Shaan Puri and Alex Hormozi run the “Hormozi Hotline,” taking live calls from five entrepreneurs and giving them unfiltered advice on their biggest business problems. Callers include a UK security bollard installer doing £500K, a recruiting agency at $2M, a luxury travel hacking business at $40K/month, and a TikTok creator with 200 million views who doesn’t know what to sell. The advice consistently emphasizes doubling down on what’s already working before chasing new channels, fixing the funnel before scaling demand, and being honest about psychological blockers.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Alex Hormozi (guest), Flo (caller 1, Wentworth Protection), Carson (caller 2, Diamond Connect), Jordan (caller 3, Elite Travel Hackers), Justin (caller 3, Elite Travel Hackers co-founder), Davi (caller 4, content creator)
Intro: The Hormozi Hotline [00:00:00]
Shaan: I want to try something different.
Alex: Okay.
Shaan: It’s the Hormozi hotline. Take five listeners out of the crowd. Have them call in. Tell us about their business. Tell us a business problem.
Alex: Cool.
Shaan: So this is the Hormozi hotline. Are you down?
Alex: Let’s do it.
Caller 1: Flo — Wentworth Protection (Security Bollards, UK) [00:00:30]
Shaan: Okay. We got Flo here. Flo, I want you to give us the name of your business and give us the one-minute description of what you do. Give us a sense of where you’re at revenue-wise. And then we’re gonna get to what’s your biggest business problem, and we’re gonna try to help you out here in a couple of minutes.
Flo: So I’m Flo. I live in London. I own a company called Wentworth Protection. What we do is we install security bollards on people’s driveways. If you don’t know what that is — basically a metal pole that you put on your driveway to stop your car from getting stolen. I started this business as a side hustle in January 2024. So we’re now about a year and a half in. It’s just me and my best mate. We both still do this as a side hustle. We’ve got a couple of installation guys. First year we did just shy of 250k revenue. This year we’re probably going to do 500. And the biggest issue we’re having right now is content.
Shaan: The problem you solve is people in the UK are getting their car stolen, and you put a pole in the driveway that prevents that?
Flo: That’s correct. Car theft is just through the roof in the UK, especially around London. So this pole comes up through your driveway and even if someone gets into your car, they just can’t drive it away.
Shaan: Okay, got it. So you did 250k year one, on pace for 500. Give us the quick and dirty on how you’re getting those customers today. Because you said it’s a side hustle — where are you getting business?
Flo: The first three months was basically purely door-to-door. Saturdays and Sundays just knocking on doors, which by the way in the UK people find that really, really strange. But now it’s about a 50/50 mix between Google ads — just search — and mainly SEO. We get loads of organic leads coming in as well, and then a little bit of referral in there.
Shaan: Okay. How much do the bollards cost?
Flo: Average ticket is about £1,000.
Shaan: What’s it cost you to install?
Flo: We run on roughly 50% margin. So paying the installation guys and buying the units is about 50% of tickets.
Shaan: So you make 500 bucks in gross profit per unit. Does that sound right?
Flo: Correct.
Shaan: Got it. So what do you want to have happen?
Flo: I want more leads.
Shaan: What stopped you from doing more door-to-door?
Flo: Honestly, it’s a time constraint. The conversion rate on door-to-door and the amount of time it takes — it just doesn’t equate to the extra effort put into content, writing more blog posts, or trying to reach out to commercial partners.
Shaan: Okay. One of the big things is I think you have to get a little bit narrower in terms of how you want to get leads, because you’re super resource-constrained right now. You don’t have a ton of capital you can put to work. So you’ve got search, you’ve got SEO, you mentioned commercial partners through outbound, and you said content.
Flo: Yeah. Content is basically the nut I’m trying to crack. I inherently know that content can be really big for this business, but it’s just not translating. We did a viral TikTok two days ago — a million views — and it’s just not translating to any increase in lead flow.
Shaan: Okay, I want to rewind for a second. You have three ways you can reliably get customers, and then you have this other way that you would like to get customers but aren’t really getting customers from yet. Does that sound right?
Flo: Yeah.
Shaan: Okay. So why not — what are you spending on search right now?
Flo: About 3k a month.
Shaan: What do you make back on the 3k?
Flo: LTV cash about 3 to 1.
Shaan: 3 to 1. Okay. So you’re making nine grand a month roughly off Google. And SEO is bringing in how much?
Flo: About the same.
Shaan: What do you spend on SEO?
Flo: Honestly, I’m just doing it all myself. I buy backlinks every now and again, but I’m doing all the writing and all the technical SEO myself.
Shaan: Okay. And that’s bringing in about 9,000 a month as well?
Flo: Pretty much. It’s about 50/50 these days.
Shaan: And you stopped doing door-to-door. You stopped because you got tired of it or because it stopped working?
Flo: It was such a grind in the early days — that was the way for us to get the business off the ground. We had no money, we just had to hustle, speak to people. But at the moment I still have a job, I have a kid, my partner has a job, he has a kid. For us to find any time to go door-to-door…
Shaan: Hard.
Flo: Hard.
Shaan: Okay. And then the rest is referrals?
Flo: Yeah. There’s a few little platforms like Next Door, Checkatrade, Bark. We get a dribble through those. But those must be small because you basically said about 10K from each of these. That’s 20K a month. That’s basically your 480K run rate.
Alex: So — more, better, new, right? If you’ve got search and you’ve got SEO — and I will come back to door-to-door, I’m not done with it — what do you have to make in order to quit the job?
Flo: We could quit right now. I’m just a little bit of a coward, to be honest.
Alex: Okay, fair. How many hours are you dedicating to this versus the job?
Flo: About 40 hours on my job and 50 hours on this every week.
Alex: Got it. So let me ask you a quick question. If you actually went door-to-door for 40 hours a week — I’m not saying you do this, but just hypothetically, if you replaced your job with spending 100% on door-to-door — would you be able to replace your income?
Flo: I think probably not. Running really quick numbers — let’s say I make two or three sales a week from door-to-door, which would be really impressive for us at this point. That would bring in about £1,500 gross a month. That wouldn’t cover it.
Alex: Okay, great. So what stops you from spending 10 grand a month on Google ads?
Flo: Great question. We just scaled our Google ads from 1,500 up to 3K. It takes about two or three months to scale.
Alex: Flo, one of the things I love about business is that every problem has already been solved. One of the things I would ask is: can you work backwards from a business that already is doing what you’re doing? Are you the only company that offers this service? And if not, who’s that company and how do they get customers?
Flo: Yeah, there are a couple of much bigger players in this space. What they’ve cracked is they’re just really good at organic — they get maybe 5 to 8x the traffic that we get.
Alex: When you say organic, I don’t think you’re saying the incumbents are amazing at TikTok. What do you actually mean?
Flo: I literally mean Google search.
Alex: Okay. So they rank SEO leads. Well, let me ask you this. If I bought your business tomorrow, my first ads would probably be Meta ads. Because making Meta ads work — the thing you have is a clear fear. People are afraid of their car getting stolen. And you can put some stats up that show a big arrow going right. And you also have a service that is tangible and visible. You can demonstrate it. It’s way better to say, in an ad, “Look — guy with a mask gets in the car, walks out.” And then: “Guy with a mask gets in and then — oh no.” The ads I would mirror are the Club ads. The little bar you use on the steering wheel. Put on local targeting, a 10-mile radius — I would bet you right now that would get you to 10, 20,000 a month.
Flo: We did Meta ads in the early days and I told myself that didn’t work, but the creative was just terrible.
Alex: Yeah, I’m sure it was. Advertising works — it’s not like Meta ads don’t work. You just needed to get the process down. If you do a very simple narrative ad with your iPhone demonstrating the product and the problem it solves, under 60 seconds — I guarantee you’ll get leads. And then all you have to do is call them, get a deposit on the phone to make sure you show up. Just say, “Hey, it’s a hundred bucks for an assessment — just to make sure you show up. I’m gonna send a truck and a guy out there. We don’t want to get no-showed.” Most people will be fine with that. Then roll it right into the thousand bucks if they decide today, and that gives you a little urgency in the sale.
Flo: Even better — we don’t even have to show up. We can do the whole thing without a site visit.
Shaan: Wait — you just install it on the first go with no scouting?
Flo: Yeah. They just send us a picture. We say, “Let’s go for it.” They send us a 50% deposit.
Alex: Yeah. Okay. Great. So it’s literally a phone sale. If I’m looking at all this stuff, the first thing I’d do is try to triple Google ads. You already went to 3K. Can we get to nine? That buys you your job back. If you tripled and kept the same ROAS, would that let you quit?
Flo: Yeah.
Alex: Right. And I would keep hitting Google ads until I can’t do it anymore. Buy all the traffic. Once I’ve maxed out Google locally, then I’d put everything into Meta ads.
Flo: What’s the rationale on keeping going on Google rather than going into Meta now?
Alex: Because you haven’t done it yet. If you’re making money somewhere, make as much as you can first. And then once you can’t make any more — more, better, new.
Shaan: Flo, one last thing. You basically said something that I think is emotional but not logical. You can counter emotion with emotion, or logic with logic, but don’t try to counter emotion with logic. You said, “I haven’t quit my job — why? Because I’m being a bit of a coward.” So you’ve got to have a conversation with yourself about how you feel about that. Do you want this to be a forever side hustle, or would you actually like this to be your main business? Where would you get the courage and conviction to do this? You have some evidence. Do you have enough evidence? What would it take?
Because we could give you five strategies that would work, but if you only have 10 hours while fatigued to execute them, you’re going to walk away saying, “Ah, it didn’t really work” — because you didn’t really try. For your long-term success, you’ve got to be able to go all in on this. Maybe now is the time, maybe it’s not. Only you know that. But it sounds like that’s something to address today.
Alex: I know a lot of entrepreneurs who got success started on the side. I don’t know a lot of entrepreneurs who finished with it on the side. So it’s unlikely that this stays a side hustle forever. The question is how do you get there from where you are today?
Flo: Yeah. I love nothing more than being in the game. I think that’s where I’m headed.
Shaan: All right, Flo. We’ve been charging 199 a minute, so you owe us some money. Thank you for calling the Hormozi hotline. We’ll see you later.
Flo: Thanks, dude. Appreciate you.
Shaan: Let us know what happens.
Flo: Thank you. Thank you.
Shaan: See you at the book launch.
Caller 2: Carson — Diamond Connect (Recruiting Agency) [00:22:00]
Shaan: All right. What’s up? Who am I speaking to?
Carson: Speaking to Carson.
Shaan: Carson. Pleasure, man. Tell us about the business.
Carson: My name is Carson. I have a recruiting business. I tell my clients: hiring should make you money, not cost you time. That’s why I built Diamond Connect. I work with a lot of companies like True Classic, Hexclad, and Hydra.
Shaan: I’m actually a customer. I use this business.
Carson: Yeah, we do all roles — junior to C-level. Did a CMO for Shaan, did performance, creative, retention, social media, head of ops.
Shaan: So a lot more on the marketing and rev side.
Alex: Carson, here’s your ad, Carson.
Shaan: Carson found me my CMO for my e-com business, who’s now the CEO of the e-com business. That’s as good as you could do.
Alex: There’s your blog. All right. What’s revenue right now?
Carson: Last year did 1.6. This year tracking to hit around two.
Alex: Got it. What’s the issue? What’s holding it back?
Carson: Being a contingency-focused recruiting agency ultimately allowed us to get a lot of clients in the door. It does come with flaws — pausing roles, slow communication, having to let the client have skin in the game. But once we unlock the first hire, they see the value and stick with us. We’re really just trying to focus on building that first role to show them what we’re doing.
Alex: Okay. What’s the issue with your current way of doing it?
Carson: We have a really good process. It’s just we have a lot of clients that sort of pause roles. There’s a lot of potential on the table with candidates that are interviewing, and I think there’s more potential for a more streamlined process — me getting less in the weeds.
Alex: Carson, let me ask you a question, because a better question gets a better answer. Is your question “how do I streamline operations?” — that’s an operational question. Or is this a scaling question: I did 1.6, I’m tracking to two, I want to get to five or seven a year and right now I don’t feel like I can do that because of either my business model or my operations. So which is it — business model and growth, or operations?
Carson: More on the business side. I want to scale. We’re about to hit two million. I see a lot of potential. I want to figure out how to take this contingency recruiting business to five to seven million while staying lean.
Alex: How do you get customers right now?
Carson: Really 98% referrals. We have a really good client base, and in the e-com niche it’s a small world — we get a lot of referrals that way.
Alex: Got it. Fundamentally — if I doubled the amount of people who were asking for roles right now, would you be able to handle it?
Carson: I think yes. I might need to bring on a few extra recruiters at scale, but ultimately these clients used me because of me and the relationships we have. I’m trying to figure out how to stay involved but also ramp up and scale.
Alex: Let me cut you off for a second. The intention behind the question is: are you demand-constrained or supply-constrained? If I could go send you more business right now, could you handle it?
Carson: Yeah, I think we can handle more.
Alex: Okay. So you’re demand-constrained. From the demand perspective, if you only have referrals, you need an input-output machine to get more leads. So the best way for most people versus the best way for you are two different things. You’ve got the core four. Have you read the book?
Carson: Right.
Alex: You’ve got warm outreach, cold outreach, content, and ads. And then on the other side, affiliates. Now, based on your background — you recruit candidates via outbound. You’re blasting people on LinkedIn: “Hey, would you be interested? I’ve got some roles.” You’re doing outbound to get candidates, which means you already have the skill and muscle of outbound. You’re just only using it for your supply. What if you used it for your demand?
Carson: Light bulb moment. Let’s go.
Alex: There we go. Fundamentally, you already know your outbound funnel metrics — we do 100 connects, 100 connects get us five meetings, five meetings turn into one placement. All you have to do is turn that same exact funnel outward toward clients.
Carson: Yeah. Really just focus more on the outbound.
Alex: Because it’s your main game. I was going to say learn ads, but if you were already doing outbound and crushing it, the secondary play — since you’re recruiting, you have access to great marketers. You could recruit a CMO to run ads for you to go get customers. But if I had to bet, I would say do more of the thing you’re already doing. Just change the target. That’s it. You can absolutely scale that to the moon.
Carson: For sure. Question on the contingency model — a lot of skin in the game for us, low risk for the client. How do I demand more communication and make sure clients aren’t pausing roles? There’s a lot out of our control at scale.
Alex: Two things. Actually three. One is customer vetting. You have to have certain types of customers. If you have shitty customers, they’re going to treat you shitty. If you have good customers, they tend to be more professional. So part of this is: what is our ideal customer? Number two, the contingency thing — the question is whether it’s a feature or a bug. Like this may just be a cost of doing business. I’ll have these conversations — what if we decided this isn’t a problem anymore and all our metrics are fine? What are your margins right now?
Carson: Probably about 50%.
Alex: Right. Okay. So your margins are fine. The issue is just that sometimes customers don’t do what you want them to. Your preference is not for that. The only tweak you can consider — when you have more demand, which you don’t have right now, which is why you have no leverage — is you can say, “Listen, our way of doing this is that you put a card down. It’s success-based, but if you don’t follow our process, we bill you a penalty because you’re wasting our time.” You can say, “The role is 15 grand. We get 30% — whatever it is. But we charge five if you waste our time.” We don’t want to charge you anything. If you continue to get more and more demand, the leverage shifts to you and you say, “Listen, I do half now and half when we complete the role. I’ve got ten other guys behind you.”
Carson: Yep, that makes sense.
Alex: So you have no leverage right now and it makes sense. Number one, I don’t think you have a steaming fire because you’ve got 50% margins and things seem to be going okay. 98% referrals means you’re good at what you do. We just need to put more into the front end — take the outbound engine, point it toward customers, be hyper-targeted about the best types. And you probably know what they look like. Take the top 20% of your current customers that are worth the most. The beauty of outbound is you get to snipe who you want. You can say: I’m only going after people I know are going to do five roles a year.
Shaan: Carson, I think what Alex just said is huge. I would not have used you if you’d said, “Give me a $20K retainer for this role.” Why? Because you were a college kid — 22 years old, doing this while in college. Use that to your advantage. Reframe it in your own mind as a feature instead of a bug. Once you just relabel the same experience you’re having, you’ll have a new experience. Try that out along with the outbound. Was that helpful?
Carson: That was super helpful. Thank you both so much.
Alex: Rock and roll, baby. Later — crush it.
Caller 3: Jordan & Justin — Elite Travel Hackers [00:36:00]
Shaan: All right. The weather is cold but the deals are hot. What’s up? You’re on the line. How you doing, Jordan?
Jordan: Hey, how are you guys?
Shaan: Oh, we got a group call. We got the co-founder in here. Is that right?
Jordan: The co-founder is here.
Shaan: All right. You’ve got Shaan and this is Alex. Give us your names, your business name, and a one-minute description. What do you guys do and how is it going revenue-wise?
Jordan: I’m Jordan Egger. Justin Frober, my co-founder, is also on the call. Our business is Elite Travel Hackers. We help business owners take their families on $30,000 to $50,000 luxury vacations for little to no money out of pocket using credit card points. We do that two ways. First, we help them optimize and maximize the number of points they’re earning per year. Most people earn one point per dollar on their credit card spend. We’re typically able to get at least a 3 to 4x on those points earned.
Alex: So you help them get more points, and then you help them spend it well.
Jordan: And then we help you spend it well. Book first class flights, five-star hotels, luxury travel — all for little to no money out of pocket.
Shaan: Wonder. So Jordan, is the business working right now or is it broken?
Jordan: Business is working. We’re doing about 40k a month right now. We do have some hurdles we’ve run into — I’ll let Justin go.
Shaan: He’s the guy who deals with the problems.
Alex: I’m going to guess you’re demand-constrained. That’s my guess. Could be wrong, but go for it.
Justin: Yeah. So last month we actually had a really big bump — we scaled to 85k.
Alex: Awesome.
Justin: And we spent a lot of time refining systems, processes, automations, getting the next round of staff hired so we can make the next big push on leads. Right now the majority of our business comes from referrals, and then 20% comes from organic traffic — and we only have a 23% close rate there. So there’s a massive gap between our referral and organic close rates.
Alex: Are you saying 80% of the business is referral, or that was the close rate?
Justin: No, sorry — 69% of the business is referrals. 98% close rate on referrals.
Alex: Okay. Everybody closes. And the rest is through organic. Do you mean web traffic from Google search, or content-based, or a mix?
Justin: Content-based.
Alex: And what’s the question you guys have? State it as crisply as you can.
Justin: How do we build trust faster and increase close rates from cold traffic? Is there a tweak in our offer or messaging?
Alex: All right, I’m going to rock your world in a couple seconds. Just tell me — what’s the price point right now?
Justin: 3K to 15K. It scales depending on the number of trips they’re taking and how much they’re spending out of pocket.
Alex: Got it. And right now I’m assuming you have the same sales process for referrals as you do for people from content?
Justin: Yeah, that’s the issue.
Alex: So every traffic source has to get treated differently because they have a basically — if you think about a customer on a continuum, there’s a certain amount of information that has to be consumed to make a decision. You need a microwave. You need something that’s going to heat them up really quickly. Walk me through the click-to-close. Someone sees a post or a reel — then what? DM, link, comment?
Justin: DM.
Alex: Okay. So they DM you. Got it. So after they DM, there’s a setter in the DMs?
Justin: Correct.
Alex: DM setter. And then what happens after that?
Justin: Into a sales calendar.
Alex: Okay. And that’s it. Is there anything else they consume between set and close?
Justin: There’s a 60-second warm-up video saying, “Hey, come with these data points so we can maximize what we can do for you.”
Alex: Yeah. So you’re missing a VSL. That’s all. Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to write a seven-minute VSL. It follows the same concept as a YouTube video. You’ll have a promise. You’ll have the pain they’re going to avoid. You’re going to give them a plan of how it all works. And then you’re going to have proof that you can help them do that — that’s all in the first 60 seconds. Then you’re going to have belief one, belief two, and belief three — basically the three biggest objections people bring up on sales calls. You’re going to break those down as FAQs. Then you put your 60-second “here’s how to prep for the call” at the end. That’s it.
Now, script the whole thing out. Also take it and put it into a PDF — some people, especially the bigger players, are bigger readers than watchers. So you can say, “Hey, here are two ways to consume it.” Just watch it before the call. And when you do that close call, the first question you ask after “hey, how’s it going?” is: “Did you get a chance to watch the video?” — which the closer should have already double-checked. If for some reason they haven’t done it, say, “Hey, no worries. I’m going to grab a cup of coffee. You go play it and I’ll come back in seven minutes. That way I’m not just blabbing a whole bunch of stuff — you can see the visuals, and it’s the best use of your time.”
That’s literally it. Now, the second thing: I want to shift your belief a little bit. You said you’re only closing 23%. 23% isn’t terrible. Like, if you do this, you’ll probably bump to mid-30s. But that’s just a normal close rate. Referrals are amazing — that’s why everybody wants them. But if you want your mind blown, start running ads. It’s going to be way worse than cold leads. So you want to treat warm like cold and treat cold like cold by giving them more information prior to the close. That’s all you’ve got to do. That alone will give you maybe a 50% lift on whatever you’re currently doing.
But that’s not going to take you to five million a year. You still have demand issues — you still need a reliable way to make more and better content, which is the larger, more important question.
Shaan: But do that first.
Alex: Yeah. Solve one problem at a time. And at the end of the day, you want to have your growth equation. What he’s talking about is: today you’re converting at 23% — that’s actually a pretty decent number. If that number was 40, what happens to the business? You don’t want to put a transformational amount of effort into something that doesn’t have a transformational result on the other side. You could just napkin math and save yourself a lot of pain. It might be that you can actually just double the number of referrals by doing something simple. Maybe today you’re just getting them and you’re not actually asking for them intelligently. You can increase your conversion and you should — but it’s worth doing some napkin math to see: if I did this, would this get me where I want to go? Good to know that going in.
Shaan: Hey Jordan — do you have a referral script you use right now?
Jordan: Yeah. At the end of every onboarding call, we ask them who else they know.
Shaan: How do you ask them?
Jordan: “Hey, do you think anybody else could use our services? You’ve seen what it’s like to do our credit card strategies. Can you connect me via text or email?”
Alex: Yeah. I would tweak that. Just a little golden BB for you. Compliment them first to reframe it. So you say: “Dude, you’re an absolute pleasure to deal with. My god, I talk to a bunch of different business owners every day. If I could talk to only people like you, I would. So what other successful business owners like you do you know?” That compliments them twice before making an ask. Most people are way happier to give you a referral. And when you say “I want other people who are successful like you,” you’ll also get better referrals overall.
Jordan: Got it. Makes perfect sense.
Shaan: One other thing that might help — people are in maximum pain when they first show up. But in your case, you have a different situation. When somebody’s back from a vacation you just booked for them for free and they just had an incredible life-changing experience — that’s probably a good moment to ask how the trip was. Because you’re going to be riding a huge wave of goodwill. They’re going to be on the high of their vacation. That’s when they’re in a peak state to be asked as well.
And on that offboarding call — if I were getting really tactical with you, when I call them up and say “Hey, how was the vacation?” I would ask: “Do you have any pictures?” Now they’re going to be like, “Oh, you want to see them?” And you say, “Hey, which friends would you normally send these pictures to? If you want, three-way me in and you can say ‘I got this whole vacation for free.’ Just three-way me in and you’re rocking and rolling.”
Jordan: Yeah. Very helpful, guys.
Alex: As I asked my first girlfriend, was that the best eight minutes of your life?
Shaan: All right, fellas. We’ll see you later.
Jordan: See you guys.
Caller 4: Davi — Content Creator (200M Views, No Product) [00:55:00]
Shaan: All right. Hormozi hotline. Yeah. All right, caller number four — you are on air. What’s your name?
Davi: Hello. I’m Davi. Alex, great to be talking with you.
Shaan: Davi, where are you calling in from?
Davi: From Brooklyn, New York.
Shaan: All right. Davi, tell us about what’s going on. What’s your business?
Davi: I’m a content creator. A little bit different than probably a lot of the businesses that call in, because I have a big audience and I have absolutely no idea what to sell them.
Shaan: You need a money model.
Alex: You have distribution and no product. Is that what you’re saying?
Davi: I’ve got distribution, no product. Yes.
Shaan: And?
Davi: I won the School Games last year.
Alex: Oh sick. And I was actually about to ask you the question I’m about to ask — and your assistant came in and said, “Alex, you have a wedding you need to walk.”
Davi: That checks out. And then I saw Shaan’s tweet yesterday and I was like, “You know what, if my life was a movie, this is the moment where it comes full circle.”
Shaan: All right. So what is the question you’ve been waiting a year to ask?
Alex: Are you an entertainer or educator? Real quick.
Davi: It leans towards education. I make content for college guys and young guys about how to get internships, how to get jobs, how to date, how to manage negative thoughts, how to make money. It’s really just virtual big-brother stuff. I have 200 million views, 350,000 followers. A big army of young dudes. I want to make a big swing with it.
Shaan: Per what — per month, per year?
Davi: 200 million views over the last two years.
Alex: What are you getting monthly?
Davi: Five to ten.
Alex: Okay. And this is TikTok we’re talking about?
Davi: TikTok and Instagram.
Alex: Okay. Go on.
Davi: So I have this big army of young dudes. I could do a paying community, I could do a mentorship. But I think there’s a bigger play — maybe employing a lot of them, or building an app and launching it across college campuses. I’ve been building this audience and I’m not sure what the big swing I should be making here is.
Shaan: Before we start being know-it-alls and telling you what to do — have you already tried anything?
Davi: I’ve committed to making two or three short form videos a day for the last couple of years outside of my day-to-day other pursuit. So I haven’t tried much in terms of monetization.
Shaan: What’s your day-to-day other pursuit?
Davi: My mom is a physician coach. She was doing 20 or 30k a month and now we’re doing 230 last month. So basically just building high-ticket sales, marketing, and fulfillment for burned-out doctors.
Alex: Well, I’ll tell you a secret. Burned-out doctors have more pain and more money than broke college guys — by an order of magnitude.
Davi: I know. And I don’t want to keep working with my mom forever. I’ve built up this audience — if there’s a big prize here, I want to go after it.
Shaan: So what do you want to have happen?
Alex: I’ll give a little reality check. 5 to 10 million views a month is not bad. It’s also not crazy. So you have enough to do a business for sure. But your TikTok views are not worth nearly what your Instagram views are. It’s probably a factor of 10 to 20x difference in value per view. Especially if it’s a little bit more meme-y, a little bit more humor-based — you can just drop through the floor on RPM. Education versus entertainment, the revenue per thousand views is a huge difference. I just want to level-set there.
So fundamentally — if you’ve got these guys and they’re looking to you for input on life stuff, whether it’s landing their first date or getting an internship, and you get DMs like “dude, you spoke the thoughts that were in my brain” — they trust you. That’s real.
Davi: Yeah. I think I’ve built up enough trust that if I wanted them to quit a job, or come work for me, or do something — that’s why I’m thinking maybe I could build something on the back of them and not just sell through them.
Alex: Let me give you a continuum that exists for you. This is super common for content creators, and it’s a risk continuum. On one end, you start a business that you do everything for — that takes the most skill and has the most risk. On the other end, you have affiliate, where you’re just promoting someone else’s stuff and getting a percentage — that’s the other extreme. Next to that is sponsorship — if you’re really good at that, people start paying you ahead of time, and it’s 100% gross margin and scales with your content. In the middle, you’ve got partnerships — you’re the exclusive guy who promotes a specific thing, you get some shares or royalties, and you let somebody else run the business while you promote. Next to that, you’ve got white labels — you don’t want to run the business but you do want your own brand and all the equity. And then the last one, which is what I started with — you own it all, you source everything, you manufacture if you want products.
Those are your options. If you wanted to get in business now, you can de-risk by trying some stuff on the left and seeing how it performs. You have the luxury of being able to test product-market fit before doing anything. You can affiliate someone else’s thing, see what the demand looks like, and if it crushes, you know you’ve got something. If it doesn’t crush, you didn’t have to do all the other stuff associated with building the business.
Davi: Right, exactly.
Alex: So number one: work your way from least risky to most risky as you validate what you want to sell. Number two — a little hack for TikTok. The people I’ve seen who monetize best off TikTok, their CTA on TikTok is “DM me on Instagram,” and then they work the DMs on Instagram. For whatever reason, Instagram just converts way better for monetization than TikTok. So they just use TikTok as a traffic platform to convert on Instagram.
Davi: Can you give me an example of some of the things you would try affiliating?
Alex: Well, you said a lot of stuff — you’ve got dating content, which probably gets into looks-maxing and all that. You’ve got “how to get a job” stuff. You’ve got biz-op stuff which I’m not the biggest fan of, but it’s out there. You have a lot of different pieces. The thing I really hate about your particular customer is that they’re broke. So the easiest path — I don’t think the idea of starting a School community is terrible, because you can have a very large community, continue to serve them at a low ticket price, use it as an initial launchpad to build the community, and then basically say, “Tell me what you guys want” and you can monetize in the meantime. Does that make sense?
Davi: Yes, got it.
Alex: That’s the easy, super low-risk option. If you’re like, “Hey man, I want to make $100 million” — I don’t have a clear path from where you’re at to get there through this TikTok audience specifically. But if you had a fleet of loyal guys that you could turn into good salespeople or ambassadors — if you had to launch something across college campuses and this was your only foundation to get to $100 million or $10 million — what would you do?
Davi: If you can train a skill, which you just mentioned — the sales thing. If you can train a skill exceptionally well, then you can absolutely source and place salespeople for large door-to-door companies. A lot of college guys are willing to relocate after college and make six figures a year, or six figures in a summer if they crush it. And those companies are happy to pay referral fees on those guys. And if you can develop a long-term reputation as being very very good at training them — you can run cohorts. You say, “Hey, you’re going to fly out to this place. We’re going to spend a week. I’m going to train you. Then you’ll graduate and go out into the world and be fruitful and multiply.” You could very well charge $5,000 for that. And then you’ll have connections from different people you can use your content to go source relationships with.
So get a Vivint, get an alarm system company — get one of those to say, “Hey, will you take people from me?” And you can make money on both sides. The best thing you can do for those guys is use them as the product.
Shaan: I’ve got an overarching question for you. Are you trying to be a content creator who makes money, or are you trying to be an entrepreneur who uses content to make money?
Davi: Wow, that’s a great question.
Shaan: Gut instinct. You can change your mind later, but gut instinct — which one did your heart go to?
Alex: You have to fully commit to this for life.
Davi: I want to be an entrepreneur.
Shaan: You want to be an entrepreneur. Great. So I think the constraint of “what business can I start using this TikTok audience for this customer” is actually not serving you at all. It’s just: what business do I want to be in where I see an opportunity, I feel passionate about solving it, and I’m going to flex my content muscles as one of my growth levers?
This whole thing was the gym where I was working out and building that muscle. But I didn’t build it to use it in the gym. I built it to use it in the real world somewhere else. Sometimes you have to pick the constraint properly. The constraint of “I need to use this business with my current TikTok audience” is not the right one.
The other thing I would do: get real. Not only is a certain number of views worth different amounts per platform, but as a simple test — if you went to a college campus and posted on TikTok and Instagram “Hey, I’m going to be at Penn State from this hour to this hour, come hang out” — how many people do you think would show up?
Davi: Probably between 10 and 100.
Shaan: That’s a pretty big spread. I think you should go try it. I’d be surprised if the number was 100. I’d be shocked if it was even 10. The reason I say that is because the nature of TikTok and short form is that people aren’t loyal to you — they’re loyal to the feed. You might show up from time to time.
The reason to do that test is to basically wash away your invisible sunk cost to “but I’ve already built this audience” — because what you actually built was the muscle of short form content. You probably haven’t built an army of people who listen and trust you. You might get more views on your TikTok than I get on my podcast — but if I tweet that I’m going somewhere for my podcast, people show up, because I’ve spent hundreds of hours in their ears. It’s a different level of connection.
If you really want to be an entrepreneur: break out of the constraint of “how do I sell these college dudes I’ve been entertaining with random TikToks about random stuff.” Just get out of the box and build the best business you can. I bet you’d kick ass that way, because you seem like somebody who’s pretty high-agency — but don’t tie one hand behind your back.
Alex: And Davi — I’ll soften what Shaan said, which is normally not my role. What you can use the brand for — let’s say you don’t sell to this audience and you don’t sell them as the product either. Let’s say you just say, “I did this thing and I learned this skill.” You can still use it to recruit for whatever business you want. That is actually still a massive win. You can just say: I’ve got these guys who are super eager and willing to work. Great — come work for me. That’s actually still a big asset.
Davi: Yeah. I appreciate it.
Shaan: Awesome, brother. Appreciate you. Thanks for calling in.
Davi: Appreciate it, guys. Thanks.
Shaan: All right. Awesome.
Alex: There we go.
Shaan: All right. That’s a wrap on the Hormozi hotline.