$100M Thumbnails: The Alex Hormozi Blueprint

TL;DR:

In the last 12 months, Alex Hormozi has gained over a million subscribers on YouTube.

Naturally, this begs the question: how did he do it?

Luckily for us, Hormozi has already answered this question: more good content.

This makes sense at a high level, but how do you explain all the people that are producing a consistent volume of videos at a high production quality level but aren’t getting anywhere near the traffic Hormozi is?

What actually makes content good?

What separates Alex from the thousands of other content creators on YouTube?

We’ll answer these questions using 4 principles that laid the foundation for the level of growth Hormozi has had the past year.

The first thing and arguably the most important thing that Alex Hormozi understood is that you have to give people a reason to listen to you.

Especially as Alex’s channel was growing, he made it a point to answer the question in the intro - why should you listen to me. If you’re interested in entrepreneurship, you’ll want to listen to someone that has successfully built businesses, not someone that just read a book and watched a couple videos on YouTube. He makes it clear in his intros that he runs acquisition.com, a portfolio of companies doing over $100M in revenue.

Such an intro creates trust for the audience because he’s clearly articulating why he has the authority to speak about the subject - he’s run multiple successful businesses himself.

If you’ve been following Hormozi for some time, you’re probably thinking that this intro is missing something.

You’re right, he used to also say “I have nothing to sell you” in his intro, but he recently took this line out of his intro in all of the 114 videos where he said it.

However, its important to talk about this line because this one line is a masterclass on laddering.

But what is laddering?

“It’s an attempt to deposition the competition by saying “we’re this”, “there’re this” and figuring out what attribute you want to talk about that not only reflects you in a positive light but just as importantly, de-positions or sheds your competition in a negative light.” says Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business Scott Galloway.

One of the best examples of laddering in recent years is Apple’s Privacy campaign where Apple’s message was “unlike its big tech brethren, its concerned about your kids, the commonwealth and your privacy. Tim Cook’s privacy is a basic human rights statement, puts a finger squarely in the eye of Facebook and Google.” says Professor Galloway.

By stating his credentials and then saying he has nothing to sell you, Alex is positioning himself as an expert and good guy and de-positioning the other online business coaches and “gurus” that don’t have the experience and are selling courses on how to get rich quick.

By saying I have nothing to sell you, he’s also saying the other gurus are trying to sell you something and therefore, don’t actually care about your success.

Its actually been quite interesting to watch Alex get progressively better and better at packaging his content for specifically for YouTube. Over time, Alex has dramatically improved his YouTube skills in 3 key areas: titles/thumbnails, energy, and pacing.

1. Titles and Thumbnails

Take a look at the first few and last few thumbnails of his videos.

Notice the dramatic difference in the quality of the thumbnails and titles.

The newer thumbnails are much more attractive. The colors pop, there’s less clutter. They’re focused on one thing.

One thing I see a lot of people do (and I’m guilty of it myself), is using the same words in the thumbnail that you use in the title. You can see here in his first few thumbnails he basically repeats the title in the thumbnail.

This is a huge missed opportunity to create more intrigue about the video.

Your thumbnail and title are the only real estate you have to get someone who doesn’t know who you are to click on your video. There’s no point in repeating the same words on the title and thumbnail. Use this real estate wisely.

It is important to make people curious about the title.

2. Energy

Comparing his old and new videos, you’ll notice that the energy behind the delivery of the content and message is wildly different, even though they both are pretty similar.

3. Pacing

In Hormozi’s old videos, its just him talking to the camera, and some of his older videos literally have no cuts.

In the first 10 seconds of an old video there was one cut, one graphic that popped up saying subscribe, and one sound effect.

But now in his newer videos, to put it simply, there’s a lot of them.

If you’re into business/entreprenuership, you’ve had to have heard of Alex Hormozi at least once.

He’s everywhere. Here are 3 ways he is able to show up seemingly everywhere all at once.

1. Shorts

Hormozi was an early adopter of shorts on YouTube. When Shorts first started getting a lot of organic reach, Alex was posting shorts daily.

Hormozi has had 2 long form videos that have crossed the 2 million views mark, but for Shorts, he’s had five times as many.

2. Podcast Appearances

Another way he gets free organic exposure is going on other podcasts.

Its like every week there’s a new podcast interview of Alex Hormozi.

If you search Alex Hormozi Podcast you can keep scrolling and scrolling and you’ll get different interviews he’s done, ranging from 1 hour all the way up to 3 hours in length.

Not only does that provide incredible depth for the people listening, he’s really good at giving hot takes and sound bites which creates an opportunity for people to create tons of shorts and give Alex even more reach - for free.

3. Engage Your Community Everywhere

And lastly, he is on every platform. No matter what platform you’re using, you’ll run into him.

And he’s not just recycling content; his team customizes the content for each platform.

But isn't it better to just focus on YouTube?

Yes, if you’re working on things on your own it is.

But, if you have a team and can manage to be on all the platforms, it can really help keep you stay on top of mind with your audience. Hormozi is able to also push his audience on other platforms to his YouTube videos.

In the last 12 months, Alex has posted 801 videos.

There are no statistics for the frequency at which the average YouTuber uploads a video, but most videos and articles giving advice on YouTube growth generally recommend posting at least once a week up to a few times a week.

I haven’t come across any advice that says to post more than 2 videos per day, which is what Alex is averaging for the last year.

“We went from 7 pieces of content a week to 80 content pieces a week, adding 300,000 YouTube subscribers and 7,000 followers on LinkedIn.” said Hormozi at a seminar.

These 4 foundational principles combine to form a content library that is one of the best examples of marketing execution on YouTube.

Here’s what happens if we look at Alex's Content through the lens of the customer journey.

The top of the funnel is YouTube shorts, podcast appearances, content about non business things.

Once you have their attention, he has a bit longer youtube videos, 5-10 minutes get to know Alex Hormozi and how he thinks.

Once you like what he has to say, he has full course and lectures available online for free.

And once you’ve taken the courses and you still want more Hormozi, you can buy his book or if you’re doing above 3mm in revenue, you can apply to be one of his portfolio companies at acquisition.com.

Alex has content specifically designed for people at each phase of the Customer Journey.

Understandably, this is a long game he’s playing. There’s a limited number of people running 3 million plus dollar companies, and they’re probably not spending a lot of time on YouTube.

So the real fruits from the seeds he’s sowing right now may not be seen for another 10-20 years.

That being said, its already working.

“[Our] web traffic went from basically nonexistent to about 100000 unique clicks a month to the site just organically. Our subscribers grew to 1.2 million from 180000. We had a $25 CPM and were getting two million dollars a month in exposure for free. And not only for free, we’re getting paid to do it. We’re getting paid now to market.” Hormozi explained in the same seminar pertaining to the results of 6 months of high volume.”

“The business result from that is that we get about 400 companies a month that apply for acquisiton.com so we can help them scale, and in that time period we grew from seven million a month to thirteen million a month, and a disclaimer that part of this was companies themselves grew.”

Alex Hormozi’s rapid growth on Youtube proves not only that it's never too late to start on YouTube, but also if you treat YouTube as a marketing engine for your business the only ceiling you have for your business is how much effort you’re willing to put into it.