still control resources. And so women have status because they control a scarce resource for men. Just being real.

And so they can influence behavior. And so all of those things increase likely that you get adherence or compliance from a request. And so if you have all four, then you were. incredibly influential. Right. And big picture, our goal as creators is to gain actual influence so that we can influence the behavior of a large group of people, right? And the way to do that most powerfully is to give them something, some sort of directive that they follow and their life gets better. And then they're more likely to adhere to a follow, you know, a follow-in request. That makes sense. So if that's the case, it's very difficult for,

for you to do that well with very short content. And so to put this in context, let's say that somebody has consumed 20 YouTube videos of mine. And let's say that those videos on average for 30 minutes. All right. So that's 10 hours of content that they've consumed from me. Okay, right? Let's do the math here.

If the average short that I put out is, let's say, 20 seconds, okay? So if we have 20 seconds for a short, that means it's three shorts per minute. So 10 hours time 60 We have 600 minutes is what my longs were And we'd have to triple that So they would have to consume 1,800 shorts of mine God

Right And so I think that what's happened Is that people have wildly over leveraged Followership and views for influence What's interesting is that like small businesses I remember Michael showed me this actually He saw this little cue card He took a picture of it from like a car detailing business or something

and they said, for 400,000 views on TikTok or 10,000 views on YouTube, $500. So any creator who wants to make something about their card detailing organically, they'll pay them $500 if they get 10,000 views on YouTube or 400,000 views on TikTok. So they had already basically appropriate that as 40x is the equivalent amount of influence. And if it were me, I still would probably rather have the 10,000 views on YouTube. If we're looking at this, what's her name? The dancing girl, Charlie, D'Milia, right? So I think she's had a couple of things that didn't work as well.

And again, it's if I make a brand built around slapping strangers in public, right, just as a complete extreme, and then I launch a credit card. Does that really carry? There's no say-do correspondence. I have no proof, right? So I have no proof that- She actually did partner with a credit card company, by the way. Right, and I think she had a popcorn.

And to be clear, there's no shade here. That's not my point here. My point is to help creators monetize. And so I see the point of short form as one thing, which is to drive them to long form. Or if you can, obviously, deliver some sort of value like I got from Huberman in that short clip. But the thing is, is that the likely that that occurs is really, really low. I have a pretty decent memory. And I remembered a short from a month earlier and that actually did it and got a result.

super unlikely. Now, if you listen to Huberman on a daily basis, for example, he probably gives 80 directives over his every podcast. And all you have to do if you're a long-form listener is listen to one of them over a month. And your life gets better and he gains influence. And so when he then makes a product recommendation, because I'll bet you that the Huberman collabs have probably crushed.

Athletic Greens. Yeah, and he's got broke, he's got the sunglasses thing. I think he's promoting David bars, which is actually high protein. Yeah. So like, and those collabs, I think, have probably gone pretty well, right?

And Rogan also to the same degree. Like when he makes, when he makes recommendations, like a huge amount of people, like including presidential recommendations, a huge amount of people follow. And this is where it gets really fucking interesting. So again, it's all of those elements. So if you have a, let's say somebody who's a long-form host, doesn't talk about politics at all,

shows no knowledge of the stuff, has a big audience, brings somebody on, their endorsement probably matters little. If their audience pays attention to a political candidate, then that's basically just functions as an ad, and the political candidate is doing the influencing on their behalf. But for their endorsement to matter, not just their distribution,

they have to have demonstrated some credibility around the topic so that people say this guy is informed. The value to be other than you've reached a million people or whatever. Right. Joe has done a ton of political stuff. And like it, don't like it, whatever, he's demonstrated that he's at least spent a lot of time trying to research the topics with the intention of just trying to find truth from an

independent perspective. I'm not getting into like the weeds on either side here, but just that, that has been the intention. And so he is tremendous influence because most people think, at least I think most consumers think this way, I don't want to do all that work. I'll just trust him. See, what's fascinating, you described the primary function of short form to drive to long form. Because you go to a broader point, you're saying that people had followers, but they didn't have influence. Yeah. Because influence comes from the four things you just described, Likeness, credibility, power status. Initially, what was going through my mind was, yes, 2020, 2020, you saw a bust because a lot of investors confused influence with followers.

Yes. Because there were more followers broadly, because there were more followers broadly, but nothing else. The initial premise I was operating was in 2025, which now I'm rethinking was, oh, but now people have figured out how to use short form to upsell to products and services, whether on school or. Yeah. Or these other 15 different monetization methods where the short form units are just becoming really marketing creatives. And where school is the best one. Yeah. I mean, it is the best one.

Well said. Well said. The premise for me was, oh, now short form, it's actually just marketing. Like, they're just like commercials. Yeah. And so the monetization is coming back. The short form is not really successful in growing your influence, but it is successful just from a distribution POV. Think of it as like awareness ads.

Yep. And so what happens is the objective in my opinion. So like the ones you, it's like school, for example, if you're a short form person, it's like, how can I just get them to take the tiniest amount of action, which is to go into a community where I can get way more interactions with them on a much faster feedback loop so that I can gain the other three or four more like harder, right? But what's interesting is like the people who I think we're doing really well in monetization

right now for TikTok are doing TikTok shop plus lives. Yes. And what's alive? Well. I think there were some creators that were still wildly undervalued. Yeah. And many that were wildly overvalued. And this is the, you know, the classic story of like, I had two people that I paid 100,000, you know, so had 100,000 followers on Instagram.

And I had both of them do a shout out for my thing. And one guy drove 10,000 customers and one guy drove zero. How is now, assuming it's not bots, but like, there's definitely legitimate creator accounts that have 100,000 followers that have zero influence. do you think more businesses should be trying to follow content creator-led models? Like we've talked a lot about, hey, there's five different ways these businesses make money. Here are some of the challenges they have. Should the other, you know, 60% of entrepreneurs come to you be thinking about, oh, I should be incorporating content more to what I do?

I have super strong reservations with the word should in general. I would say it really just depends on what the constraint of the business is. And so like, let's say you have an outbound channel that you have cool callers and cold emailers that, you know, generate B2B customers for you. Do you need to start making content? Probably not. And given the resources required, are there, is there something else in the business that would generate more enterprise value? Yeah. If so, then you should do that, right? Big picture, more attention in general tends to grow businesses provided they are not supply constraint. But that's a big asterisk. Many businesses are supply constrained. There's a lot of plumbers who,

the phone's ringing on the hook and they're like, I just need more plumbers, dude. Like I like I could yeah of course like we can like I don't have a problem getting people if you have a cleaning business the problem is not getting people to want cleaning the problem is Yeah, right? So like it depends on what the problem of the business is now if that were the issue do you make content around like what it's like to be a cleaner so that you attract cleaners people who want to clean It's like hey you already clean your house all the time want to do it for money and we have better working conditions well blah blah like fundamentally I guess reframing the question as should the other 60% of businesses add another advertising channel? No, unless it's the contraint of the business. When you think about what you're investing for acquisition.com or now for ACQ ventures, it sounds like traditionally it started from, let me bring you better business processes.

With school, it actually shifted a bit to I can just bring you tremendous distribution via my own content. What types of companies were you leaning more toward investing once you help with the processes or ones where you think the content distribution actually is what matters? So I'll say that it's both. Right. And I still use those three kind of legs of the stool. So I got money, we've got timer work, and then we've got brand reputation, distribution, et cetera. I prefer to do as many as I can of the first two because in a lot of ways brand is so much more limited, not limited in its power, but limited in how many. And maybe this could be a limiting belief for me, but I don't think it is.

I think it's very, so brand is built on associations and pairings. And if you pair yourself with too many things, the brand starts to lose its potency because, because you have associated with too many disparate things. Now, if you made many associations with things in the similar buckets, I think you could get more bullets. Right. That's more okay. More shots on goal, if you will.

But no, I try to basically do the more scalable things, which money is actually, you know, pretty scalable. We've developed a pretty, pretty exceptional team at the holding company for acquisition.com. Because I basically take, I marry a lot of old school and new school. So we have a lot of young, called five and 10-year McKinsey, you know, Bain consultants that will pool who are like, I hate feeling like a cog in a machine and just doing billable hours, but are otherwise incredibly hardworking, incredibly bright, and also see the problem with a lot of antiquated businesses and want to work with more new, more cutting

edge stuff. And also really like, and a lot of them came from, you know, my content, my world, and want to marry, I would say, big business strategy with small business tactics and then kind of like bridge those two gaps together. And that's a lot of what we do at ACQ anyways. And so I think they really enjoy it because they learn a ton from the frameworks that we have for growing companies. It adds nuance and texture to their existing knowledge set from what they learned at the kind of like big consulting firms. And just to put context to this, like, if you're looking at like supply chain, for Walmart Brazil, right, or something, you know, Walmart Latam, because you need to do some, you know, analysis for that. Super heady, really complex, lots of moving parts, and not useful

to a small business. Like, really valuable to a big business, which is why they pay the money for it, not useful at all to a small business. But the thinking process, and the reason I like taking people from that world, one is because I came from it, but also because I think at the end of the day, consultants are a lot like engineers in that you just have to solve problems. And being able to have a really good problem thinking mind is I think what makes a good, a good consultant in general. And so that feeds really well into the advisory practice. Would you invest in content creators? I would if I, like, okay, let me clarify, it will qualify the answer.

So are you saying invest in them like if I could buy a stock in a person or like if, hey, I want to start this umbrella company? I've seen initially the second. I probably wouldn't for a de novo idea for a couple reasons. One is like I don't I don't really like seed stuff like idea stuff. Also because creators are typically like big idea people. That's not the constraint. The constraint for them is execution and business acumen. And for a deal structure like that, like in a traditional structure,

I probably wouldn't have majority controller ownership. And so that would be really high risk, I think. And so I probably wouldn't like that deal. If it was a deal that was kind of the opposite, where like maybe they owned like 20% and we owned 80 and we fronted the capital and we like put all the stuff together. Sometimes you're incubating them. Yeah, maybe. Yeah. But even then it's like I also have to look at supply demand of like my own deal flow.

Right. And to do that, it would have to prove that that deal structure provides more alpha than the existing thing, which I would have a hard time. What about a later stage creator company, like the primes of the world? Yeah. So like a Logan Paul or like a whatever, Jake. Paul or something who's not him, but somebody else. Right. It would be tough.

And the main reason is investing in someone like that isn't really investing. It's a joint venture. And then it's really like, so I'm starting another business. And that's really what it would be. And so it would have to be a business that I felt the existing resources and assets that we had, we already had a huge percentage of the core competencies required, not just in knowledge, but like in Manbauer. Yeah.

to do it. It makes sense. Because for you, you're either, obviously, you're bringing capital money. Right. But you're also either bringing your image and likeness, which is distribution, or you're bringing the operational expertise. Right. You're working with these businesses that are less savvy on the distribution side,

clearly something of value. Easy. You're working with these creators. Well, you have distributions. You don't necessarily need theirs. And they don't have the operation side, which means you have to spend tons of time building. Tons. They don't have any.

Right. And so we'd have to build a company. And so that's where I see that as like translating the ultimate. the ultimate question to like, would you build a company for a creator? If that's what I translated into, then the answer is probably not. Right. Just given the, like, how much it would take. When I was chatting with Michael earlier today, he did say you've been shifting more to investing. And we briefly-AQ Ventures is all capital. Yeah, ACQ Ventures. And from my understanding, that's much earlier stage. What prompted that actually? Honestly, just we had so much deal flow for it.

So a lot of people were coming in and saying, hey, I would say it's, it is largely tech. Because it's venture, you need to have really, really potential big access outcomes. Yeah, they're just the economic, like the economics lend themselves to tech. But we had a lot of people were coming towards us in, I would say like a couple buckets. So bucket one is somebody who's already raised some round. Yeah. Consumes all my stuff. It helped them grow.

And they're like, I would just rather have you on our cap table than somebody else. And that's like a perfect scenario, right? Like they already, they like the stuff. They're kind of like subscribed our ideology. We can provide capital to help them grow because we believe in the. the thesis. So like that's great. And those the thing is is that the existing model that we had prior to that required us to have a significantly larger equity position right to justify the return, right? But because some of these tech companies can have significantly larger exits and because they don't require more work,

we can take smaller slugs and do, um, and just do money only essentially. So that's, so that was, that was kind of bucket one. Bucket two is people who don't have a cap table at all. Um, there may be bootstrapped, but they still want to take on some, um, clear opportunity that we can help fund. And those also, you know, as long as the deal structure makes sense, like those can make a lot of sense. The nice thing with that is that they require almost no work and expertise. And so it's really just like these entrepreneurs are like, I'm not trying to exit. I'm not trying to have a growth partner. I need capital and I prefer your capital to somebody else's. And we basically had so much of that. They were like, we should probably just

spin this up. And the check sizes are not that big. And so I don't even really need to raise a fund to do. Like I, like I can just do it on my own. Yeah, exactly. So, that's worked out really well. We've already done like, I want to say like six or eight deals. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah. I know just in the last like two months. So like it's, it's heating up really pretty quickly, which is great. Or I'll just lose my ass and we'll find out. But like, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I've deployed a lot of money. Like congratulations, you know, because it's funny, because in the investing worlds, for these who don't know this, in a fund structure, you basically are incentivized to deploy capital. Yeah.

Your job to put out money. Yeah. So it's kind of interesting because like the traditional like clapping of hands that happens when it's all your money. Yeah. It's actually like, well, I took a lot of swings. We'll see. You don't really have LPs.

Your LPs yourself. That's why. So cool. I've spent all my money. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah. I mean, fundamentally we operate 100% like a private equity group.

And obviously the fund, the ACQ ventures operates like a VCC. Right. Like we have a basically. a general partner who just basically runs that, came from the white combinator world, like has a really good deal flown his own. Yeah, he sources a bunch of deals on his own outside of our network, too.

Which I, you'll probably notice this is a common theme is like, I want stuff that already works and that I can put gasoline on rather than it can only work because of me. School is an exceptional product and was compounding month for month with zero advertising on its own.

Then we added gas. If it only, if it requires me in order to work, then it requires me to work until I die. That's not fun. And so just as like a side note for the creators, like everything that, again, this keeps come back to this point, but like I solve for revenue retention because if if you go on vacation and the company dies, you just bought yourself a higher leverage income, but you did not buy yourself a business. Right.

And it's not an asset. It's literally only valuable to you and not valuable to everyone else. And the valuable to everyone else part is where where you get significant out of the asset. size returns in terms of wealth creation. When you started to make content before in your previous businesses, you hadn't really gone hard on content marketing. And so was the motivation because you saw this as good lead generation for acquisition.com or was it more, hey, it's time for me to share what I've learned? I would say, one, there was multiple motivations. Yeah. And I was actually pretty reluctant to do this. And I don't even know if I will do it forever. I think some people were like,

I'm going to do this for, like, I don't know if I will do it forever. I came in with a very, clear purpose of why I was going to do this. So I'll tell you that the stories that got me to decide to decide to do it and then why. So in very short order, the Rock had Taramana for multiple billions. Hoota Beauty did a minority deal, you know, valuing the company over 600 million. Cona McGregor, same thing. Ironically, 600 million for proper 12, his whiskey company. So those were like some celebrity examples. Then I had, I remember hearing this podcast of this guy named, he did nomad capitalist. He's like a YouTuber and he talks about expatriating and like how to have tax savings and things like that. I had seen his channel and I listened to a podcast and he said,

I get 3,000 applications a month and I went to go look at the application and it was like, it was an application. It was like 30 something questions and they weren't like multiple choice. They were like very in depth questions for financials and like you had to upload documents and like there was a lot of stuff involved. And I thought to myself, if I had 3,000 applications a month for any business that was high-end B2B, my God, I would just print money. And so I thought about that and I was like, okay, so these are like, I'm getting warmer and warmer to this idea. And then Kylie Jenner gets on the cover of Forbes as a billionaire at age 20, which they ended up disproving later, but like doesn't matter. Right. I think she is a billionaire now.

But she was 20. I was 27. I thought I was hot shit. She's seven years younger and she's a chick, and she's richer. And I was like, I suck. I'm a big believer in like, if somebody's making more money than you, there's something you can learn from them in the game of business. Totally. And it might just be like, you need to be luck here. But like sometimes it's like you need to be the right place or right time. So it's like, okay, well, what do I do about that? It's like, okay, well, I try to increase my surface area of luck. Then I decided I was going to do it. And so when acquisition.com for sure was what I was going to do, the brand part wasn't something I was for sure going to do. But when I thought, okay, how can I decrease the likelihood of failure as much as

possible, like one of the tenants would be like, well, if you had an investment firm and he had an unlimited deal flow, if people who only wanted to do business with you, it would make it very hard to fail. And so I wouldn't have to be the best negotiator. I wouldn't have to be the best picker of companies. I could just have unlimited shots on goal. And so it was like, okay, so if I were to solve for that, what would I do? And I was like, well, if I could build the biggest business brand, then that would basically shrink into irrelevance or make, sorry, shrink all of my problems or make them irrelevant by consequence. That was fundamentally why I decided to do it. You mentioned the initial beginning you weren't even sure you wanted to do it. Do you enjoy having

over a million followers now in that piece of accomplished? There are pros and there are cons. And right now there are more pros than cons. And if there's a day where I feel like there are more cons than pros, I will stop. I think there are some people who really love attention and love fame and things like that. I don't think I am that person. And I feel like I have evidence to support that because I didn't do it for a long time when I think I had the opportunity to. Right now, my content feeds thousands of families.

First from, obviously, what we do at Agoidsun.com, the holding company, but then also all of the, you know, of the school, like, there's, you know, from a distributed perspective, if I were to quit in the future, I would try to make sure that I had backfilled my responsibility to those families

to make sure that, that vacuum, you know, that it was filled. The pros of this are, you have recruiting talent becomes infinitely easier, the best people in the world at whatever they do, which is such an underrated lever. Like, I just can't, I can't overstate this. Who is, is, is lever number one. Number two is you have, the obvious thing is that you have lots of deal flow or customer flow depending on whatever, you know, whatever you sell. Those are really the big pros. You have some answerly pros, like, you know, if I go to a gym and drop in, like, they usually know

how I am and they'll give me some nicer treatment. And if I go to a restaurant, they probably know who I am, and they'll be nice about it. Those don't aren't super, right. Some people like that. The downsides are that what you sell is privacy. And so that's the price that you give. Privacy is the price. And so, in one of the really tough parts

and why I spent so much time thinking about this was that it's kind of a, it's a one-way door. Yeah. It's, you can't undo it. There's no control Z. Alex, thanks so much for making time. That's your wrap. 100%. You know,