Alex Hormozi Broke the Internet and Made Me Cry
If you do almost anything in the digital marketing space, you’ve probably heard of Alex Hormozi. He’s another dude-bro-but-with-a-heart marketing guy who’s been blazing a trail of content creation prolific enough to make Gary Vee jealous.
And, like any good marketer out learn and grow, I’ve been following him. Off and on for a few months now, but lately, I’ve been gobbling up his content like crazy.
At first, it seems like he’s not doing anything differently.
He’s got a lot of rah-rah content, and the sort of kick-your-own-ass-into-being-a-boss content that’s popular in the male-dominated marketing space, but I’ve also watched some brilliant, incredibly useful content that’s blown my mind.
Recently, he broke the internet.
If you haven’t heard about this yet, he recently had a webinar to launch his new book.
About 100,000 of us (yep, that’s right, not a typo) showed up to hear what he had to say.
I signed on a little late because I had to try a few times. Apparently, having over 100,000 people try to log on to your webinar at once causes some technical difficulties.
It also breaks some Guinness World Records.
But breaking World records was not the coolest thing that happened that day.
As usual, Alex brought stellar information. That hour and a half was packed with awesome info that has already benefitted the way I do business. His content is good.
Or at least, it was for the first half of the webinar. The last half was devoted to his sales pitch.
Now, before I break down the pitch—and I’m going to—I want to be very clear that I don’t have a big problem with this.
I’m a marketer, too, and I fully understand and appreciate that if I’m going to sit through a lot of great content for free, then I’m going to get a sales pitch.
That’s fine.
If you’re good at it, I might even learn a thing or two about pitching. So much the better.
And of course, as with everything else he does, Alex is good at pitching.
So most of the 100,000 of us who started on the call, stayed on the call for the entire thing, which is how he ended up breaking the internet.
Here’s how His Sales Pitch went down:
He listed out the features of everything he was offering. There were a bunch of modules and he laid out the details like a value stacking pro. (Value stacking is a way of assigning value to the parts of an offer to create a higher perceived value. It’s been around forever, but Russel Brunson made it popular on the interwebs several years ago.)
Alex was clear about how all the parts of his offer worked, so we’d know what to expect, and he told us how it would make our lives better. (For students of mine, that’s Features & Benefits, right?🙌)
Each module of his offer concluded with an arbitrarily assigned value (it’s always arbitrary) that was of course expensive, and yet still a bargain. “Total value: $12,076,” he assured us.
Okay, whatever. We know the drill.
He then followed up with his ‘guarantee’ that he’d used all these things to grow his business and make hundreds of millions. Then, he gave us a little mindset spiel about how “skills are our best investment.”
Yah, okay, Alex.
And then, as he delays telling us the price yet again, he gives us the gut check question, “How much is double your lead flow worth?” followed up by some real-life examples of people making bank for social proof.
These are all psychological tricks designed to help us overcome our internal WTF when he tells us the price.
Is it manipulative persuasive? Sure. But again, we get it. We’ve heard this all before.
Many, many times.
And like so many times before, it’s compelling.
I fully admit, I had my credit card out and ready to pay, hoping it would at least be under $1k. I was, at that very moment, packing up my entire life to move to Chicago and I didn’t need to shell out thousands on yet another marketing program, no matter how fired up I was.
And I wasn’t alone. There were still tens of thousands of us on the call.
Tens. Of thousands.
Still.
On the call.
Because Alex is good. And his content is stellar, and if, after years of giving out amazing free content, he was actually selling something? Well, I wanted in. A lot of us did.
It was at this moment that Alex broke the internet.
And all of us.
If you haven’t watched it, here’s the link again in case you’re curious.
SPOILER AHEAD:
At the exact moment when he had us on pins and needles, when we were all waiting patiently for the price, hoping it was within our individual budgets, he actually had the nerve to drag it out.
“…all this for a single payment of …(cheeky grin) … A. Single. Payment of …”
And I’m thinking, C’mon Alex, don’t be a jerk now. And for pete’s sake, offer a payment plan. What’s the matter with you?
And that’s when the slide came up with $0 and his whole body relaxed and he said, “It’s free.”
While I was sitting there trying to figure out the angle, he laughed and continued, “I love you guys. Gotcha. It’s 100% free.”
But, what do you mean, ‘free’? I thought. How do we access it? Where’s the hidden fee?
“It’s all yours. It’s my way of saying thank you for being a part of this movement.”
And then it began to sink in. Wait. What?
“You’ll find it next to my ‘100M Offers Course’ on my site. You won’t have to opt in. It’s freely available to everyone in the public.”
I’m fuzzy on what happened next, because I started crying.
And again, I wasn’t the only one.
The chat filled with comments of “Love you, man.” and “GOAT” and other superlatives, heart emojis, and exclamation marks. I remember those because I kept trying to type something to join in and couldn’t because my hands were shaking.
Ya’ll. It was a big deal.
But … why, right? Why were so many of us in tears? Why were we all so incredibly moved that someone offered something to us for free?
Because no one does that in the marketing world.
No one.
Ever.
But I give away stuff all the time, I hear you thinking. And you’re right. I do, too.
But the common practice is to give stuff away until you have a big enough following. Then, you start charging. Eventually, you start charging a lot.
So for people with a following as big as Alex Hormozi’s, it’s typical to charge extremely high ticket prices for their programs. Grant Cardone charges $30K for a weekend with him. Mariah Coz used to charge $20K for High Ticket Hybrid. Russell Brunson’s Funnel Builder Certification Course is $10K, and that’s just a course (there’s no access to him via calls or a group).
So, once Alex started his pitch, I was completely prepared to shell out some dough if I wanted to learn more from him because big biz owners—the ones who make the millions—rarely give away lots of stuff for free when there’s a payday to be had.
And let’s remember, there were over 80,000 people still on that webinar.
Live, and in person.
Over half a million were registered.
If there was a $1k sales pitch and he converted even ten percent of us (a low price and low conversion rate for this industry), he’d have made $50 million.
At least.
Which means he skipped out on a $50 million payday.
To give us all something for free.
So yeah, that left a mark.
Here’s the thing. Running a small business is hard.
Besides the obvious stress of working without the security of a regular paycheck, there are a lot of things that make running a small business more difficult than a 9-to-5, like:
Decision fatigue because there’s no one to pass the buck to,
Anxiety about performing all the random tasks that small business owners have to do, and
Pressure to always be doing more on social media or learning more about marketing and how to grow our businesses so we can finally be successful and rest.
And then combine that with the feeling that every time you try to get more information about how to be successful, a business guru is dangling that knowledge about success to you like a carrot and charging you thousands for access to it.
And here was this guy just handing it out for free.
And passing up a $50 million payday to do it.
I tell you, in that moment, I felt more than supported, I felt loved.
By a dude-bro biz guru. While I sat at home on a Saturday watching a webinar, of all things.
It felt pretty epic.
And I think he ended up getting something bigger than a $50 million payday; he got some very potent brand loyalty, and a lot of love from all of us.
Having delivered on his promise to serve those of us who “needed the oxygen mask to take care of yourselves and your family” (a group I’ve for sure been a part of, but am so thankful to not be in right now), he offered a second deal: get three of his hardback books and an Acquisition.com hat.
This offer, I pounced on.
I’m ridiculously proud of it.
And honored that I got to be a part of it.
And this is where I wrap up this post with the moral of the story, but honestly, I’m not sure what it is.
Is it, Give More Stuff Away for Free? Well, I mean, that’s never a bad idea, but probably you should also raise your prices.
Is it Love Up Your Audience? Well, you should definitely do that. Do you know that an established metric for the confidence level of a business owner is how much they adore their clients/customers? Cultivating some love for your clients is a wonderful way to bring more energy to your work.
But the message I’m actually taking away is…
Be the Business Owner You Want to Be.
Let’s be real. Alex is fantastic, but his motivation wasn’t entirely altruistic. There’s some ego involved in shaking up the business world and turning a well-established practice on its head.
He made history that day and he knew it.
I’m not letting that take anything away from how loved and appreciated I felt, but I’d be silly to not acknowledge that that was there.
And … how magnificent.
How magnificent and wonderful that he set out to be bigger and better than the status quo and that he absolutely crushed it.
How wonderful.
What a delightful example of thinking big and claiming your big, badass future that you want for yourself.
I love that.
I want that, too.
If nothing else, I’m so grateful to him for setting that example.
What’s the big thing you’re claiming for your future? What expansion are you stepping into?
I’d love to hear, or even better, read it on your social media or newsletter. Claim it big. And send me the link to share.
In the meantime, here’s some of that free content I’m shelling out. Get it now before I make it big.
