PDF Summary:$100M Leads, by Alex Hormozi

If there’s one thing that separates thriving businesses from those that struggle, it’s lead generation—the art of getting more people interested in what you’re selling.

In $100M Leads, serial entrepreneur Alex Hormozi, whose businesses generate $200 million annually and over 20,000 leads daily, reveals his systematic approach to filling your customer pipeline. Hormozi argues there are only four ways to let people know about your business: warm outreach, cold outreach, free content, and paid ads. This guide explores his advice about leveraging these channels with lead magnets—free, high-quality products or services that get people engaged with your business. We’ll also explain his strategies for scaling your lead generation tactics with help from others.

In our commentary, we explore alternative perspectives on advertising from leading marketing firms and experts like David Ogilvy (Confessions of an Advertising Man) and Seth Godin (This is Marketing).

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Now that you understand how to take action, let’s talk about the different kinds of marketing actions you can take.

Get Leads with Private Marketing

Private marketing is marketing to people via direct, one-to-one communication. You do this through channels like email, mail, direct messages, and phone calls. Because this form of marketing is more personal, it can be very effective and is a good way to start learning how to market, Hormozi says. Below, we’ll cover two kinds of private marketing: warm outreach and cold outreach.

(Shortform note: The concept of one-to-one marketing dates back to 1993, when Don Peppers and Martha Rogers wrote The One to One Future, which introduced the idea that businesses could build direct, personal relationships with customers. Later, Seth Godin built on their ideas by emphasizing that customer permission is key to these relationships. In Permission Marketing, he writes that the old paradigm of intrusive advertisements, like TV commercials that interrupt the show, doesn’t work as well as it used to. People have grown smarter about advertising and now prefer less intrusive communication. “Permission marketing” works because it involves advertising only to people who’ve opted in, such as those who’ve signed up to an email list.)

Reach Out to Warm Leads

The simplest way to get leads is to reach out to people you know (warm leads). These are people who’ve given you permission to contact them—your friends, family, followers, current customers, previous customers, and anyone else in your existing network. As Hormozi explains, warm leads already trust you to some degree. They’re more likely to be interested in your business, and because of that, you might be able to skip the lead magnet and go straight to the core offer.

Hormozi says you should reach out to warm leads systematically. Make a list of everyone you know, and then reach out to 100 of them each day (recall Hormozi’s “Rule of 100”). Do this until you exhaust your contact list. If someone doesn’t respond to your first two or three outreach attempts (such as messages or calls), move on to the next lead.

(Shortform note: What if you can’t follow Hormozi’s Rule of 100 because you don’t have 100 warm leads to contact daily? One solution is to turn to influencers. The biggest social media influencers have millions of followers who trust them—even more than they trust traditional advertising. In other words, they have millions of warm leads, and those leads are more likely to buy from brands they recommend. Working with an influencer can help you increase people’s awareness of your brand, build its authority, and inject some creativity into your marketing (since influencers tend to be at the forefront of cultural trends and opinions).)

When you contact a warm lead, don’t directly pitch your offer to them. Instead, strike up a friendly conversation for a few minutes by asking how they’re doing and listening actively. Once you’ve built rapport, ask if they know anyone who might need what you offer, framing it in terms of the problem you’re solving for people and the value that solution provides. Hormozi writes that by not pressuring people directly, you make them feel more comfortable. That way, they’ll have an easier time referring you to others or expressing their own interest (since they won’t feel pressured to).

(Shortform note: If you aren’t used to this kind of conversation, warm outreach can seem daunting. Learning proven communication methods can make it easier. One such method comes from Think Faster, Talk Smarter, in which Matt Abrahams writes that you can use a “what, why, how” structure to lend your conversations logical and narrative coherence. To do so, first introduce what you’re talking about, then tell why it’s relevant to your listener. Lastly, explain how they can apply or make use of the information you’ve given them. Because preparation increases confidence, learning this method—or any similar technique—will help warm outreach seem less daunting.)

Reach Out to Cold Leads

In contrast to warm outreach, cold outreach means contacting people you don’t know and trying to interest them in your business. According to Hormozi, cold outreach can scale more easily, since there are more people you don’t know than people you do.

However, cold outreach is a good deal harder because it requires you to overcome a few challenges: finding a way to contact people, getting them to pay attention to your message, and sparking their interest in your offer. Hormozi offers three key tips for accomplishing this:

• Use list brokers: businesses that sell email lists, often grouped by demographic (like residents of Atlanta, Georgia) or affinity (like dog lovers). Alternatively, you can manually find emails and other contact information by searching social media profiles.
• Before you contact a lead, research them and use what you find to personalize your approach. For instance, if you learn they’re also a business owner, you might compliment their work in your message. Hormozi says this makes cold outreach feel a bit warmer.
• If a lead doesn’t respond to your first message, follow up at least two to three times. If they still don’t respond, move on to the next person. If someone does respond—for instance, by replying to your email—you’ve got an interested lead.

(Shortform note: When choosing list brokers, use your best judgment. In the past, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has argued that data brokers operate without proper transparency, calling for legislation to regulate how they gather and sell data. Advocates say this matters because without regulation, brokers aren’t limited in how they can use your data. Hormozi’s second tip carries less risk—and because people are self-interested, showing genuine interest helps get you a positive response. But while personalization helps, people’s buying wants and needs can change fast—so if you do need to follow up, keep things straightforward and respectful. This makes it more likely a lead will see your business as caring, rather than pushy.)

Get Leads with Public Marketing

Public marketing is advertising to many people all at once. Because of this, it’s less personal than private marketing: You have less chance of interesting any given lead. But, Hormozi says, it also scales better because you can reach far more people en masse than through one-on-one communication.

You can do public marketing with warm or cold leads, and it involves mostly online efforts—Hormozi specifically discusses how to do content marketing and how to run paid ads.

Post Content Online

According to Hormozi, posting content to build an online audience is the best thing you can do to get more leads. This is because it scales well: The more people who like and share your content, the more people it’ll reach. In turn, some of those people’s contacts will like and share it as well, spreading it further.

How do you get this cycle going and build a huge audience? Hormozi writes that you just need to post tons of content that provides tons of value. Freely giving useful content shows people that you have a lot to offer, which earns you their interest—and in time, their business. For instance, many fitness influencers post videos showing how they eat, how to do specific exercises with good form, and so on. Giving away this free content builds them an audience to whom they can later sell a supplement, a training program, or fitness merchandise.

(Shortform note: In 2025, some experts say that the old adage “content is king” remains true, with a few caveats. For one, you may have to do more than post a lot of useful content to succeed. With the rise of mass-produced AI content, standing out from the crowd requires more work. Marketers are increasingly using data to understand audience interests and values, then tailoring their brand storytelling around those insights. There’s also an ongoing shift toward visual and video content, since attention spans are shorter than ever—it’s quicker and easier to watch a video than read a text post. Following these strategies as well as Hormozi’s can help you make it in the competitive world of content.)

Before you start posting content, you need to know how to make it. Hormozi writes that every piece of content should do three things: grab interest, keep interest, and satisfy interest.

Grab interest: Get people’s attention by using topics they’re interested in, and tailor the content format to the platform (videos on YouTube, text on LinkedIn, etc.). People will look at stuff they already like in formats they already like, so make more of that—don’t reinvent the wheel.

Keep interest: Make people curious by using unresolved questions and storytelling—like how a good novel keeps you reading with cliffhangers. People who want to know what happens next will keep paying attention.

Satisfy interest: Deliver on your hook, making people feel rewarded for giving you their attention. This completes the “loop” that good content puts people in, encouraging them to behave the same way again when they see more of your content.

For instance, say you’re a lifestyle influencer. You might: 1) grab interest by making an Instagram reel about a personal breakthrough you had with your morning routine, 2) keep interest by saying you’ll explain the steps you took to get there, and 3) satisfy interest by telling the full story of how you found your perfect morning routine.

Hormozi says that your audience decides if they've been rewarded, not you. When your content is consistently rewarding, your followers become more likely to buy from you and to share your content, which helps your audience grow. Every person you add to your audience is a lead that you can reach out to.

Habits, Hooks, and Human Nature

While he doesn’t explain it as such, Hormozi’s approach to content creation is basically a way of exploiting people’s tendency to do things by habit. In The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg writes that habits are unconscious, automatic behaviors that are composed of a cue, a routine, and a reward. The three elements of this “habit loop” mirror the three things Hormozi says content should do:

• The cue grabs your attention and pulls you toward some action, like eating a cookie or consuming a piece of content.

• The routine is the automatic pattern Hormozi’s second step is meant to drive. If you do a good job keeping interest, people will default into an automatic pattern of consuming your content (just like we all sometimes mindlessly eat cookies).

• The reward completes the habit loop. When you reach the reward, the link between cue, routine, and final satisfaction is reinforced in your brain, further automating the habit.

Duhigg also acknowledges the role habits play in advertising. He writes that advertisers deliberately exploit your brain’s tendency to default into automatic patterns by gathering data about you, then tailoring ads to hook your attention and get you to buy. This is something like what Hormozi recommends doing, though he emphasizes the power of giving away free, useful content without expecting anything in return.

Meanwhile, Nir Eyal (Hooked) discusses the habit loop as a tool to get people hooked on your product or service. He uses the terms trigger, action, and reward, and he adds a fourth—investment—which refers to how people start to identify with things they do repeatedly. If you follow Hormozi’s advice and make consistently rewarding content, you may get people invested in your personal brand and business. Think of fandoms: Millions of people identify with their favorite authors, musicians, or influencers, and they’re invested in continuing to follow those people’s activities.

Run Paid Ads Online

Hormozi’s last method for getting leads is to use paid ads. This means crafting and running multimedia advertisements (using text, images, and video) on online platforms like Instagram or YouTube. These platforms already have huge built-in audiences, and you pay the platform to show your ads to those people.

Hormozi writes that unlike his earlier volume-focused methods, the trick with ads is to focus on cost-efficiency—ads need to provide a good return on your investment. You have to spend money to run ads, and many of them will fail. For this reason, they don’t need to be perfect. What matters more is speed: Rapidly create multiple workable ads at once, test them out, and double down on the ones that work (while cutting those that fail). This way, you’ll lose some money but make back more in the long run.

Is Efficiency Always the Goal?

Not all digital marketers agree with Hormozi that speed is the best approach. Instead of rapidly creating ads and cutting the losers, some agencies systematically test the different aspects of an ad. They change one thing at a time, measure the effect it has, and keep the good changes to incrementally improve their marketing materials (like emails or landing pages). Other experts recommend pre-testing ads with control groups to see if they work well or not.

The main difference between these approaches comes down to risk aversion. Hormozi is willing to lose money on many ads to find the one that works—which is fine for smaller, faster-moving operations (his audience is mostly small entrepreneurs). But for bigger businesses spending lots of money on major ad campaigns, his approach may risk too much loss. Larger firms don’t want to waste millions on bad ads. For this reason, they may take a somewhat slower but more systematic approach, using trial and error to develop effective marketing that they know works before they pour money into sending it out.

So, how do you run ads efficiently? Hormozi explains three basic steps:

Step #1: Choose the right platform. Look at major social media sites like Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter, all of which have massive existing audiences (everyone with an account). Hormozi advises starting with a platform that has plenty of the sort of people you want to reach (like beauty consumers on Instagram).

Step #2: Target the right audience. A platform’s targeting tools are basically filters that you use to narrow your search for the right people, much like the filters you use while shopping online. According to Hormomzi, the “right people”—your target audience—are people you think are likely to be interested in your business.

Most targeting tools use demographic filters, like age, income level, and interests. Use these filters to reduce the platform’s large audience to only the people you want your ad to reach. For example, if you’re advertising yoga classes for the elderly on Facebook, you’d use filters that target people over 60 who’ve shown interest in yoga and can afford your classes.

If you don’t want to do this manually, Hormozi says that most platforms will make you a “lookalike audience,” or an audience that shares demographic similarities with a list of contacts you provide. Make that list using all the lead contacts you have from warm outreach, content marketing, and cold outreach. This way, the people who see your ads will be similar to your already interested leads.

(Shortform note: The platforms and demographic targeting tools Hormozi discusses are the major players of surveillance capitalism—a form of business where big platforms gather data about users, make predictions about their behavior (like buying habits), and sell that data to advertisers. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff argues that this practice began with Google, which realized it could collect users’ search data to make educated guesses about their habits, preferences, and future actions. Zuboff also writes that surveillance capitalism endangers democracy by undermining people’s privacy, autonomy, and social empathy. If this concerns you, you could stick to Hormozi’s other ways of getting leads.)

Step #3: Make your ads. After you’ve targeted the right audience on the right platform, you need to craft effective ads. Drawing on the principles of marketing titan David Ogilvy, Hormozi breaks ads down into three components:

• Grab their attention: Immediately signal to the viewer that your ad concerns them in some way. For instance, you can appeal to their identity (“Cat owners…”) and location (“...in Los Angeles”).
• Offer them value: Convince people they should be interested in what you’re offering (lead magnet or core offer) by playing up its benefits and playing down the work involved in reaping them.
• Tell them to act: Lastly, tell people exactly what to do next. Make it simple and specific, like “Click this button.” Ideally, Hormozi says, you should direct them to a webpage that lets them enter their email address in exchange for your lead magnet.

More Tips for Effective Ads

As Hormozi mentions, many of the advertising ideas he shares come from the principles of experts like David Ogilvy. In Confessions of an Advertising Man, Ogilvy offers suggestions that complement Hormozi’s explanation of how to advertise:

• When it comes to grabbing attention, Ogilvy argues that any ad’s headline should be a complete advertisement in itself.

• He says advertisements should be honest, interesting, and informational, ideally featuring the brand name somewhere prominent.

• Instead of emphasizing value directly, Ogilvy says the body of an ad should contain as much relevant product info as possible—like the features and specifications of a laptop—communicated in plain, conversational language.

• As for calls-to-action, Ogilvy worked in the 20th century when things moved more slowly, and he doesn’t advise urging people to take immediate action. Instead, he writes that ads should spark lasting curiosity (perhaps by using creative images) that makes people want to investigate further.

How to Scale Your Marketing

We’ve covered Hormozi’s four marketing methods; now, let’s look at how to scale them. According to Hormozi, you can’t scale on your own because one person can only do so much marketing. When you’ve done all you can, it’s time to get help—and there are four kinds of entities who can increase your business’s reach: your customers, your employees, marketing firms, and business partners.

Scale With People: Customers and Employees

First, you can rely on happy customers to naturally spread the word about your business. People who’ve bought from you and thought your product or service was excellent will say so, telling friends and family about it. To earn good word of mouth, just give people a fantastic experience being your customer—provide them with a great product and treat them well.

(Shortform note: Research supports Hormozi’s assertion that word of mouth is a good scaling strategy. Word-of-mouth referrals tend to spread far and to keep spreading for a long time, which generates long-lasting effects for the money spent to earn them. Plus, 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family more than ads.)

You can also hire employees to help with marketing. To do this effectively, Hormozi says, you should clearly document your marketing processes (what you do that works for you), give new employees a hands-on demonstration of how to implement your marketing methods, and ask them to do the exact same thing. This ensures that your employees will get results similar to yours.

(Shortform note: Other experts agree with Hormozi that if you decide to hire employees, you should document your processes carefully. Good documentation reduces errors, saves time, and ensures consistency across your team, since anyone can reference it if they’re feeling stuck or forgot how to do something. This leads to better results and higher satisfaction for both your employees and your customers (because a well-run business creates more value). You don’t have to stop at documenting your marketing methods; documenting all your important business processes can help your team work more smoothly. To accomplish this, create checklists, written tutorials, or videos that outline how to complete essential tasks.)

Scale With Businesses: Marketing Firms and Affiliate Partners

Beyond using customers and employees, you can pay marketing firms to teach you about how they advertise. Hormozi says you should tell them upfront that you want to learn their methods, then offer to pay them to teach you. This way, you avoid becoming dependent on an outside business for your marketing success, and you can also train your employees to do what you learn.

(Shortform note: Here, Hormozi’s approach strikes a balance between outsourcing your marketing and developing a solid in-house team. Both have benefits: Outsourcing gives you faster access to more expertise, while building your own team ensures people have a deep understanding of your business and gives you more control over strategy. Following Hormozi’s advice, you’ll gain all of the benefits and avoid the downsides too.)

Lastly, you can partner with other businesses and entrepreneurs to promote your business to their audiences. Think influencer marketing—not everyone you affiliate with will be an influencer, but they’re a powerful way to get your business in front of more eyeballs fast. You can collaborate with anyone who has an audience, though; the affiliate just sends their audience your way (like with a sponsored post or video), and you pay them for every lead that you successfully gain through their outreach.

(Shortform note: In 2025, some marketing experts have begun to combine traditional affiliate marketing (where you pay another business to advocate for yours) with influencer marketing (where you pay a person with a big following to do the same). With influencers driving nearly $10 billion in annual business and engaging around 50% of Gen Z, partnering with them is becoming more important. It’s also affordable, costing 20-30% less per customer than brand content that you produce in-house.)